Big Brother is watching you, and you, and you..

Sometimes getting an award is a good thing. Something to celebrate. A trophy to display to your friends. Bragging rights. Well, some awards should be swept under the carpet, never to be found. One such award was given to the U.S. at the end of 2007, and it isn't something to brag about.

The U.S. joined the ranks of such stars as Russia, the United Kingdom and China when it comes to privacy rights. The U.S. received the worst rank for privacy rights - getting an award as an "endemic surveillance society." Its rank dropped from "extensive surveillance society" after Congress further eroded privacy rights, and it was revealed that the FBI is creating the largest biometric database in the world.

The English-based privacy rights group Privacy International has highlighted, since 1997, the status of many countries when it comes to protecting a person's privacy. The group looks into things like a country's constitutional guards to privacy and surveillance on its own people.

In a country that acts as a leader of freedom, the lack of privacy protections doesn't fall in line with the rhetoric. Since President Bush took office in 2001, civil liberties and individual rights have slowly been eroded by laws like the Patriot Act. On August 4, 2007, Congress gave the government a blank check to wiretap all telephone and electronic communication from the U.S. to another country without a warrant.

That's not all. The FBI will be creating the world's largest biometric database at the cost of $1 billion. Biometrics include fingerprints, DNA and physical descriptions. The database would give the FBI the ability to easily identify Americans whether a criminal or not. Moves by the government like this helped to add to the "deteriorating" privacy rights in the U.S.

This obsession with identity by the U.S. government can be connected with the state of its prisons. In 2005, 1 in 136 Americans were behind bars. The U.S. also has the gold metal for the most amount of its own people in prison in the world. This obsession with security raises fears by critics of an impending police state.

So is Big Brother watching you? You bet. Stay tuned for May when the REAL ID Act comes into full effect, a law that will require state IDs to fall into federal standards, including a "common readable technology" that includes RFID chips. These constant attacks on privacy will only leave all Americans naked, exposed and shaking in the wind.

Map from privacyinternational.org.