My HS students say "Eavesdropping is OK" - and I almost cry

I teach a 12-grade Consumer Economics elective class at a public high school in Maryland. We just finished a unit on consumer privacy. I included a list of laws, including the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which is supposed to protect telephone records. Then I read the USA Today, well, today, and find out about domestic data mining of phone records. Am I the only one who has heard of this law? Did the Patriot Act supercede EVERY privacy law previously passed?

There's more....

There's supposed to be a plethora of federal controls on privacy of communication records and other personal information. I just gave my Con. Ec. Kids a test on privacy law and consumer protections.

This list is from www.practicalmoneyskills.com, a site I use often in my Consumer Economics class. (I disclose to them it's created by the Visa credit card company.) It's what I handed out to my students as notes. I deleted a few non-privacy laws:

1970: fair credit reporting act
Guarantees consumer rights in the collection and reporting of information for credit, employment, insurance, and other consumer business transactions.
1974: privacy act
Gives American citizens the right to request, inspect, and challenge their own federal records.
1974: family educational rights and privacy act
Gives parents and students over 18 access to the student's school records.
1976: tax reform act
Limits disclosure of tax information and requires that taxpayers be notified when their tax records are summoned from record keepers.
1978: rights to financial privacy act
Sets conditions under which federal investigators can access an individual's bank account records.
1978: electronic fund transfer act
Requires banks that provide EFT services to disclose the circumstances under which account information can be disclosed to third parties.
1980: privacy protection act
Protects the press and others that disseminate information to the public from unlawful government searches and seizure of their work product and other materials.
1984: cable communications policy act
Protects the privacy of cable television subscriber records.
1986: electronic communications privacy act
Protects the privacy of electronic communications and transactional data such as telephone records.
1988: computer matching and privacy protection act
Protects individual privacy in connection with government benefit programs in which an individual's records at one government agency are compared against similar records at other agencies.
1988: video privacy protection act
Mandates a court order to gain access to videocassette rental records.

Did I miss something, or did all of these laws get repealed when I wasn't looking?

The scariest part is this - my students are FOR the NSA collecting of this information. I handed out the first 10 grafs or so of the USA Today story, and asked them 3 questions:

1.    Which privacy law that we studied does this appear to violate?
2.    What information is not being collected by the National Security Agency? How can they get that information?
3.    Is the government justified in doing this? Why or why not?

I'd say 80% of my students were in FAVOR of the program. Granted, I live on "the rural and remote Estern Shore" (tm) The Washington Post Company. It's not exactly a hotbed of liberalism. But this truly scared me.

Typical responses included:

"We need to know what terrorists are planning."

"Everyone got on the President before 9/11 for not doing anything, now you're complaining when he does something?"

"I don't care if the government listens to my calls and knows what I ordered on my pizza."

The only student who was visibly upset? One of my stoners who is worried the feds will find his stash of pot plants. Didn't exactly make a really effective advocate for personal privacy.

I try and not bash the President in class - it's my job to help them learn how to learn, not what to think. But it was disturbing to me the cynicism about the government this generation has.

"Why are you worried, anyway? The government does this stuff all the time. It's not like these laws MEAN anything. I mean, what can you do about it? They do want they want," said one of my brighter students.

It was everything I could do not to cry in front of my class.