COLUMN ONE : Someone May Be Watching : Everywhere we go, we’re increasingly under surveillance. Employers, marketers, even private detectives use high-tech tools and scan mostly unregulated databases to pry into our daily lives.

WASHINGTON —  There was no revolution, no totalitarian takeover, no war bringing the collapse of worldwide democracy.

But by an invention here and a new computer application there, American culture is nearing the point forewarned by those who feared technology could breed a new kind of oppression.

Americans are potentially under surveillance--watched, videotaped and digitally monitored--for most of their waking hours.

It isn’t necessarily the government doing the watching. Often it is employers, doctors, insurers and merchants--seeking security or gathering information in an invisible universe of mostly unregulated databases, the memory bank of the electronic culture.

Direct marketers have “master files” that include half the U.S. population categorized by intimate details. Anyone can subscribe to databases such as Sleuth, Asset Locator and People Finder. They sound like video games, but they have a very serious purpose: Through them, you can learn of people’s real estate holdings, the value of their homes, their children’s ages, even their neighbors’ phone numbers.

The technology offers people and institutions efficiency and security.

But some worry that it could prove to be too much of a good thing. The widening electronic culture is bringing new pressure to bear on individualism and privacy. And as the nation accelerates onto the information superhighway, what is the effect of all the rattling machinery on people’s behavior, creativity and peace?

Imagine an absolutely ordinary day. You commute to work on the freeway, stash the car in a parking garage and spend the morning at the office on the phone and computer. At lunch you get cash from an automated teller machine. After work you use a credit card at a department store, then stop at the supermarket. At home you call an 800 number and perhaps even order something from a catalogue.

At each step, you may be under surveillance.

A growing number of freeways have cameras to catch speeders, and soon many of the nation’s tollbooths will electronically read which cars are driving by.

Most parking garages also have video cameras for security. So do ATMs, supermarkets and department stores.

At work, employers can monitor every phone call and computer keystroke you make--the software to do this is available at any store--and it is completely legal. (Technology also allows employers to get detailed information from your insurers and your doctors.)

Store and credit card receipts give companies detailed information on your buying habits.

The discount club at the supermarket does more than save you money. Through your computerized membership card, your grocer can build a dossier on you, itemizing what you buy and how often.

At home, digital technology records every phone call you make, increasingly a source for investigators and lawyers fishing for data about the targets of their clients’ lawsuits. Shopping by phone gives merchants and manufacturers still more information.

And the trend will only intensify. Soon, for example, cable carriers will know not only what programs you watch but also what you read on interactive television sets. Once the TV cable becomes the conduit for most of our entertainment, shopping and financial transactions, it will also be an accessible storehouse of information about our lives.

How much surveillance goes on and how it is used is difficult to know precisely. But given the modest limitations imposed by law, scholars say the potential for abuse is enormous.

And what some experts find most discomforting is that so much highly personal data is being accumulated by private companies that have almost no restrictions on what they can do with it.

“The only rules which limit the use of the most personal information by direct marketers are the rules which the marketers voluntarily choose to follow,” Mary J. Culnan, an associate professor at the Georgetown University School of Business in Washington, testified earlier this year to a government task force.

University of Colorado sociologist Gary T. Marx worries about a less apparent problem:

“On a broad social scale, what does the presence of cameras and all these other things do to people’s behavior?”

One thing they are doing is helping to stop crime. A man was convicted of murder recently in Rochester, N.Y., because the computer at the convenience store where he claimed to be shopping during the crime obliterated his alibi.

But technology also means that much of life is becoming less secure. A leading private investigator tells the story of a prominent high-technology company that discovered that, during a company party, someone from outside had dialed into the firm’s computers by modem, locked the company out of its own machines and downloaded the plans for the company’s next generation of software.

The e-mail manager at Epson computers in California was fired in 1990 because she wanted to let employees know the company was reading their private messages--and she lost in court.

“You need to think about . . . how many people you gave your credit card number to by reading over your cellular phone,” said John B. Gage, director of the science office at Sun Microsystems Inc. in Mountain View. Cellular phones are so vulnerable that Gage estimated that perhaps 60% of the cellular calls in Silicon Valley are being taped.

Information technology is turning the business of private investigation topsy turvy. The job that was once the preserve of gumshoes like Philip Marlowe, whose assets were their charm, fists and gun, now falls in the province of mouses and modems.

Using Information America, a commonly available commercial database, anyone can plug into People Finder and find the phone number, address, dwelling type, estimated age and average income of 70 million Americans and 10 million businesses, not to mention the average price of a house in every neighborhood.

Its Skip Tracer can find people who are on the move by combing change-of-address records from the post office.

A database called Assets has property records for people nearly everywhere in the country. The Lawsuit databank offers court records. Other databases hold records on bankruptcies, liens, births and deaths, high school and college listings, wedding announcements and more. Any information is available within hours.

In 1990, the congressional General Accounting Office reported there were 910 federal databanks containing health, financial, Social Security and other personal information around the country; many of them were shared with corporations and commercial databanks.

Kroll Associates, the nation’s largest private investigation firm, has access to 700 on-line databases. That makes Kroll the largest subscriber outside the U.S. government, according to managing partner Alan Brill.

The agency used its computer skills to track down Ferdinand E. Marcos’ worldwide financial holdings, plus those of Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier of Haiti and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq during the Persian Gulf War.

A dizzying array of information is available to the direct marketing industry.

The Direct Marketing List Source, a massive catalogue that marketers use to buy mailing lists, offers 12,000 categories of lists for sale--everything from “born-again doctors who donate” to “Bill Moyers’ Journal transcript buyers” to the 750,000 people who called TV’s “The Jessica Hahn Show.”

Perhaps more important, direct marketing firms can compile these various sources into super lists, or “master files.”

The P$ycle Financial Markets list--sold by the “target marketing” subsidiary of TRW, the giant credit bureau--contains 87 million households segmented by the head of household’s age, weight, height, ethnicity, net worth and financial behavior, among other things.

The Behavior Bank divides 28 million U.S. households by 100 lifestyle categories such as the types of investments people have, their hobbies and the kinds of vacations they take.

“Most consumers think of catalogues,” said Lorna Christi, a spokeswoman for the Direct Marketing Assn. “But there are very few major corporations today that don’t do direct marketing.”

Direct marketing accounts for $350 billion in sales annually, and 54% of adult Americans, or 111 million consumers, shop this way, Christi said.

The association, which has 3,600 member firms, has an ethical code and a “guide to effective self-regulatory action.” But the guidelines are necessarily vague:

“Direct marketers should be sensitive to the issue of consumer privacy and should limit the combination, collection, rental, sale, exchange and use of consumer data to only those data which are appropriate for direct-marketing purposes,” the group’s 13-page pamphlet on “Ethical Business Practices” reads.

The association can recommend referring members found to be in violation of the code to its ethics group, or it can suspend their membership. In the last year, Christi said, the group has referred two members and suspended one.

Some privacy advocates wonder whether self-regulation is enough.

Jeff Smith, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Business, has written what some experts call the most thorough analysis of corporate America’s approach to privacy. “Managing Privacy: Information Technology and Corporate America” is a soon-to-be-published study of how banks, insurance companies and credit card firms process medical, financial and consumer data.

“Almost without exception, when it comes to privacy, companies are reactive,” Smith said. “They drift along and make policy only when some crisis occurs. It could be a consumer backlash or a legal challenge, but at that point they react with task forces and committees and they create policies.”

What most concerns the handful of privacy experts around the country is that legislative policy-making is just as haphazard and reactive.

Companies can sell data about what products people buy, where they vacation and where they invest. But disclosing what videos people rent was made illegal after the rentals of Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork were made public during his unsuccessful 1987 confirmation hearings.

In roughly 20 states, drivers’ license records are public information. This is how direct marketers can know how tall people are, how much they weigh, whether they wear glasses and, in many states, what their Social Security numbers are.

Political activists use these lists as well. In his book “Closed: 99 Ways to Stop Abortion,” anti-abortion advocate Joseph Scheidler urged fellow activists to write down the license-plate numbers of cars parked at abortion clinics, get the names and addresses of the owners from the state motor vehicles department and then picket their homes and deluge them with mail.

California stopped selling its motor vehicle records after a stalker used them to find and murder actress Rebecca Schaeffer in 1989.

There are many legitimate uses for this information. If driving records were private, for instance, school bus firms might not be able to check the driving records of job applicants.

But policy toward what should be available and what should not is all but nonexistent, privacy advocates say. In Europe, by contrast, there are laws that precisely detail how the technology can be used.

“To some extent, we are first in technology and last in privacy,” said Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

A U.S. data protection board with advisory powers was proposed in Congress in 1991, but has not materialized. And other legislation to deal with monitoring at the workplace has been stalled in Congress for years.

A bill sponsored by Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), for example, would require employers to disclose in advance that workers might be monitored, that the monitoring would be for business purposes only and that certain places, such as restrooms, would be off-limits.

Increasingly, the home is another area of concern. When the age of interactive television arrives in perhaps five years, what policy should there be governing how data on viewing or shopping habits can be used?

It’s a question to which scholars, public policy-makers and businesses have given little thought.

As Marx at the University of Colorado laments: “There hasn’t been a lot of careful research into the social implications of all this.”

Always Under Watch: A Day in the Life...

Whether by video camera or computer, surveillance techniques may threaten your privacy. Here are some of the ways:

1) THE COMMUTE: Cameras on freeways catch a driver speeding to work.

2) AT WORK: Parking garage video camera can note a worker’s arrival time, companions in auto.

3) WORKSTATION: Employers can monitor computer messages and other electronic work.

4) AT LUNCH: A diner’s credit card scan shows restaurant and bill.

5) AFTER-WORK ERRAND: ATM camera and computer records transaction. Credit card used at store shows where consumer shopped, what you bought.

6) DRIVE HOME: Toll booth scanner records when auto passed.

7) IN THE HOUSE: Shopping by phone gives companies information on tastes and lifestyle.