Privacy is an outdated notion

That's not to say that I like that fact, or that I don't lament it, but if you really think about it, it's hard to deny.  After 9/11, I was reading a Wall Street Journal aritcle discussing the national id card.  Larry Ellison was a big supporter of it (and more cynical people believed his motivations were financial in that Oracle databases were the most likely ones to be used to implement such a scheme) and countered the privacy objections by saying something to the effect of "privacy is an illusion, you don't have any". He went on to point out that we get filmed x hundred times a day without even knowing it most of the time. All of our cell calls are logged. SMS messages are all logged. Same for email. And since we decreasingly use cash, most of our purchases are tracked as well.  So his point is that we'd gain security and give up little to no liberty, so why not?  I really hate this fact, but it'd be hard to disagree with him - at least in his assessment of the 'problem', there are many objections against the solution.

This post won't come as a surprise to anyone and I bet to some extent, we've all done this to ourselves already, but it does drive the point home.  I remember reading a book called How to Be Invisible several years ago and really liked it. It might sound like one of those Paladin Press "Never pay taxes again" types of books, but it's not.  In fact, the author is quite militant when it comes to people using his suggestions to break the law.  His whole concept is how to keep yourself off the grid while living legally - that there are many cases of people being stalked, killed, or just bothered b/c of publicly available information so it pays to keep yourself off the grid. After 9/11 he said many of his suggestions should no longer be used b/c trying to keep things private took on a new meaning.  I remember the book's opening quote "Government's keep secrets from people, why then should people not be allowed to keep secrets from government"  I still paruse his http://www.howtobeinvisible.com/ and this sort of stuff makes me think I ought to go through and read the updated book again.