Maybe it's because I've held a Top Secret security clearance once...

[MADem]

160. I've had a telephone party line, and I've lived in countries where it was assumed that the

authorities were listening in, or could so do. I conduct my life in such a way that I am circumspect about what I say down the telephone, but that's me. At my age, I don't have anything to hide; I'm not carrying on with some Hot Stuff or planning train robberies.

That said, I've seen nothing that says the government is "recording" everyone's phone calls. I keep hearing people HERE saying that, but nothing I have read suggests that, even remotely. My understanding is, there has to be a nexus with an overseas POI, some indication of terrorist activity or other harm to persons on our soil, AND a warrant. And if the warrant is gotten, and the subject of the phone calls is roses, birthday parties, hemorrhoids, and lollipops, and no actionable data is gathered, the entire record is trashed. Dumped. Gone.

Which is more than I can say for my AMAZON buying record, going back to the last century!

In a society like, say, the Persian one, which is a place where rights are chilled, every fault's a fashion. The Twitter usage in the Green Revolution during the last election gladdened my heart, but the ulema are slowing down the net and vigorously blocking sites for the one coming up quite soon. "The kids" are struggling to cobble together a work-around, and so they will, I'm sure. It may be smoke signals or horn toots, who knows, but they'll come up with something if they get out in the road this time round.

You aren't on Facebook, but if you wanted to let everyone in a protest group know where to meet up, you could do worse than to slap up a FB page or even post some sort of inocuous commentary to a little used page. You go to Martha Stewart's page, and ask her if she ever does cooking demonstrations in Central Park. You go to some Fanboy's sports page, and ask him if the big game on Saturday starts at three o'clock. Your "crew" checks those public pages and knows where and when. This kind of stuff is fairly easy, and basic, but we'd be at the ballot boxes voting the bastards out if it ever got to that point--and the extreme conservatives and extreme liberals would finally have something to talk about in a civil tone, for a change.

There's no real difference between getting a warrant to read your email and getting a warrant to read your snail mail, or tap your phone, which is what the FBI did back in the old days. With electronic footprints, it's harder for people to say they did one thing on the net when they actually did something else.

As for rethinking use of the net, that horse has left the barn. Even if you don't have a facebook account, get in there and start clicking on some of the public sites and migrate over to look at some of the individual posters' sites--you'd be astounded at the piles of innocuous shit that people just love to post and they don't care who sees it. Pictures, personal details, long, drawn out stories about things that are perhaps best not aired...and with no compunctions.

People, particularly the youth, have a different view of privacy than I do. It's not just a few people, either--it's a preponderance of people. People seem to think that living their lives in public, on view to the world, is how it's done. The Kardashian Kulture has helped to foster that POV amongst the youngsters, but even people around my vintage and beyond are digging the facebook and putting way too much of their business out there, and being thrilled when that old boy/girlfriend from a century ago contacts them.

It's a different world. The time to cork that bottle and not let the genie out was thirty years ago. I don't think there's any going back, myself, but I suspect we'll see the courts deciding this matter, eventually.