Rambling On About Online Privacy

So last week’s big political/tech news was about privacy and the fact that we apparently have even less of it than we thought we did. Revelations that the NSA has been playing fast and loose with the rules shocked the media, though I seriously doubt they were nearly as shocked as they made out.

I mean seriously, did anyone think the NSA *didn’t* have this kind of data at its fingertips already? That mining ‘big data’ for valuable nuggets was a corporate-only fetish? You have only to watch any of the crime dramas these days to see that we as a culture know otherwise. The only ones with privacy these days are those who know how to lay false trails and don’t do anything worth digging into the haystack to find out about.

And that doesn’t include government agencies. Yep, the NSA lost a big chunk of its own privacy this week too. The only silver lining to the loss of the privacy we feel we once had will be the fact that government has even less of it.  For every activity governments actually need to hide from prying eyes, there are a hundred more they want to.

That’s why even Obama and his crew are prosecuting leakers and whistleblowers so hard right now when they couldn’t prosecute a single guilty party in the markets in the wake of 2008. It’s a lost cause in the end for them too, but whether it’s liberal or conservative the only privacy a government really cares about enough to fight for is its own.

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Categories: Government Regulations