I was working for Sun Microsystems in 1999 when Scott McNealy famously said "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." I did not really want to believe him then, but I knew if we did not do something about it we would end up exactly in that spot.

On his blog, Bruce Schneier has posted one of his best all encompassing privacy essays to date, The Future Of Privacy. One of the good and bad things about wholesale surveillance is that it is so un-specific. We may no longer be anonymous with all this data about us stored in who knows how many databases, but just because it passes through a filter does not mean we are being watched in the same way it did thirty years ago. The problem lies in the filtering then, when a combination of things that we do raises a flag in some computer somewhere - and we become yet another example of an unduly harassed false positive. The numbers are so great at this point - the amount of data so large - that it does not seem to work out in our favor (the innocents) or that of law enforcement. And the amount of data seems like it will just keep pace with computing power and algorithm development.