@Randem

Check out this chilling opinion from Donald Kerr, the US Principal Deputy Director of Intelligence:

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

This is exactly the kind of thing that Orwell was warning about when he wrote 1984.

Sorry, but I can not accept the idea that we have no privacy and must simply trust the eavesdroppers to safeguard my private communications. It’s been known for years that secret wiretapping tools like Echelon, Carnivore, and Magic Lantern have been available, for a price, to steal corporate secrets even before the threat of terrorism became hip and trendy.

And worse, while we know we can’t always trust the government, we still understand that we should be able to. But nobody is fooling themselves into believing that businesses have our best interest in mind. Putting the power of secret surveillance into the hands of certain businesses (the telecom industry, for instance) runs the risk of turning the key players into high-power information brokers. Does anyone need to be reminded of Ma Bell? Or more recently, Enron?

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The only acceptable answer is not to give that power in the first place.