Bob Cook <[email protected]> wrote: Privacy is nil in this day and age of snooping. Until Google or someone > else get a good encryption scheme working it won't catch on. NSA and > others like it are always a step ahead: For me that is the creepiest. >
Privacy is indeed a thing of the past. I find this bothers me less than I anticipated it would, when the trend began 30 years ago. (I saw it coming.) As I see it, we are back to the world of the 19th century when mobility was lower and most people lived in towns where everyone knew everyone else's business. There was much less privacy then, especially in the U.S. Europeans visiting American in the 18th and 19th century remarked that Americans ask nosy questions and seem to have no regard for privacy. The past wasn't so bad. My wife grew up in a small rural town on an island, somewhat behind the times. They had no off-island telephone service until 1968. She came out okay. Young people growing up in today's Internet-Google fishbowl take it in stride. Looking back, the golden age of privacy was probably in the 1920s. That was after the automobile gave people tremendous mobility, but before modern radio, telephones, police surveillance, wiretapping, fingerprint databases, punch card databases for Social Security and the draft, and other modern technology began keeping track of people. Gangsters were able to evade the law more easily than now. The autobiographical books by Henry Miller describe a lifestyle more free, hedonistic and downright destructive than most people could get away with now. He got mad at an employer or a landlord at one point. He invited in some local kids and they spent the afternoon trashing the apartment to an extent that would certainly make the local news nowadays, and trigger a nationwide manhunt. They broke up the furniture, mattresses and feather pillows, and threw paint everywhere, as I recall. Just for the fun of it. The mayhem in "Boardwalk Empire" is greatly exaggerated but it was somewhat like that. - Jed
