Ok, a little bit of personal history for me, I was dating a wonderful Peruvian girl back in 2002 and on. It was long distance for a lot of it, Her in Florida, me in Georgia at the time. She was notified after the fact that she was the subject of a wiretap because she had made overseas phone calls. Mind you, scared the holy bejesus out of her that people were listening in on her convos.

And yes, this was all directly related to the Patriot act and all the fun stuff. That some of our… late night… conversations were listened in on makes me feel to this day feel a little violated. And ultimately it’s the principle of the matter, because at some point a phone number made a call to Peru and that’s sufficient suspicion to deserve an active wiretap? WTFMate?

The biggest issue is that as companies gather more metadata on us, all for their own advertising targeting, that same data remains available for further data mining should the Government see fit to ‘request’ it.

Remember, we have a bill that is trying to be passed to grant blanket immunity from lawsuits if they voluntarily give data information on their customers at the request of the government. It’s not what we know that worries me, it’s what we don’t know about the erosion of civil liberties that concerns me.