By Myles Ludwig
I’d like to thank the CIA for paying part of my telephone bill this year.
Unfortunately, that subsidy has come at a cost of the increasing deflation of what the Supreme Court decided in 1967 as one’s reasonable expectation of privacy according to the Fourth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution.
No wonder Nixon was worried. He apparently forgot he was taping himself, or didn’t really care about being caught in the act of indecent exposure.
Only in America, as the Southern-fried philosophe Harry Golden used to say, a line since usurped by boxing promoter and sometimes scoundrel, Manalapan’s Don King and his fistful of patriotism. But it’s not only in America; viz. Angela Merkel or Britain’s newspaper hacks’ phone hackers.
Are Snowden, Assange, Manning and Ellsberg really bad guys?
When I first wrote a Sunday column about the NSA’s shenanigans and their invasion of the privacy of nearly everyone on the planet a month or so ago — an article this column’s editor doubted had much value, and even I wondered if anyone would care about — new tidbits have drooled out almost daily.
Those dribbles have culminated in this past week’s revelation that the NSA and AT&T have been in flagrante delicto for some time; the embarrassing Merkel episode; former NSA honcho Gen. (Ret.) Michael Hayden’s comment that he had to pry President Obama’s Blackberry from his hands (shades of Charlton Heston), and not a moment too soon as it turns out since the Canadian company is sinking beneath the waves of telephonia; and the noisy but brief Twitter IPO that wants to suggests everyone in the universe could have some pithy remark to relate to everyone else.
Knowledge used to be for everyone. Now it’s considered intellectual property, as if it exists only in the McMansions of gated communities guarded by neighborhood vigilante. In Russia, knowledge is considered public property — not that I’d like to be playing on that court.
According to Scientific American, the privacy issue has been around at least since Roman times and the notion that a man’s home was his castle. In 17th-century America, the Puritans believed it was their civic duty to keep a sharp eye on their neighbors.
I grew up with the idea that airing one’s dirty laundry, or putting your business in the street, or being a tattletale, was not such a good idea, maybe even a spankable offence.
But technology (and terrorism, to be fair) seems to have twisted that idea that seems outdated in the face of red light cameraz (good when they catch someone else, bad when they catch you), CCTV (good when it catches bad guys, bad when it catches us), and front-facing cameras. We used to protest various stupid sex laws by saying “keep the government out of the bedroom,” but that was before we put the bedroom in the street with sex tapes, sexting and twerkable selfies.
Is your TV, phone or tablet peeking at you like Santa Claus who knows when you are sleeping and when you are awake, knows when you’re bad and when you’re good? Remember Little Sister and Sly and the Family Stone: Somebody’s watching you?
Maybe it’s a generational thing. Is privacy a meaningful issue to the children of Millennials or some quaint vestigial concept of another age?
As the song goes, “your lips tell me no-no, but there’s yes-yes in your eyes.”
Well, I have other worries. I just got a letter purporting to be from the government that claims my Medicare carrier is crap and I should look elsewhere.
Where?
To the rapidly vanishing president, singing a refrain from Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee’s I’m Sorry?
Myles Ludwig is a media savant living in Lake Worth.