ATT and Verizon and Comcast and… . These are the plutocrats who control the three A’s of the 21st Century Information Monoplies: Accessible, Access Restricted and Limited and Access Denied.  These are the folks who push the buttons that designate us with A-4 and A-5 as either Acceptable or non-Acceptable.  Think about it.

My personal paronoia that just lately overwhelmed my basically good natured self started with the futile attempt to get ATT to be responsive to my request to ...change my service.  That’s an adventure tale to tell at a later date. It involves the frustration of trying to carry on a conversation with online customer service representatives whose lessons in English as a Second Language began and stopped with the memorization of Company Policy related to obfuscation and misdirecton.

I’ve been squabbling with ATT (lack of service and slammers of the worst kind of phoney billings for products not ordered).  I’ve also been sending emails to the NYT, Washington, and all over everywhere including TRUTHdig and CODEpink, a Jewish activist group out of NYC and just about to all candidates,  Obama and Hillary mostly. In the past few days, I’ve been trying to log on to Truthdig.com to comment on several interesting articles that were published in the past 2 weeks or so.  Talk about sluggish access to Truthdig web site and then to your log on. Hour long waits. I’ve been sitting here for 20 minutes waiting for it to come fullly on line.  I have had no other problems with other sites , with the exception of the ATT site where one is supposed to be able to modify one’s service plan .  It’s the strangest thing:  I get to the site and begin to type in my information and then after no more than thirty seconds I have a message pop up in my face saying “time ran out”  and ATT customer service disappears from view.  Attempts to get the service site back online has repeatedly been compromised by a quick disappearance of ATT billing site. 
Now, call me ...suspicious…or something, but after reading reports that our collection of electronic Media Message Bearers have been cited even by the FCC of monitoring and even blocking some emails and inquiries, etc, that might reflect badly upon their companies or the current administration, especially Homeland Security…I am very concerned that Big Brother has finnaly arrived and the Thought Police are now in charge.
Do anybody out there in Ether Land have similar experiences to relate, or any comments or suspisions that Truthdig.com is under some kind of double secret observation and monitoring for its daily dose of political inquiry that is politicallly incorrect…among the cabals and inner sanctums masquarading as leaders and captians of culture and industry?  I plan to dump ATT because of cost gouging, but now I wonder if will live long enough to get my phone disconnected because I can’t afford the disconnect fee.  TELL me that I dont have anything to worry about….please.
Sabagio Mauraeno
Somewhere in DeKalb County Georgia alone and waiting for a late night knock on the door that will the beginning of the End.

Windows is designed to nab your privacy as well. 

See the e-book at http://www.rexxinfo.org/How_to_Secure_Your_Windows_PC_and_Your_Privacy.pdf

My favorite part—where it tells about how printers write secret fingerprints on every document you print!

The digiworld is here to stay, now if only we could
read THEIR email, too….hmmmm….what sordid secrets
might THAT reveal? Hmmm….

Comment #59370 by Noah on 3/19 at 10:11 am

Dude, but google makes my life way easier

You can have “easy” and not worry about ass biting too:

http://www.scroogle.org/

They dump the history every 30 days!

Google/Yahoo keep it forever!

Dude, but google makes my life way easier. If it will come back to bite me in the ass then so be it.

Comment #13210 by Lin on 7/07 at 9:15 am says:

There’s only so much data you can have before the enormity of it buries you in a sea of “it just doesn’t matter”.

This is so true.  I remember when my father worked for Mobil back before it merged with EXXON.  The IRS wanted records concerning Mobil’s off shore business, and taxes paid on same for the previous five years.

Mobil sent the records in three railroad boxcars, and never heard any complaints from the IRS again.

Put tin foil on your head and take all your fillings so they can’t read your mind.

I can’t help but finding Mr Malseed just a wee tad tendentious when he writes that «Google doesn’t even link to its privacy policy from its lily-white home page. (Is that “evil”?)». He is quite correct in that no link to the privacy policy is provided from the Home Page, which is what I should call clean and uncluttered (presumably what Mr Malseed means by «lily-white»), but surely he didn’t fail to notice the About Google link directly below the search window ? At the bottom of <u>that</u> page, which the cautious Mr Malseed certainly must have investigated thoroughly, he should have found a link to Privacy Policy next to the Google copywrite and a link to Terms of Service. To imply, as I think Mr Malseed does, that Google attempts to make it difficult to ascertain what the company’s privacy policy is because no link is offered directly from the «lily-white» Home Page is misleading, not to say dishonest, at best….

A second, and to my mind far graver objection to Mr Malseed’s rather shallow dig is that in the course of writing five pages on privacy concerns, he nowhere mentions the word Echelon. Is Mr Malseed playing bait and switch with us, in an attempt to distract our attention from one of the greatest threats to our personal privacy and perhaps our liberty ? Given a choice between Google and the US government, I’ll take Google anytime….

There’s only so much data you can have before the enormity of it buries you in a sea of “it just doesn’t matter”.

Too much information is sometimes worth a lot less than not enough.

If it really freaks you out - every opportunity you have to search out the unpalatable on machines that are not your own - do it.. on the off chance that it will eventually drive some poor haystack-living needle hunter mad.

Google went further than censoring when they actually blacked out a story in the cache that had this in it “The New York Times Tokyo Bureau Chief, Jim Brooks, said that he couldn’t attend an official press function about 9/11 or he would be fired.”

Google II has all your searches stored so you can take advantage of them. Next you will only have to implant the chip in your hand and all will be taken care of.

I’d do the opposite.  Do a bunch of meaningless searches for “terrori*m child-po*n xx* you*g pus** ira* al-***da ci* ns* bush-hate*s anti-a*erican co*munist so*ialist li*eral” just to give them a bunch of garbage in their data mining filters.

I have compiled a list of methods I think are useful in maintaining privacy, while using the great features that these smart engineers have built.

I feel like Bush has become this country’s dictator and every law ever written to protect our right to privacy has been effectively flushed down the toilet!
Since when does anyone have the right to tap my phone or monitor my e-mails WITHOUT A LEGAL WARRENT!? SINCE BUSH THATS WHEN!

Another reason to use “dial up” and not cable or DSL.  No fixed IP address to track you with.

Google is indeed evil passing themselves off as “hip”.  Various search engines keep IP logs for differing amounts of time. Alta-Vista deletes in a year. Clusty the same. Of course Google keeps your IP log forever. Mezzy doesn’t keep a log at all and of course you can use the scroogle scraper (scroogle.org)to stop Google from feeding on your data or anonimize your web surfing or any search engine with anonymouse.org.

Very distressing, this and so many other ears listening in on our private lives (in the USA especially). As soon as Google surrenders to the feds, I look for another server. In our so-called free enterprise world, will there be a server who respects our privacy? Does Bush have dirt on the senators and representatives so that they don’t stop
government intrusion into our lives, or are both parties totally controlled by fascist corporations?
Or are these congresspeople scared for their lives?
That sounds paranoid but not in an authoritarian State.

information is power

the one who has it may change your world for good or bad. 

nothing is more dangerous than knowledge in the hands of faceless companies or governments. threats to freedom are not to be disrespected.

is it the right time for panic?

i don’t think so. here i have a few tips that may help you to rest your soul:

1. You should not make any personal or ashaming searchs in your house or office.
2. Abandon the “internet explorer” use mozilla, or orca browser.
3. If you have any god…...pray a lot

personally i don’t believe in “shame”,

I have known a long time that companies such as Google ect were spying on citizens.I was in the computer whole sale business and had information this was going on and had been really never stopped except for a while after the Nixon watergate deal.I have been hesitenant to tell all but my trusted friends .I always tried to warn friends and friends of friends about this.They said you are nuts they cant do that.I said well be careful if you think I am crazy I could tell you more but if you dont respect me even this much forget it you a fool.Its worse than you think.Weather modification ,911 is a lie , Go to Alex Jones on search engine he has been fighting this stuff for years and is on the radio on Republic Broadcasting and Genisus Network out of Austin TX.Do a search or go to http://www.infowars.com or http://www.prisonplanet.com

Yup. Google is a privacy train smash waiting to happen. Google Desktop for God’s sake.

All this ‘information’ that can be compiled in a dossier on people is already happening, dear reader…My wife went to one of those private eye websites, and pulled up a bunch of stuff on me that I’d never told her…like the aliases I never used, but put in with my info when I got my membership with BMI (songwriter’s royalty entity)...no details, sources mentioned..so, it made me look like a devious character….then the bombshell…My wife shared with me that in this dossier was a child molestation issue..no details other than a location from where it was reported to have occurred… My ex-wife was molested by her father…tried to kill herself after being reawakened to that part of her life one day….terrible day in my life..but, now I’m attached to this tag… child molester…
  Needless to say, that scares the hell out of me.  I’m depressed about this incident, thinking. well, what else is inaccurrate in this dossier?  Well, my wife tried to find just where it was that she went..and we have yet been able to find it…we could pay 30-40-50 dollars to get all kinds of info, and that sucks.. just knowing such a thing is out there….What can one do to correct this, should I decide to pursue correcting this flawed info?
  The internet…it’s just another place where mud-slingers and the like can get part of the story and make you look awfully bad..
  Lord, help us

It’s a scary thought, but I don’t think the worst case scenario in the lead of this piece is a real risk. The search engine records of any intelligent person interested in the world around them are going to be incredibly diverse. An “investigator” or “deep packet inspector” could arrive at a thousand shaggy dog stories connecting the “dots,” but anything substantial?

The world is too hierarchically complex to be able to conclude anything for sure from the fact that a person has looked up certain things. To do a complete concordance for a person even if it were possible to cross-reference emails and personal data, would require so much manpower, so much sheer time, that it boggles the mind.

Someone may be looking at “infidelity” example, because of a friend’s infidelity, because they are considering cheating and want advice on how to conceal it, or because they want to be sure of the word’s spelling.

Now if a regime did come along that is so unhip to the nature of life in a free society that it starts prosecuting people on the basis of their Net searches, then they probably will not have anything against saving a lot of time and dispensing with due process completely, and simply lock up suspected intellectuals. Or worse, take away their Net.

Its interesting to compare this to the recent attempts by china and other countries to censor the net.
How much privacy is necessary?  Want to hide your inner self from your wife and kids?  Maybe honesty would be a healthier response.

Since the FISA law   stringently restricts the retention of information obtained by monitoring communications of US citizens how do internet companies get around it and maintain files that would be illegal for the NSA to compile even with the current Bush spying program?
It seems that the very fact that datamining
of communications is possible violates the
First Amendment by restricting free communication of ideas based on laws that may not even exist but may be retroactively imposed in the future.
If the government really wants to prevent illegal activities over the internet they should not monitor millions of individuals who may or may not have intentionally accessed   something of questionable legality but should focus their limited resources on shutting down the websites distributing the illegal material.