What if complete strangers were somehow tapping into your private phone calls... all of your calls? What if they knew everything about you from the brand of ice cream you shop for, to where you spend your family vacation? What if they knew exactly how much you are paid, and whether or not you take an extra five minutes for coffee? What if they discovered your inner most thoughts? All of these frightening invasions of your privacy are occurring right now... even as you read this article. And they are so encompassing that psychiatrists will eventually be forced to treat paranoia as a normal human function. Are we crazy, perhaps over the edge? No. Think about it all for a moment or two. You begin your day with a commute to work. On the way, a police camera strategically placed to monitor pedestrians and traffic captures your image running through to your next destination. You stop at your ATM machine to grab some cash for lunch, another camera films you dropping your wallet or purse. Entering the office building, a security camera views your walk to the elevator, and then monitors your elevator etiquette. You sit down at your cluttered desk, turn on the computer to check your e-mail, totally unaware that your boss knows the contents of your e-mail, as well as the fact that you’ve spent quite a few unauthorized work hours surfing the web for those sex sites.

Then you pick up the phone to call your dentist about your afternoon appointment, your dentist of course, knows it’s you because of the caller ID box he’s invested wisely in. You call home to your private line after lunch to check your messages and discover they’ve all been retrieved because your wife’s managed to utilize the universal answering machine access code “10”. You’re busted. She knows about the Friday night fling. And not only does she know the “other” woman’s social security number, but she’s managed to find out where she lives, how much she earns, and that she has two unpaid parking tickets. She obtained all of this information in a matter of minutes from an on-line service. Meanwhile, your boss assigns you the Chicago account, and so you leave the office a tad early, with several cameras watching you yet again, to arrive there on time. In your car, you pass through a toll booth at precisely 4:15 p.m., as noted by the digital scanner that’s locked into a computer database, via the E-Z Pass technology on your car’s windshield. Once in Chicago, you run a red light, eventually a traffic ticket will arrive in the mail, along with a photo of your vehicle, in which your license plate is abundantly visible.... and, of course, the time of the traffic infraction is duly noted. Scared yet? You should be. We all should be. The technology is now available, and as you read on, it is effortlessly being utilized.

And... to add paranoia to obsession, Baltimore’s one year monitoring “experiment” has been deemed such a success story that inquiries from at least 57 other U.S. cities have “poured in”, and more systems are being made available as you read further. This is in no way The UPBEAT fiction column. This is taking place right now. Each one of these blatant invasions of your privacy happens every single day... millions of times. All are completely legal and above board. All are conveniently laced somewhere in the loosely translated concepts of privacy within our constitution.

Many many years ago the American concept of privacy was defined by Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis as “the right to be let alone.” It was a chronically gray area then and it has continued to become even more vague and eroded as we enter the millennium. Its gradual slide into nondescript is vastly becoming a skydiving freefall into oblivion. Information is much easier to access than it was, say, 10 to 15 years ago. Personal information about you that was once collected onto several pieces of paper and filed away in a dingy file cabinet is vastly different today. Its all been transformed into computer programmed data. Now, the technology that exists for acquiring, linking, and sorting this data has become so powerful that it is literally “stripping away” whatever protection we may have once had. When viewed specifically and separately, each of the mentioned privacy infringements can appear to be rather harmless. Who really cares what a junk mail company knows about you? So what if your boss yells at you for the sex sites? Does it matter that ATM machines are equipped with cameras? It seems rather necessary actually. And those street police cameras could really deter all sorts of crime... couldn’t they?

But throw all of this evidence into one stream of consciousness and you’ll soon realize that something is going awry. You don’t necessarily have to believe in or subscribe to conspiracy theories to comprehend that personal information about each and every one of us is quickly being put together section by section, fragment by fragment. Think about this: For a rather modest little fee, anyone can build an extremely detailed profile of you, including your unlisted number and all of your neighbor’s names. How is that possible? Unless the information has been collected over an undetected period of time and stored and linked to other information exactly like it about someone else. Still thinking you are completely safe?

There have been a few major technological advancements in the last decade that have enabled curious voyeurs from all over the world to reveal all of those previously hidden secrets. Computers, the Internet and miniature video cameras, [some no bigger than a pack of common matches] are all being utilized. For decades, our own government has been a captive shadowy specter peering into the private lives of its operatives, as well as constantly monitoring the affairs of foreign governments. Why? Because they can. It’s that simple. Equipped with state-of-the-art equipment and technology, one can only begin to imagine the depths to which they can penetrate the most private details of anyone they choose randomly. This same highly classified technology is now readily available to the average “Joe Nobody” on the street. Your wacky neighbor could easily access vital information on you in the time it takes for you to call your travel agent about updating your passport and moving to Greece.

There are numerous databases of information on people and their purchasing habits which, of course, readily enables advertisers to specifically gauge their demographic audience. These Madison Avenue “suits” don’t know you intimately “yet”, but they religiously watch and record everything you do because it is indeed a fine line between millions and billions spent in advertising each year... Corporations that gain access to the most precise profiles of each consumer will now be successful. And it is as ruthless and scary as anything ever conceived by horror novelist Stephen King. By exercising the simple act of giving out your social security number on a routine order form, you are throwing caution to the wind and inviting much more than you ever bargained for.

Given the facts, let’s say we leave everything to continue on course... Now what? Well... one of two things will occur. The first being that eventually the techno tide will shift, giving cart blanche to the rich and powerful. They alone will be able to afford the rapidly advancing technology to spy “at will” on the common man for profit. The second scenario is that everyone is able to spy freely on everyone else, regardless of the circumstances. Everyone would have unlimited access to the exact same informational resources allowing complete chaos to reign. No one will be exempt from surveillance. Lack of privacy will become the ultimate “equalizer of justice”. And now, to bring us all face to face with that reality, a company known as Earth Watch Incorporated has recently launched the first commercial spy satellite. Now any idiot can order a shot of you lying poolside with that Friday night fling of yours. You may want to consider wearing a few more articles of clothing the next time you decide to lounge about freely. A few sound words of advice... Get in shape, you truly are “naked” to the world. UB    

Bill Waddell is a freelance video production worker and a perpetual ponderer of deep thoughts and bizarre observations. We like to call him "McGuyver", only because we are absolutely certain that he can get us out of anything using just a bobby pin and a stick of gum. He once saved a dog from a burning building using a rubber band, a paper clip and a drinking straw. The dog survived unscathed.

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