A few days ago I wrote about how a person sent me an email telling me of the long journey a comic book I had written in 1988. The person was able to track me down by doing a Google search of my name and from it found contact information for me from my website. A few hours ago while on Google + I got a recommendation of a number of people I might want to add to my circle of friends. The third person on the list turned out to be an old high school classmate I haven’t talked to in over 15 years. A few years ago I typed in an old co-workers name in a Facebook search and got in contact with him within a few hours. For the past month I have been working on clearing up my credit and one of the credit agencies had on file an address I was at when I first moved back to San Diego with my parents in 1976. Another agency had an address for me that I stayed at for six months when I first moved to Arizona. On my computer at work two weeks ago I looked up a fancy faucet from Overstock.com and ever since I have been getting ads on Facebook and other sites I frequent for Overstock.com, something that hadn’t happened before two weeks ago.

Ever since people started going online en masse with those annoying AOL disks from back in the day, the Internet has grown from an ‘information is free’ entity to a commercial magnet. Quite a few people believed that their information was in their control on the Internet, if for no other reason because of the knowledge that with billions of people online generating many billion bits of data it would be impossible to sort through it all. Sure, in the back of our minds we may have had a slice of Philip K Dick paranoia, but only the really paranoid were in fear of being watched all the time. Some of us would roll our eyes when we heard them on the old Coast to Coast radio show. They were the black helicopter brigade, they were the ones in the media who were called tin foil hat people who had not so good hygiene who talked about microchips being implanted in their brains by the government.

We called these folks crazy yet evidence of our lives being tracked and cataloged by the government and corporate interests were all around us. I can’t count how many times criminals on procedural shows have been caught because of tracing their Internet use or tracking their active smartphones. Sure, you might have one criminal smart enough to use disposable phone, but a security camera at the ATM or the bodega camera across the street would catch them. People love watching these shows but there is always the assurance that this technology or tracking is only used against bad people. Of course, while many of us believe we have freedom, we complain about the Internet ads that pop up on social media sites, which all seem to be connected to some product we looked up on another site.

When Americans hear the news about the data mining the government was doing through Verizon, a surprising amount of people didn’t care. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) probably spoke for a lot of individuals when he made the following statement –

"I'm a Verizon customer. I don't mind Verizon turning over records to the government if the government is going to make sure that they try to match up a known terrorist phone with somebody in the United States."

Many people have the feeling that if they aren’t doing anything wrong, why should they worry if they are being monitored? The joke many people assume is the government will only find them doing boring things like going to the store or having conversations with their parents. The truth is the revelation about the data mining and capturing of our data online shouldn’t have been a surprise to most Americans. Since the Patriot Act was passed, we essentially signed away our right to privacy. The day the act was signed, privacy died in our country. It wasn’t like privacy was healthy at that point, we were slowly losing our privacy on what were relatively simple things like sales surveys, but with use of the Internet increasing and the inevitable ability of people to let technology evolve faster than the laws and common sense to deal with the evolution, we got confirmation a few days ago how deep we had compromised ourselves on privacy and the sad reality is not too many people understand how bad things have become.

Remember how I mentioned the procedural shows and how they catch criminals? One way of catching criminals is by DNA samples. For law enforcement to have a sample of your DNA, in most cases, you have to have been convicted of a crime. Once your DNA is in the system it can be compared to any sample. Again, most people would argue this is a good thing, since the people we are talking about are criminals. Well, in the mass of news that occurred in the past few weeks, it might have been overlooked by many Americans that the Supreme Court ruled that DNA samples can be taken from arrested suspects. Think about that for a moment, because the distinction between convicted and arrested is important. As the law is now, if you are arrested for a ‘serious’ crime the police can get a DNA sample from you. Before the Supreme Court ruled, there was an episode of Law and Order SVU that addressed this same issue. A guy was suspected of committing a number of rape cases in many states and even though he was a suspect and arrested in those cases, because he was never convicted his DNA wasn’t on record. He couldn’t be tied to the other crimes. With the new ruling were in place, he would have had a DNA swab when he was arrested, his DNA would have given a hit from the other arrests, and a one hour TV show would have been over in 10 minutes.

What I just laid out may seem to evade the original issue of our privacy, but my goal is to show that we have given away our privacy so freely that we don’t understand the ramification of a lot of the information we have learned over the past few days. If people are concerned about privacy their worry is with the federal government having their hands on that information. What is lost in the barrage of reports about the harvesting of our information is the government isn’t the only group with access to that information. Edward Snowden, the person who leaked the information to the press, isn’t some high ranking government official. He doesn’t even work for the government. Oh yes, he did at one time but he was working for a government contracted private company. Do you want to hear some scarier news? In the span of three months, he got hired by the company, was given a high level clearance by the company and, by his own admission, took the last three weeks of his time working there plotting a way to get the information and escape the country. Most jobs I’ve applied for, and I’m sure many of you have applied for, give new employees some sort of probation period, sometimes as much as 90 days, before they are given access to highly sensitive material. I worked at a bookstore, got hired as an assistant manager and it took me four months before I got full clearance to the computers.

When I call a company’s customer service line, normally because something bad has happened, I have to remind myself to remain as calm as possible. Why? I realize, having worked at lot of customer service jobs, that the person on the other end is someone like me. They have access to all my records at the particular company and they are usually low level, low pay employees. They have the call center job because they can’t get a job with better income and benefits. If they get upset with my attitude, they could make my life miserable and in most cases I can do little to stop them. It might be a minor inconvenience if they disrupt my cable bill, but what if it has something to do with my bank records? What if the low level person, like Edward Snowden, has access to government secrets? What might make him turn?

Let me leave you with what is to me a burning question about Snowden. By his own words, he is a 29 year old high school dropout with a job making over 200000 a year, living in Hawaii with, as news reports have given today, a girlfriend who is a stripper. In some circles that would be the male American dream. So the question has to be why would he give that all up to tell the American public something they should have known all along? Our privacy was forfeited years ago and everyone has access to it. We are distracted by the real issue this poses, with so many pieces now available to citizens, governments and corporations, do we really have privacy? Are we so afraid of what the terrorist might do to us we are willing to give up the freedoms they hate we have? Think about that the next time you see surveillance cameras at the supermarket, removing your shoes at the airport and when you get those Overstock.com ads while posting drunk pictures of yourself on Facebook that will be discovered by your employer in a few weeks.