As Americans, we guard our privacy, and rightly so, although we tend to believe we have a much greater right to privacy than our constitution and our laws provide us.  Nevertheless, you would be hard pressed to find an American who doesn’t believe that our privacy increasingly is invaded by the proliferation of computer data bases containing our personal information, cookies and trojans on our personal computers, the ever-expanding number of surveillance cameras in public and private places, and the ease with which other people can have access to our communications.

Hardly a day goes by, it seems, that there isn’t a news story about the theft or unintentional release of personal data on millions of Americans.  If it isn’t a stolen Department of Veterans Affairs laptop with personal information on 26 million veterans, it’s the search engine results of 600,000 AOL subscribers or the social security and account numbers of hundreds of thousands of credit card holders.  And no matter how much attention these disclosures attract and measures people subsequently take to prevent the release of this information, nothing appears to stem the trend.

Every savvy personal computer user knows you must have spyware protection installed on your computer to prevent the theft of your personal information from your hard drive.  With dialup connections people went on line just long enough to do what they had to do.  With broadband internet connections, we’re always connected, spending more time on the Internet and making ourselves more vulnerable to hackers.  And we’re not talking about the teenaged geek anymore, but rather international organized crime which has found another multi-million dollar source of easy money.

Just as your personal information exists in thousands of computer databases, unless you never leave your home, your image appears every day on surveillance cameras along our highways, at our places of work, and where we go to eat and be entertained.  Surveillance cameras are more prevalent in Europe than in the United States.  The UK, for example, has an estimated 4,000,000 surveillance cameras.  That’s approximately one for every 16 people.  The US, however, isn’t far behind.  Soon it will be impossible to be in a public place and not be in the eye of a surveillance camera. 

If you are as concerned about the security of your personal electronic communications as you are about your personal information, there isn’t a lot of good news here either.  The very nature of email makes it inherently insecure.  You can erase the emails you send and receive and other computer files with personal information, but unless you use special software to clean your hard drive, anyone with the right program can retrieve what you’ve erased.  Remember that next time you get rid of an old computer.  Then there’s the same email on the computer of the person you sent it to that may have been forwarded to countless other people and their hard drives to say nothing of your Internet provider’s servers. 

It’s amazing what people say in emails not knowing who all will eventually read them and the fact they will last forever.  Archeologists 10,000 years from now will only have to dig until they find the remnants of an email server.  Then all they’ll have to do is sit in an air-conditioned room and they can learn everything there is to know about humans in the 21st century.

Telephone voice communication is a bit more secure.  Unless you or the person you are talking to intentionally record your conversation, neither of you have a record of it.  The problem is you never know who else is on the connection with you.  It’s not that difficult to tap or surreptitiously record someone else’s phone conversations.  People who wish to do so can easily purchase whatever equipment they need for that purpose on the Internet.

Increasingly, people are attempting to lower their phone bills by converting from conventional telephone carriers to voice over internet protocol (VoIP).  VoIP solutions do not yet support encryption. As a result, it is relatively easy to eavesdrop on VoIP calls and even change their content.  Even the latest digital cellular phones have security vulnerabilities that continue to allow the possibility of eavesdropping or cloning. 

Yes, governments listen to telephone conversations in criminal, national security, or counter-terrorism investigations, but unless you’re planning a crime, committing espionage, or planning a terrorist attack, in my opinion, you should be more concerned about your ex-spouses private investigator or organized crime than about the government.  Despite recent disclosures of warrant-less intercepts of international telephone calls with suspected terrorists, the United States has far more protections against government intrusion into the private communications of individuals than other countries, including the checks and balances provided by congress and a free, watchdog press.

One can argue that it is technology itself that makes us more vulnerable.  A fundamental truth about technology is that no matter how much those who develop it may appreciate or understand its potential to do harm, the ability or desire to do what is necessary to prevent that harm rarely keeps pace with technological innovations. 

Technologies from atomic energy to zoology have their horror stories.  As the Jesuits taught me, everything has an equal and opposite potential for good and evil.  Anything that has the potential for great good has an equal potential for great evil.  Splitting the atom gave us atomic energy.  It also gave us nuclear war.  The invention of the computer gave us moon landings, the Internet, and the discovery of DNA.  On the other side, it gave us identity theft, carpel tunnel syndrome, and global organized crime.

Every time there is a news report about individuals’ names, social security numbers, account numbers or other personal information falling into the wrong hands, a spate of articles appear in newspapers and on the Internet telling us what we need to do to safeguard our personal information.  Mostly they tell us to regularly monitor our credit bureau records.  Aggressive credit monitoring may limit the damage done to you, but it won’t prevent it.

You can demand that your medical, financial, or governmental institution do a better job of protecting your personnel information.  In the short run, that’s not likely to have much impact.  In the long run, that may be the only thing that actually works, but providing adequate safeguards for personal information will require a large investment in time, money and technology.  Institutions tend to be reluctant to make those investments until there’s a disaster or until the clamor for change gets quite loud.  As the technology of the information age continues to expand exponentially, developing safeguard strategies and technologies to keep pace with it is no small challenge.

You can load all the anti-virus and spyware software on your personal computer that you want, but remember that it’s always playing catch-up ball.  Hackers and criminals develop ways to get around them faster than software developers come up with ways to defend against them.

To be sure, surveillance cameras are effective.  It’s become very difficult in America to knock off a Seven Eleven and get away with it because of the ubiquitous surveillance camera.  And given the disruption of last weeks plot to blow up as many as ten US jetliners over the Atlantic, would you rather have more surveillance cameras or less?

When it comes to email and telephone communications in the digital age, if you believe that only the intended recipient will read or hear what you say, you aren’t living in the real world.  If you want to have a private conversation with someone with a high degree of confidence that no one else will read or overhear it, take a walk in the woods with that person and speak very softly.

Privacy in today’s America will likely never be what it used to be or what we think it should be.  Get used to it.  The very nature of modern American society with its increasing dependence on networked digital databases, computers, surveillance cameras, email and other new communications technologies, assures that this problem is going to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does.  Giving up some of our privacy for better security with things like surveillance cameras may make us safer from criminals and terrorists while other technologies make us more vulnerable.  The challenge is to have the benefits of new technology without all the vulnerabilities.  But like virus and spyware programs, we'll always have to play catch-up ball.