There's been much talk of late about the loss of privacy, but equally calamitous is its corollary, the loss of solitude.

Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It's about sparing me from the intrusion of other people's personal lives.

Minor drama is the lifeblood of suburbs.

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority.

Unless there is some detail that I'm missing, this sounds positively Orwellian.

The larger point is that two parties are not in fact dividing over the issue of Executive power. Both parties seem to like more and more executive power just fine. They just have adopted different ways of achieving it. One can expect far more Congressional cooperation if a Democratic Congress is teamed with a Democratic President. The effective result may not be less Presidential power to run the National Surveillance State. It may be in fact be more.

How do you organize this in a way that protects an incredibly valuable asset in the United States but does it in a way that doesn't alarm reasonable people, and I underline reasonable people, in terms of civil liberties?

The question to ask is not, Are we safer? The question to ask is, Are we better off?

Focusing on the privacy of the average Joe in this way obscures the deeper threat that warrantless wiretaps pose to a democratic society.

I Could Tell You, But Then You Would Have to Be Destroyed by Me.

Though some federal appellate courts do not appear to require any degree of suspicion to justify a search, one federal district court stated categorically that all laptop searches conducted at the border require at least reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

Privacy may turn out to have become an anomaly.

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Surveillance and Privacy | Another Noteworthy Year