It's all a conspiracy

I always dread a phone call from my Uncle Bill. It's not the fact that every other word out of his mouth is either a curse or an ethnic slur, and it's definitely not the fact that he smells like old pasta sauce, since that's hardly a factor over the phone.\nNo, what bothers me about my Uncle Bill is his conspiracy theories. \nThese are all old hat in his endless rantings, but the other night he went on a tangent about the imminent police state of the one-world government that will monitor our every move via the computer chips of the Antichrist (who, according to him, is none other than George W. Bush). I hadn't heard him this riled up since his legendary cough syrup binge of 1987.\nTo him the Patriot Act, which some see as invasion of basic rights, is just the beginning of a much larger conspiracy. Soon Congress will pass Patriot Act II, which will outlaw cash money, put a surveillance camera on every street corner and outlaw toothpaste, among other things.\nBut suddenly the normally baseless ramblings of this insane old coot got me thinking. See, there's no reason for the government, or anyone else for that matter, to infiltrate our lives with cameras on every street corner, biochips or security checkpoints.\nWe already think that telling everyone our every last thought and action will make us some kind of celebrity instead of worrying about invasion of privacy. \nDo you have a blog? Do you like to update it with exactly how you feel, what you like and dislike, what you're planning to do in the coming days, weeks and months? Even if you don't, millions of other people do, and they could be writing about you. \nEven putting up an away message is promoting this idea. Gather years of disconnected online journal posts, and the next thing you know, you have a case file about a person that the FBI could only dream of 30 years ago.\nBack then, putting together a detailed log of someone's thoughts and actions would take months of interviews and surveillance. Now a few links to a live journal embedded in someone's profile will get you all the information you could ever want to stalk that person. \nHeck, even here at the Indiana Daily Student, we've found it much easier to track down people, thanks to tools like www.thefacebook.com. No longer do we have to find friends of friends who might know you from a class and then beg them for your cell phone number; you were more than happy to give it to us or anyone else on the Web site.\nWe also know that you hate spaghetti and love the Dave Matthews Band, as well as some hot guy named Adam in your Stats class. Thanks for that.\nSee? That's exactly the type of crap we're all putting out there. We think it is completely random, but do you know who might be reading it? Do you have any idea why somebody might be reading it?\nIt's not just your best friend and your Aunt Petunia. We all can see it, and most of the time we don't care. But if, say, the government had a reason to be watching you, it could be very useful to them at some point.\nThere's a very false culture bred from "reality television" that seems to promote the idea that if you let everyone know your business, you're some kind of celebrity. That's a crock. \nLook at the information real celebrities put out to the public. They don't want us to know what's going on in their personal lives. No one but the most attention-starved has-been wants the paparazzi photographing his or her every move. There are some weird people out there (they've poked me on thefacebook!), and you never want to encourage a stalker, or worse, big brother.