"Excellent rebuttal, but I do have one quibble. While you note that we should (rightly) be concerned about "THE ACTUAL GOVERNMENT," we should also be concerned about the large amounts of data that corporations are acquiring about us and selling to others. The personal information that can be retrieved by mining this data is just as revealing as anything that the various government silos have on us. In a sense, our data is actually safer with the government, since (at least theoretically) we have Constitutional recourses to remove that data. There are no such Constitutional recourses in the case of private data - just legislation." - John E. Bredehoft