Actually, this post has nothing to do with Karate other than the fact that I am tapping this out on the Treo sitting on the floor outside my son's karate class.

Today is my daughter's birthday. She's 11 today. But this post is not really going to be about that either.

I don't write about my family here. Other than family and friends who might read this site, there isn't a reader who could give my kid's names. I do this out of respect for their privacy.

Their privacy is, of course, not perfect. The town library knows what books they have borrowed and how much they (I) have paid in late fees. The school system has volumes of information on them. The Social Security Administration has them on file. The IRS knows things about them. And if they gave damn. If it mattered to anyone else in the world besides her. The NSA could with a few key strokes know when and how often my daughter talked to her best friend on the phone.

I am concerned about her and her brother's and my wife's privacy enough that I have never mentioned them by name or offered more than superficial details about their lives. But it does not bother me that somewhere in what must be terabytes of data is a record of what numbers we dialed and what numbers dialed us.

Our information is part of a vast alphabet soup that the NSA is sifting through looking for specific indicators of potential terrorist communication. They will never look at my data. They will likely never know that my data exists in their system. The extent to which its presence there is a violation of my privacy is certainly less of a violation than I voluntarily accept in many other parts of life.

If anyone reading this is from the NSA, that last call from my home number to my cell was my wife. Bread, crackers, milk, orange juice and tampons.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 04:09 PM | No Comments | Add Comment