Privacy. Do you know what this word means? And if so, do you have it? The word “Private” comes from the Latin term meaning “set apart,” or more importantly, “belonging to oneself”. It is self-evident that the idea and meaning of the word privacy, and how we experience it, has drastically changed in the new millennium. If we consider telephones alone, the stark realities of privacy loss become very apparent. In the last millennium we watched countless movies that underscored the importance of telephone privacy by illustrating how warrants must be obtained if “private communications” were to be infringed. At some point in the new millennium, not only did this expectation disappear, it became commonly accepted that no privacy exists while using a telephone, and worse, that all travel, images and data are collected non-stop. I would ask: Do we belong to ourselves in the new millennium?
In this episode we show that privacy did not vanish overnight. It was chipped away by programs with friendly names: Operation CHAOS on U.S. soil, Church Committee findings on media ties, NSA’s SHAMROCK and MINARET vacuuming communications, CIA’s HTLINGUAL opening mail, and the FBI trying to peek into reading habits through the Library Awareness push. That was the baseline before the smartphone era. And here lies the etymology of privacy: It literally means to belong to yourself. That is the crux of the matter. When you realize that, you see clearly that we no longer belong to ourselves in the digital age. Our images, our data, our very identities are pulled into the hive.
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