It's astonishing what does and doesn't get people's dander up. So far, here in Seattle--a city large and liberal enough that there's an average of more than one public protest a day against something or another--there have yet to be any protests that I know of specifically targetting the state's sweeping new invasions of personal privacy. None, for example, against our local FBI's new practice of literally sending agents to regularly sit in the middle of prayer services at a local mosque, ostentatiously taking notes on worshippers.

There was a protest here the other day against the new "Advantage Card" system instituted by QFC. (Safeway, our only other major local grocery chain, did thing years ago. Yet another good argument for shopping at your local co-op.) The program makes you eligible for sale prices only if you agree to let the company track your personal spending habits through the card.

In other words, it's no big deal that our purportedly democratic government is being sacrilegious at best, and throwing people in jail indefinitely without cause at worst. But woe unto the company that gets between we Americans and lettuce that's ten cents a head cheaper.

QFC's wretched scheme is easily defeated, for the time being; the cards lack pictures, so those wanting deals without losing their privacy can simply randomly swap cards from time to time. Defeating John Ashcroft's idea of the constitution is more problematic.

Doubtless Kroger (the megachain that owns QFC) will fix its loophole soon, and it'll all be part of the same national ID card system law enforcement checks when you run a red light or buy beer. But the protest/non-protest syndrome does point up the truism that politics is the art not only of the possible, but of the visible. Most people don't pray in mosques (or face indefinite detention, or worse). They do buy fresh produce, and they do care about its price.

The uneven and mostly invisible nature of our society's war against privacy has ensured that not only is it a very one-sided war, but it's a war that's already lost. Anyone reading this paper on a web site or in forwarded e-mail has someone reading over your shoulder. Enormous amounts of information on you are floating around out there: not just your purchasing habits, or your worshipping habits, but your credit, employment, housing, financial, legal, and medical histories, your family, your social circles, your reading and listening habits, your political beliefs.

It's all out there; less certain is whether it's used, and if so, to what purposes and by whom, and how much of it is ever in one place at one time. Already, the noose is tightening in ways unthinkable outside science fiction a decade ago. Many computers can now store all that data and more for each of the planet's six billion plus people. Those computers, like all computers, operate by a basic rule: garbage in, garbage out.

The reason our government's massive expansion in intelligence-gathering powers will be useless in "fighting terrorism" is that we already have too much empirical data. ECHELON, for example, can monitor (via satellite) every phone call or e-mail on Earth, and that's just for starters. But to be useful, at some point, somebody must use that data: analyze it, pick out the trends, or write the software that analyzes it and picks out the trends and gives the results to a human being. That's where the system collapses.

If some 25-year-old insurance company employee in some anonymous, flourescent-lit hell spends 10 seconds coding your entire life's medical history, and makes a mistake, it'll take you months of voice mail and correspondence and documentation (and, god forbid, lawyers) to get it straightened out--not much help if you're, say, being denied access to medical care for your heart attack (or pre-natal care during your pregnancy) as a result. And, again, it can be worse--as when dimwit junior level cop believes a malign but fanciful terrorist "tip" that your cousin is a Middle Eastern terrorist.

Any boomer who has ever, out of curiosity, filed a Freedom of Information Act request to get the FBI's version of how they spent their youth can testify that it's a good laugh. Dor example, one friend of mine credited with being a leader of the Berkeley People's Park demonstrations was actually a US Marine fighting somewhere in Southeast Asia at the time. Such errors are only multiplying in scale and consequence today, with much less humorous results.

We've established that our national security apparatus had plenty of pre-9/11 information that an attack was in the works, and plenty of clues as to the nature of that attack, its timing, and the identity of the attackers. But those clues were all held by separate tentacles of our bazillion-appendaged security octopus. To genuinely fight terrorism, we'd need sweeping improvements in our ability to communicate among those different databases and to interpret that information quickly and accurately. The last thing we need is more governmental self-granted expansion of privacy violations; it just adds more data to an overloaded system. They make things worse, not better. (And if your interest is in making this system collapse, don't withdraw from it--flood it with useless information, preferably conflicting.)

Government, as it happens, can't make that sort of improvement in its ability to interpret quickly and accurately. It violates human nature, entropy-loving laws of physics, and Newton's Third Law of Bumbling Bureaucrats. But that rationale is being used anyway, to [ublicly justify centralizing all those new, disparate ways in which we're monitored. Never mind that the a potential for government (and corporate) incompetence and abuse is truly terrifying.

The United States owes its entire non-Native history to people wanting to erase their pasts and make fresh starts. Now, we're in the forefront of making it impossible for people to shed their pasts, or someone's imagined version of their pasts. Sadly, modern Americans seem so incapable of imagining the freedoms our ancestors took for granted--such as escaping to frontiers that no longer exist--that when our human desire to be able to start fresh is denied, the protests spring up only when some company wants to find more efficient ways to sell us toilet paper.