"In "God's Spies," Lewis Lapham's essay on the practice of surveillance 
 and the striving for federal omniscience, he observes that Americans
 no longer resist governmental invasions of privacy.  This can't be
 surprising.  Americans have apparently come to loathe privacy, their
 own or anybody else's.  A week's worth of casual channel surfing gives 
 the proof.  Take MTV's Loveline, on which a real young woman --
 somebody's daughter or, quite possibly, someday somebody's mother --
 voluntarily called in recently to discuss her boyfriend's desire to
 insert not just his penis but both testicles during intercourse.  She
 wanted, as I recall, to know if this was normal or at all dangerous.
 Or watch America's Funniest Home Videos, on network television, which
 never seems to want for homemade tapes of people falling down drunk at 
 their own weddings or getting hit in the groin by flying objects.
 These tapes are not seized by heartless governmental investigators;
 people submit them willingly, gleefully.  Need I even mention Jerry
 Springer?

"Americans who can't get on television can always turn to the
 Internet.  Millions of them have put up Web pages devoted to
 themselves.  In these bizarre advertisements for Brand Me, they
 eagerly give away, to a global audience, their names, addresses, birth 
 dates, lists of favorite movies and CDs, and sexual activities, often
 illuminating any or all of these interests with digitized photos.

"So who cares about privacy?  The only invasive police that Americans
 would fear is one that forced them to stop talking about themselves."

 - A. Kam Napier, from a letter in the May 1999 Harper's Magazine