Stop worrying about NSA
Polistra has been hammering on two points about the NSA mess: (1) Snowden isn't giving any news. Techy types have known for 30 years that NSA monitors everything. (2) Because NSA monitors everything, they are highly unlikely to find you interesting.

Result: NSA is sort of like Calvin's Manifest Election. You may be on their list, but you won't know it until they grab you, and there's nothing you can do about it anyway. When you're grabbed, you're gone. No need to think about little trivialities like laws, because NSA doesn't use laws.

You should be worrying more about local and physical aspects of privacy.

Example. My publisher is going through some type of bankruptcy, and they're sending form letters to all their creditors at each stage of the process. Hadn't really thought of it until now, but I am one of their creditors: they're obligated by contract to send me an annual royalty check.

On the outside, of course, these letters don't say "We owe you some money that we might not be able to pay." They're just letters from a New York Law Firm. To make it worse, each letter comes twice because the publisher has two slightly different addresses on file (same street, two zip codes) and automatically sends a letter to both addresses.



How many people in this part of town are debtors and how many are creditors? I'm pretty sure this is closer to Debtor Flats than Creditor Heights. So it's a safe bet that the postman now sees me as a deadbeat.

If this notice had been sent online, NSA would store it along with everything else but wouldn't bother to read it. Even if someone did intercept and read the letter online, they would form a correct impression based on the actual text, not a biased impression based on the look of the envelope. No privacy problem there.

Maybe I'm oversensitive... Back in the '90s when I was in serious debt, scary-looking letters were truly and properly scary. Since then I've turned the situation around. But knowing that I'm now the creditor instead of the debtor doesn't erase the old humiliation.
  ¶ 10:08 AM