All those cool tools may come with a price: your privacy

While you were IM'ing a friend about what Santa brought, downloading Mariah to your iPod and snapping pictures of the kids playing Xbox on your new walkie-talkie cell phone, Big Brother stopped by.

He rummaged through your hard drive and found your credit card number (the one you used for the Xbox 360 game). He took a peek at the Web sites you've visited (naughty, naughty). And he jotted down your e-mail password (who in the world is RedHotMama?).

Hey, information wants to be free. Get over it.

With technology hurtling toward that legendary Singularity futurists dream of -- computers that think for themselves! -- it's no wonder we mortals feel overwhelmed by the speed of change. In five years, we've gone from mastering e-mail and downloading our first music file to chatting on MySpace and sharing photos through Flickr. But no one fully explained the dangers of viruses, worms, cookies, Trojan horses, malware, spyware and rootkits (you never heard of rootkits?).

The highest toll on the information superhighway is our privacy, it seems.

Every time we swap music files, download the latest JibJab video or "chat" in an online forum, we leave traces of ourselves, our likes and dislikes, our innermost thoughts. It's all lingering out there, bouncing around Internet switches and ISP servers, ripe for the picking.

But what, us worry? We're getting our news from "Daily Show" downloads, snickering at podcasts that lambaste Hillary, firing off e-mails that lampoon Bush. We're live-blogging the breakup of Nick and Jessica, and we're lovin' it.

Or are we, as the late social critic Neil Postman fretted, amusing ourselves to death?

Red flags wave

You don't have to be a Luddite crank to wonder how technology alters our lives, our rights and the law. Recent issues in the news make the point:

* Spying: Set aside the politics of the Bush administration's ordering the National Security Agency to spy on people on U.S. soil. Just think: Tapping key points in the telecommunications infrastructure could net millions of telephone and e-mail communications, and they could be stored for after-the-fact review.

Is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 flexible enough to adjust to such high-tech methods? Stay tuned.

* Data mining: What if a company used technology to gather your most sensitive information -- about health, finances, employment, even your Social Security number -- unbeknownst to you? What if it sold that information to hundreds of companies and government agencies? And what if its own computers weren't secure enough to thwart hackers?

Then you'd have ChoicePoint, the nation's largest data-mining company and subject of multiple lawsuits. Last month, a Nigerian man pleaded guilty to having hacked into ChoicePoint's data-stuffed computers.

* Spychips: That's slang for Radio Frequency Identification, or RFID. It involves tiny data-storage chips embedded in everything from library books to "express pay" gas cards.

But why stop there? Some people have started embedding RFID chips into animals, the better to find Fido should he jump the fence. Some child advocates suggest having kids in school wear RFID badges, the better to track their movements. And when Congress passed the Real ID Act of 2005 in May, it seemed to pave the way for RFID tags on driver's licenses (time will tell).

* Rootkit: Here's a new entry for your wired world lexicon. The term came into wide usage in November, as word spread about Sony BMG's use of aggressive anti-pirating coding in music CDs -- which computer experts said was spyware. Sony has stopped the practice, but experts worry that thousands of computers were corrupted by self-installing code that, worse than a virus, is nearly impossible to find and remove.

Lawsuits have been filed to sort things out.

Warnings resound

The shocking thing in all these examples is not the technology itself but how quiescent we've been in accepting intrusion. Even the idea of a spychip has lost its power to unnerve -- hey, do it for the children!

Much more is at stake than the security of a credit card or an eBay account; it's our freedom draining away. As Justice Louis Brandeis warned as early as 1928, when he famously dissented on the use of wiretaps to convict bootlegger Roy Olmstead, "Discovery and invention have made it possible for the government, by means far more effective than stretching upon the rack, to obtain disclosure in court of what is whispered in the closet."

Almost clairvoyantly, he continued, "Ways may some day be developed by which the government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court and by which it will be able to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home."

We've arrived, it seems, at Brandeis' future.

But buck up, it's a new year. Go over to that PC, delete those cookies, erase that cache, clear credit card numbers from forms, remove health-related info, run those anti-virus programs.

And be it resolved for 2006: Big Brother is not welcome here.