Big Brother watching you...

Age 16 to 25? The Pentagon Has Your Number, and More - New York Times The article details the latest in the government's privacy violations (this time acknowledged by the culprits - the Pentagon, though without much remorse really.) Didn't think Big Brother was watching you? Well, if you are 16-25, they have been working on it since 2002. I am actually quite surprised that this idea has occurred to them so late in the game. Most of the data is publically available - graduation dates, age and ethnicity - it just needs collection and sorting. Of course, the best part is that they have a marketing company managing this data. What's curious is that the article mentions the marketing company that traffics personal data as a business model as if it's the most natural thing in the world. The government, on the other hand, is an aweful machine. It's a strange dychotomy here in the US - we don't want the government to know anything about us, even though, to some extent, we have control over it's actions (minor, I agree). Yet we are perfectly ok with Corporations collecting information about us and knowing some of the more intimate details. This is directly opposite to the European attitude towards such things. To me this illustrates an interesting difference in the conceptualization of freedom.