Over the weekend, I read American Psycho whose backcover reads “He is twenty-six years old and living his own American Dream”. It was a fascinating read, where a man puts money and objects above the preciousness of life. The intersting about this is that I borrowed this book from the library. While standing in line to check out, I thought to myself, “I wonder if this book will look bad on my checkout history?”.

After I read Wil Wheaton’s latest post regarding some people’s hope that we allow the government to monitor our personal habits, lifestyles, and reading choices, three major things struck me:

1. The government already has the ability to monitor our electronic conversations (email, phone, cell-phone, pages, irc) in “order to stop the trafficking of drugs and terrorist action”.

2. The new Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act help monitoring the general public with the Total Information Awareness campaign. Now the government can link up with third party (read businesses’) databases and monitor our purchases and any other service we might purchase.

3. We aren’t allowed to even know when Big Brother is watching us. That’s prohibited from release, even under a court order. Doesn’t that put the balance of power in the executive and legislative branches when the judiciary can be basically cut out of the loop?

Where do we go from here? Will TIA actually protect our security? Unfortunately, the more we scrutinize transaction and communication electronically, the more we push those who would do this country harm into using methods that are even more difficult to track. Cash transactions are already the norm for illegal trade, so will the government now collect every feed from every video camera in the US to track those cash purchases? I doubt that would even help, just harm us who have done nothing wrong.

Here’s another interesting though. In the article Wil mentions, a woman would like to know who reads books on serial killers or bomb making in her neighborhood. She says its important to her. I’d like to know everyone in my neighborhood who has ever committed a crime or if they’ve ever been diagnosed as psychotic. You might say that this is crazy talk, but there is Megan’s Law which requires sex offenders to register with local police. So apparently we have a right to track people who have committed certain crimes and are back in the general population, because they pose a threat. Why not apply this to psychotics? Then again, why wait until they commit the crime? Isn’t that too late? Perhaps we should move to a military court system of guilty until proven innocent. Isn’t that where our laws are going?