*shrug* ECHELON is a major data-mining effort, and an illustration of just how unlikely you are to find anything useful when 99.99999% of what you have is unrelated crap, especially with the sheer volume of information we have moving around today. Sure, it *can* be abused... but it's likelier that the shopkeeper at the local grocery store will steal your credit card details. It's simply easier to do.

As for the change of views from the 80s to the present day, it's a global issue. We've had an actual revolution since then, equal in value, if not greater than, the Industrial Revolution. We live in an age where you can look up data at the push of key, and we expect it now. Privacy? What privacy? Our age is becoming more and more identified with TV programs whose sole *purpose* is to peek at peoples' lives. Privacy has become a secondary consideration when compared to our thirst for mostly useless information - we have people *addicted* to information now. Hell, I think I'm a prime example of the phenomenon, though I try to focus on something useful rather than peeking into peoples' lives.

Information, information... we want information. But have we become numbers now? To some extent, we have, particularly for various software bots designed to mine all the useless crap we so easily share about ourselves with a keystroke.


Everything we do with our computer when we connect to the net sends out amazing quantities of information about us - and there's very little we can do about it without compromising the ease with which we use it. You want an Internet connection? Cool, so the ISP is capable of monitoring everything that passes through its lines, like it or not. Try stopping it, you're paying it for the ability to transfer lots of data through its lines, after all. And this is true all the way up to the big continental ISPs that provide the Internet backbone. You want cool software? Expect it to send out lots of info that can be easily interpreted by anyone familiar with it... like a browser. Or an anti-virus. Or any piece of software that has to access a remote computer ever in its existence.

So in this sense, Google is really the least of your concerns. Google has too much junk in it. But someone who monitors merely a single PC directly based on its IP address can gather quite a lot more.

As for governments demanding information from private companies... They can easily set up an ECHELON-style project without bothering to ask you, not needing Google at all. And any demand for information would apply only to servers located in the country proper - a limited slice of the huge pie, which Google can simply decide to move someplace else to avoid any legal trouble.