Little Rock   If you ever want to keep a secret, don’t ever write it down anywhere. Don’t walk, but run away the internet! That’s increasingly the single biggest clue to protecting your privacy.

The evidence mounts daily as the tidal surges of data seep out of every conceivable internet portal and stream into hands both nefarious and purposeful. Let’s look at some cases in point.

• WikiLeaks has to be in the conversation, but someone has to explain Julian Assange to me these days. Is he about transparency or anarchy? Is he serving a greater cause or an agent of the KGB? The fact that we’re scratching our heads, means there is a big warning sign attached to anything with a WikiLeaks label these days.
• Yahoo had all of the critical data lifted from a half-million customers in the latest and largest hackfest, including social security numbers and the whole enchilada. The biggest concern in the papers was whether it would lower Yahoo’s sale price to the telecoms.
• The FBI arrested someone in August who had lifted the source code for hacking into foreign government websites (and just maybe we should discuss that sometime, too!), but now they aren’t clear if he was a Snowden wannabe or a hoarder who couldn’t keep himself from taking stuff home. Booz Allen has made billions subcontracting to NSA and other agencies for this kind of spy craft, but seems to be running a Swiss cheese factory.
• Yahoo seems to have answered a secret subpoena from the government and created a scanner for its email to try and isolate messages for an alleged terrorist the G-men were tracking.

The list is endless: Apple, one bank after another, credit companies, department stores, hotels, and on and on. Pretty much if you operate in the modern economy, your data is eventually going to end up everywhere, partly because it cost money for companies to protect it, and they would rather apologize for the breech and say, “it’s happening to everyone,” rather than provide the security they are implicitly promising whenever you turn over your information.

No worries, you could go with encryption right?

Not if you follow what is happening to Open Whisper, reputedly the best encryption site out there developed by Mr. Encryption, Moxie Marlinspike, an eccentric, genius hacker and programmer. The government has secretly subpoenaed his company for information. We know this because the ACLU has won some court proceedings trying to protect Marlinspike and his operation. Nonetheless the government is still after Open Whisper because they are trying to collect information that the company expressly says that it does NOT collect.

We’re living in a catch-22 world now. We can’t live with the internet, but we can’t live without it. At this point we need to come to grips with the fact that unless we’re hand signaling to someone out in the wilderness somewhere, no secret is safe, and of course even while our lips might be moving and our hands waving, an eye in the sky probably has our GPS coordinates handy and some footage available.

Our lives are an open book. Get used to it!

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Please enjoy Suzanne Vega’s We of Me. Thanks to KABF.