Little Big Brother
Big Brother is watching (via Instapundit). Only it's not really Big Brother per se. Just a lot of little Big Brothers.
I don't consider this in the same way as the random searches started last week on the NY Subway. From a privacy standpoint, I think they're two different animals. Whether a good or useful idea or not, the subway searches are dictated by a sense of need. The databases are dictated by a sense of possibility.
And it's technolgy that has made this information possible, and therefore public. A long time ago in a galaxy far far away, there were no digital databases. No phone number databases. No social security number databases. No credit card numbers. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Well, ok -- maybe 40-50 years ago there weren't any. Oh, there were local directories of all sorts, but they mostly had only phone numbers and addresses, weren't linked to each other, and weren't globally available. That has changed slowly over time, and more recently, much more quickly. We have few laws or policies in place to maintain the expectations we hold based upon experiences created in an era when these things weren't possible. But the longer we go without them, the less likely it will be, I think, that we'll create any.