"I am continually shocked and appalled at the details people voluntarily post online about themselves."

Amid all the efforts to stir up public outrage about the evils of government invading our privacy, MySpace and Friendster stand as monuments to our willingness to invade our own privacy. Do you expect the government not to take advantage of the information people post about themselves?

New Scientist has discovered that Pentagon's National Security Agency, which specialises in eavesdropping and code-breaking, is funding research into the mass harvesting of the information that people post about themselves on social networks. And it could harness advances in internet technology - specifically the forthcoming "semantic web" championed by the web standards organisation W3C - to combine data from social networking websites with details such as banking, retail and property records, allowing the NSA to build extensive, all-embracing personal profiles of individuals....

"You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resumé. People don't realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days," says [Jon Callas, chief security officer at PGP, a Silicon Valley-based maker of encryption software].

But I used a pseudonym!... But I left off my last name!

There's also the problem of trying to make people care about the government listening in on phone calls when we walk around everywhere with our phones and talk in front of people all the time.

UPDATE: If you think this post is an argument about what rights are, your reading is very poor.