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Taking privacy cues from the federal government is - to say the least - ironic, considering today's Orwellian level of surveillance. At virtually any given time outside of one's own home, an American citizen can reasonably assume his movements and actions are being monitored by something, by somebody, somewhere.

Governmental surveillance is not about the government collecting the information you're sharing publicly and willingly; it's about collecting the information you don't think you're sharing at all, such as the online searches you do on search engines... or private emails or text messages... or the location of your mobile phone at any time.

Foreigners like me have no privacy rights whatsoever. Yet we keep using U.S.-based services all the time, making us a legal target for gathering and storing our private information. Other countries do surveillance as well. But nobody has the global visibility that United States does.

With those people, I'm very far apart, because I believe that government access to communications and stored records is valuable when done under tightly controlled conditions which protect legitimate privacy interests.

In digital era, privacy must be a priority. Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?

We are moving rapidly into a world in which the spying machinery is built into every object we encounter.

Privacy is tremendously important. I believe the American people, and all people, should be skeptical of government power, should ask hard questions: What is the authority? What is the oversight? That's the way it ought to be.

Since real spies are so good, you never really know what actual spying is. But I do think spying is a lot more dangerous than we are led to believe.

On his own okay, Bush has authorized eavesdropping on as many as a thousand people over the past three years, with some of those intercepts being purely domestic, the New York Times reported.

We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.