As FmH readers know, I maintain an interest in privacy and its violations, although it has largely become a lost cause. In The Anonymity Experiment, a correspondent for Popular Science attempts to obscure her tracks for just a week, in accordance with the following directives:

I heard of this from kottke, and the foregone conclusion was that it would not be very successful. His teaser left me curious about how she would measure the results. The piece is well-documented and I learned a few things about how to cover my tracks better. But her conclusion? Predictably, that you can never know how successful you have been, and that there is more information out there about you than you can ever know.

Speaking of ingrained paranoia, I recently sent out Freedom of Information Act requests to ten government agencies I thought might have records on me from my prior activities. Most wrote back that they found nothing about me, a fact to which I had a complicated reaction. I was (a) relieved; (b) surprised that my lifelong countercultural activities had apparently not attracted the attention I had expected; (c) dismayed I was being thus denied an odd sort of badge of courage; (d) of course, mistrustful of the denials; and (e) mindful of the fact that submitting FOIA requests might per se place me on a watch list or two (which I had not worried about in writing the letters, expecting that I was already on file). The Dept of Homeland Security, by the way, did not answer in the negative, saying instead that it was a matter of national security whether I was being monitored for national security purposes, and therefore declining to answer my request. By the way, don’t we think Carnivore, or some sophisticated government data mining equivalent or improvement, whatever it might be called, is monitoring this post to the internet and flagging me for further concern?

What do FmHers think? Was the whole endeavor foolish on my part?