Public records are available to such an alarming rate that it appears that we have no privacy anymore. For a small fee, you can look up the past of any one on the internet, and get tax records, personal records, adress, and many other things. The information has always been available ? at least much of it has ? but it used to be very difficult to get unless you were a government law enforcement agent. But the internet has changed all that by allowing the building of large data bases and speeding up the rate of information travel to faster than light speeds.

Then again, there are some good things about public records being available. If everyone can be researched by everyone, then even government officials are not invulnerable from the prying eyes of the public. Perhaps they will make our society more open because everyone is allowed to see everything about everyone else. The other thing about public records is that they are not always accurate. I was listed (when I researched myself) as having an address I had not had in years! And besides that, on one of the forms, it was me, but my name was mispelled.

Far scarier than the availability of public records is the prevalence of secret government data bases. They know not only the stuff everyone else knows: mortgages, tax records, liens, judgments, history of addresses, evictions if any, etc. They also know all kinds of things that they really aren't supposed to know according to the constitution. They spy on people and keep track of their political affiliations, they can tap phones and watch communications. It is easy to sound paranoid about such things, but the fact is that there is no way to know precisely what the government knows and what it does not know. We can only hope that they use this information responsible, but how can we know that they will. Especially in the last few years, with the terrorism scare, they have been going much farther in terms of private snooping than before.

A service that has always been available to those willing to pay, even before it was so easy to obtain public records form all over the country, has been the private detective. Clients can order these investigators to follow around and watch people, snap pictures of them, ask questions of their relatives about them, and do all kinds of creepy, stalkerish things, and it is all legal.