The issue of blanket surveillance by the NSA now heads to the Supreme Court.  The powerful ruling by Judge Richard J. Leon of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia against the blanket surveillance now means that the issue will be argued before the Supreme Court.

This will happen as Judge Leon, while issuing an opinion that calls the use of technology “almost Orwellian” and that “James Madison would be aghast”,  ruled only on the part of two petitioners to the court.  He stayed his injunction “in light of the significant national security interests at stake in this case …

The fast and easy answer is yes.  The privacy our parents and grandparents had is no longer.  The privacy we still have in pockets of our lives will not be available to our children and grandchildren. The historical definition of privacy that has existed for centuries no longer exists.

In the last seven years I have written and spoken about privacy and whether we will have any in the future.  In 2006, before the iPhone and all the hand held computing that has followed, I wrote a column titled “Technology Advances, Privacy Declines”.  As I wrote in a recent …