Privacy was clearly a major topic in 2013.  The ongoing conversations around the world subsequent to Snowden’s revelations have been extensive and on-going.  His recent comments to England on Christmas Day and the recent interview in the Washington Post provoked a lot of commentary at the end of the year.

The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford just called 2013  “The Year of Privacy”.  As the author mentioned in this column, dictionary.com named “privacy the word of the year”. In addition, Safegov.org published a column about  “The Year in Privacy 2013 and …

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 …

In the last column here I wrote about the decline in what used to be called privacy.  The definition of privacy is mutable, ever changing.  What was considered private 100 years ago, even 20 years ago is practically non-existent today.  As I wrote in 2006 before the iPhone and all devices that have followed  “Technology Increases, Privacy Declines” One of the characteristics of the Shift Age is that all of us now live with two realities, the physical  reality and screen reality.

So, the uproar around Mr. Snowden’s disclosure of PRISM and how much the NSA, with …