Last month Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal disclosed that Attorney General Eric Holder had authorized the National Counterterrorism Center to copy and examine pretty much any information the government has collected about you. In the past, the agency couldn’t store information about ordinary Americans unless they were suspects in or party to a specific investigation. Under the new orders, flight records, lists of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students, financial records of people seeking federally backed mortgages, health records of patients at veterans’ hospitals — pick a database, and this obscure agency has permission to study it for patterns that ostensibly predict terrorist behavior, and to share it with foreign governments, whether or not you are suspected of any wrongdoing. The new rules were subjected to robust official debate — all behind closed doors.

Likewise, while we were all distracted by the dance on the fiscal cliff, the 112th Congress in its final days whisked through a renewal of the law that governs eavesdropping by American intelligence agencies on Americans’ phone calls and e-mail traffic. A couple of senators made modest attempts to hold the eavesdroppers more accountable by, for example, disclosing the number of law-abiding citizens whose communications have been intercepted. Their efforts were voted down.

“The Obama administration’s position on privacy is basically ‘Trust us, we’re good guys,’ ” said Daniel Solove of George Washington University, whose book “Nothing to Hide” challenges the myth that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from government snooping. “That’s exactly what Bush said. And it’s also the same thing that any despot says. We shouldn’t have to trust.”

Rigorous, independent oversight, he added, not only protects against abuses but also helps assure that what we do in the name of security actually works. But it doesn’t happen if we don’t demand it.

The government, of course, is not the only — not even the most aggressive — invader. You can take your pick of the ways Facebook and Google are monetizing you by serving up your personal profile and browsing habits to advertisers for profit. Some of this feels harmless, or even useful — why shouldn’t my mobile device serve me ads tailored to my interests? But some of it is flat-out creepy. One of the more obnoxious trends is the custom-targeting of that irresistibly vulnerable market, our children.

When our personal information is exploited this way, we may grumble, or we may seek the largely false comfort of tweaking our privacy settings, but we feel helpless before the mystifying rush of technology.

You would think the one sort of invasion just about everyone deplores was hacking. But even there we are ambivalent. When Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids were caught pillaging the voice mail of celebrities, the public response was muted; when it turned out that they had hacked the phone of a 13-year-old murder victim, the pitchforks and torches came out.