The chief Deputy Director of National Intelligence says that Americans need to redefine privacy and must learn to trust the government with their private information:

WASHINGTON (AP) — As Congress debates new rules for government eavesdropping, a top intelligence official says it is time that people in the United States change their definition of privacy. Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information.

In justifying this new definition of privacy, Kerr cites the growth of the Internet, and especially of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace:

Kerr said at an October intelligence conference in San Antonio, Texas, that he finds it odd that some would be concerned that the government may be listening in when people are “perfectly willing for a green-card holder at an [Internet service provider] who may or may have not have been an illegal entrant to the United States to handle their data.” He noted that government employees face up to five years in prison and $100,000 in fines if convicted of misusing private information. Millions of people in this country — particularly young people — already have surrendered anonymity to social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, and to Internet commerce. These sites reveal to the public, government and corporations what was once closely guarded information, like personal statistics and credit card numbers. “Those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs. And so, it’s not for us to inflict one size fits all,” said Kerr, 68. “Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that.”

Kerr’s analogy is flawed, of course, because of the fundamental difference between government monitoring and most private transactions on the Internet. For the most part, the information that’s available about individuals online is there for one of two reasons; either it’s something that’s publicly available (like a newspaper article), or it’s information that people have voluntarily given up in exchange for a service. If I setup a Facebook page that others can access it’s not the same as the government being able to monitor my private conversations and transactions.

And that, it seems, may be exactly what’s going on:

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco, California. Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class-action suit, claims there are as many as 20 such sites in the U.S.

That’s fundamentally different from what Kerr is talking about. And, as a lawyer for the EFF notes, his arguments against anonymity ignore the importance that it has played in American history:

“Anonymity has been important since the Federalist Papers were written under pseudonyms,” Opsahl said. “The government has tremendous power: the police power, the ability to arrest, to detain, to take away rights. Tying together that someone has spoken out on an issue with their identity is a far more dangerous thing if it is the government that is trying to tie it together.”

Publius would not have survived under the regime that that Kerr is proposing and that alone should be reasons to second-guess him.