In some correspondence with a close friend, I challenged him
with the argument that many people in the U.S. regard a concern for privacy
as a presumption of guilt. i.e., “Those who want privacy must have something
to hide.” I really hit his hot button with that memo because he wrote back
with the comment that in a free society, what we do with our money is “nobody’s
damn business”.
According to Mark Nestmann, author of How To Achieve Personal and
Financial Privacy in A Public Age, “the right to privacy is not explicitly
guaranteed in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Nonetheless, this
document provides several implied privacy protections, including the right
to free association (First Amendment); the prohibition against illegal
search and and seizures (Fourth Amendment) and the Fifth Amendment, which
protects individuals from being forced to testify against themselves ...
“.
Privacy is not a crime, but there are many people who seem to believe
that anyone with an interest in privacy must have something to hide.
We now live in a society where there are an abundance of people who
want to make our financial affairs as public as possible. The government
can’t control us as easily when they don’t have complete details about
where we live and work, how we make and spend our money and even what we
do in our leisure time. The IRS wants to have every possible scrap of information
about how we make and spend our money. If possible, they would prefer to
have all of our income and expense information on their computer so they
can prepare our tax returns for us. Every government agency with a mission
seeks information in order to accomplish that mission, without regard to
how that might impinge on our privacy. Government controls over the movement
of money, over prices and the use of foreign trusts or foreign bank accounts
all require that they take away some of our privacy in order to enforce
their rules.
Marketers are also insatiable users of information. The more information
the marketers can acquire about you, the better able they are to send you
sales materials on products or services that are likely to be of interest
to you. They don’t want to send you letters that you don’t want to read
any more than you want to receive them. But a cost for this increasingly
customized marketing process is a huge loss of privacy. The marketers can
easily sell (or rent) any part or all of the information they have in their
files about you, without your explicit consent as to whether they sell
or rent that information, and if so, to whom. (However, you can now require
the companies to refrain from renting or selling your name and related
information.)
But perhaps the worst of the lot are the lawyers who hire investigators
to seek as much information about a potential plaintiff as possible before
proceeding to sue the plaintiff. The investigators are primarily
hired to determine if the potential plaintiff has any liquid assets or
liability insurance. Some lawyers are using this information to identify
promising litigation targets before they attempt to locate potential plaintiffs.
Instead of “chasing ambulances” they first search deep pockets and then
they look for former patients, clients or customers (of the potential target
victims) who may be willing to sue for some exaggerated grievance. For
example, they hire investigators to identify local surgeons and the hospitals
where they work. The investigators then track down information about former
patients of the surgeon. Then someone calls on the former patient to ask
if they are "really, really, really" satisfied with the outcome of their
surgery.
Extensive information is also available to government agents (at all
levels) who are now strongly motivated to use asset forfeitures as a source
of funding for their agency. With few exceptions, all human organizations
seek to perpetuate their existence to provide a livelihood for those who
work for the organization. President Reagan opened “Pandora’s Box” when
he agreed to confiscate money from drug dealers and use that money to pay
for the “war” on drugs. Now, with the ongoing pressure of the public to
cut back on government services and on taxes, many government agencies
will turn more and more to asset forfeitures for revenues to fund their
activities. What better way for some desperate or unscrupulous government
agency (or police department) to get money than to look people up in one
of the readily available information data bases and to then target the
most promising prospects for some easy entrapment procedures?
Privacy is simply one of many ways to protect your assets from these
kinds of opportunistic predators. For help on creating a low profile and
protecting your privacy, here are some resources. By the way. If you enter
the word privacy in a major search engine, you will get millions of "hits"
because almost every web site now has a web page to describe their privacy
policy.
Privacy 2000 by Mark Nestmann. Copies are available for $75 from
the author at http://www.nestmann.com/bookstore.cfm
Mark also writes and publishes 97 Ways to Protect What's Left of Your
Privacy and Property Rights, which is available for $25.00 from his
web site.
The Privacy Alliance is an organization to help businesses comply with
an assortment of federal privacy laws. <http://www.privacyalliance.org>
The Privacy Forum is a moderated public discussion list on a wide range
of privacy topics. <http://www.vortex.com/privacy.html>
The Orlando Mail Drop. This company provides private mail forwarding
services and has a section of their web site that is devoted to the subject
of privacy. <http://www.orlandomaildrop.com/privacy.html>