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I'm afraid you're a lot more trusting of the government than I am. I have no reason to hide my transactions, so I don't bother. For me, this discussion is an ideological one, not a personal one.

The issue I mentioned is not a matter of trusting the government. If you read the form when you sign up for many discount cards, the retailer specifies limits on how your purchase data will be shared. Releasing it to the government would be a violation of that agreement. And it's really moot anyway, as one can simply pay cash and not use a discount card, so the only people who would have data transmitted from discount card databases would be those who don't care, as you do.

Look at the current relationship between the federal government and the banking industry. Your data is transparently available to the feds under many circumstances, and court orders are easily obtained in any case.

A court order is still required, which limits the ability to obtain data in bulk - and, in addition, probable cause to obtain a court order needs to come from other sources, not the financial data itself.

Consider the library situation that has developed.

And libraries are nuking records as a result. That law of unintended consequences thang that is a rider on every bill passed by Congress but that is never considered during debate.

I'm sorry, but ideals don't seem to be in place any longer with regard to privacy from government intrusion.

I've developed an alternative view towards this problem. Gun grabbers sometimes postulate the idea of keeping guns legal but outlawing ammo. I think we should reverse that concept regarding personal data and its use by the feds - we really can't do too much about the mountains of data that are legally available from private sources (the ammo) - but we CAN institute controls on governmental databases and analytical tools that use this data (the guns). So IMO the best approach is to worry less about the minuitae of the data (where the feds can bury data-gathering mechanisms deep in legislation where only the most masochistic wonks can find them) and instead concentrate on review of the databases, which are much larger projects that sooner or later appear on the political radar screens.

"but we CAN institute controls on governmental databases and analytical tools that use this data (the guns). So IMO the best approach is to worry less about the minuitae of the data (where the feds can bury data-gathering mechanisms deep in legislation where only the most masochistic wonks can find them) and instead concentrate on review of the databases, which are much larger projects that sooner or later appear on the political radar screens."

In general, I agree with your approach. But, there is a continuing problem with keeping legislators from passing things that bypass ideals. I'm not a libertarian, by any stretch of the imagination, but I do notice an increasing lack of privacy when it comes to the government. Industry as well, of course, but I'm less alarmed about getting more junk mail than I am about having to explain why I withdrew $10k in cash from my savings account.

Just yesterday, I had a visit from a nice man from the CA Board of Equalization, the sales tax folks. While he opted not to do an audit of my business, since there was little chance of recovering any unpaid sales taxes, he did take away with him a couple of mandatory forms, wherein I was compelled to provide account numbers for my business bank accounts, along with my merchant bank account number.

Now, I have no doubt at all that the state of CA can access every sale I make, given that almost all my sales are paid for by credit card.

No audit. That's nice. They wouldn't have found anything, anyhow, because I keep detailed, accurate records and don't hide any sales, cash or otherwise.

My point here is that we have certain principles in the USA, as outlined in our Constitution. The 4th and 5th Amendments come to mind here. However, our rights to privacy from governmental snooping are far from as strong as they once were.

Events like 9/11 are triggers which let our legislators remove little pieces of privacy, in the name of national security. I don't have a lot of confidence that this process is going to slow down.

I see a lot of comments about what might happen under a Democratic administration should some of the measures under consideration be implemented. I'm worried about _all_ administrations, to be quite frank. John Ashcroft doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in me when it comes to privacy issues.