And yet another big waste of government dollars is coming down the pike. Yes, a big honking database is useful for data mining. However, GIGO. Means garbage in, garbage out. So, starting now, you do this (if you aren't already.):
(1) Pay cash where you can. That means for most stuff. That gets around 95% of monitoring.
(2) If you are making phone calls you don't want people to know about, use a disposible phone card and a pay phone.
(3) If you are paranoid about your email being tracked, use one of the really good encryption schemes. And one of those garbage free email accounts. Or just use one of those garbage accounts, accessed from your public library or internet cafe, and embed your text in a JPG image file. Of course, for most of us we don't really care if the big bad govenment reads our email anyway - but if you do care, do the above. But realize that unless the feds are already monitoring you personally, or someone you are communicating with, you are free and clear anyway - the email is broken into little packets and routed through different channels. They would have to be monitoring all the mailservers and there are thousands of them. And you can always set up your own mailserver.
(4) Whenever you sign up for anything on the internet, use a bogus name, age, gender, salary, educational level, and marital status. Use different stuff each time. This not only will mess up government tracking but it totally prevents the companies that buy internet cookie data from getting a picture of who you are.
(5) Open and close credit card accounts. Keep an account or two permanently, but for rental car, airplane, and hotel purchases use accounts that you close down every 6 months. Make sure that your credit card applications use incorrect middle initials. If your first name is John, spell it Jon, Johnn, Jahn, and Jan. If your last name is Smith spell it Smyth, Smythe, and Smithe. "Accidentally" transpose two numbers in your SSN. Open up a box at "Mailboxes Etc." and use that as your address of record. Close the box and get a new one every year. Use the box only for your "rotating" credit card accounts.
Now, what does all this do? First, paying cash makes most purchases invisible. Rotating cards with slightly different SSN's, names, and address changes means that your data gets mixed in with other people's. Thus the data becomes contaminated. Data mining is not useful for garbage.
Of course, if you are a primary suspect in a major felony investigation they will drag the data swamp, pull everything out, and match all this back to you, pretty much. But that's not what this is about. This is about muddying that waters regarding ordinary citizens to prevent them from pulling out data that might identify you on a general data search. Suppose they decide to look for anyone who is consuming 500 rounds of ammo a month at gun ranges and who travels to a particular gun show in a particular city every year. The above tactics will ensure that you are invisible even if you fit that profile.
Good luck, fellow fish in the data sea!
For the moment. Most people get cash from ATMs, and the new cash has a magnetic stripe embedded. The next simple step is to have the ATM mechanism record the serial#s of the bills as they're dispensed, along with the account dispensed to. When you make purchases with $20s, the vendor generally winds up depositing the 20s in his bank. Matching up serial#s would create a picture of who you do business with, and who the customers of a particular vendor are