09.09.04 - 5:00 p.m.

Allow me a brief Luddite rant against the vagaries of the connected age:

Today, I received a fax from a company called "America Find, Inc." which promises to "Check People and Companies Out For You!" Now, I already have access to a company that offers much the same services, so none of this is anything new. I've used the company on two or three occasions to track down someone involved in a case. In one case, I tracked down a doctor who closed his practice and lost his license for abusing prescription medication at his parents' house and served him w/a subpoena duces tecum for records in several cases. The database search provided not just his current address, but his past addresses and his "likely relatives" by cross-referencing, well, things. I didn't have to provide any information except his name and general location, although obviously it's easier to find someone in a small town with fewer people. The service had his SS number listed as well. Now, my firm had to provide the company with some sort of statement that we would only use the service for legitimate purposes, but that is hardly enough to control a nefarious individual user.

In any case, "America Find, Inc." promises asset and background searches, including all public information and SS number verification, bank account locations including account balance information!. Among the "Additional Services Available"?

• unlisted telephone numbers
• phone call history
• credit card transactions
• physician reports
• credit reports
• phone/cell number to physical address searches
• ...and more!

Some of these seem - quite superficially, and without any real knowledge or research - completely illegal to me. Bank account balance information? Isn't that private? My phone call history? - sure, maybe that should be available to the police department, but maybe even they need a warrant? physician reports? Ever heard of HIPPA? Credit reports? Don't you need someone's permission to access them?

I realize that I am unlikely ever to be threatened or injured by such widespread access to private information unless I've somehow become involved in legal action. I don't think that some great tentacled entity is keeping tabs on my reading or the movies I watch or the CDs I buy except to the extent that said entity wishes to market more of the same to me, to incorporate my tastes into some complicated, secret algorhythm that will provide the Company with the calculus of success. At the same time, I absolutely hate this interconnectedness. I think people should be able to disappear if they want to, to remake themselves without this tether of data tying them to some old, shed life. The romance of America is that you can remake yourself: the country is big enough that you can escape, entirely, your home if that's what you want to do, and that sort of striving, driven romanticism - escape, perfection - is an essential part of the country's identity to me.

There are absolutely legitimate uses for almost every service provided by this company. Men and women, after all, shouldn't be able to escape their child support obligations and leave their partners behind with the kid and no $ to use to take care of him/her. People shouldn't be able to abduct their children and deny their ex access by disappearing. If you skip out on a large debt, your creditors should be able to find you, whereever you are, and so on.

And I hate regulation. Bureaucracies are only as functional as their most junior functionary, as the gatekeeper - the idiot mail clerk or customer service representative who answers the phone and knows nothing, worse than nothing. The middle manager who doesn't inform the junior functionaries of this or that change in policy, and so on. This serves to make bureaucracies essentially dysfunctional. Still - there should be SOME sort of law, SOME sort of restraint on what information is available to whom and when.