The saying "Three can keep a secret if two are dead," was popular centuries before Google, Facebook, and the Patriot Act. In pre-industrial societies, you had no secrets because everyone you knew, knew everyone else that you knew. Even the king wouldn't recognize you on sight, the selectman knew you, and he could inform on you to the magistrate, and so on.
Then there was a blip in history where people concentrated in cities, anonymous in the crowd. Differences of race, culture, class, occupation, and recreational preference formed self-contained information networks. Gossip in the Screen Actor's Guild might reach in Congress, but it required attention and effort. A socialist, a homosexual, a light-skinned African American, might pass for a member of the mainstream. An enemy or overly curious person might find out, and accidental discoveries could happen, and these were subjects of much anxiety for people attempting to pass.
The difference now is that your inquisitive counterpart has Google search and Facebook's raison d'etre is facilitating accidental encounters. Federal subpoenas pull up not warehouses full of paper, but digital files that can be transmitted and analyzed in fractions of seconds. The digital medium is so fast and cheap that much more data is being retained and examined for useful patterns than was ever possible in the era of print.
But a lot of us are still passing - or trying to. Many forms of discrimination and persecution are now illegal, but they still happen. There are always loopholes, dark corners, subtle and sneaky attacks that are undetectable or unenforceable. And there are other forms of discrimination and persecution that are still legal and socially acceptable in at least some milieus.
We are still trying to hide our secrets, but it's getting harder and harder. All it takes is a photo of you in someone else's Facebook album, a blog post you forgot to mark private, or a webpage you long since took down that's still in Memory Hole. If there's a federal subpoena, even more is available to scrutiny - your library records, your webmail archives, purchases made with your debit card, websites accessed from your IP address...
Is the problem that we can't keep our secrets anymore or that we still need to have them?
Would it be easier and more advantageous to reinforce our personal information fortresses or change law and culture so drastically that these facts about our personal lives could not be used against us?
