On Wednesday June 3, 2009 U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker dismissed the lawsuits against the nation’s telecoms for participation in the drag-net electronic surveillance program that captured untold riches about who we all really are. Your every credit card purchase, text message, phone call, website visited and email sent were potentially harvested by these companies in the name of protecting us from terrorism. The unconstitutional telco warrantless wiretaps are now RULE OF LAW.

Yet one cannot help but imagine the value of possessing this data. With a large enough sample, such data can be mined with supercomputers and cloud computing to provide fairly accurate profiles for nearly every citizen. By ranking these profiles using psychological personality traits, one could highlight groups such as “free thinkers with potential networking capability who are 18-35″ or “religious, high earners with families of more than four children who fill prescriptions for STD medication”.  The potential abuses are enormous, the data is literally who we are on a day to day basis.

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