"The Web Means the End of Forgetting"

Wow, read the harrowing first two paragraphs of this NY Times article for some really upsetting examples of innocent individuals being persecuted for perfectly ordinary online behavior.

My takeaway isn't that we need to better guard individual privacy. Rather, it's that we need to stand together against a corpocracy which (unlike our nominal republic) is not in any way bound to respect cherished American freedoms.

It was a dark day indeed when the ACLU allowed itself to be rebranded as a liberal partisan group, rather than work to staunchly maintain its reputation for political agnosticism. Both left and right need to ally somehow to ensure preservation of our freedom of expression. The alternative is that we all simply learn to carefully guard our expression ("protect our privacy"), and, to me, that's no alternative at all. How would that differ from living under totalitarianism?