12 October—As if the prospect of our beloved (and entirely trustworthy, of course) federal government knowing the smallest details about our financial life weren’t bad enough, consider that you don’t need to have opened an account with Facebook or even visited it for the antisocial juggernaut network to know all about you.

And, probably to a somewhat less disgusting but equally intrusive extent, the same goes for virtually all the businesses we visit online, even if we just look but not buy. What do algorithms know about curiosity? That’s why even the good online businesses bug us incessantly about things we might have looked up on their websites. Are they trying to wear us down? Of course.

Then there are the rap-sheets credit-rating agencies keep on us that we’ve accepted for decades—with unenthusiastic resignation, to be sure—because we realize that their intrusive surveillance is necessary for our own convenience. And we grudgingly accept that we can’t do a bloody thing to correct any of the misinformation that they’re all so quick to sell.

You don’t want to know what your tattletale smartphone tells everybody, including the government, about you, from where you are to what you’re doing to how much you’re spending on what. Not to mention if you’ve been spending too much time around somebody harboring the novel coronavirus. And who knows what else? And you needn’t have installed intrusive apps and authorized whatever it may be for your privacy to be invaded.

On the subject of covert federal government surveillance, how many of us have bothered to exercise our right guaranteed under the Freedom of Information Act (5 U.S.C. § 552) and the Privacy Act (5 U.S.C. § 552a) to inspect the dossiers the FBI and other government agencies have on us? There’s likely a hell of a lot of misinformation gathered and compiled, for whatever reasons, by government operatives. Just like the credit-rating agencies, only worse.

Keep in mind that the FBI, in addition to legitimate law-enforcement activity, has from its earliest days unashamedly, usually unlawfully, spied on people who have simply exercised their right to speak out against government policies, Constitution be damned. And it’s nonpartisan.

And the NSA—which will in all likelihood deny any request to inspect its files for what the agency will insist, usually without justification, are national security reasons—is authorized to do virtually anything to monitor, collect, and process information to protect the good guys. That includes keeping dossiers on any people who may have had even casual intercourse—make that communication or contact—with known or suspected bad guys. Better safe than sorry, after all.

What can you do about all this surveillance anywhere and everywhere? Grin and bear it. And, of course, keep calm and carry on . . .