For the longest time, I couldn’t get worked up about privacy: my

right to it; how it’s dying; how we’re headed for an even more wired,

under-regulated, over-intrusive, privacy-deprived age.

I should also point out that as news director and a guy who makes 【M1】_________

his life on the Web, I know better than most people that we’re hurtling 【M2】_________

toward an even more intrusive world. We’re all being watched by

computers wherever we visit websites; by the mere act of “browsing”, 【M3】_________

we’re going to public in a way that was unimaginable a decade ago. I 【M4】_________

know this because I’m a watcher, either. When people come to my 【M5】_________

website, without ever knowing their names, I can peer over their

shoulders, recording what they look at, timing how long they stay on a

particular page, followed them around the sprawling webpages. 【M6】_________

None of this would bother me in least, I suspect, if a few years ago, 【M7】_________

my phone, like Marley’s ghost, hadn’t given me a glimpse of the

nightmares to come. In Thanksgiving weekend in1995, someone 【M8】_________

forwarded my home telephone number to an out-of-state answering

machine, which unsuspecting callers trying to reach me heard a male 【M9】_________

voice identify himself as me and say some extreme rude things. Then, 【M10】________

with typical hacker aplomb, the prankster asked people to leave their

messages. This went on for several days until my wife and I figured out

that something was wrong and got our phone service restored.

【M9】