“To learn that the government – using information that the law now requires be recorded on tape and stored indefinitely by banks, the telephone company, airlines, credit-card companies – can know more about me (my more sociable activities, anyway) than I do myself. If necessary, I could list most of the plane trips I’ve taken; and my old checkbook stubs are in a drawer – somewhere. But I don’t remember whom I telephoned exactly four months ago at 11 a.m., and never will. I don’t think it was Julia.”

(Susan Sontag, “Debriefing,” p. 46 in I, etcetera.)