In his State of the Union address, the President cautioned that even though nine million Americans have signed up for Obamacare, the final judgment is still in the offing.  House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), on the other hand, would prefer to keep the focus sharply on the launch point, an abject failure the scale of which recalls the Spanish Armada.   “The only way,” Bohner sniped eight-and-a-half million subscribers ago, “to fully protect the American people is to scrap this law once and for all.  There is no way to fix this… I think everybody understands I’m not happy the rollout has been wrought with a whole range of problems.”  Really?  It appeared to me that the Speaker embraced each and every misstep with the moist giddiness of an eleven-year-old girl at a One Direction concert.  Either way, the birthing pains are squarely behind us now and, perhaps most importantly, there have been, according to Patti Unruh, a spokeswoman for the Medicare agency, “no successful security attacks on HealthCare.gov, and no person or group has maliciously accessed personally identifiable information.”

Which is no small accomplishment these days.  To wit: In the last month, hackers posted the cell phone numbers of 4.6 million Snapchat users, while a couple million other accountholders were being compromised over at Google, Twitter and Yahoo.  Meanwhile, Target, Inc. executives groveled in front of a Senate committee, trying unsuccessfully to explain how it was that 40 million credit card records were swiped under their very noses.  And despite the exile of Edward Snowden, an intercepted telephone call between Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nulandand and the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt, spawned an international uproar.  In that conversation, which had been posted on YouTube, Ms. Nulandand is heard to have said, “fuck the EU” in the wake of mass anti-government protests against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to re-establish the country as a Soviet satellite.

It is conceivable, then, that in the current zeitgeist, Richard Nixon would hardly have been given a traffic ticket.  It is widely accepted that the Patriot Act has expurgated the Bill of Rights; there is no longer any legally accepted notion of personal privacy.  Even technological privacy is but a chimera at a time when encrypted messages can be decoded merely by listening to a computer’s hum.  Nonetheless, there is always, in our fair land, a trial lawyer willing to sue, to bet against the odds.  So it is that a class action lawsuit was filed against Facebook, alleging that the social media behemoth “has systematically violated consumers’ privacy by reading its users’ personal, private Facebook messages without their consent.”   While the company defends its actions as a prophylactic against viruses and spam, they are more likely engaged in data mining, the results of which are sold to advertisers and marketers who themselves utilize spamming, albeit in a more refined and targeted way.  Facebook is also the named defendant in a case surrounding unauthorized “Likes”, which seems rather esoteric if not patently trivial, and therefore merits no further mention.  What I will say, however, is that the arc of invasiveness has quizzically matched that of the decriminalization of marijuana.  These shifts, while recent, resonate with the timeless theme of inward retreat in response to the loss of liberty.  Consider the crowdfunding campaign for Imagination is the Only Escape, a video game that sees a young boy flee the horror of the Holocaust through fantasy.  So we would do well, in this environment, to remember the words of Sun Tzu: “To a surrounded enemy, you must leave a way of escape.”  Or better yet, those of Christopher Wallace: “B.I.G., P-O, P-P-A / No info, for the, DEA / Federal agents mad cause I’m flagrant / Tap my cell, and the phone in the basement.”  True dat.