Perhaps some of you awoke this morning like I did and cracked open your own personal copy of Tampabay.com to learn that, holy Christmas balls, “Taxes aid porn site software.” Dear god, say it isn’t so. Then again, maybe you were like me and just thought that the Times was trying to get some hits on the story by overemphasizing one potential use of an otherwise neutral piece of privacy software. After all, the software in question, PrivacyView, is really just a web-browsing anonymizer - something like a proxy on steroids, it makes it difficult to track your browsing behavior, and has the potential to go a step further and destroy the cached results of that behavior.

Apparently, people just don’t find protecting personal freedoms and privacy all that interesting these days. This fact is even borne out by Privacyview LLC’s own PR strategy, which involves just making the leap from private to pr0n all by itself:

The days of Internet porn consumers being ‘busted’ by their spouses or worse yet, their children, will eventually be a thing of the past.

Seriously? You dumb motherfuckers. I think somewhere on the list of ways to sink your business model and to kill any hint of public funding would be to preempt the demonizing of your product by others by doing it yourself. The Times isn’t even entirely guilty of porning up matters, because this stuff is coming straight from the company itself. Aw, swell. It’s great to live in a time where the basic right to privacy presumes illicit behavior on the part of the person needing privacy.

Thus commences the slippery slope, and who better to slap our asses for good luck on the way down than freaking Ronda Storms? So, here’s how this works. 1) If you need privacy, you must be doing something “wrong”, 2) there’s a high probability that whatever you’re doing “wrong” involves nekkid parts, 3) looking at teh nekkid at all means you are, according to Storms, the “worst of the worst” (read, pedophile, predator, superfreak, etc.). But what if I only look at nude pics of Ann Coulter? *shiver*

If you close the door when you pee, the terrorists win . . . plus you’re probably looking at porn, and not the good kind either. Great. Let’s all just turn ourselves in en masse. Authoritarian flash mob. CU @ teh Jailz11!

Anyway, yeah, three cheers for us being one step to some sort of lame-ass dystopia where we’re all begging to have cameras installed in our houses so we have a record of our persistent non-criminal behavior. “Hi camera, here I am, not doing illegal shit. Nope, no need for privacy here, no sir. What’s that? Spread ‘em and cough? Yes sir, right away sir. No sir, that is not my condom full of heroin.” Soon we’ll end up like this guy, who publishes virtually every moment of his life as a way to combat his listing on the U.S. terrorist watch list.