We all claim to want privacy online, but that desire is rarely reflected in our online behavior. In a story that originally aired in January, OTM producer Sarah Abdurrahman looks into the futile attempts we make to protect our digital identities.

Johannes Brahms - Violin Concerto op.77 in D Major

This week, to help insulate journalists and their sources from government surveillance, The New Yorker launched a new service. It’s called Strongbox, and it enables people to send messages and documents to journalists anonymously and untraceably. It was developed from code created by programmers Kevin Poulsen and the late Aaron Swartz. The New Yorker's Nicholas Thompson explains to Bob how it works.

Music: John Lurie - Horse Guitar

OTM producer Doug Anderson fires up Grindr and meets up with another guy for a casual, anonymous...interview.

Fred Astaire - I'm Putting All My Eggs In One Basket

Grindr is a phone app that allows gay men to find other users based on their proximity. Brooke speaks with Jaime Woo, author of Meet Grindr: How One App changed the Way We Connect about the app's effect on our understanding of privacy.

Brooke talks to Grindr founder Joel Simkhai about what inspired the app and how it manages to make money.

Facebook has introduced a new search tool called social graph search, which lets users search across the Facebook database by users' interests. Privacy advocates aren't pleased with the new feature, arguing that it makes information about users too easy to find. Bob talks to Tom Scott, who has been given early access to the feature and has been publicizing some of his searches. 

Four Tet - 0181

Following the school massacre in nearby Connecticut, a New York state paper published a map showing the names and addresses of handgun permit owners in its readership area — all except for one county, where local officials have refused to provide the paper with the information. This decision violates explicit New York State law, but has a supporter in New York state Senator Greg Ball, who tells Bob why he's supporting Putnam County officials.

Yo La Tengo - Stupid Things

On Thursday, Vice President Biden sketched out early hints of what gun control reform might look like. One potential reform concerns something that you might mistakenly assume already exists: a central database of gun transactions in the US, maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. The NRA has blocked all such efforts in the past. New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg tells Bob why the ATF's record-keeping on gun sales is actually incredibly antiquated. 

When we were looking over our archives for segments to include in this week's special hour on privacy, there were way more segments we wanted to air than time allotted. So I thought I'd throw this interview  with Ryan Singel from 2010 up on the blog.

Police car mounted license plate readers collect date, time and location information and are used by law enforcement around the country to help catch criminals. But when Minneapolis Star Tribune reporter Eric Roper filed a Freedom of Information request for information on his own car, he got a lot more than he bargained for. In a segment that originally aired in August of 2012, Bob talks to Roper about how Minneapolis police and agencies across the country deal with this potentially sensitive location information.

Last March, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) was granted unprecedented power to collect data on ordinary U.S. citizens, data like flight records or lists of casino employees. Critics have likened the NCTC to the "Pre-Crime Squad" in the movie "Minority Report." Wall Street Journal reporter Julia Angwin talks with Bob about this dramatic shift in the intelligence community's power over US citizens.

Here's a common refrain in privacy discussions: “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.” There's also Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt famously saying:  "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Brooke speaks with George Washington University law professor Daniel Solove who says those types of arguments misunderstand privacy entirely.

In Philip Bobbitt's 2008 book Terror and Consent: The Wars for the 21st Century, he argues that data collection is an incredibly useful tool that’s fundamentally misunderstood by the public. Brooke talks with Bobbitt about that and the way the media and public also misunderstand warrants. Bobbitt, law professor at Columbia University is author most recently of The Garments of Court and Palace: Machiavelli and the World That He Made.

Build Buildings - Let's Go

We all claim to want privacy online, but that desire is rarely reflected in our online behavior. OTM producer Sarah Abdurrahman looks into the futile attempts we make to protect our digital identities.

Johannes Brahms - Violin Concerto op.77 in D Major

In 2002, artist and professor Hasan Elahi spent six months being interrogated off and on by the FBI as a suspected terrorist. In response to this experience, he created Tracking Transience, a website that makes his every move available to the FBI - and everybody else. In a segment that originally aired in November of 2011, Brooke talks to Elahi about the project.

Privacy is among the many issues raised by the Petraeus affair. We don’t know exactly what the FBI did, or what sort of legal barriers they had to surmount to get access. Reporter Peter Maass wrote that an unexpected consequence of Petreaus’s fall is that we all might learn a little more about how the FBI operates. Brooke spoke with Maass about an unlikely connection between the Petraeus scandal and former Supreme Court Nominee Robert Bork. 

Johan Borger - Goodnight My Friend

With every new online service we participate in—from mobile banking to the latest social networking site—more and more of our personal information is being stored online—and for privacy advocates, that is a scary trade off. Now the state of California is taking steps to make sure that this consumer data stays protected, with the creation of a new Privacy Enforcement and Protection Unit. Brooke speaks with California Attorney General Kamala Harris about enforcing privacy rules.

Last month, the Association of American Publishers announced a milestone. 2012 is the first year that adult eBooks have outsold adult hardcover books. For the book industry, those sales are especially valuable because they bring in not just revenue but data. As you read from your Kindle, Nook or iPad, the device transmits all the details of how you do your reading – data that is beginning to shape the way books are written. Wall Street Journal reporter Alexandra Alter tells Bob that the new data is a big deal for an industry that has traditionally been unable measure its audience.