a made up word for a made up idea

I am right now listening to Bryan Cunningham (on The NewsHour), a former aid to then national security adviser Condi Rice, go on and on about how the current revelations about NSA data-mining shouldn’t disturb us because the data is “anonymized.”

Anonymized. Don’t you just love it?

What Cunningham claims his neologism means is that names and addresses have been stripped from the toll records that have been collected from the three major Telco’s, and, so, the government can’t trace our calls back to us. . . .

Cunningham is not the only guy I’ve heard express this idea today, to which I have to say, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Try this.

Or, if you have an account, try a LexisNexis search.

And these are just the consumer products—I know law enforcement and the intelligence community have access to much more powerful “reverse search” tools. Does Cunningham think we’ve never seen a computer?