There are people who use e-mail as a basic tool, just another method of communication. And then there are e-mail junkies, word hogs who check their e-mail roughly 111 times a day, and generate enough energy from cyber give-and-take to qualify it as an alternative fuel source.

I am one of those people. Though I have not composed an actual letter in years, I love writing e-mail. I justify spending inordinate amounts of time crafting a single missive by reminding myself that as soon as I'm done, I can get it directly to the intended recipient and, if I'm lucky, get a response right away. Hell, I'll go so far as to say that e-mail has improved the quality of my life.

Until now.

We live in a time that will someday be remembered as the Paranoid Era, and we're facing the joys of the Total Information Awareness Act. The TIA aims to capture what the Feds call the "information signature" of Americans by monitoring our financial, travel, and medical records, as well as all our communications. Using the government's own language here, "ultra-large all-source information repositories" could store, say, all of my precious e-mails, as part of a "virtual, centralized, grand database" that would be accessible to intelligence officers.

Uh, maybe I misunderstood 11th-grade English class, but wasn't Big Brother supposed to be a bad thing?

I suppose if you only use e-mail to send animated dancing kittens to everyone in your prayer circle, you may be less anxious than I am about the TIA. But suddenly, I find that my progressive sensibilities and somewhat disturbed sense of humor cast long shadows over my e-trail. What if the agency implementing the TIA chooses to emulate that other bastion of federal snoopage, the IRS, and begins auditing people at random? I'm not sure they'd like what they'd find in my wake.

There's the "George Bush As Chimp" e-mail, which rather brilliantly compared simian and presidential facial expressions. Then there's the ranting rebuke I sent to a high-school classmate who'd tracked me down and started sending me religious-patriotic poetry. Despite learning that I was a liberal, homosexual atheist, she just had to send me an epic poem about how the country is going to hell if we don't embrace Christian values and old-fashioned nationalism. I responded with a florid message in which I referred to myself as a "raving homo pinko commie" who didn't really want to read any more of her "idiotic flag-waving Jesus-pimping bullshit."

It gets worse. My friend Sasha (not her real name -- are you kidding?) sends me a continual stream of updates on protests, marches, and political actions. She calls her notification list "The Usual Suspects," so you know we look bad even before nosy agents discover her genially worded descriptions of civil disobedience and arrangements for busing rabble-rousers to the White House lawn. My computer must be fairly permeated with the spirit of revolution from Sasha's e-mails alone. (It doesn't help that I wrote that I'd meet her for a march carrying a poster of Bush emblazoned with STOP THIS TERRORIST BEFORE HE KILLS AGAIN.)

The worst of it may be my Anthrax Humor Contest. (I know death-inducing spores aren't really funny, but it was an edgy time, okay?) I sent out what I thought was an amusing news story about an anthrax-investigation press conference and encouraged my friends -- let's call them Boris, Natasha, and Squirrel -- to join me in attempting to rewrite the story for maximum humor. Does it make us bad people that we reveled in our grisly rewrites, or that the winning entry equated priestly pedophilia with anthrax? Sure, the flurry of e-mails might make us look like terrorists who are also deviants, but only if you read them out of context.

Of course, that's the issue. The agents of the TIA -- somehow, I envision Hummer-driving, khaki-clad men with prominent eyebrows -- don't know me. They'll think they do, armed as they'll be with thousands of pieces of data, but they won't have seen me to know that I'm about as threatening as flan, and that my "plotting" is limited to tracking the progress of a really nice jacket on the automatic-markdown rack at Filene's Basement. No, based on my e-trail, they could read me as a dangerous subversive.

But how dangerous? Maybe the agents will have a handy color-coded chart like the one Tom Ridge uses to warn us about terrorist threats. Would I be rated Blushing Pink, to indicate nominal misbehavior for which I should be mildly shamed? Or have I been irreverent enough to be upgraded all the way to Red Menace? Maybe they'll broadcast the alert, warning my neighbors of the increased likelihood of cynicism in my presence -- no one knows the hour of my next zinger, but it's sure to come.

I can see it now: eventually agents would haul me in, declare me an e-mail combatant, and lock me away with no access to NPR for months. After they thought they'd broken my spirit, they'd parade me before a kangaroo court consisting of elderly members of the Ford, Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr. administrations, all newly re-entrusted with our government. If this were the McCarthy era, they'd admonish me to name names in exchange for mercy. My friends would hold their collective breath: would I give up Sasha and her usual suspects? Could I betray Boris, Natasha, and Squirrel?

But this is not the 1940s, and the Feds won't need me to cough up names: they'll already know who I've been talking to and what we were talking about. I know that sounds a little paranoid, but what's really scary is that my scenario isn't a lot paranoid. So what to do? I suppose I could change the tenor of my communications, sprinkling them with expressions like "amber waves of grain," or, at the very least, "let's roll." But why would I? Instead, I think I'll act up a little more, perhaps sending out a mass e-mail with the subject line "This commie don't run."

David Valdes Greenwood can be reached by the feds at mambobean@hotmail.com.

Issue Date: January 17 - 23, 2003