Privacy has become an anachronism, something that we used to have but which is almost nonexistent nowadays. It is illegal for the United States to spy on its citizens … kinda. The laws have been circumvented by a mutual pact among five nations. Under the terms of the UKUSA agreement, Britain spies on Americans and America spies on British citizens, and then the two conspirators trade data.

This system is called ECHELON, and has been kicking around in some form longer than I have. The result of the UKUSA treaty signed by the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand was and is to have a vast global intelligence monster which allegedly shares common goals. The system is so "efficient" that reportedly National Security Agency (NSA) folk from Fort Meade can work from Menwith Hill in England to intercept local communications without either nation having to burden themselves with the formality of seeking approval or disclosing the operation.

The London Telegraph reported in December of last year that the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament had officially confirmed the existence and purpose of ECHELON. "A global electronic spy network that can eavesdrop on every telephone, e-mail and telex communication around the world will be officially acknowledged for the first time in a European Commission report."

The report noted: "Within Europe all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency, transferring all target information from the European mainland via the strategic hub of London, then by satellite to Fort Meade in Maryland via the crucial hub at Menwith Hill, in the North York moors in the UK.

"The ECHELON system forms part of the UKUSA system, but unlike many of the electronic spy systems developed during the Cold War, ECHELON is designed primarily for non-military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every country."

Long ago and far away, Adolf Hitler was talking to Hermann Rauschning and said, "The people about us are unaware of what is really happening to them: They gaze fascinated at one or two familiar superficialities, such as possession and income and rank and other outworn conceptions. As long as these are kept intact, they are quite satisfied. But in the meantime they have entered a new relation: a powerful social force has caught them up. They themselves are changed. What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings."

I see someone has made a TV movie of "Brave New World." Are we to view it as a work of fiction, or a foreshadowing of what looms in the very near future?

CONWAY, Arkansas -- Most Americans have probably never heard of Acxiom Corp., a giant information service tucked near the rolling Ozark foothills. But chances are that Acxiom knows quite a lot about them. Twenty-four hours a day, Acxiom electronically gathers and sorts information about 196 million Americans. Credit card transactions and magazine subscriptions. Telephone numbers and real estate records. Car registrations and fishing licenses. Consumer surveys and demographic details.

What Acxiom does is perfectly legal--assembling an array of facts from scattered sources. But the phenomenon known as "data warehousing" or "datamining" represents yet another example of how traditional American notions of personal privacy have become obsolete, outstripped by technology's ability to peer into personal lives.

In a flash, data warehouses can assemble electronic dossiers that give marketers, insurers and in some cases law enforcement a stunningly clear look into an American's needs, lifestyle and spending habits.

"The whole thing is scary," said Jim Settle, former supervisor of the FBI's National Computer Crimes Squad and now a security consultant. "It's not the government you need to worry about. It's private industry."

Acxiom can often determine whether an American owns a dog or a cat, enjoys camping or gourmet cooking, reads the Bible or lots of other books. It can often pinpoint an American's occupation, car and favorite vacations. By analyzing the equivalent of billions of pages of data, it often projects for its customers who should be offered a credit card or who is likely to buy a personal computer.

You're enjoying your favorite sitcom in the not-too-distant future, but for a change you're actually interested in the commercials. They are about financial services and luxury cars, seemingly tailored for a sophisticated chap like yourself. The guy a few houses away with his car on blocks in the front yard is watching the same show. But at the commercial breaks he gets ads for beer.

Newspapers and magazines can do it now: customize ads for different demographic groups. Soon TV will be able to do the same, using those fancy, advanced digital set-top boxes that will arrive in millions of living rooms over the next few years. The information will flow both ways.

Yes, with a flick of the zapper you will have all kinds of information at your fingertips. And your every zap will register with the folks who want to sell you something, transmitting to them all kinds of information about you and your viewing habits--the shows you watch, the channels you prefer, the pay-per-view movies you order.

As of now, some 80% of television ad money is wasted on the eyeballs of people who are in no way prospects for their products. Why throw away money trying to sell beer to nondrinkers?

William Harvey, the founder of Next Century Media Inc., has developed software that records demographic characteristics and viewing habits and uses the data to decide whose box gets which ad. In one test run, he even recorded when viewers increased or decreased the volume. He foresees the day when ads will be targeted to individual sets in the same household. Mom and Pop won't get the same commercials the kids will.

If you truly value your privacy, you could cancel your cable service and read more books. Then again, maybe not. If you order books on the Internet through Amazon.com, the on-line service tracks your purchases and sends unsolicited E-mails about other books that its computer thinks you'll be interested in. So George Orwell had it right after all, though not in the way he expected it to happen. In his 1984 everybody had a giant TV screen on the wall of every room in his or her dwelling. The screen wasn't there to entertain but to watch them, broadcasting their every move, their every grimace, to the bureaucrats at the Ministry of Truth.

The way it has worked out, the people at the other end aren't interested in controlling your mind. They just want to sell you stuff.

BOSTON -- Did you hear the one about the mail carrier in Mt. Vernon, N.Y.? She didn't take big-enough steps, so the Post Office gave her her walking papers. Although Martha Cherry's customers consider her service above average, she received a letter of dismissal stating, "At each step, the heel of your leading foot did not pass the toe of the trailing foot by more than one inch."

The incident is the latest and most visible example of an increasingly popular management activity: tracking employees' work patterns. Call it monitoring or surveillance or a nonstop performance review. By whatever name, it's the updated version of George Orwell's warning that Big Brother Is Watching You.

Examples abound: Dial an airline and a recorded voice will say, "To ensure quality service, this call may be monitored." Phone a bank or an investment firm and a frequent high-pitched beep will signal that your conversation is also being recorded--for "quality."

One friend, an airline reservation agent, has watched the monitoring--and the pressure--increase during the past six years. "You never know when they're listening," he says. "Every year they raise the bar in terms of the time they allow you to complete a call. Things are more strict in terms of having to do more in less time. They're ratcheting up the pressure. It's becoming a harder job."

As the quest for productivity grows more intense, surveillance--human and computerized--casts a spreading shadow over the American workplace. Already computers count the keystrokes of data-entry clerks, sending a silent message: Type fast or you're out. And already computers for reservation agents track the seconds between calls and the minutes spent away from the phone. Anyone who exceeds the time limit during a break may be paged on an intercom.

It's all a bit too reminiscent of Orwell's vision of the future in "1984," where an omnipresent "telescreen" picks up any sound "above the level of a very low whisper" and tracks a person's action "so long as he remained within the field of vision." As Orwell explains, "You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

Commuters in Singapore driving to work on one of the city state's main roads will be guinea pigs for the world's most sophisticated electronic road pricing system. Cars using East Coast Parkway in the morning rush hour should hear an electronic gadget on their dashboards beep, and see it deduct a toll from their stored-value cash card. If they don't, they'll have to pay a S$70 (US$45) fine. The evidence will be collected by a computerized robotic eye in a gantry that spans the carriageway. It takes a picture of the driver and the car, records the time of day and can detect whether the cash card has been placed incorrectly or a fuse has blown in the dashboard device.

Simpler systems, based on pre-purchased data cards or chips, are used on New York and New Jersey roads, in the United States, and on toll roads leading into Oslo, Norway. In Norway, cameras register all cars entering the city without a valid chip and fines are sent to the car owners. On the US toll roads, drivers with stored-value passes on their windscreens use a certain lane, to avoid waiting at a toll booth.

The Singapore system, however, does much more. It not only takes photographs and records all the data of the event, but checks every car in every lane, and adjusts the price deducted depending on the time of day.

Postal services as we know them will be dead within ten years and replaced by electronic mail, according to the Swedish postal service Sweden Post.

The 366-year-old state-owned business is about to provide every Swedish citizen over the age of six with an e-mail address and services as part of the first national service of its kind.Messages for people who cannot cope with computers or simply do not want to use e-mail will be printed and delivered to their home or office.

Swedish citizens will also be able to access their e-mail from public kiosks as well as their own computers, and will be given a smartcard to encode their e-mails if they want them to be safe from prying eyes.

The aim, Sweden Post says, is to encourage Swedish people to pay all their bills and even submit their tax returns using the e-mail system.Known as @Post, the service has attracted the interest of more than 12 other countries.