{"id":1091,"date":"2014-08-06T16:01:02","date_gmt":"2014-08-06T16:01:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/?p=1091"},"modified":"2021-08-03T01:06:32","modified_gmt":"2021-08-03T08:06:32","slug":"privacy-and-the-electric-monk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.privateinternetaccess.com\/blog\/privacy-and-the-electric-monk\/","title":{"rendered":"Privacy And The Electric Monk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many believe several contradictory things about privacy. If we could figure out why this is, we could solve a lot of problems with governments disrespecting fundamental civil liberties, and worse, getting away with it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The writer Douglas Adams is most known for his Hitch-Hiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy<\/em> trilogy, with five books in it. However, he wrote a couple of other series as well, and in one of them, Dirk Gently\u2019s Holistic Detective Agency,<\/em> there is a very special character known as the Electric Monk<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

The idea of an Electric Monk was simple. Just like a VCR would record TV shows for you so you wouldn\u2019t have to be there to see them at exactly the time they broadcast, an Electric Monk could watch all that garbage for you and more, believing every single word of it, so you could go about your daily life instead. It could believe in all the world\u2019s major religions simultaneously and could hold eight completely contradictory ideas in its head at the same time without having any symptoms of malfunction.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s where today\u2019s general statements on privacy from the public comes into play. You can easily hear all these phrases from one and the same person in the continuous timeframe of five minutes while discussing privacy:<\/p>\n