NSA surveillance and the dream police

Memories are very personal things, over which we feel an intimate sense of ownership. Some people, such as spies, are sworn to secrecy over this or that incident, but, as one event or another washes over us, we typically aren't responsible one way or another for them. They are the historical cloth out of which we are cut. They are what makes us who we are.

This isn't science fiction. Who else could possibly own one's memory, anyway?

One would think that, at the very least, one could testify under oath about whether something did or did not in fact occur, through no fault of one's own, as part of one's personal historical record to establish one's relative guilt or innocence. Or, maybe not - the second of the two cases, argued before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco last week, concerned a situation that could have been culled from a legal theorist's note book, and which seems the more interesting of the two cases. The Register