7 years ago today, one of the largest events happened in our personal history. Just over a mile away from my apartment in downtown NYC, the skyline, city and the people of NY were permanently altered.

The smell of smoke was everywhere - the fire didn’t go out for months. The smell was… chemical. Plastic-like. Un-natural. Have you ever shorted out electronics? If I close my eyes and think about it, I can still smell it. Some nights the the smoke was so thick outside my window, other nights the wind would shift direction and you’d smell the sea. Cars still were not allowed back in the city. I decided that, while I’d like to stick around and discuss conspiracy theories and politics with my friends, my apartment was unfit to live. Now was the best time to do something I had been thinking about doing for years - go check out Asia.

In October, Pippin and I subletted our apartment, loaded up the car with our cats and belongings and went to stay with his Dad for a few weeks while we prepared for Asia. I had really wanted to see Thailand (loved the food and the few Thais I met before) and Japan. Pippin was game for anything. We flew out on December 25, 2001 with a flight on British Airways to Bangkok with a layover in Europe.

We arrived in Bangkok two weeks later and, to tell you the truth, all I wanted to do was turn around and get back on the plane. I hated it. The air quality was terrible (I was trying to escape bad air remember?), the sidewalks were un-walkable, it was hot, dirty, hectic. People harassed us everywhere. We decided to get the hell out of Bangkok and flew down to Koh Samui. Needless to say, a week later I was scuba diving off Koh Tao and thus began my love affair with this country.

The most common retort against privacy advocates — by those in favor of ID checks, cameras, databases, data mining and other wholesale surveillance measures — is this line: “If you aren’t doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?”

Some clever answers: “If I’m not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me.” “Because the government gets to define what’s wrong, and they keep changing the definition.” “Because you might do something wrong with my information.” My problem with quips like these — as right as they are — is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It’s not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? (”Who watches the watchers?”) and “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, “If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged.” Watch someone long enough, and you’ll find something to arrest — or just blackmail — with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies — whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It’s intrinsic to the concept of liberty.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

How many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our words are subtly altered.

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. And it’s our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

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Bruce Schneier is the CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and the author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

Here are the key things which I noticed:

Me, Myself and I
There’s a very strong sense of me here. What do I want, what do I think. And everyone will let you know their opinions.

Complain, complain
Americans are really good at complaining. I think we’re the best at it, we could win awards. One thing I’ve noticed over the years - if you complain about something, the negativity expressed will make you feel worse, not better. I know many people would argue about this, but try it out first.

For example, the couple next to me on the plane complained from takeoff to landing loudly about everything. They made the flight attendants and everyone around them uncomfortable. It created a sort of umbrella of negativity around them, which puts people in a bad mood. Thais would have handled it by just brushing things off, and not letting them bother them, or perhaps have made a joke about it.

Lack of ‘Greng Jai’
There is a concept which is foreign to Americans which all Thai people grew up knowing. Imagine thinking about the consequence of everything you say and do before doing or saying it. Think “will this offend/hurt/make this other person uncomfortable?” And then if so, not doing it. Value others in front of yourself. Sounds like a nice concept doesn’t it? Americans don’t do it (me, me, me) and Thais do it way overboard. I think a nice happy medium would be ideal.

More about greng jai here:
http://euanharvey.typepad.com/soidogs/2007/09/kreng-jai.html
http://www.thai-blogs.com/index.php/2006/11/30/thais_are_kreng_jai_people?blog=7
http://thailandgal.blogspot.com/2006/09/terrell-owens-and-kreng-jai.html
http://katswindow.net/2002/03/25/how-is-your-heart/

I’m off to New York tomorrow morning. I’m not looking forward to the 27 hours of travel, but it’ll be nice to see everyone again and get a change of scenery. I’m all packed - my bag weighs 38lbs, 30lbs of that are gifts. If anyone wants to hang out in NYC or Mass let me know.

Congrats to everyone in California who will be married this week…

Oh, and everyone go download the new version of FireFox - it’s getting released today! go download firefox 3!

The sky just opened up as I’m writing this and is now currently dumping rain down on Bangkok. I love the rainy season.

See you all in a few weeks when I return.

This is the new version of 00ff00. I’ve combined diary.00ff00.com and the old 00ff00.com together, as well as added a bunch of new stuff. Let me know what you think!

We should be going home to NYC tomorrow. I’m excited for some real food again. Where should we eat first?

I’ll put some photos up when I get home and unpack everything.

Once we reached Denver our drive started to suck. See, Denver’s at the base of the Rockies, so once we got there, it was pretty much flat from there on. About an hour later we were in boring flat corn and wheat fields. That lasted until tonight.

We stopped somewhere in Kansas for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. The owner was so freaked out by us asking for tea and chopsticks, that he asked us where we were from. It was strange, when I later asked him where he was from, he told me Washington. I pressed, recognizing the fact that he was speaking Mandarin to one of the employees. I said, “What part of Washington?” He replied with “Northern Washington, but not Seattle.” I said, “Oh, near Vancouver?” and he said, “Yes, in Vancouver.” I was so shocked that he was afraid to say that he lived in Canada, that I didn’t even bother to ask what part of China he was from. Yikes! What would make this nice family from China move there? I can’t imagine what prejudices they’ve had to put up with to be afraid to say where they were from.

Anyway, we got the heck out of there as quickly as possible and camped overnight about 30 minutes from the border between Kansas and Missouri. There were a million cool bugs at the campsite, ranging from huge cicadas, crazy spiders with round pill-like bodies, huge grasshoppers the size of my hand and a ton of other random bugs. We took outside showers amongst the bugs and went to sleep. I awoke at about 4am and saw a huge deer grazing a few feet away from the tent.

Today we drove and drove and drove. More corn and wheat and corn and wheat and corn and cows. Did I mention the corn?

We’re now in Illinois. Or is it Indiana? No, definitely Illinois. We should be home tomorrow or the next day. I’ll add more photos when I get home!

The next morning we hiked down about a mile into the canyon to get a better view. We took much needed showers (the desert dust just sticks to you) and then headed out towards Arches National Park.

Arches is pretty much the other side of the state, so we spent about 5 or 6 hours driving through ever changing desert wasteland. One hour we were on the moon, with pure white rock and sand dunes. The next was Mars, with orange and red rocks, cliffs and canyons. Later the ground was yellow and flat, with scrappy bushes and dead grass. It was a hot drive — the temperature was about 100 all day. It’s way too hot in the desert to mess with the air conditioner, so we used our natural cooling method and drank tons of water. We’ve been filling up our 3 gallon water jugs about once a day, and going through all that water. Imagine drinking a whole gallon of water a day and not going to the bathroom! That’s how hot and dry it is. Because you sweat so much, and it evaporates so quickly, your skin becomes very salty. You can taste it when you lick your lips.

We drove through Capitol Reef and Grand Escalante National Parks on the way to Arches. We saw some 1,000 (est) year old petroglyphs in Capitol Reef, which was pretty neat.

Thunderstorms are an entirely different thing out here in the desert. Well, first of all, since it rarely rains in the desert, when it does, the ground can’t absorb it quickly enough, and it runs off into the canyons and creates flash floods. We had to be very careful when exploring the canyons to watch the weather. Rain you say? Strangely enough, it’s rained every day so far in the desert. We must be very lucky. Or maybe it’s the super short rainy season.. I’m not sure. It’s defiantly made the desert more bearable. We look forward to the rainstorms, and try to catch up with them while driving. You can see them from miles and miles away because it’s so flat. I think the lack of humidity in the air also provides better visibility. Another thing which is different about the thunderstorms in the desert — there are no trees. You are the tallest thing around. So when a thunderstorm is near, there is a very good chance of getting struck by lightning. You have to stay in the car — no playing in the rain! It’s a bit scary to be out so vulnerable like that, watching lightning strike all around you.

We reached Arches about an hour before sunset, and did the 1.5 mile hike up to the Delicate Arch. That’s the famous arch which you may or may not have seen — it’s on most of the Utah license plates. The walk was cool — through a desert trail, then onto a huge rock, which must have been a mile long itself. At the top was the arch, bigger and more awesome than I had imagined. We waited there until it was almost pitch black, and walked back on the trail by starlight. The stars were the most impressive that we’ve seen so far. There was very little (no) light pollution, and the milky way was so bright. We were able to find a few constellations, and watch the heat lightning on the horizon. We laid on the car for a while watching the stars before driving to a campground to camp. We chose a nice shady spot to set up camp.

The next day we drove into Moab (mow-ab) to have some breakfast and ice cream. Around noon we left to drive more through the desert and into Colorado. We finally reached the mountains around 4:00 — and the temperature was much more reasonable — in the 80’s. We drove all the way into Aspen and had some dinner. We spent an hour or so walking around downtown, and then drove out and camped at the Maroon Bells. The Maroon Bells are some big mountains with a nice lake at the base. The lake was probably 40 degrees, and the temp outside was about 65. We made a fire for no good reason at all, other than entertainment. Then we went to sleep. It was a bit chilly!

We woke up this morning and it was probably 40 degrees out, for I could see my breath. We broke down camp and drove. We stopped at the continental divide, along Independence Pass, at elevation of 10,095 feet. We could see snow just around the corner. It was Tundra — too high and windy for trees to grow. Neat. I remember stopping there when I was younger with my brother. He used to live in Aspen.

We continued to Leadville and had lunch. I think this town has changed a lot since I’ve been here last. I remember it being a bit more ‘Wild West’ — now it’s more more ‘hippy’. I had a veggie burger while listening to the Grateful Dead loudly on the speakers.

We’re now driving East on rt. 70, almost in Denver. We will drive today until we get tired, probably stopping for the night in Kansas (yay, corn). We’re pretty much driving back straight from here to Massachusetts, nothing exciting left on the itinerary. I’ll post photos when I can.