The road to privacy.

There's a theft taking place. The thieves are the relentless and remorseless kleptomaniacs who run CorporateWorld, and what they are stealing is you! By you I mean every scrap of data about your persona--they have records of your health, bank and financial information, purchases, employment history, records on your children, income and debt statements, court documents (from simple traffic tickets to jail time), credit ratings, property owned, taxes paid (or unpaid), college transcripts, travel history, divorces or family disputes, prescriptions, investments, retirement plans.

It amounts to a virtual kidnapping. In corporate databanks all around the country, a little digital "you" has been hidden away, and they can pretty much do with it as they want, without the real you being notified, much less consulted.

I wonder if bankers had mommas. I wonder the same about all the corporate chieftains who now routinely reach out and grab our privacy without so much as a "pretty please." They are carelessly stiff-arming the Constitution. Oh, say the bankers, this is all legit. Didn't you know that Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999? Sure enough GLB (properly pronounced "GLUB" for its drowning effect on privacy rights) expressly authorizes them to peddle our personal information. For example, a financial conglomerate like CitiGroup (which led the lobbying effort) can hand your health records from their Travelers insurance subsidiary to their Citibank officers or give your Citibank records to their Salomon Smith Barney investment house--without asking for your okay.

In 2001, Charlene Nelson, a stout believer in the Fourth Amendment, learned that a cabal of bankers, legislators, and the governor of her state of North Dakota were trying to undo a good state "opt-in" law requiring banks to get permission before selling their customer's financial data. The cabal claimed that this pesky permission provision had to be altered to bring North Dakota into compliance with GLB.

Nelson, a mother of three young boys who lives west of Fargo, considers herself a conservative; she had never been much of a political activist, but she knew political horse manure when she sniffed it--and this claim was seriously stinky.

In fact, the bankers lied. GLB doesn't require states to conform--indeed, it specifically allows states to provide more privacy protection for their citizens. Offended by the lie, Nelson wrote her legislators, assuming they would respect the wishes of citizens like her. They didn't. "I was just stunned when it passed," she says, and she went from angry to activist.

About a dozen friends and neighbors met, came up with the punchy acronym POP (Protect Our Privacy), decided to petition for a binding referendum to reverse the legislators' action, and set out to collect signatures to put the issue on the ballot.

The powers that be scoffed, believing that these were rank amateurs and asserting that North Dakotans didn't care about the privacy change. But POP hit the streets, the phones, and the talk-radio shows, creating quite a stink of its own. POP rallied hundreds of volunteers to collect signatures and shocked the cognoscenti by getting more than enough signatures in only six weeks--unheard of in North Dakota. Along the way, POP also built a right-left coalition ranging from the Constitution Party to labor unions, from the Farm Bureau to the ACLU.

Now the chase was on, and the Big Boys resorted to their usual arsenal of money, lies, and raw ugliness. "All we had was grassroots folks and the issue," says Nelson, who directed POP's campaign from her kitchen table. The bankers put up $150,000 (five times what POP could collect), hired professional flacks, and launched a television assault. First they tried to buffalo voters with the odd assertion that North Dakota banks don't sell their customers' information, so there's no need to worry. North Dakota might be a rural state, but the people aren't rubes--if bankers don't plan to sell people's privacy, why did they change the law?

"Oh, right," conceded the bankers, who then shifted to the old ruse that passage of the referendum would cause corporations to flee, jobs to be lost, and the state to dry up and blow away. This ridiculous pitch became the bankers' featured campaign theme, complete with an absolutely hilarious television ad that had all the credibility of a 1950s "Monster from Outerspace" movie.

The ad began with a peaceful scene of a bridge leading into North Dakota. As a voice-over begins to warn of the dark economic consequences of POP's privacy referendum, viewers see a big stone wall moving from the left side of the screen until it completely blocks the bridge, sealing the state's borders from outside commercial intercourse. The punchline comes in the form of a metal shield rising in front of the bridge with the ominous words: "CLOSED FOR BUSINESS!"

As Napoleon once advised, "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

Then the PR henchmen of the industry went from stupid to mean, turning on Nelson herself, assailing her as some sort of right-wing wacko--a tactic that North Dakotans, a very decent people, didn't find amusing. The amazing thing is that the bankers and the politicos thought any of these ploys would work. As a writer for the Fargo Forum put it, "In the end, the biggest wall was the one blocking the bankers' view of the electorate."

They got what they deserved, which is an old-fashioned drubbing from the voters, who sided with POP by 73 to 27 percent in last year's elections.

By daring to stand up, Nelson and her grassroots rebels tapped into a public anger that is seething all across our country. The privacy thieves think they're getting away with it, but they are despised by the people (polls consistently reveal 70 to 90 percent opposition to their various tactics and thefts), and whenever people are given the chance to pull a lever, as Nelson gave the people of North Dakota, they respond in huge majorities.

This is a realignment issue for U.S. politics, with people of all ideologies (except corporatism and authoritarianism--a decidedly narrow base in our land) wanting to stop the thievery and force the thieves to spend the rest of their lives going from county fair to county fair, where they'd be required to sit all day in dunking booths marked "Privacy Thief--25 cents a shot." They'd be dunked so often their skin would have a permanent pucker.

What we have here is another failure of our country's corrupt political leadership. How corrupt is it? So totally that neither the Republican nor Democratic Parties will reach down to pick up this big, juicy, rich, and ripe political gift laying on the ground right in front of them. Neither party has the guts or gumption to rankle the powerhouse corporate contributors--who happen to be the privacy thieves.

Nelson says she and the other POPers got "a crash course in civics" and are staying in the fight. Not only are they being vigilant and noisy about ongoing sneaky banker efforts to punch loopholes into North Dakota's "opt-in" requirement, but she's also organizing in her hometown against the privacy-crushing provisions of Bush's Patriot and Homeland Security Acts. She believes we all need to stand up, and she's willing to share with anyone the lessons she's learning in her kitchen table rebellion. Just e-mail [e-mail]

Progressive populist and 2002 Humanist Pioneer Award winner Jim Hightower, former editor of the Texas Observer, is a nationally known columnist, radio commentator, and public speaker who was twice elected agricultural commissioner of Texas. This column was excerpted and adapted from his 2003 book Thieves in High Places and is reprinted by arrangement with Viking, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.