THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And the people gathered at the 10th Hackers on Planet Earth made that sadly and abundantly clear.

The latest tools for consumer countersurveillance and evasion technology were on display last weekend as thousands of tech experts, civil libertarians and whistleblowers gathered at the 10th Hackers on Planet Earth (Hope X) conference in Manhattan to reassess emerging threats to privacy and confidentiality in the digital and physical worlds.

The consensus among attendees was clear: Privacy is dead.

“You’d have to be naked in a steam room on top of a mountain if you want to have a truly confidential conversation,” said conference speaker Steve Rambam, a private investigator. “And it has to be your steam room.”...

Conference experts said that the broader and growing threats to privacy and confidentiality come from corporations and private defense contractors.

“Ten years ago, there were private-sector attacks on your privacy, and there were public-sector attacks on your privacy. Today they’re interchangeable,” said Rambam, in a custom-made Italian suit and tie, who then wandered off toward the lectern through a sea of black T-shirts and neon-colored hairstyles. He was famously arrested by the FBI at the 2006 Hope conference — on charges of interfering with a federal money-laundering prosecution — making him a legend among hackers.

Rambam, who was cleared of the charges but retains a healthy resentment of federal law enforcement, said that in recent years data collection by government agencies has been far outpaced by that by corporations, including Vigilant Solutions, which owns a 2.5 billion license plate database — the world’s largest and reportedly growing by 70 million new scans a month — that serves more than 2,000 intelligence and law enforcement agencies, from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security down to local law enforcement.

With private-sector data collection, “there’s no need for a warrant,” said Rambam. “It’s a private business record. There’s no [Freedom of Information Act] for Microsoft. And they can do whatever they want with it.”

And don't expect them to friend you as they follow you.