Today in Conservertarian Non-Sequitur Theater

I think I’ve seen this kind of argument elsewhere, too, but I’m just baffled by what Ann Althouse seems to arguing here:

Amid all the efforts to stir up public outrage about the evils of government invading our privacy, MySpace and Friendster stand as monuments to our willingness to invade our own privacy. Do you expect the government not to take advantage of the information people post about themselves?

[…]

There’s also the problem of trying to make people care about the government listening in on phone calls when we walk around everywhere with our phones and talk in front of people all the time.

Nobody, alas, is more prone to cranky rants about people making annoying cell calls in public than me, but the logic here is just incomprehensible. Yes, sometimes post personal details about themselves on network sites, and they cannot have an expectation of privacy about these things (although I think that what people choose to keep private should be respected even if people make some things public)–but what does this have to do with the vast majority of people who don’t? How does the fact that people sometimes make phone calls in public diminish the expectation of privacy of phone calls that aren’t made in public? By Althouse’s logic, because an increasing number of people pose nude on the internet, there would be no reason to object if the government started taking nude pictures of people without their consent. Before 9/11 Changed Everything I would have thought this was too obvious to even require saying, but voluntarily waiving your own privacy and having someone invade it without your consent are categorically different things.