Yes, this may be necessary at times. But it's a lousy habit to get into without at least sometimes considering other choices. Instead of passing a law forbidding this, which in the long run will prove futile, we might instead require that every corporation collecting such data must openly publish the home numbers of its top 50 officers. If a telemarketer calls me up at home, I'd sure like to have the pager number of the company's CEO to call him up and let him know how I feel about being interrupted. Conviction rates may go up, while illegal rousting and hassling of the innocent will certainly go down.
Accountability goes both ways.
Despite the infamous King videotape, the Simi Valley jury still acquitted the accused officers. Instead, everyone talks about shrouding information, blocking vision, creating new layers of secrecy. The ability to encrypt one's own information is advocated by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and so-called cypherpunks as a remedy for the proliferation of electronic monitoring by governments, corporations and individuals. But this solution, a nearly precise inversion of the old hacker notion of unlimited access to all data as an ideal state of existence, doesn't impress Brin either. Brin asks rhetorically.