Dear Lucille,After I wrote you, I was reading an article on the Internet and I will just quote from it here. Maybe it will indicate to you, what I mean by "stalking."

"Smith is a former computer programmer, an Internet specialist, a nerd of a very high order. At forty-eight, he has a beard, bushy eyebrows, and a serious demeanor that masks a ready sense of irony and humor. He has devoted years to the study of data collection and surveillance networks. In the late 1990s, it was Smith who uncovered the technical underpinnings of several surreptitious methods of tracking people online, including something dubbed "Web Bugs." He found code in Microsoft Word documents that showed who had handled them. Then as a computer consultant he began tracking the accelerating convergence of many commonplace electronic devices and networks that collect information about us.In short, he is one of the very best at watching those who watch us, a technical guy who understands the deepest implications of the data revolution and the partnership between government and the information industry. "What has changed is that we might have a thousand times more data for law enforcement to work with," Smith said. "And human beings have never lived in that regime before."That perspective made him an excellent surveillance tour guide of New York that day, in late summer 2003. It took him no effort: finding sensors on the Upper West Side was as easy as spotting pigeons in the park. They were everywhere, electronic sentinels, absorbing information about so many individuals and sending it to databases, public and private, as the digital fuel for our emerging surveillance society. Smith got into his own car, a Volvo, and pulled out some electronic "goodies" he keeps handy to demonstrate his ideas. One device was a global positioning system, or GPS, receiver that, when connected to a laptop, tells him exactly where he is at any given moment. It was a two-year-old model that cost about $100 when he bought it. It had enough storage to hold the equivalent of about 6 million pieces of paper filled with information. That's relatively small compared with what he could have bought for $100 that day: a new system with four times the storage capacity. Then he showed off a wireless camera. It was smaller than the one he noticed at Starbucks, a cube about as wide across as a postage stamp. Operating on a 9-volt battery, he said, it can broadcast a television signal up to 200 feet.He started his car and drove south toward the Lincoln Tunnel, not far from the Empire State Building. The global positioning system was on and tracking our every move. But Smith was not as impressed with it as he used to be. New cell phones, he said, can be programmed to transmit their location every few seconds to the mobile network. He steered his way through the tunnel and, on the New Jersey side, went to a tollbooth.Government agencies have been collecting tolls forever at bridges, some highways, and on ferries. Until the early 1990s, the vast majority accepted only coins and currency. The point was to collect money. Now the role of tollbooths is evolving. More and more, they're also becoming a matter-of-fact part of a security and law enforcement infrastructure as digital checkpoints. Cameras are often pointed at drivers' faces and their license plates. When drivers use an electronic transponder such as E-ZPass to automatically pay the tolls, they're also handing over information about themselves.That's what happened, with zero fanfare, when Smith drove slowly by the booth. The transponder, held against his windshield, sent out a signal that he was coming. The system knew it was his car, because he had previously registered and shared his bank account number. The technology in the tollbooth took note of the identification number and exact time and location that the car passed by. In the vast majority of these transactions - and there are millions of them every day now in the United States - drivers get what they pay for: convenience. Millions of transponders have been issued since the E-ZPass system was first installed in the New York region in the early nineties. On some days, more than eight of ten cars going into Manhattan use them. They're not just for tolls anymore. Fast-food customers use transponders to charge snacks, while airport parking lots use them to deduct fees. "It has just revolutionized the way our operation is run," a transit authority official said."