CNN is reporting Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl is indeed dead, killed by his kidnappers.

A senior U.S. administration source said law enforcement officials received a videotape in recent hours that gave them reason to believe the 38-year-old Pearl was dead. Pearl’s wife is pregnant with the couple’s first child.

Where do we point the fingers? Can we simply write it off as an act of terrorism?

Personally, I hope the Wall Street Journal feels like shit. But are they really to blame? It’s easy to blame the popular media for wanting to send reporters into high-risk areas to cover events. This trend became popular during the Vietnam War. It’s also easy to blame the reporters themselves. They know the risks, yet they go anyway.

Or are we, the public, to blame? We love front-line reporting. Or at least we don’t shy away from it. We like to see gun-camera footage of laser-guided bombs hitting their targets. We like to see that we are indeed winning.

It reminds me of what Walter Cronkite once said:

Twenty years ago reporters told us what we needed to know. Now they tell us what we want to know. The two are not always synonymous.

Did we care about Chandra Levy, or did we just want to know if she slept with Rep. Gary Condit? That’s all the media cared about, or cared to ask.

I think in situations like this, we all have blood on our hands.

There’s another privacy brouhaha cropping up. This time, it involves Microsoft’s Media Player, which apparently tracks not only the songs you listen to but the DVD’s you watch as well. All of this is made possible by the XP operating system and a magical log file that no one seems to know how to find.

Sure, there are privacy concerns here that are valid in my opinion, but I learned a long time ago, that if you are going to surf the web or use a computer connected to the Internet for any reason, then your privacy is at risk.

Because there are no laws, no standards, and no precedents for may of these activities, companies are going to try any way to make money from that activity. That’s what companies do. The shareholders and Wall Street demand that these companies explore every possible revenue stream. Does that make it right? That all depends on who you ask.

It might be worth the infringement of privacy to have a player automatically download Track and Artist information. It might not. That’s the question here. As long as I am knowingly making certain info public or accessible in some way, I have a choice. The real problem lies in taking away that choice by not telling me I am providing information.

So, we get into a circle. Does a company have to tell you that it is logging info about you? If there are laws that force them to do so, are they clear and without loopholes? What if they tell us, but we don’t read it and just click “Next,” who’s responsible?

The upshot of all this is that privacy is constantly eroding and certain activities make you more susceptible to the total extinction of your privacy. If it is that important to you, than you may not want to use a computer. Run, don’t walk, to your closest bookstore and read a book. But beware, if you use a credit card, someone knows what book you are reading.

We were discussing the usability of one of our new projects here at the office and one of my coworkers repeated this adage:

If you make something idiot-proof, they’ll just make better idiots.

It’s a sad commentary on humanity, but it’s true. As a wise man once said, “It’s funny cuz it’s true.”