I remember the TV game show from the 1950s and ‘60s, “I’ve Got a Secret.” Garry Moore and Steve Allen, among others, hosted the show. There were four celebrity panelists trying to guess the “secret” that a guest on the show had. The secret could be anything from owning a hundred Russian Wolf Hounds to eating 50 gallons of chocolate ripple ice-cream in one sitting.

Those were the good ol’ days ... when you could have a secret. Those days are long gone. The National Security Agency now knows all our secrets. The NSA or one of our country’s 16 other intelligence gathering communities has been eavesdropping - “spying” - on us for years with the ultimate goal of - now get this! - monitoring, recording and saving every scrap of data and communication of every person on Planet Earth. Shoot, there’d be no need to have a “What’s My Line” game show today; the NSA already knows all our “lines.”

This whole business of a government wanting to collect and store emails, texts, tweets, credit card sales, phone calls and whatever of the world’s population reminds me of King Midas. Midas, the king of Phrygia, was granted a wish by Bacchus, who was essentially the god of wine. Midas wished that whatever he touched would turn to gold. It didn’t take King Midas long to realize that he had too much of a good thing. When he got hungry and tried to eat, every morsel of food became not a Chicken McNugget but a nugget of gold. It took Midas less than a day to seek out Bacchus and ask him to take back the favor he had been granted.

Midas, oddly enough in the context here, didn’t use his intelligence. His wish was all about folly and the story seems to indicate that Bacchus knew from the outset that Midas would rue the moment when the king had the “Midas touch.” If the god of wine sees things in a more sober manner than you, well, maybe what you’re doing is foolish.

After you know everything about me and everything about everybody else, what’s going to happen then? Really, at this point the “gold vault” of secrets, private transactions and communications collected by our government has only served to make the world at large mad. On top of that, the NSA secret about our secrets being collected and stored has been outted. There will always be somebody to reveal government secrets and government’s private deliberations. Remember the Pentagon Papers? Government can’t have secrets if government won’t let its citizens have secrets; same for privacy. Anybody who thinks the more surveillance information that’s collected and stored will result in more security and power also reminds me of King Midas. In another story, Apollo gave Midas the ears of an ass for his stupidity. Ears of an ass definitely apply here.

Bob Morgan is a retired, award-winning journalist and an author.