How To Be A Pack Rat - Forbes.com

Meet MS researcher Gordon Bell:

How To Be A Pack Rat - Forbes.com: "'It started out as me capturing all the stuff that I had from various corporations and working environments,' says Bell. By scanning files into a computer, he was able to get rid of sheaves of paper going back 40 years. Everything from memos to magazines to old articles and pictures got added to the archive. 'It was really going back just to see what was there and trying to clean up the past,' he says.

Soon he was also archiving his personal life, scanning in old photos and copying music CDs. Even books were scanned in and converted to text documents. And once the past was saved, Bell put in place mechanisms to archive new data--indeed every letter, voice mail, word processing document and e-mail. Bell even stores every Web page he visits. 'That is a valuable thing, because usually when you go back and try to find that sort of thing again, you can't do it,' he says. "

Interesting! It also mentions that - believe it - he archives all the tv shows he watches, so they will be accessible forever. And then the very real, and very scary part:

"It's something that could be particularly useful in corporate environments, says Bell. "Corporations all have varying problems of how they want to preserve information," he says, "but what I advocate is basically to store everything." Keeping every e-mail and voice mail helps workers keep track of what they're supposed to be doing, and having every document archived makes an excellent audit trail for companies trying to improve processes or identify problems. "

Something tells me Homeland Security has their fingers crossed on this one. Before this stuff goes mainstream, someone needs to make sure Congress rules these devices off limits to subpoenas as a matter of privacy.