The Valley's secretive culture sprang up from its Pentagon contracts and the cult of intellectual property. Acolytes of Whole Earth Catalog publisher Stewart Brand may remember his assertion that information wants to be free while dropping their annual 2CB on the playa — but it's far more rarely acknowledged that he prefaced that aphorism with the maxim that information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. And what's the most valuable information you can have? Information you can use against someone. While bosses are tasty game for a hungry underling, it's far easier for management to hunt their minions, since they have the keys to the Exchange server and outbound HTTP request logs. Having been logged, filtered and background-checked on Google at more than a few well-known local heavyweights myself, I present at least five ways you're being watched not by the NSA, but by the local, private sector — especially the paranoid executives at Apple.