This is the year without a Santa Claus

The U.S. Postal Service has temporarily shut down its annual Operation Santa Claus, in which individuals "adopt" children who write letters to the North Pole, after a postal worker recognized one gift giver as a registered sex offender.

"This is a program that we have promoted for 100 years that is very near and dear to the Postal Service," said Sue Brennan, a spokeswoman for the program. "Everyone wants to believe in Santa. For us to stop this, we feel we are doing the right thing."

At first, the Postal Service said the program would not resume until next year because the problem could not be fixed quickly. Later on, it said it planned to reopen the Manhattan program on Saturday, with procedural changes. It doesn't know about other cities.

Under the fixes, the program will acquire an anonymity that might drain it of some of its warmth. Names and addresses will be blacked out and letters will be numbered. Instead of sending gifts directly, gift-givers will need to take wrapped presents to the post office and provide the recipient's number. The post office will then send them out.

The idea of personally delivering gifts to children in the city's poorest corners -- a step that many program participants most enjoyed -- is now completely unthinkable.

This transformation of personal gift-giving into a black box is but one example of how questions of privacy affect the way groups implement the ideal of open connectivity. Human connections become mere abstractions, if they aren't prohibited completely. Yet if we open the system without making considerable expenditures of time and money to screen out untrustworthy givers, we run a real risk of equally, if not even more inhumane acts.  It's a classic tragic choice.