When push comes to shove
Response to my friend, @polotek, about PRISM
@polotek sent me an article to read about PRISM and general government big-brothering and wanted to hear my thoughts about it, so I went ahead and read the post. From my understanding the author’s view was basically, “the government should be allowed to collect the data and access it anytime, but to read any actual content get an order to obtain it”. Sounds reasonable to many–or possibly most–people. Here’s the issue tho, how do we know the government isn’t already using it against citizens? We’d most likely never know until it became widespread. Maybe it isn’t now, but in 5, 10, or 20 years they could be.
If someone wrote something, lets say, defamatory against Obama and it started to pick up steam they could look at your records and easily say “if you dont delete the post and stop posting about Obama we’ll tell everyone your secret about X, and we’ll send you to prison for the rest of your life”. What would you do? You might say “I’d fight it!”, but when push came to shove, would you be willing to lose all of your money, potentially lose your freedom forever, destroy your family, and if you did have any dark secrets, for them to be released to everyone?
When you say it’s okay for the government to have a massive database of all your private info you’re expecting them to never break the rules. Do you seriously trust them on that? From the government that brought you torture, gitmo, assassination attempts on US citizens, and more things that are considered illegal, you expect them to not do something as small as reading emails? That’s a naive assumption. Government usage makes Facebook’s questionable privacy practices seem saintly.
If growing up in the Obama and Bush presidencies taught me anything, it’s that the government doesn’t really have any rules. War crimes? Sure, on paper it’s illegal, but who’s going to do anything about it? This is the same issue. They read your stuff without permission under the authority of a high ranking officer or government employee, and you really believe the government or courts will choose you over them if it even makes it that far? All they have to say is “this is a terrorism manner” and because of the unbelievably repulsive state secret laws you wont even get a trial. Any evidence they took from you can’t be shown to a court. Obama has been overusing it since it became a law in 2008 and this is the same government you want to allow into your private records to use against you?
The moment we start just blindly trusting our government is when we give up our freedoms. Jefferson and the original founders warned about this. They made a bunch of laws to protect the citizens from the government. Now, Obama and Bush have been working double time to make sure the government is protected from the people. Is this not blatantly obvious to others? We don’t need all this survelience. 9/11 could have easily been avoided with the CIA work they were doing. They had the info all without ever having PRISM or similar then. So, again, why? Why should we blindly trust the government that’s been repeatedly stripping our freedoms and privacy to shake hands and not use it for “evil”? It’s not if the government is going to abuse this power, it’s when.
