Enough with the PRISM Paranoia Already
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The media’s warnings and alarms over the PRISM disclosure continue unabated. As we have discussed before there’s little context provided on just what the government is collecting. Just look at today’s Mozilla Firefox homepage. There’s a thumbnail graphic of a surveillance camera and accompanying text: “Security and privacy are not optional. Stand with a broad coalition to demand that the NSA stop watching us: stopwatching.us.”
It’s not PRISM that we should be worried about. First, the Government is monitoring meta data. The NSA is looking for patterns. It’s not looking for what you may have ordered on the Home Shopping Network. If you’re going to be concerned, why aren’t you concerned about the information that you submitted on your tax returns? I’d be more concerned about the potential misuse of that information.
The American public wants to have it all. We want SUV’s and we also want to put an end to global warming. We wanted to fight wars on two fronts, but no one wanted to sacrifice. And we want complete privacy and complete security from terrorism. Well, we can’t have it all. We are sacrificing some measure of privacy for some enhanced measure of security. Life is about compromises.
If you’re going to be concerned about privacy, I’d suggest that you be concerned about retail and social media websites that take your personal information. Really personal information. They take it and sell it. And sometimes they lose it. Just today, Facebook announced that it had exposed 6 million phone numbers to unauthorized viewers.
Last year, someone stole my wife identity and she was connected with a car bought by an affiliate of a drug cartel. Then, the FBI and DEA showed up at our house. I’m more concerned about incidents like that than the NSA looking for phone patterns. By the way, that information you put up on Facebook. It can be bought by the federal government and those decidedly less friendly as well.
