The recent leak of inforrmation regarding the efforts of the NSA (National Security Agency) to gather information on U.S. citizens, referred to as "data collection programs", has caused a huge stir in Washington and across the country. The plan, intended to gather information on terroristic activities, caused such a stir because the information gathered has not been solely related to actual persons involved in terrorism, but on vast amounts of the American public in general.
The leak to the British newspaper The Guardian, a result of the effort of Edward Snowden, who worked as a contractor for the NSA, initially revealed that phone company giant Verizon has been complacent in providing phone records to the NSA. Those phone records were as detailed as every call you make, every person you call, how often, how long your calls are, etc. (Mind you, this was not of calls made to/from known terrorist cells or overseas, but all calls.) Then, news broke of Internet giants also providing personal information to the NSA.
In addition to Yahoo!, Apple, and Facebook, Google is one of those giants. As this blogging service, Blogger, is owned by Google, I suspect that any views of dissent, as mine will be, might be suspect.
Ever since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the illusion of we would never be attacked on our own land has been broken. The idea of security, naturally, took a priority. Over the eleven-and-a-half years since then, however, how security has been approached has been, at the very least, suspicious, in and of itself. In my opinion, those efforts have been mixed, at best.
More specific to the NSA issue, there is the standard argument of If you have nothing to hide, then what's the problem? Well, frankly, the vast majority of American citizens don't have anything to hide, so that is an absolutely valid question. In fact, if the vast majority of Americans did have some serious things to hide, then the argument of hiding could be made en masse, and perhaps -- perhaps -- could this program be seen in a somewhat better light.
But the uproar does not stem from a desire to hide something; it stems from fear -- fear that this is just one more attack on our freedom and liberties under a guise of national security. While trying to hide something is a pretty powerful motivator, especially if what you're hiding is illegal or immoral, fear is an even more powerful motivator. Hiding something illegal from the government is a poor reason; fear of one's freedoms and liberties continually being eroded is a righteous reason.
If what has been happening in this country for the past eleven-plus years with the initiation of the Patriot Act was made into a movie, it might well be called 'King James Redux'.
One of the ways that the fear that many Americans share became evident in a story that aired yesterday on the NBC morning show 'Today'. It was revealed that sales on Amazon.com of the George Orwell classic '1984', the book in which the term "Big Brother" was coined, has increased more than 6,000% in just twenty-four hours since the news of the NSA program became public. (In the video in the above link, it is stated that the increase is 5,800%, but other sources have since listed the jump as more than 6,000%.) That means that, if '1984' had been selling on Amazon at a pace of around 100 books per week, in that twenty-four hour period, the sales of the same book would have inflated to around 6,100 copies.
Here in America, Big Brother is, and has been, watching.
In that same 'Today' article, President Obama mentions Orwell's book, and says that they have struck a balance in the implementation of these programs. President Obama's optimism is not shared by me.
For example, let's say that I am posting on Facebook. One of the topics covered in my posting is the recent bombings in Boston. Let's go further and say that one of the things I say is the following: "It's horrible that they got away with the bombing, and they were planning more, but it was good that the President went there." (Some of you might be a step of ahead of me as far as where I am going with this.) The statement seems fairly innocuous, doesn't it? To most individuals, it is an innocuous statement. However, what if someone from the NSA sees this? Certain buzzwords in that innocuous statement might raise a red flag:"It's horrible that they got away with the bombing, and they were planning more, but it was good that the President went there."
Now, let's say that I post that in a couple of places on Facebook, write that in a few E-mails, and mention it a few times on the phone. People who know me well enough personally would know that the reason is that it was a hot topic at the time. How would people who do not know me personally know the same?
In his 1999 HBO special, 'You are All Diseased', the late comedian George Carlin, speaking more specifically about airport security, although I think it can be extrapolated to a broader scale, commented, "[Americans are] always willing to trade away a little of their freedom in exchange for the feeling -- the illusion -- of security." His observation is correct because it has been happening more and more, over and over again. It seems as though people believe that liberty is in opposition to security.
The question here is how can a balance be struck between security and liberty? If the scales continue to tip in the direction of security (real or an illusion), how far are we willing to let it tip that way? Time will tell if this latest political hoodwinking is, at last, the turning point.
Terry
No comments:
Post a Comment