I've been seeing more and more articles about the Total Information Awareness agency lately and the more I read, the more I'm freaking out about it.
These publications would have me believe the Fourth Reich has started to hold lunch meetings every Monday at Sizzlers across the greater Washington D.C. Area, where you can order a Stasi and Shrimp Scampi special for $7.95.
Consider this quote from John Perry Barlow of the Electric Frontier Foundation:
"If you have the Total Information Awareness project working, it might be relatively easy to find everyone who had bought more than a ton of fertilizer and 500 gallons of diesel in the last year, which would be a great way of spotting potential Tim McVeigh's — but it would also spot half the farmers and ranchers in America. But having spotted them, it couldn't toss them out until it'd exposed them to the next layer of search. And the important thing to think about there is that they're no longer just looking for terrorist activity, they're looking for any kind of criminality at all — which includes what I consider to be cultural crimes, like say marijuana smoking." — Mother Jones
It sounds very scary, but here's my twenty-thousand dollar question: why do liberals always fear getting caught smoking weed?
Join the fray by reading through and commenting at the end.
This is a tough issue. I would favor the side of more privacy, more danger to steer clear of the slippery slope of "just one more" video monity, "just one more" logging script, etc.
Because weed makes you paranoid! The real question is: Why does the government arrest people for smoking it?
I'm not all that paranoid about the government crawling up my rectum looking for subersive data, because there is such an enormous amount of it (data, that is) to wade through. What is scary is that the guvment has a pretty poor track record when it comes to interpreting data. That's what is scary.
I believe a person has nothing to fear as long as you live within the law. What I don't like is the potential for the government to start chipping away at our Constitution one policy or law at a time. How long does it take for a police state to be born out of a democracy, or even partial democracy?
Once the government has full access to a person without civil rights then I think Beerzie's point of misinterpretation of facts can become a horror, or a real life Brazil, if you will.
I am not scared of governments with this kind of power --
I am scared of people with this kind of power.
Of the people for the people....right?
Correction: I am scared of a person with this power.