I am always in question when some one is worried about the goverment infringing on my privacy.

If you stop and look at what it takes to live life — such as buying a house, filing taxes, being admitted to a hospital, or one hundred other things that business or goverment agencyies need to verify who you say you are — how much private info is left to divulge?

Reply to this comment

If they would make a law (if there isn’t already one) where anyone abusing this would go to jail, once convicted, for a minimum of 20 years w/out probation or time off for good behavior.

This should be a minimum-to-serve sentence to start after conviction and should be enforced. Also, let everyone know they would serve the time and pay back any restitution they cost someone.

It is time to uphold the right of the offended more than that of the offender. As in all crime, the effected and forgotten are the victims. We need to remember that they didn’t ask to be victimized and their right should come first.

Reply to this comment

Privacy vs security is an admirmable tradeoff. I don’t believe you have to necessarily sacrifice one for the other. If done right — in the right hands of truly conscientious, ethical people, who don’t snoop for details beyond their need or beyond some level of suspectability — I believe it can work and we can be safe. A novel, naive notion, possibly, but then again so was democracy at some point and in many places, still is.

Reply to this comment

I believe that my privacy is one of the greatest rights we have as citizens of the USA. The government should not intrude in people’s private lives. Big government is a hungry machine, which gobbles up individuals’ rights as it tries to spread influence and political correctness. It is bad enough that they are taxing us to death, but then taking our rights away on top of it is a shame.

Reply to this comment

Some fear and apprehension should have been anticipated by the higher-end promoters of the last phase changes in general technologies, but we seemed to have failed to act upon our own history once again!

Changes in general technologies spawned a similar tail spin at the turn of the last century, which threw the world into 50 years of paranoia . . . if you will remember?

Conveniently, we held “Communism” accountable for all the misery, when the real “culprit” was widespread fear
and ignorance! For example, most who so spiritedly condemned Communism in those days didn’t even have a definition for the word!

No, the real problem was a phantom feeling of losing something that spread quickly through the country brought on by the onslaught of so many modernizations in technologies. These changes are never pleasant. A lot of people get laid off permanently, some are too old to retrain for new jobs, while others have to struggle harder than ever before to keep up with the changes . . . and yes, some are simply swept under by the current.

The last thing anyone wants to hear in a time like this is that the whole thing unleashed faster than anyone could predict, and that not even the best thinkers in the land have any real answers to the problems which arose from it! It’s a fragile time where people either get together and work it all out, or do something covert to keep everyone’s attention
focused until some “naturalization” occurs. In olden times, people would sacrifice a goat to appease the
forces that threw them into chaos, and that seems to be the same practice today! At the turn of the last century, the “sacrificial goat” was “communism” . . . it was an easy pick. Once again, everyone gathered at the sacrificial alter and fed the fire, but as always before, this sort of covert distraction only builds to the “phantom” fears caused from changing technologies adding even more suspicions!

If you will recall, the whole country went into “lock down” over WWI and WWII . . . remember the Japanese concentration camps in the US and all the privacy
and property violations to innocent Japanese Americans then? It took McCarthy, with the help of Edward R. Murrow, to wake the people up again, where fear had been promoted on such a national level that it placed the whole continent into a deep spell! We never seemed to hit any “pay dirt” over privacy issues or national security (or personal security for that matter), not until some one screws it up on a national level . . . enough to warrant BIG, NASTY violation headlines! Unfortunately, a lot gets swept over the falls waiting for that to happen.

Privacy is a condition limited only by individual awareness where security is achieved through the same means. The levels of each are proportionate to the amount of commitment (or non commitment) invested into it’s
mastery on an individual level. Obviously, all are not equal
in this ability where those who voluntarily surrender their
privacy for security automatically promote a condition that
can be neither private or secure. The surrendering of
personal privacy on any level can only promote collectivist
objectives. In this scheme, the unique conditions which
found the very nature of each individual life and it’s circumstances become limited and proportionately
devaluated, (“threatened”) proving there are no
substitutes for personal awareness, privacy or security.

No appointed group or constructed system can be held accountable for personal awareness, privacy or personal security any more than you can provide these things for yourself as an individual. Don’t be afraid — be informed! Be ABLE And best of all, be accountable! Otherwise, those things you resist most, you will become.

Reply to this comment

The issue of privacy or security is a farce, [as] we have no real privacy in a country where you must constantly give your vital information to anyone you wish to have take you seriously; and then they in turn sell or divulge your information to other “interested” parties for the sake of various polls.

They tell you it is to serve you better, but they don’t ask if you want to be better served or if what they call better actually is.

Reply to this comment

The people in the Soviet Union were secure, and the people in China are secure. Personally, I prefer insecurity to complete control, and think that our government is already too instrusive.

Terrorist attacks will inevitably occur, and we’ll deal with them just as we did 9/11. We should not act out of fear.

Reply to this comment

Well said, Dennis Brown. With the mentality privacy is everything, who cares if a few thousand, or hundred-thousand are killed or maimed, so long as it doesn’t affect me or my family.

Personally, I have nothing to fear, because I have nothing to hide.

Reply to this comment

“The law was created for man, not man for the law”.

Said another way: “Objective laws were created for bad men, not good men for subjective laws”.

Objective laws are based on the law of nature that no one can manipulate it, while subjective laws are based on the whims and desires of bad men – dishonest, irrational, lazy, criminal-minded people – in governments, religions, businesses, and societies.

If the law is meant to protect and secure lives, properties, and contracts with honest, rational, hard-working, and business-minded people implementing it, then it is worth sacrificing privacy.

It is time to identify, expose, and ostracise NEOCHEATERS AND VALUE USURPERS/DESTROYERS anywhere they are!

Reply to this comment

There are very scary and very real parallels between Bush and Hitler. Anyone who knows any history at all (no, not the mindnumbing and meaningless names and dates you were forced to memorize in public school) will know what I’m talking abou.

The Reichstag fire and 9/11. Hermann Goering and Joseph Goebbles orchestrated the fire that set the building that housed the Parliament for the German Republic ablaze. The Nazis then blamed the communist party. Hitler then proposed emergency legislation and altered the protections of the Weimer constitution, curtailing freedom of the press, right of assembly and association, and right of privacy in personal communications. He used fear, propaganda, and bullying tactics to quiet any domestic dissent. Hitler went on to basically abolish democracy in a quasi-legal fashion.

Exactly as Bush is doing.

Mindless patriotism scares me much more than terrorism. Enough people in pre-Nazi Germany either believed the lies about the imminent communist takeover that Hitler spouted forth or allowed him and his Nazi cohorts to bully them into giving him enough power to conduct one of the most ghastly reigns of terror the world has ever been subjected to.

Please, please, wake up and smell the fascism!

Reply to this comment