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im willing to give up a certain amount of freedom vs security. for example: in air flight, check my bag, check my pockets, if you need to check my flight history, no big deal. i have a big enough fear of flying that one less thing to concern myself with is ok by me when im in the air.
i dont really know what the issue is. we use credit cards, we have accounts on numerous websites, we use easy pass, hell, we post on public blogs. we voluntarily put the information out there and even if the government isnt watching, just by looking at how tailored an amazon page can be a month after my last purchase it becomes painfully obvious that somebody is.
a couple months ago i was helping a friend with a case of animal abuse. long story short, an ex girlfriends new boyfriend killed one of his cats and the other one was receiving routine beatings until he took the cat away from the ex. he knew nothing about the girl friends new boyfriend but after a five minute internet search we had his name, address, where he works, hell we even had photos of the guy holding the cats.
it was all out there without any probing by some sort of outside source, and the rest of us are just as bad as him about putting it out there. its hard to demand that people stay out of our business and then we throw our business in their face.
i always find it funny that at one second people will complain about wire tapping their phones, and then with that same phone they will discuss the most intimate details of their personal lives at a crowded mall.
if you dont want someone prying into your life, then dont make yourself an open book.
I’m not entirely in disagreement Derrick. There’s definitely a lot of truth to some of that. I particularly agree with the flying stuff and those searches. I’ve got no problem with it. I think the difference with regard to the other stuff comes from the fact that is it just other citizens or businesses using the information we make public, which if misused on their part may or may not constitute a crime for which they can be punished if they misuse the information and the fact that it is the government, who has the power to arrest, detain, whatever anyone for whatever reason they see fit. Also, you’re talking about information that we willingly make public as individuals, and wiretapping which is without our consent and not stuff that we would normally make public. So yeah, if someone puts something on the internet and then what they put out there is used as evidence of wrongdoing and gets them arrested or detained then that’s all above board. But if I’m having a private conversation with a friend and the government, without the independent judgement of a court or a judge decides that they don’t like something I said and detains or arrests me indefinitely as a result of that…then that’s something that I have an issue with. I’m just not sure why the existing law which says “You want to tap someone’s phone and you feel that it’s urgent then go ahead. But you need to get a warrant as much as 72 hours after the fact to be sure you have a non-political legal entity determine that you had probable cause.” was so insufficient. And I’m across the board on this stuff. I’d no more want a democratic administration wiretapping the NRA or whatever and using their own judgement without warrant to arrest someone than I would wanting the current administration wiretapping the ACLU and using their own skewed determination to interpret that some remark they heard was cause to detain or arrest someone without a third party judging it without political bias.