Frankly, Americans complaining about the government spying on them is rather like Kim Kardashian complaining about the paparazzi taking pictures of her.
You’d better pray you are never prosecuted or sued for anything. Because not only Big Brother but even your civil adversary could compel Google to turn over all of the searches you made when you thought nobody was watching. And just think how embarrassing or compromising it would be to have some of those search terms come under public scrutiny – no matter how innocent your explanation.
So if you’re planning to cheat on your spouse, or to do something even worse, don’t search Google for guidance because you might as well be talking to your local gossipmonger, or to the police. And if you think you can un-Google your most compromising searches, think again…
By the way, it’s not just Google. Because you’d be shocked at the spying and eavesdropping your employer, your Internet Service Provider, your local supermarket, or even your favorite (naughty) website engages in to keep track of your emails, purchases, preferences and … peccadilloes. And all of them blithely use that information for their own commercial purposes, but would rat you out just as blithely at the mere hint of prosecution or civil litigation.
(“Beware: Google Declares ‘Nothing’s Private,’ The iPINIONS Journal, December 8, 2009)
In this Information Age, tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and WikiLeaks are masters of the universe. But they have created a schizophrenic human species – whose members share everything about everything, yet claim to be zealous about their privacy.
Only this explains the growing outrage over the government’s National Security Agency (NSA) monitoring their promiscuous and indiscriminate digital footprints. But there’s no explaining why these nincompoops think it’s okay for tech companies to spy on them to sell them stuff, but not okay for the NSA to do so to keep them safe.
Not to mention how they blithely give up truly sensitive personal information for the convenience of buying stuff with credit cards. After all, records collected from such transactions make the generic phone records the NSA collects seem even less intrusive than a traffic cop’s speed gun.
But all we need is for terrorists to pull off another 9/11. For the same people venting outrage about government surveillance today will be venting ever greater outrage over the government’s failure to monitor the footprints of those terrorists (i.e., connecting the dots).
This is why I applaud President Obama for effectively telling these nincompoops to get over their outrage … and themselves with their inherently contradictory concerns about privacy:
Nobody is listening to your telephone calls… [The government is merely] digesting phone numbers and the durations of calls, seeking links that might identify potential leads with respect to folks who might engage in terrorism.
It’s important to recognize that you can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience.
(Associated Press, June 8, 2013)
Enough said?
Except that I gather some people are concerned about the government using the metadata the NSA collects to prosecute them. But clearly no concern is warranted in this respect, unless they are engaged in illegal activities. Even then, no judge would admit any evidence obtained via an illegal wiretap or e-mail intercept. In law we call such tainted evidence “fruit of the poisonous tree.”
And if they are merely worried about electronic data being used in civil litigation or to embarrass them, then they should be far more concerned about the spying Google and other private companies do than about that which the government does.
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