I’ve slacked off on the blogging over the past couple of months because I’ve been kind of busy, but I’ll try to speed up again. Google Analytics claims that I have about a dozen or so regular readers, so to you folks, I apologize.
Unfortunately, the story that the NSA is getting all our call records has me nearly speechless.
I fully support government surveilance of known or strongly suspected terrorists or criminals. Those people should be captured, and surveilance is a necessary part of doing so.
However, I’m a lot more troubled by government surveilance when there’s no individualized suspicion. There may well be some theoretical benenfit to NSA data gathering, some statistical chance of finding real miscreants, but I don’t believe it’s worth the effort or the intrusion into people’s lives. Basically, I just think the government should be more respectful of people’s privacy and not violate it for reasons that are unlikely to yield a net benefit to the public.
I’m also concerned about the frequent abuse of this kind of surveilance. It’s real easy for government spies to slide down that slippery slope and start seeing everyone they don’t like as a potential enemy of the state. Rather than trying to maximize the number of bad guys they catch, they spy on people they hate, in the hope of catching them doing something bad. The classic example of this is the surveilance of civil rights groups back in the 1960s.
This latest surveilance effort by the NSA (according to news reports) is even worse. They’re not just spying on people they don’t like, they’re spying on everone.
(As I’m writing this piece, my wife received a phone call from my mother. Someday, perhaps even today, the NSA will get a record of that call.)
Or maybe I’m wrong there. Maybe they are spying on people they hate. Maybe they hate all of us.
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