If our government needs to check call logs to keep this country safe, then by all means, check away. For all I care, the NSA can come over to my house and listen in to my own conversations.Hands down, the saddest letter to the editor of the entire year.
People are complaining that it is an invasion of privacy. Let me tell you something: The NSA will not be cracking down on some guy in Connecticut for using a curse word. They are looking for terrorists.
If people are saying nothing wrong or calling the wrong people, there should be nothing to worry about. If you're not a terrorist, you have nothing to worry about. If no one was making bad deals overseas with warlords in Iraq or Afghanistan, there wouldn't need to be this proactive strike on terrorism.
The NSA is not actually listening in and recording phone calls, they are just checking call records - where calls are going to or coming from - in order to detect any calling patterns that may lead to terrorist activity. They do not actually have the right to listen into or record any phone conversations without a warrant from a judge.
I'm not saying that it absolutely doesn't happen, but if it keeps me safe, I don't care.
Unless the people who are proposing that this is an invasion of privacy can come up with some surefire way to keep me safe from any terrorist attacks, quit complaining.
Let the NSA do its job and keep this country safe.
Brad Ecklund, Olympia
Jun 4, 2006
only the ignorant have nothing to fear
Constitution? Old and outmoded. Slippery slopes? I've got traction tires. Power corrupts? Change the channel.
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8 comments:
I can tell you which English teacher he didn't have...
If by "you" you mean "humanity," then of course.
The trend toward this kind of thinking seems to be accelerating. I hear people saying and writing these things all the time. "I've got nothing to hide," they say. "Why should I be worried?"
A lot of people seem to believe that so long as they're not stopped from doing what is legal, the government is welcome to watch their every move. ("I'm not breaking the law. What do I care if they want to read my bank statement or see which books I checked out of the library?")
But that kind of thinking would only make sense if laws were both unchanging and always in conformity with widely held public sentiment about which behaviors are acceptable and which are not. Unfortunately, however, our laws change and they are not always in conformity with public sentiment.
Considering that the I've-Got-Nothing-to-Hide crowd often appears to be coextensive with the Government-Doesn't-Know-Best crowd, I find this drift toward a totalitarian police state utterly baffling. The only explanation, I think, is that Americans, paying more attention to American Idol than to politics and the bases for our government, have almost completely lost their grip on the basic political discourse that's required to maintain freedom.
This, after all, is the nation where people complain about federal regulation but insist on federal money. How exactly is the federal government supposed to provide all the programs that people want without making regulations to guide the direction of the money? Put all the economic power in the hands of the federal government and it's going to set up a system of obstacles to control the flow of money; somebody will come along with good intentions and try to make those obstacles into some kind of "progressive" public policy (say, holding schools "accountable" with NCLB and then cutting funding for those schools who don't conform); before you know it, the federal government has become one social engineering bureau.
Give them the power to look into our windows and listen to our phone calls and all you're doing is providing data for those well-intentioned social engineers. ("Hey, I don't like the way people criticize the government. Let's make it so the only people who can get federal funding are the ones who say nice things about us.")
And voila, we're living in a totalitarian paradise.
What's also astonishing is that people hold to this ignorant trust of the government despite the high-profile gaffes of the past few years. The VA data gone missing is a perfect example.
People scream bloody murder if their information is lost or stolen, but don't seem to realize that since it's collected in these massive databases, which are operated by frail and feeble humans, it's only a matter of time before the next blunder.
Exactly. I think people just have no concept of how data collection in a digital age works. People in the right place can take information that could literally put thousands of people in ruin, stick it on a keychain flash card, and walk out the door with it. Vast databases can be filled with pieces of information that alone are insignificant, but accumulated and explored by data-mining algorithms can produce focused and accurate results. Technical byproducts of devices like mobile phones allow phone companies to track a person's location within a few hundred yards.
All that contributes not to revealing people who are doing things they shouldn't be doing, but to putting everyone under the consciousness of surveillance. At what point do good people cease being good because they believe it's the right thing to do and start being "good" because they're afraid they'll be seen?
Exactly. I think people just have no concept of how data collection in a digital age works. People in the right place can take information that could literally put thousands of people in ruin, stick it on a keychain flash card, and walk out the door with it. Vast databases can be filled with pieces of information that alone are insignificant, but accumulated and explored by data-mining algorithms can produce focused and accurate results. Technical byproducts of devices like mobile phones allow phone companies to track a person's location within a few hundred yards.
All that contributes not to revealing people who are doing things they shouldn't be doing, but to putting everyone under the consciousness of surveillance. At what point do good people cease being good because they believe it's the right thing to do and start being "good" because they're afraid they'll be seen?
It's a sensible view if you assume an ideal world full of international terrorists.
My guess, the people who support the "nothing to hide" argument are the same ones who won't use their credit card on the internet but, will let their 19 year-old waiter take it into another room to run their dinner bill. Hypocritical idiots if you ask me.
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