There are times when a story, or a person, just makes you want to smack your forehead in disbelief.
Take, for example, 68-year-old Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence, who wants Americans to redefine what privacy really is.
Last I checked, and you may have a different dictionary than I, but privacy meant “the state of being free from intrusion or disturbance in one's private life or affairs.”
What’s his new definition of privacy? That government and businesses properly safeguard people’s private communications and financial information, according to CNN.
How ludicrous is that?
Government safeguarding my financial information … Umm, I think not. The only businesses I want to have any access to my bank accounts are those I have accounts open with.
As far as my communications are concerned, the government should have no business poking its nose in my business. I have nothing to hide, mind you, but I’d like to think the government has better things to do than worry about what I’m talking about on the phone, or e-mailing to my family and friends.
Like maybe finding a way to get us out of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Get us out of those wars, and I’ll grant you access to anything you want to know about me, OK?
With Internet sites like Myspace, or Facebook, Kerr said that Americans are essentially giving up privacy anyway by posting personal information on such social networking sites. “Those two generations younger than we are have a very different idea of what is essential privacy, what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs. And so, it's not for us to inflict one size fits all,” said Kerr, 68. “Protecting anonymity isn't a fight that can be won. Anyone that's typed in their name on Google understands that.”
True, anyone with access to Google has at one time or another typed their name into the search engine. But, what comes up is in the public domain. Your bank numbers aren’t going to pop up in a Google search, hell, not even the bank you belong to will come up as part of the search.
What we don’t expect, and maybe we should, is the government to keep tabs on what we’re putting into the public domain.
Hell, my cell phone conversations are pretty boring, to be honest. I don’t know too many national secrets, and the only secrets I divulge over my phone have to do with the inner workings of my employer when an issue comes up that the union I belong to needs to know about.
Article comments
1 - moonraven
More fascism--1984 had nthing on the Bush Gang of Fascist Petrocriminals.
Next up: stool samples.
2 - Howard Bowen
Does our government need to completely congeal the public into one predetermined mind-set? The Evolution Theory has given rise to the concept that no matter what we, as citizens, are programed with through the media, we eventually will succumb to becoming consumers that bind to that ethic. The TV is riddled with sexual promiscuity, violence, and dramas that express corruption in government and business. The media expounded relentlessly for 30 years that "sex sells". If the concept that depictions of extreme violence through the media not only alleviates, but then channels human instincts of that persuasion into passively cordoned containment, how do you explain the mirrored reflection of sexual standards in the "private sector" to that of TV standards? Now is a good time to think about the results of either. Are the TV dramas of corruption in government and business supposed to evince trust when the programs themselves make the very concept seem ridiculous and implausible? Like the government, they want you know they have covered every angle; asked and answered every question. Evolution theory is used to buttress many nature programs while blatantly or subliminally reinforcing atheism. Has the government effectively surpassed the amendment that bars the creation, manipulation, or controlling of religion from its chambers, by repeatedly denouncing religion, thus making it substantive? By following their standards of wealth and power, you also won't need any fear of the divine, or the laws there-in that brought civilization onward. By authoritatively outlawing and banning religion in schools, in public, and most menacingly with-in government, the result is that people have been persuaded to turn their lives away from God. The reason God gave us life has been subverted into consumerism: lust, greed, hate, dissatisfaction, jealousy, narcissism. The government has propelled and succeeded in creating a godless society, that, according to its actions, not its words, has promoted, by their own admissal, an untrustworthy public that is now being convinced they need to be spied upon. Who is the government in latter America, what are they really doing, and is their anything that can be done to stop the change? The new world order certainly reeks of a society that is now a work engine that has been re-invented as a support system for an elitist government.
3 - Abeward Pena
well, this is america... And due to that our laws go by precedent. Guess what??? Since, yahoo and other companies lost their case, using the defense "...the government ordered us to give them that information..." the the same outcome will occur in US courts for these companies. The US can't sue china government for making the ISP give out personal information, and then go and do the same thing and say they are exempt. International law shows that. So the US government would lose in that case since it was a US court that found yahoo and other companies at fault for releasing the private data. And future cases would follow the same precedent. We all know Bush know's this fact, they say he went to college. That is why he is trying to force the exemption. But if congress does so then they would have to follow suite and publicly say sorry for yelling at yahoo for doing the same thing as the US made these companies do.