With the newly expanded powers being contemplated, what some suspected was already being done illegally, will be made legal. In March, Jon Stokes of Ars Technica wrote of a Wall Street Journal revelation:
Gorman's WSJ piece provides sourced confirmation that the NSA is doing exactly what I and others suspected they were doing, i.e., they're collecting e-mail headers, Web surfing histories, cell phone call logs, and every other trace of the digital and analog connections that we make to the world, and they're synthesizing this into complete informational portraits of individuals. (emphasis added)
Freedom Talking Points
Many Americans feel unmoved by the fact that the government is spying on them, since they are not doing anything illegal. This thinking needs to be confronted on a number of grounds:
1. The 4th Amendment allows us to live and move around privately, without being observed, tracked, or monitored. Real freedom native freedom demands this minimum. And yet no one can travel anywhere in this country without being caught on film, as Robert O'Harrow describes in No Place to Hide.
2. If there is erroneous material in some database(s) that the government has compiled on us, we have no way to correct it. And of course there is erroneous material in it; we're talking about a bureaucracy.
3. Investigations into how the government uses information it collects on people who pose no threat, but are merely exercising their 1st Amendment rights by criticizing their government, reveals a pattern of deliberately sabotaging the target's career or other aspects of life. The Church Committee explains:
The victim may never suspect that his misfortunes are the intended result of activities undertaken by his government, and accordingly may have no opportunity to challenge the actions taken against him.
4. Believing that info collected will not be used against us is akin to believing that no one will try to subvert elections run on undetectably mutable software. Where the opportunity exists, it will be exploited.
Surely, there are more reasons OEN readers can develop to use as talking points with friends, neighbors, professors and legislators.
The duopoly is about to add another unconstitutional law on the books, turning the Land of the Free into Slavery, Inc. Let's work on talking points from the ground up, to build the case for freedom.
1 | 2
