BIG BROTHER is alive and well and living in America. George Orwell wasn't just a writer, he was a visionary. He was just off a little on when it would start being publicly acknowledged. I have been on various government watch lists for decades. I have always had too many connections and less than approved interests. They monitor everything, from the magazines and books that you buy and read through organizations that you belong to probably what you watch on your cable and satellite TV. The computer age brought on the ability to do this and gather endless information without much human supervision required.
in some ways, it bothered me but in other ways, I just don't care anymore. My problem with it is that they seem to use all of this information for stupid things and then don't use it for important things like national security. The terrorists that hit us on 911 were far from sneaky. they were actually looked at by several different agencies. the problem is that our different agencies refuse to share information. The left hand is never allowed to know what the right hand is doing!! After the fact, they could put it together and see it coming but that didn't help the thousands that died. While this sort of information gathering is intrusive it is a two-edged sword with both the ability to harm you and the ability to save you.
I think of my Granny. When she was in her 70s she got so that she was lost and mentally unable to take care of herself anymore. She tried to make coffee on her gas stove with her electric plastic poly-perk coffee pot and nearly burned the house down!
She came to stay with my parents while they decided what to do with her. She carried her huge purse everywhere with her and nobody was supposed to mess with it at all. After her being there for about a week I pulled my Dad aside and told him that I didn't think that Granny was senile. I thought that she was STONED on drugs. I was in my early 20s and knew what stoned looked like.
long story short, I crawled into her bedroom late one night and grabbed her bag. We checked it out and it was her own personal pharmacy. We made a list and took it to our pharmacist who was a friend and had been where we bought our medicine for 20 years. He looked it over and told us that if we took that stuff as prescribed it would kill us. only the fact that Granny had been taking most of it for years had allowed her to adjust to it and it not kill her. we took it to the Doctor and he couldn't believe what she was taking. When she was at home she went to several doctors and they were prescribing drugs without knowing what the other doctors were giving her. He took her off of everything except one "Nerve pill" that she had been taking for decades and probably no longer affected her and might not be good to suddenly pull her off of.
Guess what Granny wasn't Doddy at all, As she dried out she made a massive come back and eventually got to go home. Now with all the computer checks that couldn't happen. She actually had several prescriptions that should NEVER be taken together because they were 1 plus 1 cam make 5, kind of like mixing barbiturates with alcohol.
I am not a very private person and make my pleasures, likes, and opinions well known. What we have to do is stay on the governments back to ensure that the information that they and others gather is used for very specific and reasonable purposes and not sold or used for other things. They recently caught a serial killer. they matched the DNA that they had to one of his family members. When they did the then legally sought the name of that DNA sample and from there tracked down the serial killer. There were only a limited number of her family members that were the right age and had lived in the right places at the tight time. BINGO they caught him. He was an ex-cop and they never would have caught him otherwise.
was this intrusive into his relative's stuff? Not really because when they were scanning the information there was no connection between that person and that sample. Only when there was a legal reason for them to find out WHO that sample belonged to did the get legal permission to have that company tell them who it was from. It was a little like someone spotting a car leaving the scene of a crime and they got the license plate number. The cops can look it up but it isn't general information.
I know people in the odd business of monitoring and watching people. They are a part of the government CIA, FBI, National Security group that tries to keep us safe. They stop terrorists before they can act and most of the time we never hear about it. They don't want people panicking and seeing a terrorist behind every bush. Look at how easy it would be to by a gun and kill a bunch of people at a high school football game. For every one that they shot 5 would be trampled. Yet that doesn't happen. They watch things like that CLOSE. The same goes for malls. Are they intrusive YES. If they want to listen to my phone they are welcome to I have NEVER talked about things that they would be interested in on the phone...I will admit that at times there WERE things that would have interested them. I never have assumed that phones were secure.
With the world as it is now where you can be on the other side of the world, we can't do things the old ways. Terrorists can be in and out so fast that they will hardly make an impression of things here before they can do something awful and either die or be gone before we can react. I am willing to give up some of my privacy to live in peace and not have terrorists doing things on a weekly basis. You don't hear about the terrorists that they catch most of the time because the information that they used to identify and capture them before they acted would not be admissible in court. They are generally NOT American citizens and despite the belief of some they are not covered by the constitutional rights. Most are deported, the worst of the worst end up in Guantanamo and some just "disappear".
we live in a tough world now. Look at Mexico and a lot of the Central and South American nations, all of the Middle East and much of Africa. That could be us in a few years if our government doesn't come together and stop encouraging chaos. Chaos is like fertilizer for terrorists and violence.
Privacy is a very expensive pleasure right now that we can't afford. What we need to do is make using that private information for commercial profit and sold to other companies should be severely controlled with awful penalties for abuse.
www.chron.com
