Y’all, I think this is the Seventh Sign
I guess the world is ending. And, with things as they are, it’s probably not a big loss in the cosmic overview.
The NRA and the ACLU have teamed up to fight the NSA, the FBI, the DOJ, the DOD and a particularly militant branch of the AARP. (Okay, I made up the AARP part but I couldn’t help myself so it doesn’t count.)
The NRA and ACLU want the rest of them to stop datamining.
Datamining is in the eye of the beholder. The government already knows how much money I make, what my house is worth, how many people live here and through medicare, all my aches and pains.
But that’s not all —
Kroger knows everything I ate for the past six months, how much toilet paper I use, whether or not I have a dog, if I have an alcohol problem and my favorite shade of nail polish.
Google knows everything I have bought or thought about buying on the internet. So does Facebook.
My city government knows when I water my yard and how much garbage I have. My county government knows what books I have checked out of the library and they also have my birth certificate, any lawsuits I have been involved in, what political primary I vote in, how many registered voters there are in my house, and how to find me for jury duty.
My state government knows what kind of car I drive, if I speed, and what letters I have written to Rick Perry.
American Express knows me better than my Momma does.
Yeah, I don’t want the government listening in on my phone calls. Damn straight. But, I wondering why we’re just starting to complain now.
Thanks to Mike for the heads up.
Hee hee, the NRA just figured out that when they sent THEIR data lists (read: gunowner databases, ya’ll!!) to each other and Remington, Browning, etc, they made a present of it to the NSA as well. Goobers!
1Aggieland Liz – you beat me to it. That is the one of the craziest lawsuits I ever heard of, but just one of them
2@Aggieland liz I was wondering when the NRA would figure that out.
NRA, meet the NSA….Lolololololol
3I used to be a big supporter of the ACLU and still like most of what they do but they’re dead wrong on this one. If anything, Glenn Greenwald and Eric Snowden should be branded as the traitors they are. This collection might be abhorrent to some but it was done with a warrant which is more authorization than that under Bush had.
Exactly how do these people think we are to keep ahead of terrorists, many of whom are highly sophisticated in IT?
4Some of us haven’t started complaining just now. Some of us started complaining back when the last administration was implementing massive domestic spying programs in 01/02 (John Pointdexter/ DARPA/ TIA/ Operation TIPS/ etc.) which included among other things armtwisting internet search providers, infiltrating peace organizations, and silencing librarians. Some of us have been complaining ever since.
Conservatives who have just now started freaking out can just hush up…most of them weren’t bothered by it until President Muslim McBlackenstein showed up. It’s not new, and if you thought it was perfectly okay when your guy was doing it you have no space to whine about civil liberties now.
5First, I agree with everything JJ said. Add to that anybody who tries to get you to sign up for a “card” for their store. They just want another way to track what you buy.
If anybody is listening in on my phone calls, they are bound to be bored to tears. Same thing with folks who are reading my e-mail.
Secondly I totally agree with Sam in Kyle, and if Obama made a trip to Russia and doesn’t come back with Snowden, he’s lost a lot of my respect.
People who give our national security information to China, and then to Russia, are not heroes.
All this complaining about what government knows about us, is nothing more than political theater. And, it’s tiresome.
6You missed a couple: Auto insurance companies ALL know what kind of cars you have in your garage. Health insurance companies know the health of your body, and maybe your mind.
7Miemaw, I have news for you… our country has given our national security information to Russia and China for decades, usually by deporting the folks with the information in their heads.
For example, we deported a Tsien Hsue-Shen from the US in 1955 to China. He only was one of the leading experts in rocketry, a founder of what eventually became the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a former Army Air colonel, and only had the testimony of people like the Undersecretary of the Navy wanting the FBI and State Department to keep from deporting him.
Of course, we ship him off, and the result? China has a modern missile and rocket program, all because we (the US) was stupid enough to gift wrap him to the Chinese.
8So the NRA actually did figure out that their sacred member database has been hacked by the NSA? Couldn’t have happened to more deserving people! Can’t wait to have St. Wayne LaPierre and his legal team show up for the hearings!
9Someday Girl you done nailed it. All of this has been going on since the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Feith based Project for a New American Century provided the push to get Bush to back the Patriot (so-called) Act. All Mr. Snowden accomplished was to bring it out into the open where it was hard to ignore. Like Juanita Jean, my life is pretty boring and I’m not so worried about what various government entities might find out about me as I am about what various corporate entities have been keeping tabs on. Up here in Slap-Happy-Sappy Valley there’s a huge group of people up at the Snake Yewniversity who are worried that someone might find out their blood pressure, fasting glucose, cholesterol, height, weight, navel-circumference, and BMI are but don’t seem to be at all concerned about who gets to see their credit rating. It’s a wacky world, no doubt about it.
10A word for the librarians: when the gag orders came out that their reader checkout lists might be searched and if they were, it was illegal to tell the object of the search, it was handled in a multitude of ways. Here’s my two favorite, with the second one being my all time favorite.
1. Several libraries posted signs on the wall that said, “No records have been subpoenaed from this library.” That way, if the sign came down, readers would know something was afoot.
2. Most libraries now delete the checkout record the minute the item checked out is returned. The historical data is not there to be searched. Any search would only pull up a snapshot of what was checked out at that particular instant. I cheered when I read this one.
Both of these were implemented within a week of the library data search law being passed.
11What SusanF said.
12Don A, one of the main differences is if there’s a mistake on my credit rating I can fix it because I can see what’s on there. If Petco or Randall’s gets something wrong about me on their loyalty card, I don’t have to hire a lawyer. If the county has my house incorrectly valued or Verizon bills me for calls that aren’t mine, I won’t go to jail over it.
If the government puts a 6 year old or Grammy MaryBeth on a no-fly list, no one is allowed to find out how or why that happened and they can’t fix it. If you’ve done nothing wrong but some set of information the government gathered makes it seem you might have? Ask Richard Jewell and Steven Hatfill what happens next. And lastly, when I go to the bathroom I’m definitely not doing anything wrong and I’m certainly not doing anything interesting. But I still close the door.
13@ SusanF. Yup everyone knows what kind of rabble-rousing radicals those librarians can be.I don’t think you could expect much different in a profession most closely aligned with the creative arts and which believes in the adage A place for everything…” and have a couple of alphanumeric systems to determine place.
14@Maggie, they didn’t hafta hack it – they just collected it with the google-a-jillion others that they have collected too! When LaPierre emailed the list to Glock and Winchester and Colt they were cc-ing the NSA too – that’s the cream of this jest!
15Full disclosure: I don’t do Facebook, I turn my phone off when I shop, I don’t do customer loyalty cards or complete surveys that require personal information, I use a firewall and multiple types of cookie / data mining removal software (my kid is a geek who finished in the top 10 at Blackhat – the Hackers Convention / Competition and my BFF works for the FBI in Cybercrimes so I am careful about that sort of thing). What I am saying is, I don’t give my information away to anyone, at least not willingly.
Janna Malamud Smith, wrote in her book,”Private Matters: In Defense of the Personal Life,” Safe privacy is an important component of autonomy, freedom, and thus psychological well-being, in any society that values individuals. … Summed up briefly, a statement of “how not to dehumanize people” might read: Don’t terrorize or humiliate. Don’t starve, freeze, exhaust. Don’t demean or impose degrading submission. Don’t force separation from loved ones. Don’t make demands in an incomprehensible language. Don’t refuse to listen closely. Don’t destroy privacy. Terrorists of all sorts destroy privacy both by corrupting it into secrecy and by using hostile surveillance to undo its useful sanctuary.
One might ask, how does stripping people of their privacy violate their humanity? In his landmark book, Privacy and Freedom, Alan Westin names four states of privacy: solitude, anonymity, reserve, and intimacy. The reasons for valuing privacy become more apparent as we explore these states….
The essence of solitude, and all privacy, is a sense of choice and control. You control who watches or learns about you. You choose to leave and return. …
Intimacy is a private state because in it people relax their public front either physically or emotionally or, occasionally, both. They tell personal stories, exchange looks, or touch privately. They may ignore each other without offending. They may have sex. They may speak frankly using words they would not use in front of others, expressing ideas and feelings — positive or negative — that are unacceptable in public. (I don’t think I ever got over his death. I am so angry at you I could scream. That joke is disgusting, but it’s really funny.) Shielded from forced exposure, a person often feels more able to be honest. Take away privacy and you deprive people of the ability to be honest.
Sorry about the long post but I feel rather strongly about this. Particularly in light of the closing of Lavabit. Ladar Levison, Lavabit’s owner, closed down his firm after being served with a secret federal court order. “I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit,” Levinson said in a statement on the firm’s homepage. “After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations.”
So the owner of a major ISP tells us that he’s stopped using email and if we knew what he knew, we’d stop too. Doesn’t bode well does it?
16What gets me is video cameras in elevators (and someone suggested behind me last week, teevees running so you’d look up at them for good face recognition). Now where do you go when your undies are giving you a wedgie and the lady’s room is on another floor?
17I want to know at all times what this government is doing and fobbing off in the name of national security. Snowden is a hero for forcing us to confront what is going on. Manning is a hero for blowing the cover off our war machine. There is little to nothing that wasn’t already presumed by the folks we’re being told are enemies in these disclosures, but there is sure one helluva a lot of lies and propaganda for domestic consumption that are out in the open. A blindfolded electorate or the practice of willing stupidity is inconsistent with meaningful democracy. When our government lies with such brazen impunity, I little care about arrogance, hubris or wayward motivation of whistleblowers.
18Since I have a pretty good idea that the only messages read by NSA et al are those with meta-data within the scope of the subpoenas. Of course I can’t prove it, and there is always some creep out there who didn’t but said he did — just to get attention, so I’m not worried about what NSA knows. Like Juanita-Jean Kroger knows everything I’ve bought in a Kroger or affiliated store since 1996 and because of the credit card all the fuel I’ve used and how money was spent away from Kroger.
19I consider Kroger to be more insidious than any government. I fear the motivation of profit more than the presence of government, especially since the representative of profit is supervised and tasked by a person with more to gain than the miscreant.
Juanita Jean, didn’t your daddy tell you to pay cash at the liquor store?
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