Monday, May 15, 2006

Regarding Those Wire Taps

"If you're looking for a needle, making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn't make sense."


The NSA (one of America's spy agencies) recently acquired a database of "all the phone calls made in the United States" in order to search for terrorist activity. The political left (the people who favor big government) are up in arms about it, while the political right (the people who favor limited government) are shrugging their shoulders and saying, "What's the big deal?"

I know what the NSA is doing: They are playing the world's largest ever game of 6-Degrees of Separation with supercomputers. They have taken 10 billion phone calls and are just messing around with the numbers until their 800-processor, football-field-sized supercomputer spits interesting things out.

Do I care? No, even though I am "on the left".

Should I care? Yes.

Granted, I am here in Thailand and not a single one of my calls is in the posession of the NSA... but even if it were, I wouldn't care. If they want to hear me bug Mike about going to TQ2, or hear me order a Whopper from Burger King, what's it to me? I'm the person who posts on the internet about shouting at Pot, details of my health or my sleeping habits, or even dreams that make me cry.

Now we talk about the principle: Is it a good thing that the government now has the ability to just demand things that used to require a court order? (Remember in the news you would hear the reporter say, "Investigators are currently awaiting a court order to obtain the phone records of the killer.") Should we really mentally differentiate or ameliorate the severity of this because the information the NSA has is "anonymous"? (Do you think it will remain anonymous if the NSA takes an interest in a particular phone call?)

Americans have gotten this new attitude over the past 50 years or so: "I wasn't doing anything wrong, so feel free to look around all you want." (Note my opinion above.) That obviously goes against Americans' original creed, which was "I wasn't doing anything wrong, so f**k off."

Times change, but freedoms do not change... just how much we value them and fight to uphold them.



UPDATE:

According to one "inside source", ABC News is saying that the whole undertaking is an attempt to find out who reporters' "confidential sources" are. (Hat tip Think Progress.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah, all this from the land of the 'free'. Oh don't worry it's to protect you all from 'terrorists', hahaha isn't that line getting a little bit old.....

You think they're not collecting data on al of thailand calls, think again buddy. The NSA are collecting information on anything AND everything

Jil Wrinkle said...

I'm sure that they are collecting data on any call I make from Thailand to America... which is about once every 3 months or so. Like I said... if they want to hear me wish my mother a happy birthday, let them. (And... as I said in the post... shame on me for feeling that way.)

According to recent polls, somewhere around 33% of Americans still believe that everything the government (President Bush especially) is doing is necessary and reasonable "to fight terrorism"... while 50% seem to know better. (The other 17% apparently aren't sure.)

Personally, I've pretty much given up on America being taken seriously anymore by the rest of the world. It's becoming a nation of right-wing lunatics, religious wackos, left-wing zealots, and a bunch of know-nothing nitwits in the middle.