I love ya, Barry, but this is seriously fucked up.
President Obama has announced that he wants the power to listen in on anything that people write on the internet. With proper warrants, of course, and he says the legislation just requires internet companies to have the technology to be able to comply with a warrant if necessary and it’s all very harmless, but I’m not buying it.
Once the government has the power to listen, they will listen. They will find out about your finances, they will find out about your sex life. Of course, most of us are probably well below the radar, that is to say, we are not important or interesting enough for the government to bother listening to. Still, it’s the principal of the thing.
1st, you should be able to have a conversation without everybody listening in on it. If you are with your friends in your garage, having a friendly discussion about how to build nuclear weapons or who should be first against the wall come the revolution, what’s the real harm in that? And who among us can say they have never had such conversations? And if those friends are just facebook friends, it’s even more harmless. Unless you are actually trying to procure enriched uranium the government should just mind it’s own damned business.
Doubleplus Ungood
2nd, the U.S. government doesn’t own the internet. People in every country in the world use this service and the elected representatives in Washington, D.C., do not represent them. Investigation without representation is tyranny. I’m quite sure if Tom Paine (or was it Patrick Henry?) were alive, he would agree with me.
3rd, it’s overreach. If the government wants to know what I’m saying on Facebook, they can just send me a friend request. Hell, I accept everybody.
They don’t have the personnel to deal with all the information which is publicly available and yet they want to dig deeper. With the Bush administration, they were so eager to torture people that they didn’t bother hiring anybody who spoke Arabic to read a few newspapers and watch a couple of hours of Arabic TV a day. Then they fired the woman (Sibel Edmonds) who complained about it.
4th, Seriously, President Obama, you will not be president forever. Do you really want to leave this much power in the hands of the person who will follow you, no matter who it is? You have seen the American electorate. You know their potential for electing a semi-retarded psychopath who has never mentally graduated from the glory days of his adolescence when he reveled in the sadistic rush of sticking firecrackers up frog’s asses.
Please rethink this one, President Obama. This is a seriously bad idea, on many levels.
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