BIG BROTHER

If you get the Press you probably saw the Q&A by Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press
After talking about phone records and the NSA's colossal database of American phone calls, he goes on with...
"Q: Is that everything?
"A: Nope.  A day after the
court document surfaced, the
Guardian and The Washington
Post published stories and se-
cret PowerPoint slides reveal-
ing another classified syping
program.  Unlike the effort to
collect phone records, this one
hadn't even been hinted about
publicly.
    This program code-named
PRISM allowed the NSA and
FBI to tap directly into the
servers of major U.S. Internet
companies such as Google, Ap-
ple, Microsoft, Facebook and
AOL."
[He also goes on to say PRISM was approved by a judge in a secret court order.  So we are assured that these things are signed off by a judge of some sort.] 

My father worked at the Boston Naval Shipyard, and I can remember my mother being upset when the FBI would come around to check up on what 'neighbors' thought of my father.  My mother knew it was the FBI the same way we know it's Mormons now going door to door so neatly dressed and two by two ...by their dress, which back then was complete with the felt hat men always wore with black suits back then, and always the FBI's dress code.  It was either during or right after WWII I think, as I was quite young (I think) or it may have been the beginning of the Communist threat.  My mother never liked the neighbors as they were the back-biting type that would thrive on rumors. To question neighbors like that could be like asking someone that didn't like you for a reference.  But nothing ever came of their checks, of course.  But, like this confiscating of communication records of all kinds bothers us, the FBI checks went against her grain.

I think the American people are going to have to weigh the pros of it against the cons.  With the recent Boston Marathon bombing, the powers that be in Washington are probably just trying to do their best to protect us against the Islamic terrorist groups.  The personal threat of the National Security Bureau to the population seems more the threat of losing our rights to privacy, than the worry of some terrorist group damaging our own personal area, as if we all lived in a terrorist cell.  Then there is the more conservative worry about all this information getting into the wrong hands, or being tinkered with to make innocent people sound like a threat.

On my Facebook page, on Thursday I put the comment: "Remind me not to go Verizon if I change from my ATT cell phone. Guess the National Security Agency has its own information filter where they can filter out certain key words, like Google does for our own encyclopedia in a pinch. My key word for the NSA is "McCarthyism." History is only the best teacher if we USE IT for our Nation's future. Sorry... this is no joke, and I don't like to go political... but it's not really talking about one party or another, just the USofA becoming a "police state." Are they really protecting our freedoms by monitoring all of us? ..."

We never upped our calling plan on that cell phone anyway, and our land phones have been listed in telephone books I guess since the invention of the telephone. 

Just as the government wants to keep their population safe to protect their lives and properties, we have to keep the government in check in order to keep our rights to privacy.  I don't know if this is stated in the Constitution of the United States, but I'm going to finally read the darn thing and find out.

Freedom is a two way street.  We lose our right to privacy if we want to be sheltered by the government that will be constantly on guard for anything that looks suspicious; but if the government isn't on constant watch it also means that we are in danger of terrorist cells easily building up strength.  There has to be a balance, and when there's any threat of an attack on American Soil, we all desire that shelter... that is... until we see what freedoms we lose as a result.

To simplify it to a very basic healthy comparison, Think about when our kids were going out on their own... or recently got their driving license.  We couldn't watch their every move.  Did we really want to?  They had to practice being grown up and on their own.  Now I think the American people generally regard the Government like parental figures, picking them up when accidents of nature happen through FEMA, instead of their just depending on their insurance company and the charities like the Red Cross and Salvation Army, as well as their own townships help, neighbors and rescue and fire squads.  We now expect the U.S. Government to pay for all that destruction when terrorists get through to us and bomb buildings and take lives.  We expect the US Government to pay, not the foreign powers that caused it.  Although we bomb their nations, and many innocent lives are taken, and usually we make good on the destruction we cause as a result once we go over there and shoot all the bad guys.
 
If everything that happens is supposed to be taken care of by the government, we no longer have a right to complain about how they protect us especially from a threat from foreign powers.  What their needs to be is a balance, and more and more ways of digital eletronic communication through satellites  throws us off balance more than even a border watch to make sure the enemy doesn't invade us.  Things have gotten more and more complicated in this day of super computers and vast intercommunication systems. 

It's NUTS!  and I don't know where it will end.  I need to go out and take a walk with the dog.  Things seem simpler in the woods where the biggest threat could be a falling branch, or a possible bear with cubs nearby.  We do need to beware, but do we need a government to be a Big Brother watching us?