With the revelation of yet another secret government spy program, it should be more obvious than ever that we are living in a surveilance society on the edge of becoming a police state. Last month USA Today ran a front page story on the NSA, revealing the agency was sifting through phone logs and internet traffic of millions of American citizens. This latest revelation by the New York Times has equally troubling constitutional implications. At the same time, it has been reported (here and here) that local police and the federal government (including the FBI, DHS and DOJ) have sidestepped legal warrants in favor of private data brokers, many of which use pretexting to illegally obtain personal information. Congress has had hearings on all of these issues with little to no actual progress. This has been due to the administration and their supporters blocking attempts to pry into the details of these programs. The one exception to this has been the use of data brokers, to which most of those interviewed have been fairly forthcoming. Even so, I can’t help but feel that one day soon, we may here the words “papers, please” on our way to work. Alles klar, herr komisar?
TechThink
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I love this quote from the Washington Post article:
“An outside auditing firm is now used to verify that investigators have real intelligence leads behind their requests for information. That is all to the good; it is clear that when it comes to defending their customers, international banking executives are far more aggressive than, say, American telephone company executives.”
It’s a pretty sad state of affairs when banks are doing a better job of protecting our rights than our own government.