Perspectives

I'd like to apologize for the tardiness of this entry. I've been a little busy with school, and it totally slipped my mind that it was my turn to write an article.

There's been a lot of controversy over the surveillance plan that the fed has been employing, and the debate about the limits of privacy has heated up a little more as the NSA has recently retrieved a ton of post-911 phone records and hasn't been exactly conciliatory when it comes to providing evidence during an inquiry (which has been called off, due to the impossibility of any further investigation).

We all know the standard sides of the debate. One side cries "1984" while the other points to invisible terrorists that last attacked America 5 years ago. To be completely honest, I think both arguments are insane. I admit that I'm speaking from ignorance to the actual details, but I think that just about everybody that we hear giving these two arguments day to day are more or less ignorant as well. That is, they're not well-informed enough to support either claim (those being either A. The government is growing oppressively large and will start arresting us for having sex for pleasure soon or B. The terrorists are hiding everywhere around us and the only way to prevent them from hurting more people is to tap phones).

The president says that we aren't having our privacy infringed upon, because they're not trolling the general public, but just people who are suspect. Well, I'm not cynical enough to call him a liar, but I have to say that this kind of testimony is certainly not evidence either way. That is, if our privacy was being infringed upon, we'd expect him to say this just as much as if it wasn't. What I find intriguing about this, however, is that the government is now openly tapping phones (though not saying exactly whose phones get tapped, why, or when).

We'd be crazy to believe that the government hasn't been doing this stuff since the technology was available to listen in on the populous, most especially during the Red Scare. What we see now is that the government is coming forth with a bold admission of what they're doing. Simply enough, the question is "why come clean now?" Of course, I do admit that I don't have any real evidence to show you that the government has been listening in for decades, but I don't think it as unlikely as the alternative, but I do feel like one of two things is happening here: 1. The fed is trying not to risk getting caught secretly tapping phones. 2. They don't think there's any danger of a serious political backlash here.

The second alternative troubles me most. If it was more politically dangerous to admit to such doings when the fate of the whole world was at stake than when we are talking about the vague potential that some maniacs might repeat an attack similar to one that happened 5 years ago, it seems that the public has either become more complacent, ignorant, or impotent in the eyes of the fed. If that's the case, then it doesn't mean much anymore to be an American.