We see you
Americans are being closely and constantly watched, carefully scrutinized and meticulously monitored as never before. From government wiretapping, to Google cameras that offer up street-level views of private houses around the world, to mighty digital data banks that record and store everything from real-estate-loan applications to pizza purchases, the machinery of observation and analysis has become powerful and pervasive.
What I find bizarre is that, generally, Americans seem mostly unconcerned by the whole thing.
August 22nd, 2007 at 10:31 am
I dont know about unconcerned, but rather acceptant in the fact that the .gov will do what they want to do when they want to do it. I talk to close friends in the workplace about political issues and ask them if the things that are going on in the political spectrum disturbs them at all, and most say that as long as what the .gov does doesnt effect their paycheck then they do not care. Ignorance is bliss….
BT
August 22nd, 2007 at 11:31 am
You know, there’s something to be said for the good old days when you could actually leave your minor troubles behind you by leaving town. My grandfather was like that when my Dad was a boy. He’d rack up a bunch of local debt, and when he couldn’t or didn’t want to deal with the problem, he’d simply move away.
Nowadays, everything is under strict digital scrutiny. Heck, when I turned 18 back in 1990, I was living in Canada and got a speeding ticket in the USA while on a snowboarding trip. I never did pay the thing, which was $200. When I finally moved down to the state where I’d gotten the ticket a couple years later, I called the town’s police department to find out how to settle up the ticket. They had no record of it in their computer and none in their front desk files. They finally went waaaay to the back, dug it out and let me know how much I owed.
After my thanks for the info, I figured it was going back to the abyss of the back-room filing cabinet never to be seen again, so I didn’t bother paying it. And I suppose I was right. If that had happened in this decade, I probably couldn’t have done that.
August 22nd, 2007 at 11:57 am
:shrug:
We’ve also got the capability to track every person in a four mile by four mile area over the better part of a day. It’s still not particularly scary to me, though. Who and what is going to sift through all that data, and even if they could, what are they going to do with it?
Even if you limit things to highly suspicious activity — a single person driving around a house four times, unusually massive withdrawals — reality is that you’re still looking for a single needle in a stack of needles.
Outside of tracking from a crime backwards, these technologies just haven’t shown themselves to be that useful. I guess you can justify some paranoia by recognizing that quite legitimate and moral can become illegal very easily, but it seems to be easier to fight those changes in law which have negative effects and no benefit against immoral acts, rather than the ones that can quite effectively deal with murderers but could assist unlawful ordinances.
Joe Huffman would disagree, no doubt, but I never claimed to be a libertarian.