Legal!?

Pre-starting note: I wrote this a week+ ago. I was sick, it was late, but the issues are still relevant.

News Flash! Big Brother listening in on your phone calls is about to be legal (even though it's now been admitted to have been going on since a little while after Sept. 11 2001).

This has always been allowed, and it is doubleplus ungood to think otherwise.

I could go on with Orwellian comparisons for ages, but will refrain for now.

It is not comforting to know that my conversations on the phone with my family and friends are subject to tapping and investigation. International calls are primarily what is being disscussed (so far)...and that would include my whole family and a few friends. I do tend to bring up politics from time to time, and probably use certain key words that would no doubt trigger software to start recording the conversation. Which then would at some point require human assesment...which therefore require a file or files to be kept.

Since when has a "War on Terror" ever been a real war anyway? A war with no definable enemies? A war that allows wartimes powers?! Please! A non-war that allows the U.S. president powers far in excess of "peacetime" powers? Even those, he pushes to the extreme and way past (think torture, phone taps, and the ability hold people in detention for unlimited amounts of time with little or no legal recourse). We no longer follow the Geneva conventions (among many other conventions) and we have just thrown most of the Constitution in the trash. Pretty cool that this particular "war" has no actual, definable enemy and basically can continue indefinitely. REMINDER: the Constitution was written expressly to prevent this kind of governmental control (don't even START me on the so-called Patriot Act...the name alone reeks of propaganda reminiscent of things Americans have always been against [think policies of Stalin, Mao, Hitler]). People, please!!! Every nation on earth since the time a "nation" first existed has been at war with terrorism against it (and/it's peoples). It is a country's responsability to protect itself and its citizens against acts of terror, it is not a declared war that allows the executive branch to bypass constitutional law.

NOTE: Before I go on, let me just say that my views on this are not paranoia or sme kind of a conspiracy theory. Bush has admitted to this personal invasion of privacy publically. The Justice Department is about to declare it legal. The methods, etc. are extrapolated from a lot of sources that I'm not going into here. Remember that while Bush and Co. seem to be talking about specific taps on specific calls, there is nothing they say that actually limit it to that...and quite a few that could be read as any/all international calls.

How many people do you know that are really pissed at having to give their Social Security number to banks, credit institutions, and even universities. Very soon there will be a national ID card with a RFID computer chip that allows remote viewing (how long before criminals beat that?...less time than it took to beat credit cards is my guess). People should also think about how much other info on each and every one of you has floating around out there. I did a search on myself and got a bit of info for free (it even listed my brother and father). $50 more would have gotten me a staggering amount of info. This isn't even identity theft, and that is a problem that costs billions of dollars a year. That's mostly from stolen, sold or lost info, but this other stuff is legal...sound like I'm going off on a tangent? Not really. I'm coming back to this in a minute.

The U.S. government (in what I firmly and strongly believe is in direct violation of the Constitution) now can compile files (audio and written) on any international call without so much as court approval or the vaguest of proof of impropriety other than the claim that "Hey, we're in a war on terror!". It is widely known that the NSA and now, even the CIA and FBI have some of the best scanning software in the world. International calls (supposedly only) are computer scanned for key words. Calls with key words are recorded, filed and saved for someone to check. This creates files. Files on people like me, my family and friends...because any conversation about the U.S. government, terrorism, Iraq, etc. are bound to include key words.

Back to the part that sounded like a tangent. The Pentagon has "lost" over a trillion dollars in the last 10 years. There have been multiple cases of laptops containing sensitive data lost (even in White House strategy sessions). Data lost or corrupted through hacker attacks on computers containing sensitive data, and let's not forget the multiple spy scandles that occur on a somewhat regular basis. Even if you fully trust the U.S. Government to check in on one of your international calls, can you trust them with the files they made of the check? If you can get loads of stuff legally on the internet, what do you figure you could get if you just ignored the law? The info available is staggering.

Am I paranoid? Not really. Even though I strongly suspect there is a file on me somewhere. I feel (and believe) in the long run it'll show me as one of millions of harmless people concerned about what is happening in the world. Am I one of those nutcases that believe in conspiracy theories, etc.? I often jokingly say, "Yes.". The trick is to understand the joke. Do I believe in all, or most conspiracy theories? Of course not. Some of them? Sure. It's silly to think there aren't conspiricies in this world (people are arrested for them all the time). As to whether I fit the "nutcase" part, that's pretty subjective.

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

It's been so long since I've read Orwell's 1984, I may just offer some stranger in the street a couple of bucks to pick up one for me in a small bookstore and leave it at a pre-designated location (wouldn't want my name on the list of the people that buy it)... lol