Source: http://www.nsawatch.org/eaves101.html
When I wrote Tag I suspected that many of the world’s secret agencies were tracking, filtering, and analyzing the “content” (content being everything you say or do digitally) produced by the world’s citizens. The NSA was one agency, due to their technological advantages, I suspected were better than most; however GCHQ (Britain), DGSE (France), BND (Germany), MSS (China), RAW (India) and the list goes on and on. The more technically advanced a country is (China and India are greatly underestimated in their ability), the more focused on external communications they become.
So take it for granted that everything you (especially everything I do, because as a UK citizen living outside of the USA I am specifically not protected by any of America’s laws on privacy – but as you Americans now know; neither are you) do online it is being recorded and archived.
“President Obama acknowledged the collection of online content from Internet companies by noting, “Now, with respect to the Internet and emails — this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States.””
I watched Present Obama, stumble his way through his defense of spying on the citizens he leads…
And here’s a quote from that speech (notice by the way how many times he stumbles):
“No one is listening to your phone calls,” Obama insisted…
That’s a lie. They are listening, recording and archiving your phone calls. How is this justified in congress or anywhere else?… “it’s for your own protection. As William Hague, foreign secretary of the UK says…
“gathering intelligence from phones and online sites should not concern people who have nothing to hide.”
And there’s some truth to what these “guardians of democracy” to that; however, who’s watching the guardians?
When State apparatus is used, for whatever reason, to spy on people who are citizens within that state – then by definition the state has become totalitarian.
Let me make one thing absolutely clear – I abhor terrorism in all its forms; terrorists are scum, and I believe the death penalty is justified when the killing or injury of innocents has been caused. I think that is a law that should be global in nature. The line, “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter is bullshit when the lives or well-being of innocent people are involved.
What I cannot accept, is the proactive nature of defense against terrorism because, again by definition, that has to assume that everyone could be a terrorist and therefore everyone is under suspicion until proven guilty. Such a way of living is what Obama, indeed most of the governments of the “civilized” world are proposing and that’s plain wrong.
Security for the people has to be reactive, not proactive, in order to secure for the generations to come the liberty that we as humans deserve.