---they keep us in the dark and feed us bullshit.
The story is below.
A technician at AT&T in San Francisco became curious when he discovered that our top electronics intelligence agency was building a secret room in the communications building to inspect not only the traffic but the content of messages that you and I were sending over the Internet.
He blew the whistle.
Congress is now being asked by the Bush administration to retroactively immunize the communications companies that are supposed to be serving us but are really turning our thoughts over to the government.
During my lifetime, I can think of a few regimes that emphasized the need to know the thoughts of their citizens: Stalin's USSR and its purge trials and gulag, Hitler's Germany and its death camps, and Pol Pot's Cambodia with its killing fields.
Do we really want to be in this business?
We'll read everyone's mail in order to catch the bad guy?
Well, why not, you say. After all, he's a bad guy who wants to destroy us, right?
Right.
We still don't allow general searches to catch those who are trying to subvert us, from smuggling goods past the tax and customs inspectors (subverting us economically), to hiding and selling drugs, guns, etc. Law enforcement is still required to obtain a search warrant based on individualized suspicion and probable cause to believe that you are holding contraband in a particular place (which is described as your house, for example, not all of the apartments in your building).
This battle was fought and won generations ago, embodied in our Constitution. I would've thought that the Bush administration originalists would've realized this. Don't tell me that they suddenly believe in an 'evolving' constitution, as I do, which meets new and emerging circumstances.
At any rate, governments which spy on their citizens in secret are rotten to the core, or so it seems.
What do you think?