TUESDAY, JUNE 18, 2013: Who would’ve thought it possible? Our own president and congress have no problems with flipping off the very freedoms the framers of our U.S. Constitution had worked so hard to secure for posterity; freedoms which (from our own Revolutionary War all the way up to Afghanistan) 1,343,812 brave American men and women have selflessly died in battle to protect and defend. On to the specifics…
DNA Mining of Suspects: A slim U.S. Supreme Court majority recently ruled in favor of permitting police to routinely harvest a DNA sample from ANYONE they arrest. So much for innocent until proven guilty, huh?
Let’s consider the fate of those who are eventually proven innocent. Would the police then delete their DNA records? I think not. In a tightly woven WWW, one can never expect to completely wipe each and every law enforcement agency’s computer hard drive. A far more judicious Supreme Court would’ve ruled that DNA samples could be taken ONLY AFTER a jury convicts the accused.
NSA / Prism Data Mining: Our government has become privy to each and every land line / cellphone call, email message and mouse click we make. So much for Constitutionally protected privacy, huh?
btw… the cellphone revolution was designed just so GPS can stalk everyone; so drones can home in on our cell phone signals. So much for our Constitutionally “guaranteed” right to peaceable dissent. I mean how would that even be possible with a menacing drone hovering overhead taking potshots at you?
WTF is next? A mandatory radio chip forcibly, subcutaneously embedded in all of our bodies? Getting wrestled to the floor, prone, to get a barcode ID tattooed on our asses? Or getting our hides seared with a branding iron?
Even if you do not buy into my stark comparisons to an Orwellian Society, there’s a purely practical issue. Just how effective can monitoring billions upon billions of our electronic messages be when ninety-nine percent of them involve we, the good guys? Conversely, just how feasible would it be to rapidly find a distinct minority of bad guy “needles” hidden within such a ginormous haystack?
Historically speaking, America’s nightmarish, post 9/11, anti-terrorism tactics became the “accepted” “norm” during the tenure of the Constitution shredding W. Since President Obama has not only failed to reverse W’s damage, but has also perpetuated it, a Who lyrical couplet applies in this instance: “Meet the new boss… Same as the old boss.” Won’t Get Fooled Again? Sorry to say… some Americans have been fooled / lulled into believing that Big Brother is no big deal.
If Obama was a BIG “D” Democrat, he would’ve (unapologetically) slammed down the lid on the Pandora’s Box, which W had opened. Obama would’ve donned his exterminator’s cap to 86 W’s swarm of (electronic) bugs. But instead, our Prez tries to downplay this serious NSA matter. Said he…
“When I came into this office, I made two commitments that are more important than any other. Number one, to keep the American people safe. And number two, to uphold the constitution and constitutional rights to privacy and to civil liberties. I think it’s important to recognize you can’t have 100 percent security and also 100 percent privacy, and also zero inconvenience. We're going to have to make some choices as a society.”American Civil Liberties and our Constitutional Right To Privacy have been reduced to #2. #2 the euphemism?
Back in 1759, a far wiser, more resolute Benjamin Franklin thought otherwise when, said he:
“They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”Purportedly, one of the most vital vertebrae in America’s Constitutional spine is a government that respects the privacy of its citizenry. Terrorists, whose goal is to rob us of our freedom, have successfully attacked us each and every time our own leaders data mine (to borrow/adapt song lyrics by the Police) “Every (electronic) move we make… (They’ll) be watching you.”
I’ll cut Obama some slack… after all, it is possible that the smoke from the burning Constitution is so dense that he cannot recognize, precisely, what’s on fire.
So how do you feel about all of this? Is a spineless U.S. Constitution… a devoid of privacy, lower case america… a spying all the way down to your DNA america [sic]… an Orwellian, unwell society even worth protecting? I’d tend to side with wise Mr. Franklin.
