I’ve always believed that respecting someone’s right to privacy is vital to protecting our freedom.
Am I wrong?
If you haven’t endangered anyone or committed any crimes, why is it OK for some government agency to be looking through your personal life?
Under the label of counter-terrorism governments today can do anything they like.
Mega Data collection is mass surveillance and Section 215 of The Patriot Act gives them the right to scrutinise this information!
The National Security Agency code name for this invasion of privacy is PRISM.
This law allows all communications of private citizens to be monitored, analysed and stored.
Every thing you do with a credit card or in an online search is known as a “Data Event”, this information belongs to you and should be your property.
You should have the right to privacy and any data event relate to you should not be available to a government to monitor, collect or analyse. [1]
What is the next step for our society?
The MUSCULAR program, for instance, allows for surveillance of Yahoo and Google private clouds without any need to inform the target individual or for a warrant.
What are the repercussions within a society, or a culture of this loss of privacy?
What does this kind of prognosis promise for the future of art?
Will artists be granted the rights to create freely, to think freely and to express the zeitgeist of their generation?
The Patriot Act has already taken this privacy away from the individual and what has this loss done to benefit our society or our democracy?
How is this preserving “Freedom and Liberty for all”?
These rights are too important to give to a government to protect, as they are the first to abuse them, in the name of “freedom from terror”. [2]
The important things that we must remember about a government, any government is:
1) they can never be completely trusted
2) they may not treat you fairly.
By Boky and Blake
[1] TED Talk: Here’s How We Take Back the Internet by Edward Snowden
http://www.ted.com/talks/edward_snowden_heres_how_we_take_back_the_internet
[2] Weiner, Tim, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, 2007 Random House New York NY, ISBN: 978-0-307-38900-8