Perhaps I should, but for some reason I cannot, rise to the level of outrage evident on the net yesterday about the NSA's gathering of Verizon customers' phone records, under a "top secret court order" issued in April. First, I wondered why there was such surprise. Hasn't this kind of thing been going on since soon after 9/11 2001? Isn't it all part and parcel of The Patriot Act? Shouldn't outrage be about why that Act isn't being revised or replaced by something more relevant to today's technology and general circumstances?
As I understand it (but could be getting hold of the wrong end of this stick) the current order, result of a warrant, is for a limited time, with a firm expiration date involved. Would that not indicate clearly that there has been a specific reason for this particular order to a particular company, over a defined span of time? What will be revealed isn't the content of phone conversations, but a record of calls from one phone number to another. Whereas, in the past such information would have been pretty useless without many hours of perusal by hundreds of eyes, current technology with pattern-seeking abilities puts a different perspective on such a vast amount of data, and what might be learned from it.
Anyone using the internet is tracked in many ways already - without warrant, by Google, Facebook, and Twitter and perhaps others, for commercial purposes. I cannot look at websites selling travel bags or bras, or eyeglass frames without, shortly after, being hounded by ads for all these items wherever I go on the net. Privacy, if it ever truly existed on the internet, disappeared long ago: the price we paid for what we got.
I wish the same level of outrage seen yesterday on the issue of privacy were apparent from as many people over drone strikes killing innocents abroad - victims of such atrocities are denied an opportunity to live out their very lives, whether in privacy or otherwise!
Postscript: There's an interesting take on this and on today's PRISM revelations at Cannonfire - do go take a look!
