About 500 people met in Union Square to listen to a number of privacy advocates and civil liberties groups discuss Fourth Amendment rights as they stand today, in light of recent revelations about the U.S. government's spying capability.
According to the organizers, Independence Day is a poignant day to protest in support of citizens' constitutional rights for protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, which they claim have been eroded under both the Bush and Obama administrations.
You know I have been against this whole program since the Bush administration first pushed through the Patriot Act after 9/11.
However I have to say that as much as it bothers me to know that my e-mails and phone records are being cataloged by the government for use against me should I do something that for some reason makes me a "person of interest," the fact that the same types of programs are being used around the world puts things in a somewhat different perspective for me.
Recently we learned that France has its own massive data gathering program as well, just like many of its European neighbors.
So living with that reality I am not sure how America could NOT be carefully monitoring communications coming in and out of the country.
And in fact that appears to be the attitude of most Americans:
One month after the Guardian’s first story, which revealed an order from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizing the NSA to collect the phone records of every Verizon customer, there has been no public movement in Washington to stop the court from issuing another such order. Congress has no intelligence reform bill that would rein in the phone-tracking, or Internet monitoring, or cyberattack-planning, or any of the other secret government workings that Snowden’s disclosures have revealed.
And as for the protests which inspired this post? Well I am not so sure how serious they are about this issue either.
As of right now I have to admit that I am less concerned about what information the government is gathering, and MORE concerned about the information contained on those laptops (or hard drives if you prefer) that Snowden spirited out of the country with him.
I would like to see him back here in America, along with that stolen information, so that the government can start doing some damage assessments (Since we KNOW that both China and Russia have every bit of data that Snowden brought to their countries) and putting in safeguards to make sure another security leak like this does not happen in the future.
(Photos courtesy of Buzzfeed.)
Update: By the way, if you re concerned with what information the government has gathered about you specifically, there is a way for you to find out.
