The Pentagon's new Office of Information Awareness is building a system called "Total Information Awareness" that would effectively provide government officials with immediate access to your personal information: all of your communications (phone calls, emails and web searches), financial records, purchases, prescriptions, school records, medical records and travel history. Under this program, your entire lives would be catalogued and available to government officials. How do you like it?
Sounds like what TRW and like firms already have. Face it, in the electronic age there is no such thing as privacy. If anyone, govt or private, wants your 411, they can quickly know more about you than you do.
That isn't quite true. I don't have a credit card and sparingly use a debit card. When I went looking for a house loan, all the banks were upset because I had an empty file from the credit report companies. A government database is one that you cannot opt out of, and it will have much more information than any credit report.
How do you pay for anything or travel? Do you live in a bunker and only come out to receive your pay in cash, no marked bills? Anyway, I missed my point. My point was that if someone -the govt, a company, your bank, some psycho- wants your 411 bad enough, they can get it. They can go through your trash, tap your phone, check your phone records (you do own a telephone, right, or are you posting from the library?), check with your employer, monitor your onlnie activities, etc. Technology has rendered the concept of privacy a sad myth and while not having a credit card may make it slightly less easy for anyone who wants to spy on you, you're kidding yourself if you think you're opaque to anyone interested in you.
No, they cannot. It would be illegal. The government cannot tap phones or get phone and bank records without a warrant, and different goverenment agencies cannot share their databases. Most of these things are also illegal for individuals or companies in any curcumstance. If there was a single database clearinghouse, it would be far more dangerous. It would be a simple matter for any agency to use data collected by any other agency. You can use information to develop patterns and create accurate predictions. This goes even beyond individual freedom. For example, what does democracy mean when there is 100% accurate gerrymandering?
This is mostly true, but I don't know if that makes it RIGHT or that people should just have to deal with it. I am not so sure something like the TIA would go over hunky dory with most people, but then again....
When I lived in SC a few years back, I remember there being a stink after it came out that the DMV had "sold" the lists of everyone's Driver's License ID numbers to various parties. They were like, "What? You didn't want us to do that? Sorry..." Point is, these databases are becoming increasingly shared and comprehensive. Are our leaders more honest than they always have been? Because if not, we could all be very screwed.
Ha ha ha ha ha!!! Oh that was a good one. You almost had me going there. What? You're serious? BWA hahahahahahaha!!!!! That's twice as funny!
Hey, whoah! I'm not saying it's right. I'm just saying that the horse has not only already bolted out of the barn, he's laying on a beach in the Bahamas and ordering margaritas with your credit card.
No no no, that's spejic who has no credit card, not me. Being the naive individual that I am, I have chosen to let them track me via my purchases as I actually travel and do not wish to pay the airlines in cash nor do I wish to send cash to hotels ahead of time in order to secure a room. Oh, and just to make spejic even more paranoid... Broader domestic spying allowed http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=676&e=5&u=/usatoday/20021119/ts_usatoday/4633001
The law is important for two reasons. First, it gives you recourse when the law breaking is discovered. You can get convictions based on illegal evidence thrown out and you can sue for damages to your rights. Second, it makes it harder to carry out the offense in the first place. Official lawbreaking is always in danger of being revealed by wistleblowers, so it cannot be that open and thus cannot use the full resources of the state. We are a nation of laws. The moment people say "Just give up defending your rights - it won't matter if you do nothing wrong" is the moment we stop being Americans. Don't forget that we used to make fun of the Russians and the Nazis for doing just what is being done now.
Well.... I don't mean to offend here... but weren't the CIA and some British organization poisoning theire own people in the 50's and 60's? Comitting all kinds of murder under their own people for the sake of research? Trusting your government (especially in world dominating countries like US and GB who are mixed up in all kinds of contracontracontra political war games kind of ************) is the most foolish thing to do.
I read somewhere that during the Cold War, the CIA wasn't allowed to spy on American citizens and MI6 wasn't allowed to spy on Brits, so the CIA would spy on Brits and MI6 would spy on Americans, then they would exchange the information. Alex
In Woody Allen's "Bananas" the CIA had US military personnel fighting both for and against the rebels of some Central American republic because the Agency "wasn't taking any chances."