Big Brother Is Watching You And You Don't Care - Unless You're Naked
I remember when 911 happened and our government started The Patriot Act, people were not in support of giving up so many of our hard-fought rights in one swoop.
Never have our citizens been so convinced that our freedoms should take a back seat to our safety, but many expressed doubts in the governments' ability to exercise restraint using their newly enacted powers. In hindsight, it seems we were not being paranoid at all when some suggested that the government would use its powers to spy on ordinary citizens, something the government denied it would ever do.
They lied again and we believed them again. When will we learn?
Fast forward a decade later and we hardly even noticed when the Patriot Act was up for renewal. We ignore how our government is invading our privacy without warrants or due cause in it's efforts to catch terrorists that pose a lesser threat than many other things in our country and we spend enormous amounts of money combatting a perceived danger when much more worthy uses of those funds are urgently needed.
Have Americans resigned themselves to an Orwellian government looking over their every communication and move, trading their privacy for a sense of security?
The USA PATRIOT Act is an Act of Congress that was signed into law by President George W. Bush on October 26, 2001. With its ten-letter abbreviation (USA PATRIOT) expanded, the full title is "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001". credit
How can the facts not be reported to the point of misleading the population into believing things that don't add up?
For example, according to the FBI's own website, there have been 54 deaths in the US involving terrorism since September 11th, 2001 and over 500 deaths per year caused by police officers across the country.
There is no doubt that criminals exist and present a danger to others. However, when the number of people killed by their own government vastly surpasses the number of people who died fighting for that government in foreign wars — something needs to be said.
In the Land of the Free, citizens are killed by public servants at nearly twice the rate of soldiers deployed to war. credit
The constant barrage of terrorist related news in the mainstream media beats like war drums, deafening the population to the farce they are being sold. We feel we are under a threat to our way of life when in reality there is no foreign threat, only a domestic threat eroding our privacy, our freedoms and our sovereignty in incremental steps and while we fight among ourselves over issues of no great importance, the true threat continues unabated and right under our noses.
Although the facts stare us right in the face, we as citizens continue to ignore them and patriotically condone the use of force against a perceived enemy that does not exist with the intensity or the numbers we are being told they do.
Certainly, they don't exist in numbers so great as to justify the vast amount of money we are being asked to spend on programs that erode our freedoms even further.
People in other countries don't hate us for our freedoms, the lie often spouted by patriotic parrots without even researching anything resembling a fact, but they do find our bullying to be as distasteful as it is, especially if it is based on incorrect information.
There were no weapons of mass destruction when we invaded Iraq, but so what, we invaded and occupied them anyway.
There are no great numbers of illegal immigrants coming in from Latin America or Mexico and still we think we need to build a wall across the south of the US. How stupid can we be?
Not long ago, Ronald Reagan was portrayed as a hero for declaring, "Tear down this wall.", in front of the Berlin Wall, as if he had anything to do with its demise and today we want to build one to keep Mexicans out. Have we lost our minds?
For starters, anyone can look at the US Immigration website and see that just as many Latin people leave the US back to their home countries as there are coming in and of the ones immigrating illegally, over 83% do so on an airplane. They just fly here and don't go back.
Does it really make sense to build a 20 billion dollar wall to keep people out that already make up such a huge percentage of our population? Only if you've been brainwashed by fear in the press would you even consider it.
These manufactured threats are frightening the population into giving away their rights in exchange for safety and leading us into a life of continuous, government surveillance and no one seems to care as long as they can play Pokeman and have their cell phone apps.
We listen to the news and think the "facts" they are reporting are true, but if you just check to see for yourself, you'll often find they are not true at all.
One of the best and entertaining videos I've seen for how surveillance is being overlooked by the general public, the media and how uninformed the people are, is this video of John Oliver talking about surveillance, The Patriot Act and his interview with Edward Snowden.
Sadly, It seems that most Americans have become complacent when it comes to having their privacy invaded unless they are naked, as John Oliver puts so succinctly in this interview with Edward Snowden.
He takes a very complicated subject and makes it amusing and easy to digest for the average person. If you're an American, you need to see this and understand what is going on.
Government Surveillance: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
This post has been ranked within the top 25 most undervalued posts in the first half of Jan 20. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $13.06 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Jan 20 - Part I. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
If you are the author and would prefer not to receive these comments, simply reply "Stop" to this comment.
It makes you wonder if they are searching for someone or something other than a terrorist. I think they are searching for the genius of our times, like the Picasso or Newton of the modern era. That's why they do standardized testing, montor phones, computers, everything we do so they can trace that person and soak up the resources without missing a single trace of their existence. There are 6-7billion people on the earth. Where's the smartest brightest and when will they awaken us out of the dark ages, that is the question I believe they are searching for with the monitoring.
That is a remarkable perspective I've never heard before. I'll have to give that some thought. Thanks
Thank you for replying and taking me seriously! Appreciate the sincerity and I hope whatever they are truly after they find it because that's a lot of time money effort resources etc that could have been used elsewhere.
I used to play an augmented reality, GPS-based RPG called Ingress (the direct predecessor to Pokémon Go).
It has been called "the most expensive free game you'll ever play," and that's because you have to drive or hike or whatever (with your location services on at all times) to the specific locations to perform the tasks of the game.
It's fun. Capture the flag meets geocaching. Lots of history to learn and interesting landmarks to find during extremely intelligent gameplay.
However, this game, owned by Niantic Labs, originally a division of Google, has a very interesting TOS. To play, you're literally agreeing to have your specific routes and movements tracked, as well at one point users were even tasked with documenting landmarks with photos and interesting facts that not only ended up in Pokemon Go (literally all of the PokeStop photos were taken by Ingress players over the course of about two years). That information is also used to literally develop a profile of patterns of traffic, feed information about landmarks into Google Maps, among other services.
Edit: Then, of course, you also have the obvious transfer of that information as needed to the government or whoever needs it and has the money to buy it. (That's also basically in the TOS we agree to.)
That's in addition to their tracking players' every move. It encourages constant engagement with that GPS tracker also engaged so it's all catalogued.
The most expensive free game of all time? Definitely a contender when it comes to privacy.
I can remember when answering machines came out and people were concerned to have a device with a microphone in their house and what that would mean to their privacy.
By comparison today, people freely give their personal information away to companies they know little about who profit from it, carrying surveillance with them everywhere they go without giving it a second thought.
With the advent of the RFID chip, the future seems to be integrating the technology directly with human physiology. Movies are glorifying cyborgs and enhanced realities and if the next generation moves to embrace merging humans with computer enhancements, privacy could become a lost memory.
@jessamynorchard
The sad part is that people do it for fun , because they've never had the real thing, walking with a old man from the nearby village , someone that lived through the "heroic" moments, I'm talking more to google than friends , and even then some just check google , it's like there is already an AI , made by humans, but yes with the documentation and all the pattern recognition that's about to come , I'm not sure why they are even going for those routs. Same with facebook , I've read that they were looking for neurologists to look into brain patterns, so corporations are like a steeming train and most people won't keep up or see the curveball coming , It's truly horrific for me to see how quickly the world changes and traditions get destroyed for the "next big thing" , there are vast differences between generations, peoples and times and somehow everyone wants to disregard that and just stay docile and be a hamster basically.
Where I'm at the "grand" generation are heartfelt and community driven, they've lived nice lives for the most part , struggled a lot and learned a lot, but they stuck together and helped each other out, sure there are the "outcasts" about half of people are disfunctional (drinking, succumb to old age, .. ) , but as a mindset , so cool , so easygoing , inviting, shy, closed off, after them the generation of my parents are way worse , 70% I would deem docile, cigarettes , no exercise , constant complaining , or just working with no real goals, given up on life.
And then there are the pc and phone zombies like me :D , when we are alone we are on a phone :| computers are our best friend and we have truly lost I'm interested to see how the future will develop, but I'm sure if we don't change something and start going in a more grounded direction , we will never achieve personal realization of the majority.
You sure about the 'unless you are naked' part? :-)
You'll have to watch the video to see just how sure? The way it's presented makes it pretty clear that's what Americans really care about when it comes to privacy.