But I am fine with that, because it is a two way road and it actually ultimately makes me feel a lot safer knowing that it is a lot harder for Congressman Babyrapist to be a hypocrite or for the government to get away with extremely shady shit. And the tradeoff in privacy for convenience and access to information is a worthwhile one, in my eyes.
Except for the fact that Congressman Babyrapist is the one that has your information, in secret, and not the other way around.
Frankly, the government had access to a lot of personal information before this stuff ever came along. They have been tracking all personal financial transactions ever since the advent of the Social Security number being a requirement to get hired. What has changed is we are approaching the ability to mine that information in drastically more efficient ways, making it a lot more usable than a pile of files in a warehouse guarded by top men.
The difference is that we KNOW what they're doing and how they can use it. It's public. What, how, and why is completely secret in this case. All we know is that the government is STORING personal, private information on us, and we don't even know what that information is, how it is stored, or how it is being used.
I have a technical background. Most of congress does not (I think there are 5 engineers in congress right now). They're going to a 2-3 hour closed briefing and then somehow saying it's all good. That just doesn't make sense. They're obviously not looking at infrastructure, security, coding, the APIs used to grab info on the fly, etc. What's more than likely being discussed is the legal (in the strictest terms) of it. They probably wouldn't understand what they were looking at anyway. Jim Hines (D-CT) is on the intelligence committee and didn't even know about these programs until the traitor spilled his guts (per his CSPAN appearance). Many other reps have grave concerns over it, especially after the briefings.
If the government wants to take public information and sort it, that's fine and dandy. Idiots that don't make their FB accounts private, fine. But secretly mining through private information is completely different. The only reason they're allowed to do it is because lawmakers haven't caught up with technology yet. We don't know that some low level employee in Cincinatti won't be able to run a script and publish all sorts of private information on us, or that some contractor could do the same.
And again, even if the system in place was just so fucking awesome and without bugs, backdoors, or any other issues (Anyone who has been in the software industry knows this stuff is commonplace and constant), the fact still remains that they're collecting your personal, private information without your consent or knowledge. Why are you so adamant about wanting to live in a Big Brother State?
