For some time, the privacy rights of Americans has been depicted as a "fringe" issue. Its strongest advocates have tended to be connected to the Tea Party or to the Occupy movement. The Occupy crowd found out just how quickly their privacy wasn't worth a damn. What really mattered was social control and the perpetuation of a fraudulent sense of class harmony, notably in the supposedly liberal bastion of New York City.
The Obama Administration has been something less than progressive regarding privacy rights. The federal government's ambivalence comes across in matters of "national security," the boundaries of which remain as ill-defined as the more remote areas of the Mexico-US border. The basic notion appears to be that just about anything in one's personal life is fair game to investigate, collect, and keep indefinitely. Anything labeled "national security" trumps due process.
This disturbing trend is only gathering momentum.
A Reuters story picked up (ironically) in today's Chicago Tribune claims the Obama Administration is creating a plan that would allow US spy agencies "full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country..."
The Big Brotherish scheme is unsurprisingly cloaked in national security imperatives. The idea is to follow the money and snag the forces of evil. This is hardly a novel idea. The question isn't whether the proposed snooping will be effective; the doubt stems from the plan's erosion of fundamental democratic rights. Relying on a government's good intentions, from those who think they know what's best, is a dangerous road for a democracy to travel.
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