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I know it says to pick 2... but only one really applies and I'm not voting for stars.
I've got nothing to hide, they can track me as long as they want. Oh wait, they already do. Because of my job, anything and everything I do can be tracked and such by the government. They can legally tap my phones and I wouldn't know it.
I don't doubt that everyone will lose a lot of privacy over the next 10-20 years, just as we have over the past 10-20. The real question is to whom will we lose it. Will it be someone like the priest at confession, or will it be some identity-thief who then proceeds to max out all our credit cards. Things don't look all that good for the priest so far. It is, after all, the identity-thief who turns the greater profit, and free market capitalism does love a profit...from whatever source derived...
The government is beginning to become oppressive. The Patriot Act, and legislation like it that will be passed in the future, and increasingly more powerful computers, will put our lives under a microscope.
I don't like it, but I guess we need to get used to it.
I don't doubt that everyone will lose a lot of privacy over the next 10-20 years, just as we have over the past 10-20. The real question is to whom will we lose it. Will it be someone like the priest at confession, or will it be some identity-thief who then proceeds to max out all our credit cards. Things don't look all that good for the priest so far. It is, after all, the identity-thief who turns the greater profit, and free market capitalism does love a profit...from whatever source derived...
Yes, the abolition of private property is the answer! Or perhaps you believe the government should start regulating identity theft?
The current anti-privacy phenomenon is an attempt to reduce the human being to numbers on paper. It always has been about control, throughout history. With current technology, that control can be achieved. Of course, not everyone will willingly walk into the prison, they have to be prodded. Our genetic development has made fear, not love, the greatest motivator, hence, 9/11 achieved its objective: our methodical imprisonment.
I have always and will continue to argue that freedom is our natural state of being. There is no need to assert it or to fight for more. When one freedom is yielded to others, all the rest will follow.
If people want to keep voting more power to the government and want the government to make more decisions for our lives, then we are goin gto lose privacy simply from a control perspective. Imagine what it would be like with programs such National Health Care. Imagine the control the government is going to want to have over your lives, but all in the name of the common good.
The private sector already knows far too much about my "private" life. I trust them less than any government because the government cannot make a profit off the information and the private sector exists to do so.
We teach children about privacy with the old Christmas song about Santa Clause.
“I’m making a list and checking it twice
I’ll know who has been naughty or nice.”
Talk about instilling fear. My first step to freedom was realizing that Santa could NOT “know if I had been naughty or nice”. Only I could know that and if I were the least bit careful my parents wouldn’t know either.
The same applies to the private sector and the government. Show them what they expect and keep the rest to yourself.
I'm no legal scholar, but it's my understanding that the average American would be absolutely shocked to learn just how little "right to privacy" we really DO have. And I'm not sure there's anything we can do about it--it's just an inevitable side-effect of ever-increasing technology. Several thinkers along these lines have alluded to the fact that in the future, ALL of us will have to simply learn to take it for granted that virtually ALL of our daily activities, public or private, will be able to be "observed" by someone, somehow---and we'll just have to learn (or at least future generations will), to accept this--just as we've ALREADY accepted 'outrages' that our independent ancestors would have found intolerable.
In an age of unimaginably intelligent computers, aerial surveillance, etc etc etc. there really is no possibility we'll ever again know the 'privacy' that was known in the past. We can try to 'regulate' it a bit, but that's about all. Intrusion is inevitable, and it's here to stay. Do I LIKE this?..Nope....but I accept its inevitability. You can't "un-invent' technology.
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