How Should Americans React to Secret Widespread Government Surveillance of the Common Citizen

 NSA campus at Fort Meade Maryland

 

            Last week Gen. Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency (NSA), testified in front of the House Intelligence Committee that the wide ranging data gathering by government secret collection programs had disrupted, “potential terrorist events,” and had stopped 10 home based treats over 13 years.

            I started to wonder though, if the information is so critical in finding personal details about terrorists, is that not the exact reason for the rest of us to be concerned about the government warehousing and analyzing that same information about the rest of us?

            Alexander testified that in 2012 the FBI searched 300 numbers out of the millions of numbers and other personal data storied in the NSA super computers.  No further comment was made about what constituted the search of the 300 numbers, but it is safe to guess those 300 had more than their meta data scrutinized…how many arrests, charges, convictions did this additional invasion of privacy produce?  We don’t know.

            A recently disclosed classified Department of Justice document obtained by FOIA request shows that to begin recording your phone calls and chats the government only needs a subjective determination of an “investigative interest” based on “suspicion” or suspected “predilection” to criminal intent. The government no longer needs probable cause to start investigating and turn your digital life upside down. 

            President Barrack Obama announced in a press conference last week that the government has been collecting this private information for years and we have nothing to worry about, adding that everyone’s information is being warehoused for five years, “just in case,” the government needs to investigate a citizen later.  By storing this information for future possible prosecution, isn’t the government saying the whole U.S. citizenry is considered guilty until proven innocent?  Or is it “possibly” guilty?

            I remember watching Hogan’s Heroes as a boy and laughing at the comical Gestopo agent (Nazi Germany’s secret police) as he said, “we suspect everyone, ev-rey-one.”  Sadly it is now the governments of the former free democracies that suspect everyone.

            What would the Founding Fathers have done if they discovered that King George was not just raising taxes on tea, but had been reading the mail of every British citizen in the colonies and creating association trees of which colonists knew each other, talked with each other, did business together, slept together…and then gave all this information to the military to store and analyze in case they needed to use it against the colonists in the future.

            What would the Founding Fathers do?  What would you do?