Two bills passed Congress this week with much fanfare and are heading for the opposite chambers, ultimately the President’s desk for signing; the Human Trafficking Bill out of the Senate and a bill to fight cyber terrorism out of the House. But nestled in these bills are provisions to give law enforcement more power to erode our right to privacy through access to our internet activity.
Granted these provisions make it easier to fight the two scourges but coupled with the passing of the Snowden revelations and the willingness to allow big business to push that extra shirt you don’t need by exercising a free hand in our consumption history there is an almost daily erosion of our privacy rights.
An alliance of right wing politicians, left wing politicians, Muslim extremists engaged in terrorism, big business, big government, law enforcement, a starving print and broadcast media fighting for a few morsels of dwindling ratings or circulation, has created an atmosphere of paranoia and fear that sucks the life out of our Constitution.
Our right to bring an assault weapon to a school playground or our right to refuse to serve left handed obese people with a lisp on religious grounds are sacrosanct, but our right to privacy? The first and second Amendments are etched in granite but the fourth? Walk all over that one after traipsing around in a Central Park dog run on a Friday afternoon. While the left obsesses about what’s politically correct and the right dresses people in revolutionary clothes and parades around with fifes and drums, we choose whether we are MSNBC or FOX people. Meanwhile you hear that sound drip, drip, drip…you hear that? It’s the sound of our privacy rights narrowing every day and there’s almost nothing left.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) is the most powerful lobby in all of Washington. What about an NPA for privacy? ……crickets.
During the height of the Snowden NSA imbroglio President Obama promised a dialogue about national security vs. our privacy rights. That was almost 2 years ago and we are still waiting for that dialogue. It’s reported that Snowden is looking for a deal in order to come back from Russian exile. Why aren’t we offering him between 5 and 10 years of prison and in return we get to put him on trial and commence the national conversation?
The world has always been filled with bad people who wanted to do bad things to good people. The terrorists seem to want to bring our world back a couple of centuries but a couple of centuries ago Americans were not talking about responding to external threats by trashing our fundamental rights.
Instead of looking inward to see how we can co-opt our privacy why don’t we enlist every army of every country who is affected by the terrorists, put massive troops on the ground, invest in security of our borders and rid this scourge regardless of political, strategic or religious ramifications; without sacrificing the principles of our beloved nation and our precious rights.
Hitler, The Civil War, rampant crime, the wild frontier, the Cold War, sometimes deadly internal politics, we have survived them all and we will survive this wave of Islamic extremism.
Yet right now our privacy rights are like a paper dam holding back a tidal bore.
George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are stirring in their graves murmuring I told ya so’s and Ed Snowden’s warnings are no longer a nightmare scenario but a fait accompli.