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Another step towards tyranny
Almost nine years have elapsed since Scott McNealy said, "You have zero privacy...get over it." Yet there is still something chilling about this bit of newspeak from the federal government.
Quoting from an AP story:
WASHINGTON (AP) - A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.
Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.
Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.
Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.
The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans' privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.
The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people's private e-mails and phone calls without a court order between 2001 and 2007.
Some lawmakers, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appear reluctant to grant immunity. Suits might be the only way to determine how far the government has burrowed into people's privacy without court permission.
The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill will protect telecommunications companies.
The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.
Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.
Leaving aside the grammatical confusion, that statement has no literal and concrete meaning. As has long been the case with vague language from the governments, you can bet that vagueness will be exploited to the maximum.
What Congress is now mulling is not a mere technicality, but a strike at the very heart of the First Amendment: our right to petition the government for redress of grievances.