Hat tip to dayglored for pointing out this article.
Hat tip to dayglored for pointing out this article.
Yello FRiend, great article, and thread started here -
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/3056710/posts
Try going somewhere in solitude. It is difficult to do without someone becoming paranoid. It is as if, if a person is all alone, they must be up to no good.
Thanks for the article
Profound implications.
Privacy is an archaic construct. It is something for which the Internet was invented. It exists as an idea in the hearts of the young and a nostalgic wish for the old and experienced.
It used to be that a man could go to work in a factory, drive his car home, and once that front door closed, no one but the residents of that home knew the goings on. No one knew what was on the radio or what was for dinner. No one knew what was in the mail or spoken in private.
Today, we can’t even go to the store without being tracked. Our purchases, our dinner menus, our drinking habits, and our very physical movements tracked, cataloged, databased, analyzed, pored over by government officials and private companies alike.
Oh and lo be the poor soul who pays in cash! While your waiter or waitress might enjoy the extra tip, that cashier ringing up your $250 in groceries would look at you funny and has to swipe a special pen across the two hundreds and a fifty you give them.
Get in your car, the black box knows. It might not transmit your travels, yet, but if you’re involved in an accident, they can find out where you’ve been, how fast you were going, and what was on the radio.
A man today who only pays cash, eschews digital media in all its forms, sparingly utilizes a traditional, analog, PBX-switch-based home telephone, drives a pre-1980 vehicle, attends church every Sunday, grows his own vegetables, and hunts every season to keep his freezer stocked with meat is seen as a kook, a terrorist, a right-wing nut job! They’re the very definition of Ted Kaszinski, Terry Nichols, David Koresh, even! But not even 100 years ago, that man was your normal, run-of-the-mill, responsible American. Not even a frontiersman, but an honest, hard-working American.
How damned are we as a society that we’ve fallen this far? How thoroughly and utterly hopeless is it that a man who wishes to marry a woman in a Christian church, have a family, and go to work for 50 years or more just to live a good, honest, decent life is now considered a vagabond and a crazy person? How far have we fallen?
Was then Secretary of the Treasury Timmy Geithner the original author of the IRS harassment policy towards the TEA Party?