Put this way, The Government and Google knows more about you than your spouse or family and friends.
They only know as far as where you choose to browse the web, or even more forwardly, what you post on facebook of yourself. But then again, the internet is like your backyard: unless you have some towering wall around your yard, what you do outdoors in your yard is fair game for the neighbors to see.
Regarding going through data, this isn’t random, it’s overwhelmingly a keyword search in databases for people, places, and objects. No sane person would be interested in having to try and look for something in an investigation randomly browsing through the trillions of pages that exist on the web, or in databases, even for some of the world’s biggest geniuses who work for the government, such mental processing is highly impractical, shoot for the keywords, or the fingerprint matches, or who was at a specific proximity to a crime scene location.
The big illusion here is that the government is somehow exaggeratedly powerful with this system, however inadvertently, Edward Snowden, al qaeda, Taliban, etc, prove that even technology isn’t neccessarily a trump card, in fact, even the most advanced computer is limited by the mental capacity of the person operating it, and even then, the system is only really designed to specialize in a given realm.
NORAD was totally unequipped to deal with hijacked suicide airliners, even the most advanced air defense platform was reduced to finding flying needles in a haystack. Snowden and the other leakers demonstrated how incompetent and unprepared the NSA is in knowing who is loyal to them, despite acting tough and trying to look nice by talking smack about those who disagree with them, well, now you have a 30 year old who pranced away to Russia with your classified information, and now you pretty much can’t do anything about it.
My primary beef about security is that the way that the U.S. does it, is extremely wasteful, both in time as well as in money.
Information is totally used for your benefit: it’s used to prosecute criminals, who seldom, if ever, walk around with T-Shirts saying “ I am a serial killer” or shout out loud proudly on main street, I am going to go shoot some people tommorrow”. It doesn’t work like that, but collected evidence and careful database searches of information is workable.
“Knowledge is power. They aren’t going to use that power for your benefit.”
And yet information is used for the benefit of society all the time, criminal investigations, use databased information to narrow down suspects. The military always has spied and assasinated people, even during the American Revolution, where we took out British COmmanding Officers fairly frequently in battle. You are being quite narrowly selective in who you think spies on you. Government isn’t the only ones, plenty of your nongovernment Joes and Janes have had a fun time with hacking into a person’s laptop and/or webcam and eliciting information from him/her. Foreign governments wouldn’t think twice about probing information about people to get around and target. I don’t know, but there sure is a whole lot more outside of your circle of reasoning that you leave out here. A whole lot more. Spying is neccessary in going after criminals for no better reason than you can’t take most of them for their word anyways.
I very much disagree with much of what you wrote.
The massive data mining operation against the American people is a major violation of the 4th Amendment, in fact it effectively repeals it. Who is going to protect your rights, a secret court, accountable to who?
The Government isn’t all powerful, yet. But technology is moving on very fast. Anything you have ever posted on the internet is forever. Along with your travel history (gps, smartphones).
Are you OK with Government and Business spying on you in your home via the microphone and camera’s in you smart phones, tv’s etc. How much loss of privacy is enough for you? Any limits?
“Information is totally used for your benefit”
No not always. Tell that to young people who have lost out on a job because of something stupid they have posted on Facebook.
What do you think a Hitler would have done with all this technology? Very very few of his enemies would have escaped.
Privacy is the Major Civil right of our time. Freedom will not survive the loss of privacy. (And privacy is almost gone now).