Americans Are Actually Concerned About Privacy – Really?
Rufus Petersen
Israel’s been spying on us for decades, but our mainstream media neglects to mention any of it, even when the government is actively investigating it.
just don’t get it about the NSA spying flap. As a person who doesn’t worship technology for its own sake, people have long labeled me as a Luddite. I don’t own a smart phone. I don’t even text-message. As for social-networking you can safely make the assumption to count me out. I’m as anti-social as I want to be, and a “network” is only going to make things worse. While I am definitely social in my own way, the negatives around sociability just come down in a different way online. Still they are negatives.
Privacy is the chief issue. How long have we been hearing about Facebook and privacy? Google maps and privacy? These stories have been ongoing in the media for years now. Germans and other Europeans are concerned about their privacy. Americans aren’t.
Or so I thought, until the controversy about NSA programs hit the mainstream. “You mean the Patriot Act actually exists?” I have a very-aware old chum who used to work for the government, and he takes the opposite tack. “You’ve got no privacy- never did , especially online. Why do you need it? Just get used to it…” he seems to sneer, as if I was a naïve bumpkin.
I haven’t gotten used to it, but I did get used to the idea that people I regard as intelligent increasingly seem to regard privacy as an antiquated notion. The fact that it no longer exists is merely the price we pay for the pursuit of modern life, they maintain. Marc Zuckerberg said something notorious about privacy no longer being a social norm. So how is it that the biggest story happening now is that the NSA is collecting so-called “metadata”, much to the chagrin of the American people? Or is that just the media, pretending to be civil-libertarians? It might be amusing to think the media has turned against Obama, but without any loyalty to begin with they are certainly looking for a story with legs.
In the nineties I became aware of banter about a computer program that could look for certain key words that might turn up in phone conversations as they happened- words like “bomb” “militia”, “conspiracy” etc.- you get the idea. Enough of such terms could warrant that phone number for further watching. Inevitably, because such topics interest me and I like to talk on the phone, I soon began to hear audible clicks often, the kind of clicks you would hear in older times when someone in your home or elsewhere would pick up another extension. Problem was that I didn’t have another extension and the person I was speaking with usually didn’t either. Odd too was the fact that the sounds would often happen at auspicious moments during the conversation.
The years went by and this continued until shortly after Obama was elected, and after a couple more years another sound of something like pattering feet or helicopter blades began. I still get this frequently, and I don’t flatter myself that my calls are actually being listened to. I’m not an important person and I’m not up to anything remotely illegal. Likely there is a special program for people just like me who need to be intimidated, but warrant no further attention. At least they’ve gotten rid of the old school phone-hitting-the-receiver sound. It had begun to seem slightly laughable. Certainly they have the technology to listen to me or anyone else without a sound being heard by any party having that conversation.
Where has the public been all the time on these subjects? Here’s a story from over three years ago:
NSA suspends metadata collection : http://www.fiercegovernmentit.
It’s like the politicos have pointed out, none of this is new, so why the excitement? There are few people who don’t use computers of some variety, and have noted how their searches are monitored by marketers. We all clean our cookies and run our virus software. Any halfway bright guy should feel self-consciously smug for having to say “I told you so”. There is no satisfaction in uttering what everybody knows.
If this is such big news, the babes in the woods SHOULD have another shock coming their way: Israeli tech companies have had similar abilities to do just what the NSA does. I could be wrong, but I think that the first instant messaging was an Israeli tech creation, as was Yahoo. As their technology has become ubiquitously integrated with ours, these channels that were created as a back door at Day One certainly have to be paying off, and what the NSA doesn’t catch, Tel Aviv might, who can then turn around and notify the appropriate authorities here.
Knowledge of any of this certainly isn’t news either. I’ve been noting such lore for a good decade now in selected publications and websites. And much worse than any individual American being spied upon, any of our military and security groups suffer the same problem. The implications for this are massive for us as a nation, unless we trust every motive of every faction of the Israeli government.
I know little about computers, technology or security, but do you think the information at all these links is just science fiction, or anti-semitic ravings thought up by the tin-hat crowd? Israel’s been spying on us for decades, but our mainstream media neglects to mention any of it, even when the government is actively investigating it.