"People Who Urge Calm Over NSA Spying Make Me Nervous"

[JDPriestly]

37. The point is that the government can chart all of your contacts and who they

contact. Through that means, they can determine who influences whom. They can determine what sources a journalist contacts before writing a story, what experts or witnesses a lawyer contacts before filing a lawsuit or preparing to defend a client.

And it isn't just the government as an abstract entity. The individuals who do what Snowden did, the systems managers and others who have access to this system can secretly obtain information they want. They can probably do it surreptitiously.

It isn't just the Fourth Amendment that is violated. It is our ability to speak, worship and associate freely without the government being able to identify our speech (which reflects our thoughts), our religious views and our associations. That is surveillance even if the government has to get a subpoena to obtain the specific words we said or wrote. And if you look at the history of totalitarian countries around the world, the stages are always 1) an awareness of having dangerous enemies 2) developing into a feeling of national or racial or ethnic vulnerability, 3) progressing into a need to defend, 4) moving on toward some sort of spying or surveillance system, 5) and when the consensus is that all those precautions prove insufficient, 6) acceptance of repression -- hauling people off to Siberia or concentration camps or renditioning them or simply arranging for them to be killed in their homes or on the streets. Once you have repression, people continue to insist that they are free, that they can say what they want, that their news is free, etc., but they become silent, sullen and less creative. The society slows the pace of its development. The security of the government becomes the primary concern of government as it is increasingly distanced and isolated from the people -- for fear that the people will rebel.

We are on step 4. And we still won't be perfectly safe. We will never be perfectly safe. So, as long as we think that instead of having the rights set forth in the Bill of Rights, we have the right to eternal life in our bodies on this earth, we will probably be ready to move to steps 5 and 6.


That is where we are headed. This surveillance, and that is what it is, needs to be stopped now before we reach the next step.