How Government Can Use Privacy Violations To Blackmail Citizens
An excerpt from Jacob Hornberger's piece at Tenth Amendment Center:
Let's say a married CEO of a major corporation has been having an affair with his assistant, one that they have been able to keep secret with secret email accounts. What are the chances that that CEO is going to publicly object to the government's "request" (read: demand) for his customers' records? What are the chances that he will join up with libertarians and publicly call for a dismantling of the entire warfare-state racket?Slim chance indeed, especially when he knows that the government has copies of all his emails and recordings of his telephone calls in its files and knows that the government will not hesitate to furnish such information to one of its toadies in the mainstream press.
That's the reason that the Cuban communist regime maintains surveillance over all its citizenry. It's the same for the communist regimes in Vietnam, China, and North Korea. Oh sure, they say that it's necessary to keep their people safe, just like U.S. national-security state officials do. But what it's really designed to do is to maintain their tax-and-control racket over the citizenry and to ensure that everyone continues behaving like a good little citizen, one who always defers to authority and never makes waves.
Our right to privacy -- our right to control who sees and hears personal facts about us -- is enormously valuable and one of our civil liberties we need to fight for, along with the rest that are being eroded.
It doesn't have to be something as nasty as an affair. What if the CEO had once contacted AA? What if he or she had called a Suicide Hotline at some point in the past, or a crisis pregnancy hotline? Or even a criminal defense lawyer for a consultation? Most of us have at least one thing in our past we don't want made public.
DrMaturin at June 17, 2013 5:41 AM
Government snooping hasn't robbed us of the ability to "control who sees and hears personal facts about us." It has robbed us of the illusion that we can "control who sees and hears personal facts about us."
We never actually had that control, but we could delude ourselves into thinking that we did ... or at least some control.
My ISP knows what Web sites I visit. My phone company knows what calls I make. My grocery store knows my purchase history. My neighbor can watch my comings and goings. My coworkers can "overhear" my phone conversations. And so on.
The difference is that others are limited by law as to what they can legally do with that information. The government, on the other hand, has very few, if any, limitations.
If my neighbor tries to blackmail me with photos of my legal, but ill-advised, indiscretion, I have legal remedies. I can go to a government agency (the police) for relief.
If the government tries to blackmail me, I'm screwed.
Conan the Grammarian at June 17, 2013 8:54 AM
Gee whiz, to think that government would even use honest information.
Just make up some lies. Call you a pedophile, rapist, or whatever, and destroy your life.
It's pretty naive to walk around out here and worry that government will blackmail me with surveillance footage when all they gotta do is make up something horrific and false.
And all your friends will be on the news, "I'd of never suspected them. They were always so honest and nice."
Cat at June 17, 2013 6:04 PM
I have been in the IT/tech world for many years. Too many years ago to remember I caught another temp that worked the other shift at the same company was surfing porn on company time. I reported him. The manager almost wanted to fire me because I told the temp company on him.
I worked for a company that declared IE was the only allowed browser for the whole company. My IT manager told me to put a "forget-it" code in any time the inventory showed that FireFox was loaded.
My latest company I found out that one of our customers used our software when my dead lady was in their care. I tried to find a copy of the database that had her in it. There was nothing by then (5+ years had passed).
So saying that only 300 inquiries have happened and trusting them is something that I can't, if not refuse, to believe.
When you have a billion record database at your hands you are going to at least inquire on your own phone number and e-mail addresses if not put in a forget-it code.
Jim P. at June 17, 2013 8:36 PM
Yeah, IMO the fact that the government has the data is itself an unconstitutional seizure, even if they (supposedly) never look at it. There's just way too much opportunity for abuse there. Everyone involved keeps saying "don't worry; protections are in place", but I haven't heard a single government official describe what those protections actually are or how they work. All we ever get is "trust us".
Cousin Dave at June 18, 2013 7:11 AM
And I seem to recall the way the FISA court is setup is that the prosecutors can use evidence seized on mild suspicion without a prior warrant.
Or in other words your 4th and 5th are essentially null and void.
Jim P. at June 18, 2013 2:03 PM
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