Stealing Our Privacy With a Smile and a Lie

Obama spoke at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA today. The topic was the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, aka the Not Really Affordable Care Act, and after the smoke and mirrors, he took a prearranged question from a reporter, if you can call them reporters anymore. The question was obviously about the most recent scandal to hit the public's attention: the records subpoenaing of all Verizon customers in the United States of America--and that's just what we're aware of at this time.


The president said that these activities have been going on since (you guessed it) the GW Bush administration, without specifically mentioning George by name. Part of his response (below) addressed his take on the justification of pissing on the Bill of Rights:

"When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what this program is about ... What the intelligence is doing is looking at phone numbers, and durations of calls; they are not looking at people's names and they're not looking at content. ... If the intelligence committee actually wants to listen to a phone call they have to go back to a federal judge, just like they would in a criminal investigation."

So evidently, it's okay for the government to know when you called, who you called, where you were when you called, where they were when you called, and how long the call lasted. I see--that isn't an invasion of privacy as Obama sees it. I have no problem with the government actually profiling possible or probable terrorists and doing this, but not my gammy you don't.

I enjoyed Bill O'Reilly's analogy of this action. He said it's like the police kicking in everyone's door to find one bad guy in the process. I've paraphrased him and hope I've said it accurately, but you get the point.

Obama said the program wasn't exactly "top secret" per se, it was more like, ummm, confidential and that congress is aware of this program of subpoenaing your phone records. In other words, as long as your elected officials know about the fact that you are being spied on by the government, it's okay. We should trust them because they know what's best for us, like sodas under 16 ounces, less salt, less sugar. Soon we'll be forced to go to bed at a prescribed time because humans require a certain amount of sleep. Will uniforms be next? A ban on ice cream?

Obama also discussed the internet and said:  “With respect to the Internet and emails, this does not apply to U.S. citizens and it does not apply to people living in the United States.” Tell that to the Washington Post who says differently.

He called for the need for citizens to make choices as to whether they want 100% security or 100% privacy. He said we can't have both, but anyone with a brain knows you can never have total security anyway.  His saying: "We're going to have to make some choices as a society,” makes it sound like he gave us a choice in the first place--he didn't. Besides, it seems pretty clear that Obama's goal isn't to actually catch terrorists, but to assuage our fears of them as we remove our shoes, belts, and dignity at our airports. We could have done something to prevent the Boston Marathon terrorist attack (which he might plan on calling "sportsplace violence"), when we had information on terrorist number one, but we did nothing.

Finally, the Homeland Security Act was never meant to be used the way this president is hiding behind it. Congressman Sensenbrenner, author of the bill when GW Bush was president, made it clear that it is not to be used as a public confiscation of records but to be used with suspected terrorists. Unfortunately, we have a president who seems more concerned about his image as the guy who defeated al Qaeda, than a person concerned about the people he governs.

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