Sunday, August 11, 2013

AUGUST 11, 2013

     The government has released a white paper saying that it has the right to tap our telephones, internet activity, and so on.  It's legal, the government says, when the spying is "relevant, a broad standard that permits discovery of large volumes of data in circumstances where doing so is necessary to identify much smaller amounts of information within that data that directly bears on the matter being investigated."  Whatever that might be, of course--a defense secret, a love affair, whatever.

     That's fine with some of
us.  The Washington Post says the House voted against killing the program last month but adds that the vote was close.  I, of course, would have voted to kill it.

     I'd have done so on the general ground that "this is not the America that we agreed to," as someone once said.   I believe that individual Americans' privacy matters more than the government's right to snoop.
 The government disagrees and in that fight it greatly outweighs me.  So it's winning.  I don't see that changing but it should.

    

 

 

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