In response to a reader email, yes, I read these links. And as to why I don’t post them Instapundit-style but rather in globs of ten or so, well, it’s because I use the research that I do as well. It’s easier to scroll back through the blog to find stories when they’re bunched up in one post, as opposed to scattered to the digital winds. The aim of this site is to be a resource for those who are serious about ending total surveillance, restoring a civilized level of privacy protections for citizens of this country. When the construction of the Surveillance State here is complete, we will have nowhere to hide from our government.
This has grave implications for our ability to engage in dissent and protest against the crimes of our governments. What’s more, it will have dire implications for journalism. Journalists will be tracked and surveiled at a far higher rate than the rest of us. Passive, pervasive harassment of journalists has the ability to stifle the search for truth, information all of us depend on for an accurate view of what our government is up to.
Governments of the world murdered 252 million unarmed civilians during the twentieth century, not because they suddenly became more cruel, but because they have the means. Advances in technology and industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century gave humankind the ability to wage war on a global scale. So we did. It gave governments the means also to mass murder their own citizens. So they did.
To say it can’t happen again is the height of naivete. The chief lesson of history is that governments murder and enslave. That is not hyperbole, it is fact. The Surveillance State will empower governments to do far more. Do I think that mass murder is on the horizon any time soon? I don’t. What I believe this surveillance infrastructure will be used for is incremental enslavement, the boxing in of citizens, who aren’t aware of the prison being built around them until they try to escape. It will by then be too late. This is why privacy should be enshrined into law on an equal plane with that of free speech. Our data is ours, our lives are our own.
I also post fun science-y stories.
