by James Potterfield

Created on: April 21, 2008

Too much is made in the present political climate about the threats to out civil liberties. Far, far, far too much is said about how governmental agencies are tapping our phones and reading our email and invading our lives, and in the end, it's the proverbial mole hill made into Mount Everest. The majority of Americans know they are not terrorists, and that they have nothing to hide, as far as what the government might be looking for. Because this holds true for the vast majority of Americans, the government will, in all likelihood, take one look at most of us, and come to the conclusion that we are neither seditious enough or even really interesting enough to waste money spying on. The vast majority of us lead mundane lives working at mundane jobs doing mundane things. Let us, for a second, imagine we have the vast resources of the NSA and the CIA. We can do virtually anything. Are we A) going to use those resources to sift through vasts amounts of dross to find real terrorists, ignoring most of what we see, and forgetting everything that is not pertinent to our search, or will we B) build a Hooveresque file on every single American citizen, complete with emails about children's school doings and what cute thing pets have done and recorded phone calls about how Mr. Bertram's wife needs to get milk? When it is stated in this light, I feel it becomes painfully obvious that this issue has been blown completely out of proportion by lobbying entities and people more concerned with privacy than is probably mentally healthy. For at least a decade, privacy has not truly existed in cyberspace. Even if the government was not watching emails and listening to phone calls, any private individual with the proper equipment and technical capability could do the same thing, if not on the same scale, and yet the ACLU and other such entities do not, as far as I am aware, scream and shout about that kind of thing. In the end, this really is not the massive issue some make it out to be. Digital privacy is a charmingly quaint notion, but unfortunately, that is all it is in practicality; a notion. To assume otherwise is narrow minded, foolish, and delusional

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