US Government Is Looking A Lot Like Cuba, USSR, And East Germany When It Comes To Privacy

Posted in Internet Privacy,Our Blog on June 8, 2013

If the government can take anyone’s DNA after they’re arrested-despite the presumption of innocence until guilt is proven-and collect unlimited data on every American citizen via our cell phones, e-mail messages, and online data storage, then perhaps next the government will dispense with the pretense of offering any expectation of any remaining privacy rights?

It’s looking more and more like we must now expect unlimited surveillance and unwarranted intrusions for the sake-the excuse, rather-of security, at the cost of privacy.

This eerily resembles the ways of present-day Cuba, or of past times in the former Soviet Block and in the former nation of East Germany. The same excuse of security was and is paramount in those places, but no one even had the illusion that they had privacy from their governments.

Welcome to the new world order?

Our Founding Fathers must be cringing in their repose, watching as fundamental civil liberties are so diminished and diluted by our elected “leaders” with double-secret laws with names like “Patriot” in the title.

The rest of us should be cringing, too, and speaking out against these overzealous actions by our government. Or is the Cuba model of security over privacy really that attractive? This writer hopes our Congressmen and Congresswomen recall their history, rediscover their backbones and start behaving like the leaders we elect them to be, and to heed the famous words of Benjamin Franklin, never more prescient than now: “People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither, and will lose both.”