Technology, Security and The Government

It didn’t take reading Little Brother for me to have a pretty serious distrust in our government and the steps that they take to ensure “security.” I’m already required to give my drivers license number up to be able to buy a box of sudafed. I spend insane amounts of money ordering medication from Canada in order to get a medication that has been used as the treatment standard for a health condition that I suffer from, but the FDA won’t approve for semantic reasons, despite it having been used in Canada, Mexico, and most of Europe for over 30 years. I can’t find soda with normal sugar in it, only super-saturated diabetes inducing high fructose corn syrup, because the government’s in the business of subsidising the corn industry. BG&E violates me with a steel pipe on a monthly basis, despite utilities being “regulated” by the government. Insurance companies are allowed to take lots of your money for when you “need it most” and then do everything they possibly can not to give any of it back to you, and the government lets them do that too. The government’s been in the business of lining its own pockets for years, and it’s come to be all that I expect from them.
There’s lots of monitoring going on in present day society and I don’t think it’s anything new. Maybe due to the ubiquity of technology, it is affecting more people, but I think there are lots of instances where people are being and have been monitored without it. Spies can come in all forms. Projects such as ECHELON or Room 641A have brought to public attention the very real possibility that the government is able to monitor most Internet communication. Congress has been unable to affect the actions of the NSA, which I found to be most aptly expressed in this headline from fark.com “Congress: Let's investigate the NSA's spying program. NSA: Die in a fire. Congress: Okay, that's fine then, nothing to see here”
The inability of Congress to affect the actions of the NSA is pretty disturbing. Google has also been emerging as a possible future metaverse superpower, and its new Medical Records feature has me wondering how soon we will be chanting the mantra “I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!”
I was able to speak with someone who was a Network Administrator at the NSA for a number of years in the 1990s. He told me that the greatest accomplishment that his “team” was known for was the ability to intercept (via satellite) all telecommunication traffic from the middle east during Desert Storm, decrypt and copy it to a local drive, and then send the traffic back to its destination in a mere 17 seconds. While this was clearly in the interest of security at the time, it does make one wonder exactly what the NSA is doing to monitor our networks today, especially with the inclusion of the Patriot Act.
The lack of oversight and potential for abuse makes me nervous. Even though the NSA is accountable to various military figures, I’d like a civilian there to decide what is and isn’t acceptable forms of treatment for “suspects.” I’m sure that a large variety of military actions are taken on a regular basis to ensure the safety of this country, utilizing highly secretive teams like Delta Force, that probably violate handfuls of international treaties, the Bill of Rights, and possibly even the Geneva Convention – and all for good cause. I don’t think anyone would deny that it’s okay to save millions of lives by doing something slightly illegal. However, it’s such a slippery slope that it’s one I am even afraid to approach. Where does it end? How far is too far? To what extent is surveillance okay? I honestly don’t have an answer.