RE:every post regarding government snooping

From Percepti0n <hickory@enteract.com>
Date Wed, 3 Nov 1999 19:51:44 -0600 (CST)


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My place of employment usually has some pretty interesting discussions on
our company mailing list.  Here is a snippet from a thread that I
thought would be apropriate for here - what do you think of this outlook? 
 Though I wish my personal business could be snoop proof, and I don't
agree with a lot of things the government does - this actually makes a bit
of sense.  - -


> > Too many people are willing to give up
> > privacy in the name of "getting the bad guys." 



> 
> Actually, the opposite is true; too many people are unwilling to go to
> even the slightest inconvenience in order to help protect society. You
put
> disparaging quotes around "getting the bad guys", but the fact is that
> there are bad guys out there, and there's nothing wrong with taking some
> precautions in the name of public safety.
> 
> It's one thing to say "These new standards will be completely
ineffective
> in fighting crime or terrorism, and since they do invade privacy, they
> should be scrapped." But nobody in this thread has said that. What
> everyone has said--to a man--is, essentially, that the U.S. government
is
> evil; that their real goal is to keep track of what everybody is doing,
> all the time; that the government's professed aim of deterring threats
to
> the people from "bad guys" is just a front; and that the real reason
> they're doing this is because it's a logical step on the journey towards
> turning the United States into a fascist police state. After all, all of
> us smart computer people know how the government works and what its true
> aims are; it's just all those flag-waving, Ozzie-and-Harriet types that
> constitute the general population that are deluded.
> 
> This is a profoundly juvenile attitude, born of ignorance. There is no
> evidence that we are sliding into tyranny, or that anyone even wants us
> to. The only reason anyone wants to think that we are is that it's fun
to
> think of yourself as a free-minded rebel, fighting against an evil
> corporate oligarchy that wants to snuff out all privacy and freedom, and
> it's also fun to think of yourself as being in the minority of seeing
> the "power structure" as it really is. All you Harry Tuttle-wannabes
would
> do well to consider: a) you're actually the majority at this point; b)
> you're still wrong.
> 


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