Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion
In a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit DiscussionIn a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
As I have been reading many of the articles here at Irregular Times about the Protect America Act and the associated programs at the NSA to spy on our activity on the Internet, I have been asking myself one question over and over: How can we live under this constant surveillance by our government?
Our email is being read. Our telephone calls are being listened to. Where we go and what we do on the Internet is being recorded.
How can we do anything when we know that our words and actions are all being recorded, to be used against us at some future date by our own government?
I didn’t come up a good answer to that question, until I realized it was the wrong question. Here’s the right question for us to ask ourselves in these times: How, when the government is constantly watching and recording us using the Internet, should we respond?
The idea that we would respond to government spying against us on the Internet by withdrawing, pulling back into our private lives, in our own homes, huddled away from the telephone and the computer for fear of the prying eyes and long ears of Alberto Gonzales, is exactly the kind of reaction the right wingers would love. They would love for us to withdraw from political activism. They would love for us to be afraid.
So, I think that the best response to the Protect America Act is to go on doing things just as we have in the past. We keep on speaking up. We keep on living, and expanding our lives online. We refuse to be afraid.
The Internet levels the playing field. It’s no wonder that people like George W. Bush and Alberto Gonzales want to abuse it, and tarnish it with the stain of constant suspicion.
Don’t give up. Don’t give in. Keep on.
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August 10th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
Don’t withdraw! That’s exactly what the criminals in Washinton would like to provoke us into doing. It’s so tempting to just back off and relax and hope the problem goes away because someone else is doing something about while we hide, off the Net, off our phone lines, etc. Don’t withdraw. Instead, increase your activity. Millions of us continuting to fight on will overwhelm their software programs that is designed to find “subversives”, and they can’t possibly detain and stop millions of us. We can overwhelm them instead of them intimidating us.
Some German people who lived through watching Jews and others being arrested in the night, said that if the people watching had taken action against the arresting troops by rushing them en masse and scaring them away, the unfettered arrests of the innocent would have been stopped. But, no one had the balls to defend the innocent being taken away to their deaths. They stood frozen in fear and watched, and then they were next. Sheep are easy to herd and slaughter.
August 12th, 2007 at 7:15 am
I agree, S. Let’s do what the name of the Protect America Act says, and Protect America - Act!