Terrorized

 There is no privacy on the Internet.

  Members of Congress roundly criticize phone and Internet data collection by government spy agencies, after repeatedly voting for the program. Only when the program is revealed do they rant against it.
   Aside from the hypocrisy issue, there is this: Does it really stop terrorism?
   Defenders point to a handful of incidents where someone was stopped, but a couple or three arrests while scooping up data on millions of phone calls and many millions more emails, videos, chat room postings, and all else that flows through the communications system raises the question of whether the intrusion into the private lives of every American and all the other people around the world who are in the communications mix is justified.
   Government officials claim that yes, it is justified. Senior government security chief James Clapper told NBC News that it's "absurd" to charge the government with abusing the technology. Nonetheless, the government is considering criminal charges against the leaker for violating "a sacred trust" by revealing the program to newspapers.
   Marketers and market research firms as well as hackers have been using the Internet to monitor and track user behavior and preferences since Day One, so it's really no surprise that government is also monitoring and tracking what citizens say and do. The issue is, should they?

   As for the nation being terrorized, look around. Airport security check-in security with its baggage and body searches, office building cameras and recording devices, school lockdowns, government scooping and analysis of phone and internet communications, and widespread insistence that every individual must carry a gun, are all symptoms of a terrorized nation.

   So while so many people live in terror, that means the terrorists have won. There is little need to actually mount an attack. They need only threaten.
  It's like saying "Boo!"

   I don't know what the answer is.
   I do know that all the alleged anti-terrorist security measures are too much of an infringement on our individual freedoms.

   Unless this is a Full Employment Act for the security industry.

   Or, to quote Benjamin Franklin, ”People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both.”

   George Orwell was right. Big Brother is here.