by The Department of Homeland Security is coming. Will our privacy be destroyed under its heel? Student newspapers rarely have meaningful contents, but read Matt Chock’s essay in the Cornell Daily Sun on this subject.
Consider also what the N.Y. Times has to say. Are you prepared to live under the microscope? Don’t think it can happen? Think again.
A seasoned information technology professional, not like this author, for example, could bring John Poindexter’s dossier database to life easily given the access to data.
Let me state that even more clearly: if I had access to the various data collection points already in existence, I could, by myself, create a database that would contain extraordinary information on every person in the U.S.A. And that’s just one man, working alone.
Is that a good thing? From a technological perspective, it is good to have that kind of power. The Internet and its surrounding structure is supported by it.
From a social perspective, it cannot be a positive change for a democratic government to begin to compile dossiers on its citizens. I am by no stretch of the imagination a religious person; however, even I must ask if the “mark of the beast” can be far from being mandated by Washington.
The fact is, there is always going to be a certain amount of risk involved in living. No President can change that by ordering profiles created on each of us.
A better first step would be to build a working immigration and naturalization system. Non-citizens inherently have lower expectations of privacy and higher probabilities of targeting the U.S. for terrorist actions. Working to keep terrorists out of our country is a worthy endeavor. Infringing on the Constitutional rights of citizens is not.
