The ends justify the means

I admit to everyone that I've been trying to tune out the news the past two months.  Somewhere along the way I just had enough of it all.  No, not the petty criminal stories and filler feel-good stuff my local market serves--I'm talking about national news.  The President.  It isn't that I don't care; it's that I care too much.

My general opinion on the state of this nation is that we're in serious trouble.  Not from some louse-ridden terrorists stuck in an oil-rich desert halfway around the planet, no.  We're in trouble because like many cultures before us, we've let a charismatic group of people with a sweetened, poisonous ideology lead us in the wrong direction.

When I was in Catholic school, I remember one lesson that was pounded into my young skull over and over: The ends never justify the means.

So when I hear the Bush administration explaining why it sidestepped the FISA court to conduct domestic surveillance and that they're doing it because, boiled down, "it works", I cringe.  This is the gist of their argument: It's okay to conduct warrantless wiretaps on Americans in America because it helps us get terrorists.  And polls are showing that roughly half the country agrees.  Half of the adults polled said they believe that the ends justify the means.  Spy on us.

Does our personal security justify the removal of our civil liberties?  Half of us here in the US say "yes".

You might be asking yourself if things can get any worse. You might mistakenly believe that the government could only carry something like that so far before the people rise up out of their stupor and change the leadership.  But then, you might want to check out the fight between Google and the US Government.

The Bush administration wants access to what Google knows and they're testing the waters with a legal discovery request (Google is not a party to any crime or lawsuit relating to this request) to get an entire weeks worth of Google's "link database"--the stuff you search for--and the keywords people are using to search for it with.  You see, Google knows who you are, what you like to search for in private, and what ads you respond to.  Heck, they may even hold all your email neatly searchable and if you blog, like me, you might even have your political views exposed as well.  All in one tightly searchable package.  Imagine all the domestic information you could mine out of that.  That's a huge, red apple just dangling there in front of the government.  They'd have to listen to hours and hours and hours of your banal phone calls to aunt Beatrice in South Hampton England to get the same information a few seconds of data mining on Google's data would give them. 

And remember, this is the same government that held an American citizen in custody for 3 years without access to a lawyer or without being charged with a crime. 

So what's next?  Heck if I know.  But there's one thing I've got my ear to the ground for--a one-if-by-land-two-if-by-sea sorta signal.  I think the biggest threat to a government looking to root out undesireables in their midst is encryption technology of sufficient complexity to stymy their searches.  In the past our government has classified encryption technology as a "weapon" and forbid it's transferal beyond our borders.  Anyone on the internet back in the early to mid-90s probably saw all the browser encryption issues related to this. I believe the government will need to crack down on encryption again if they want to keep the Googles and MSN's and other collectors of our personal data nice and fat and searchable.  The more talk you hear about the government restricting or prohibiting encryption, the more you ought to consider buying a little place outside our borders--you know, just to summer in.