On Becoming A Bit

Sure, you FEEL like a human being. Like a …..person. You have flesh and bodily functions and other people treat you like a person and all, but you aren’t a person anymore in a very important way. You are a bit.

States quietly buy, mine personal data — including names of your associates and relatives

And of course, it all starts at the top…

The Bush Administration Intelligence Hydra

You are an electronic file.

And when you displease the government….or your credit card company…or your HMO by say, wanting medical treatment….

Your file is pulled. And scrutinized. And judged.

Your life is no longer private. Your police record is no longer separated from your medical record or your credit record or your driving record or your tax record. If not now…soon. And if not now, soon….the jamoch at the DMV or the phone company can pull up your file and there you are, laid out like a centerfold. And it is only going to get worse Real ID as a wedge issue

As mcjoan says in the link above…

Warrantless wiretapping, retroactive immunity, Operation Total Information Awareness, passport file breaches, a toothless Oversight Operations Board stacked with cronies. Each a head on the monster that is the Bush administration’s approach to intelligence, one in which political expediency trumps the Constitution every time.

snip

So it’s time for the public to flex its muscle on this issue. The first step is to demand what Sen. Wyden is calling for–public hearings about what the government is up to in implementing the various components of Operation Total Information Awareness in outright defiance of a Congressional ban. The intelligence committees should immediate convene hearings and demand public answers. That means you, Jello Jay Rockefeller need to do your job. Every Democrat on that committee (Feinstein, Wyden, Bayh, Mikulski, Bill Nelson, Feingold, and Whitehouse) should be demanding hearings as well.

(You can contact them through the Contact Congress box on the right of the page.)

As I said in an earlier essay

One of the basic functions of government is supposed to be limiting government expansion. Government oversight. This is in many ways, the government truly representing The People. “The Government” knows this, the government knows The People want to limit it….and so we end up, after a long circumnavigation….back at our title. Our reality has become on a very very deep level, The Government vs, The People. And right now….the Government is winning.