I apologize for the very brief posting this morning.
A website called "Stop Watching Us" (alternatively termed Stop
Watching US) asks us all to sign a petition demanding that the United States
government stop spying on citizens of all nations through actions taken by the
National Security Agency. Stop Watching Us was formed last week by a
coalition of civil liberties groups and has been backed by a "who's who" of freedom and privacy-based organizations including Electronic Frontier Foundation and Greenpeace USA.
The United
Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted on the 10th
of December, 1948 states the following in Article 12:
"No one shall be
subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or
correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the
right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."
The Commission was
made up of 18 members from various backgrounds and the UDHR Drafting Committee
was charred by Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of American President Franklin D.
Roosevelt. Obviously, at that time, the designers could not possibly have anticipated the degree to which governments can interfere with our privacy.
Here is an excerpt
from the letter sent to the U.S. Congress by Stop Watching Us:
"We are calling
on Congress to take immediate action to halt this surveillance and provide a
full public accounting of the NSA's and the FBI's data collection programs. We
call on Congress to immediately and publicly:
1.
Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT
Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear
that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any
person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be
reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;
2.
Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to
the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create
specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional
surveillance;
3.
Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be
responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance."
Thus far, over 195,000
people have signed the petition and, from the brief time I spent on the
website, it was growing very, very rapidly. It's obvious that there is a lot of anger out there.
Posts
This is a good idea however I doubt the gubment will listen unless that petition ends up with at least 100 million signatures. What's a few hundred thousands, or even 2 million protest signatures when you consider the size of the USA (over 300 million citizens)?
ReplyDeleteThen if they tell you they will back out of surveillance, it will probably be a lie anyways!
Many people would say that Governments spying on their citizens appears to have become a global phenomena, but is it? It sounds like many of the countries in Europe find the revelations of the America government collecting and sifting through "metadata" as somewhat distasteful. It should be pointed out that Europe also shares many of the same problems with terrorist attacks that we in America face. With all the noise we are easily distracted from the crux of the issue, whether this program needs to exist, and if the mind boggling amount of money being spent on collecting and saving mountains of data could be put to better use. My recent post on the subject can be found below,
ReplyDeletehttp://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2013/06/governments-spying-on-their-citizens.html
Unbelievable. You want America to be free from terrorists, yet you complain and bitch about your rights when the administration does things like this to monitor possible threats from our home turf. You morons..so what that they peruse your conversations and info. If you have nothing to hide, then you have no reason to complain. As for me, they can scan all they want and I hope this shit goes through. I think they should scan everything out there. The most recent threats to America came in from people living in it's borders, using it's resources including all data and electronic communication.
ReplyDeleteBy allowing the right to privacy to be abolished, we as citizens are putting those who govern us in a position to easily track ANYBODY who goes against ANYTHING the government says. No human institution/government ought to be trusted with that much POWER. Because after all,
Delete"Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton
Let's learn from the past.