Slashdot Mirror
DNI Office Asks Why People Trust Facebook More Than the Government
Daniel_Stuckey writes "General Counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence Robert S. Litt explained that our expectation of privacy isn't legally recognized by the Supreme Court once we've offered it to a third party. Thus, sifting through third party data doesn't qualify 'on a constitutional level' as invasive to our personal privacy. This he brought to an interesting point about volunteered personal data, and social media habits. Our willingness to give our information to companies and social networking websites is baffling to the ODNI. 'Why is it that people are willing to expose large quantities of information to private parties but don't want the Government to have the same information?,' he asked."
I was going to start by talking about the fact that social media can't come after you with guns and exact taxes. Previous commenters covered that well. But government doesn't share the info they collect. They sit on it. At least with Facebook, when I share information with friends, there is a good expectation of reciprocity. With government, it is almost all one way. If government made it clear WHAT information they had on me, and gave me an opportunity to annotate their observations, and if they made decisions affecting me with MY INPUT beyond and above the secret info they collect, I'd have no problem with the information they already collect. I mean, we can't stop them. At every period in history, government has collected as much information as they can. What is important is transparency and accountability. The glass ceiling isn't just for women and racial minorities. If we're going to live in a feudal society, we should at least be honest about it. I hate the pretty illusions and lies.
I would add that people give their information voluntarily to these third parties, while the government takes it using the threat of violence. People give their information to third parties because the third party offers a service for storing and distributing their information to select friends and acquaintances. The government takes and distributes information to an untold number of alphabet soup agencies for some abstract, unproven and unconstitutional notion of security.
Furthermore, the very definition of sharing information at all requires that you do it with a third party. So does the ODNI suggest that the government be privy to communication between me and my doctor? Lawyer? Wife?! That we're even at the point that government officials are asking these questions is proof that the government has grown too big and powerful for the good of the people.
“When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.” -Thomas Jefferson
"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." -James Madison
Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium.
Just scroll down a few slashdot stories to see some examples of government abuse of power and ways it over-reacts with police force against private citizens. Heck, My home state now has a moritorium on the death penalty because we kept sending innocent people to death row.
If the people of the State of Illinois killed innocent people, does that make them all murderers?