I am one who has never done Facebook. Primarily because when it started, I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to connect with old school mates, or share photos online with friends and family. I had no interest in the details of their children’s minute by minute lives, or what a GREAT vacation they had at their ‘time share’. Just send me the Christmas card letter. That is enough information for me. Frankly, I just didn’t have the time for it.
Then there was the other disincentive, and that my wife’s admonitions, “Don’t you dare join, so your old girl friends can find you!” She had heard too many upsetting stories from her friends of their mates having dalliances started from Facebook “friends”. 🙂
My only recent concessions to social media has been Twitter and Linkedin, and sometimes I wonder if that wasn’t a mistake. I held off on those for years, until my need (desire) to counter the FATCA Compliance Complex on Linkedin or warn about FATCA on Twitter overcame my better judgement. I am in the process or re-evaluating that, but I know my history is already scooped up by the NSA to be used however the government wants in the future. Even my email on Yahoo servers is theirs now!
The last few weeks of news about NSA surveillance and total global information data gathering is unsettling in many ways. Even if you believe that there may be no current threat from our government as Obama has tried to reassure us, you live with the knowledge that NSA Leadership lies, and everything you do online, will be gathered, stored and will never be purged, EVER!
Many friends shrug it off with the lame self delusional justification, “I have nothing to hide“. If you are being honest, you have to ask yourself, how will your data be used in the future against you? Answer, we don’t know! However, given human nature, that our Constitution was designed to guard against, I think it is safe to say, do not assume that it will be benign.
On the bright side, it does give you some immortality. You live on forever, with your details stored in Utah. So its not just the Mormons in Utah baptizing you into heaven, now the NSA is assuring the electronic YOU, never dies. Along with my tombstone engraving that says “He was FBAR Compliant”, I can now add, “Life Details on NSA Severs”.
Yesterday, I received this email from a contributor on Isaac Brock that uses the alias of Plato, or I often call him ‘The Economist’. I have borrowed some of his salient comments for previous posts. With his permission, I share this one here:
Dear friends and family,
I wanted to let you know that this will be my last post on Facebook. I am cancelling my account because it has become clear that the US Government through the NSA and other agencies have been systematically violating all of our 4th and 5th Amendment rights and guarantees under the Constitution.
Here is what the 4th Amendment says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
It is clear from the Snowden revelations that not only is the NSA doing this but their plans are even bigger. Despite what Pres. Obama and others say, what the NSA is doing IS a violation of your privacy. They do not need to listen to your phone calls, read your emails, or look at all your posts on Facebook or other social media sites to know virtually EVERYTHING about you! They have profiled you completely – through TSA they even have several X-ray images of you naked, too.
They say this is for “your own protection” because of a “war on terror” that Pres. Obama has declared no longer exists. If it really worked, then why didn’t they stop the Boston bombing? The Russians even warned them about these two guys! It didn’t work because that is NOT what it is for.
Since I have friends and family outside of the USA I refuse to provide the NSA and the rest of the government the means to force Facebook to aid them in profiling them, too. Because the technology certainly exists to follow FB and other social media wherever the connections lead them – and you have no control over what they do, no way to object, and no rights anymore to stop them!
Part of the 5th Amendment states: “…no one shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.”
Here is your legal position with respect to anything posted on Facebook: YOU HAVE NONE!
EVERYTHING you post on FB becomes both THEIR property and PUBLIC property. If someone wants to take anything you posted and misrepresent you, you have no rights to sue for libel or slander. This, of course, includes the government. If any of you admit to a wrong-doing of any nature (like smoking marijuana, etc.), it CAN be used against you! Being on FB is an ipso facto act of your giving up your rights and protection.
I, for one, no longer am willing to facilitate this un-American, unConstitutional process. I suggest you all start vigorously protesting to your representatives to let them know that this is simply unacceptable in America!! I refuse to live out the rest of my life aiding and abetting this totalitarian process.
BTW, this is the third time I’ve tried to post this; ironically the other times FB simply stopped working. I wrote this off-line and posted it.
Don’t you hate it when “The Onion” gets it right, years before Snowden tells us! They just assumed the wrong secret agency, the CIA instead of the NSA.
Truly distressing where the world (as being shaped by the US) is now at.
I do not use a smart phone at all. Yes I know that cell phones are logged too but the smart phones are worse …. I had a tablet once that ran on Android …. wouldn’t do much of anything unless I opened a gmail account ….. after a week or three I cancelled the gmail account and have not used the tablet since. I avoid directly using anything operated by Google like the plague and when doing searches use startpage.com (a European site that shields your IP address and deliberately does NOT record your searches and so has no database to be captured by anyone. For email check out gmx.com (I am not sure about this but it seems a better bet than Google and Hotmail) but am still trying to find a good email provider outside the US that actively seeks to protect one’s privacy …. whilst realizing that ANY digital communication is indefinitely susceptible to capture, cracking and misinterpretation … yet so is face to face live conversation … just that once said, the live conversation is over unless recorded. Is this paranoia?
BTW the story about the school teacher is a good one …. I am familiar with a circumstance where a Government in a developing country wanted to create industry that would employ many people and earn hard currency – so they created Export oriented Free Zones behind walls and wire fences with Guards and Customs officers to control every thing that entered or left the Zones for fear that something imported into the Zone without duty being paid might “leak” into the Customs territory instead of being exported to a foreign market. The Customs regulations and rituals became harder and harder to comply with and I made the point that …… The increased bureaucratic difficulties and higher fences to protect against minimal loss of duty through a little leakage into the Customs Territory would so burden and increase the operating costs of the legitimate business that those businesses would close and migrate to more cost effective and efficient locations around the world and the loss to the Customs Territory through lack of employment and Hard Currency earnings would be much worse. Of course no one would listen to little me … and the learned ridiculed my view …. yet in a few years my prediction came to pass. Common sense is am amazing thing.
I keep thinking how sensible of Petros to move the web site to a host located outside the US. I have come to believe that everything should be focused outside the US given the recent behavior of the US. Perhaps if the world would only focus its business activity elsewhere and leave to US to themselves then the US might begin to realize just how extremely awful their behavior has become.