Much has been made of recent revelations that the NSA is basically tapping everything, including the entire Internet, in order to fight terrorism. The implicit invasion of privacy is unmistakable, yet the story has swung wildly from one extreme to the other, depending on who you read. For now, I choose to believe that the NSA has taken a lawful approach that severely restricts the use of said data to simply searching for patterns that imply terrorism. Until we hear that rendition has ticked up a notch, I think that makes sense. However, this does not mean that I disagree that the US government should be watched by its people to make certain that they are sticking to their own constraints.
What has me writing this piece is the fact that I have no such faith in our Canadian government, as the large C conservatives (who basically came from the Reform party, a somewhat more extreme right wing party than our previous progressive conservatives, and one that has ceased to be amusing as they seem to want to stomp all over our Canadian identity) have a track record of side-stepping the law (proroguing the government not once but twice to escape scrutiny, and wiping out the Wheat Board without following due process as written in law are but two examples) …
So I was not surprised, but also not at all pleased, to read this headline:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2013/06/14/f-sunday-edition-government-history.html?cmp=rss
*sigh* … really?
I reread 1984 very recently … and taking control of history (“tweaking” it as necessary) was Big Brother’s signature technique to get the population completely under control. The rest – duplicitousness and deceit – we already have that in our politics, obviously …
