During the past few weeks we have learned an important thing: Our government is out of control and it has been for a long time. We have been living our lives, going to work, paying our bills and raising our families. Every two years, we’ve gone to the ballot box and voted for what we thought was the lesser of two evils. We are now beginning to learn that the lesser of two evils is still evil.
The government is tracking your phone calls, texts, emails, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Skype calls and credit card transactions. The government will tell you it is just “collecting data,” not listening to phone calls. By the way, my smartphone has GPS; they are collecting that data too. Kroger collects data on the food I buy in the guise of better pricing. It is just data collection and citizens have nothing to worry about, as long as they’re not doing anything wrong. But who determines what is “wrong”? Remember when the government in New York City determined that sugary drinks are “wrong”?
I have been involved in politics, to some extent, for most of my adult life. The past six years I have been much more involved and what I have seen concerns me. The mantra of every group I have been involved with during the past six years has been “collect as much data as possible: name, cell number, emails, addresses, married/ single, children, race, religion, groups they belong to, etc.” Everything is about developing lists and gathering as much information as possible. Lists are the key to winning. At first I did not understand why these groups craved so much data. Then I was shown it is all about studying patterns and predicting outcomes.
Humans are creatures of habit. We go to the same restaurants and order the same things because we know what we like. We like to stay in our comfort zone. In our comfort zone things are predictable and we crave predictability. There is nothing wrong with this; it allows us to live our lives with reasonable expectations that if we do something that we’ve done before, and we were happy because of it, we will likely do it again.
This predictability is why lists and data are so important to political organizations and the government. This predictability allows the political organizations to target groups of people, or demographics that will donate money or make phone calls. Predictability can identify those who are most likely to vote and those who will likely need some prodding to get to the polls. Database prediction also allows political organizations to mass market to certain groups and change the marketing based on the group to whom they are catering. With enough data, an organization can predict a person’s likely behavior in the future.
The government has an advantage over all other organizations because we are forced to provide all that data to the government via the Internal Revenue Service and our tax returns. As we have found out in the past weeks, the government is also collecting our data through phone calls, emails, Facebook and other social media. So it follows that if political and commercial organizations can predict how you will act in the future with the amount of data they collect, the government must have a much clearer idea of how we will act in the future. This is where things become interesting.
The question is why, and to what end, is the government collecting and storing so much data? If the point of collecting this data is to predict how groups and individuals will act in the future, why, then, is the government so concerned about how citizens will behave in the future?
Let’s assume that the government is using data collection to determine how people will vote. The government would never target groups of people or individuals who challenge the bureaucracy, right? Certainly, those in power would never target groups and harass them if they “liked” the Fair Tax page on Facebook? What if I referenced the Communist Party USA in a Facebook status, or shared a quote from Rush Limbaugh or Michael Moore, that would not make the FBI interested in my “behavior,” right? I mean if our government is not interested in my behavior on social media sites, in emails I send and receive, in phones calls I take and make or in websites I visit that Google happens to remember automatically, what reason would it have to store it at all? As the famous line from “Star Wars” goes, “These aren’t the droids we are looking for. … Move along.”
Email columnist Scott Allegrini at letters@tfpfeb.toledowebdesigns.com.
