17Apr2003
Your life has been computerized. Every store with a discount card tracks your purchases and sells that information to advertisers. To force people to use them, the stores raise prices all over and 'discount' them back to almost where they started. Shopping without using a card gets harder and more expensive every year.
Now the government wants to create a master file on all Americans, citizens and others, to fight terrorism. If you've been annoyed by computer mistakes before, wait until the Feds arrive with a warrant and seal you away from help because of a computer error. Don't think it will happen to a citizen? Sorry, it already has.
Here's a great column about this by one of my favorite columnists, Wendy M. Grossman.
Here's another portent of the so called Patriot Laws.
I find these stories chilling and far more danger to my freedom than any terrorist. The worst terrorists can do is kill a relatively small number of people. The potential of these laws and Homeland Security can create a dictatorship of the US.
Our freedoms can be constrained, whittled down, lost. Citizens could (and have) disappeared, self censorship already is happening, and travel documents and/or ID cards could be next, all in the name of security and patriotism. The list of what they could do under current laws, never mind the extensions they currently have in Congress, makes the book "1984" seem tame by comparison.
I'll close with a quote from Ben Franklin, one of our nation's founders:
"Those who give up a little freedom for security will soon have neither freedom nor security."
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