John Still Has Some Old-Fashioned American Outrage About Surveillance

John writes:

Hey Marc,

I just saw this article on reddit. My initial reaction was skepticism but it appears to be true. If that is the case it is astounding. this is the sort of thing we were always told happened in the USSR or East Germany. And the real problem is that, with the federal government denying that it is monitoring all phone calls and internet use, how did they even get the information to conduct this travesty of justice? Is this what America has become?

John

I had seen the article in the press:

[T]hey were peppering my husband with questions. Where is he from? Where are his parents from? They asked about me, where was I, where do I work, where do my parents live. Do you have any bombs, they asked. Do you own a pressure cooker? My husband said no, but we have a rice cooker. Can you make a bomb with that? My husband said no, my wife uses it to make quinoa. What the hell is quinoa, they asked. ...

Have you ever looked up how to make a pressure cooker bomb? My husband, ever the oppositional kind, asked them if they themselves weren’t curious as to how a pressure cooker bomb works, if they ever looked it up. Two of them admitted they did.

I reply:

Yes, this is what America has become. It just means that truly private thoughts should never be entered into a keyboard and truly private actions should never be done in the presence of a cell phone. If you want to keep travels private be careful about the Feds watching your itinerary. Any kind of GPS instrumentation is risky, and there are instruments in any modern car. Better to go on a bike. We've twisted the concept of espionage too, to mean any unauthorized release of data, whether to an identifiable foe, or not. There will be consequences of all this, but just what they are isn't clear yet.