WHAT? ME WORRY?

In discussion with a couple friends over a few steaming cup o' joes about how ridiculous the notion that THEY (we all know who THEY is. Big Brother, The All Knowing Eye, Suits) know what we've done, where we've been, and what we're doing right now - I laughed, and said, how SILLY! I then called my partner, and asked him to make sure Cedric the Entertainer (our pet boxer) got his water from the fridge and the leftover ribeye from last night. I then went to the store to pickup my prescriptions and a pound of pepper jack cheese, and as I thought about my earlier discussion, I though, "come on guys, really how truly fearful have we become?
I mean they couldn't find me if they really wanted to if I wasn't at my residence, could they?" Then it hit me, as I paid with my credit card and got $1 off for using my loyalty card from Kroger's Food & Drug -----

I was a fool. How hard would it be for the goverment in one of it's many forms, to choose the best day possible out of all my days, the best one to serve whatever purpose they wanted to use against me? They could get the records of when I was at the store, what I bought, what I was prescribed, all from the store if they flashed the right credentials. I then thought what else could they know about all of us?

Well, if you use a toll pass like most of us do that work in the city, they know where you are at on the roads & what time, & if they wanted to, could wait for you at the next toll booth by monitoring that, ok, just throw that away and the loyalty card, even though you'll be overpaying and having to sit in lines to get through the toll booths. Fine, but then they could just monitor your cell phone to determine what tower your signal is connected the closest to, and have a pretty good idea where to find you, and most people can't live without their phones. Then I recalled hearing from an old guy wearing bibs that the government has a transmitter in all our tires, could that be true, I thought? But what else are they doing that they can keep track of?

Besides the obvious, like credit cards, they can also know what movies you rent, the books you take out from the library, what some of our kids are eating for lunch, when & where they leave the school building, see us on dozens of cameras placed around the cities at major intersections and outside major businesses or gov't agencies.
And, I must not forget the ever loving peering eyes of the gov't, and it's use of the internet, to know where we've been on the net or let friends or relatives visit when they're on it. And what about paid shills, I mean with all the recent news of a dozen or more journalists being on the goverment's payroll as employees to espouse dogma for the White House edict, who might be in our lives who is actually a paid informant for the military as a teacher, policeman, council member, or doctor, who holds information about us, or we look to for advice?

And I thought to myself, the only way I can be totally free of BIG BROTHER is to move out into the country and not use any of the items I mentioned above. It may come to that with the repeated stories of ID tags for your pets, then the stories of ones for school kids in select cities, and when will they finally decide it's in the best interest for all newborns to be ID tagged for their safety, then in the complete end to uniqueness, privacy, and the ability to choose what one does with one's self so as long as it doesn't harm another -

A TOTALLY TAGGED CIVILIAN POPULATION.

I decided not to tell my two coffee drinking buddies about what I had thought about, no need to worry them any more than what they already worry about our goverment doing (and what they do that we don't know about), without hearing the ramblings of a man on his way home to see his loving partner and one of the greatest joys God has given them on the planet, the boxer known as Cedric the Entertainer.



(a good source of the national ID chip I just found after writing my experience --- http://www.worthynews.com/Government/chip.html )

The father of data mining, something our future Homeland Security Chief is very interested in...as if it's not already being used.

Out of convenience we voluntarily invite a lot of scrutiny into our lives, probably far more than we suspect when we rent a video or buy a book from Amazon. I'm aware but not paranoid (yet).

love your avatar by the way..

I'll look up data mining.

the avatar was in the DU library, just waiting for me (and others :) ). Here's one clip and link:

In the late 1960s and 1970s, the Red Army Faction (RAF) and other militant groups unleashed a stream of bombings, robberies, kidnappings, and murders throughout Germany. Faced with this growing threat, Horst Herold , head of Germany's Bundeskriminalamt (the BKA, or federal police), had a bold plan: to create a computer network to mine data from real-estate agencies, utility companies, and other sources, in hopes of pinpointing the terrorists' whereabouts.

As director of Germany's federal police, Horst Herold initiated a nationwide program in data mining and computer profiling.

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/apr03/fbisb2.html

An audio clip can be accessed here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1900455|Panel Calls for Data-Mining Privacy Laws>

And, here's something interesting:

http://www.eyebeam.org/reblog/archives/2004/05/gao_studies_us_government_data_m.html|GAO Studies U.S. Government Data Mining>

simple living, in the pursuit of goverment control & corporate bottom lines, has to answer for it all someday...

got another link?

http://www.eyebeam.org/reblog/archives/2004/05/gao_studies_us_government_data_m.html

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1900455

And, here's another NPR audio clip. It's an interview with the author of No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4482727

I don't say that often. thanks for the relinks.. reading that was so 1984!

Hey, the technology's been advancing for a while... :)

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.

he is a liberal, ya know? and yeah, THANKS A LOT, I needed to hear that I'm paranoid and that doesn't necessarily mean they're NOT out to get me...

sometimes I feel that intellectualism (and I'm a very devout Christian) is an enemy to this gov't..... and they want us silenced.

creeps me out dude....

of the same technology that brings many gifts, like the internet we are using. It's one more reason to get the goons out of office and restore democracy in this country.

Re your thread title: "What - Me Worry?" You probably know that is the signature quote from the mascot of Mad Magazine, Alfred E. Newman. This fictional character is a piefaced redhead with protuberant ears who looks so uncannily like Ted Koppel that one must suspect a genetic relationship. Given Koppel's role as Kool Aid dispenser -- "War Is Peace," "Ignorance Is Strength,: and so on, I think he is well cast as Orwell's Big Brother.

Andif that doesn't make any sense to you, you need to have another beer like me.
:toast:

Have a good weekend!
:hi:

when we were kids we'd stay up late and flick through the channels and see Ted and LAFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF cuz he looked like our dear campy Al E. Newman!