THE CRUX OF IT: You’re not paranoid if they’re actually watching you.

 

Reuters’s Joseph Menn reported that Yahoo assisted with a  wire-tap service and chose to comply with governmental classified “directive” to build “a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information to be provided by U.S. intelligence officials” — the NSA in particular.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer did not refuse or resist the request in any manner.

The specifics of the directive are unclear but it is believed that the request invoked Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which permits the bulk collection of communications for the purpose of targeting a foreign individual.

But no specific foreign target was identified. Rather, every single Yahoo account holder was placed under surveillance .

Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell claims, “We fight any requests that we deem unclear, improper, overbroad, or unlawful,”

But that is obviously not factual.

Similar statements were made by officials at Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Apple who have professed that any such request would be denied and also challenged in court.

Patrick Toomey, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, said  that “the order issued to Yahoo appears to be unprecedented and unconstitutional. The government appears to have compelled Yahoo to conduct precisely the type of general, suspicionless search that the Fourth Amendment was intended to prohibit.”

So, in this technological time that we live in, can there be any reasonable expectation of privacy or autonomy?

The answer is both yes and no.

While innovation provides the means to almost any conceived end now ( if not now then soon), the mechanisms put in place to prevent overreach should be preventative.

In other words; the rule of law should supersede what tech advances can accomplish by ensuring that those wielding said tech are unable to act outside of lawful boundaries without consequences.

 

That is not happening and there aren’t any consequences enacted!

You are being watched and recorded  – that is not in question.

Whether or not you care or think there is anything to be done about it is.