No, You Can't Watch

In the news recently comes a story about the latest technological revolution in the service of individual liberty.  A cryptographic dream...or nightmare...depending on your perspective.

Back in October, the startup tech firm Silent Circle ruffled governments’ feathers with a “surveillance-proof” smartphone app to allow people to make secure phone calls and send texts easily. Now, the company is pushing things even further—with a groundbreaking encrypted data transfer app that will enable people to send files securely from a smartphone or tablet at the touch of a button. (For now, it’s just being released for iPhones and iPads, though Android versions should come soon.) That means photographs, videos, spreadsheets, you name it—sent scrambled from one person to another in a matter of seconds.

...

If governments don’t come round, though, Silent Circle’s solution is simple: The team will close up shop and move to a jurisdiction that won’t try to force them to comply with surveillance.

“We feel that every citizen has a right to communicate,” Janke says, “the right to send data without the fear of it being grabbed out of the air and used by criminals, stored by governments, and aggregated by companies that sell it.”

 How cool is that?  Very cool!  Anything that limits the intrusion of government in our private lives should be considered a step forward for everyone.

Professionalize! Federalize?

I don't know much about this chap, Alex Jones.  But it appears as though he has poked the TSA one too many times.  As a result, he is harassed by TSA agents every time he flies.

I seem to recall that some Democrats were making the assertion that "when you federalize, you professionalize" during the debates over the formation of the TSA.

This is apparently what the TSA considers to be "professional" conduct.  They are doing it wrong.  Trust me.

I Know Where You Are

Imagine a government agency that can compel certain groups of people to visit its offices.  The imagine that this agency further compels these visitors to wear identification tags during every visit.  Imagine those ID tags also contain RFID chips so that the government agency can know where each and every person is while in or near their facility.

How many people would be outraged?  How long would this policy last?

The agency is a school.  The "certain groups" would be students.

The number of outraged families is one.

By the time the government gets around to mandating that RFID chips be surgically implanted in every citizen, I fully expect not to hear a single "baaa".

One of the reasons for structuring our public school days in hourly segments was to prepare students for life in an industrial setting.  They had to be trained to move in response to bells and similar broad scale signals.  Independent thought and pursuit of personal interests went right out the window.

Where better to wear down the public's expectation of privacy than in our public schools.  In another 30 years, the government will be able to go where it wants, when it wants, and no one will dare suggest it to be out of place. 

The Fourth Amendment right to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects as well as our expectation that government agents would secure warrants before conducting a search will be so twisted as to become unrecognizable to the men that wrote the Amendment in the first place.  If they can do it to the "commerce clause" and the "general welfare clause" to permit the New Deal, Social Security, and similar extra Constitutional activities, then we can expect people that support a "living Constitution" to fully embrace a government that readily asks the digital equivalent of "papers please" on a routine basis.