Dear America,
The PBS program "Frontline" showed the first part of a two part exposé of Facebook's cavalier attitude toward the right to privacy of its users. Since the 2016 election, much has been made of the nefarious use by the Russians of the data Facebook collects, and for that matter Facebook itself, in the election on behalf of Donald Trump. The proliferation of canards, calumnies and outright lies on that particular social medium, but on social media in general, has become a cause célèbre across the world, but in this country in particular. But one has to wonder why it has taken so long for the public to recognize the dangers represented by the rampant theft of our identifying information. Recall that after the September 11th terrorist attacks, our government enacted the "Patriot Act" for the purpose of protecting our people, and at that time, even with the massive loss of life and shocking details of those attacks, there was controversy, especially when the act's sunset clause came around and its renewal was in the offing, first under the George W. Bush administration and later during the Obama administration. Civil liberties are implicated by the plenary right to supervise our communications and activities that the Patriot Act comprises, and it wasn't just civil libertarians who were asking questions. In fact, I would opine that President Obama's advocacy for extension of the Patriot Act was one of the least popular things he ever did, and the nature of our spy agencies' power pursuant to the act is so sensitive that a program about it created by PBS is still unavailable for viewing on television.
The tension between individual rights vis-à-vis the government, either state, local or federal, continues unabated to this day. Yet we have blithely--not I since I refuse to use social media or even take cookies on my computer and my phone to the extent that I can prevent them from being implanted, but billions of us--sacrificed our right to control data about our lives...sometimes intimate and sensitive data...in the name of narcissism and the ability to shop on-line. When it was the government intruding on us, we were up in arms...at least many of us were. But somehow we don't seem so upset when it's Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. Since Microsoft took over the world of computing in the seventies, we have just rolled over and played dead on this issue in the name of almighty commerce, the American creed. It seems that if government does it, it is a threat to democracy, but if business and industry do it, it's good for us. What are we collectively thinking?
The Frontline piece demonstrated an almost perverse aura of epiphany such as might be the case if none of this had ever been revealed much less widely reported on the news and in the papers. I don't fault Frontline for that; I fault us, America, because we have elected and reelected people to our legislature, and for that matter to our presidency, who do nothing about this, putatively out of concern for our first amendment freedoms while they don't seem too concerned about them at all when it comes to the NSA, and I guess that's actually a consistent approach. Our government and free enterprise seem to want all of our personal lives out in the open so that they can "protect" us and prey on us respectively. However, if we stand back and look at the whole constellation of the facts, we see this. As to protecting us, our government still protects the purchase, sale and proliferation of the things that mad people kill us with. And as to preying on us, our phones ring every day, pulling us away from the stoves on which we are cooking our meals and awakening our sleeping children on the off chance that we might be stupid enough to give up even more information or in the alternative buy something worthless or give to a bogus organization that claims to be on our side. And we sit by and let the same people control our lives this way.
But reprehensible as they are, the government agents who watch every move we make right next to the "entrepreneurs" who get rich claiming that they employ and feed us, we put them there and keep them there. To paraphrase the immortal bard, the fault is not in our stars and our predators but in ourselves. We go to the polls, as we will next week, and vote on the basis of the suspect information that we individually and in groups chose to believe. If the congress stays Republican, don't blame them for being self-seeking and disingenuous. We have only ourselves to blame.
Your friend,
Mike
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