mycatharsis.com

In President Bush’s America,  nobody.  Literally.

Brought to you by a Republican and Christian president, of all people. Nurtured on a steady diet of Milton William Cooper, Brother Stair, and other shortwave icons of varying sanities during my somewhat nerdy high school years, I always expected Bill Clinton to be the one to usher in this age for us during the 90s.  Boy, was I wrong.  I don’t care if it puts me on their watchlist to say this, but screw the FBI.  No way in hell I’m giving them this information, voluntarily at least.  I’m so glad the same organization that can’t even follow the constitutional boundaries set by George W. Bush is telling me they won’t abuse the information they gather, but for some reason I don’t quite buy that.

The nation that imprisons more people per capita than Russia, China, Iran, or ANY other country in the world now wants to compile a massive database containing all it’s citizen’s physical characteristics. (They claim they’ll only store criminal’s info, but not even this programs supporters could not seriously believe that).   Home of the free indeed!

In an era where we are being subjected to more and more unique ways of privacy invasion, traffic cameras, REAL ID cards, data mining, and more,  the age-old question comes up, “Who watches the watchers?”  Apparently, if you know what’s good for you, no one.  A man in Massachusetts is on trial for nothing more than videotaping an arrest by police with cell phone camera.  This is simply shameful, no other way to put it.  The police should be ashamed for arresting this guy, and the D.A. should be ashamed for prosecuting him.  There is ONLY ONE reason to go to all this trouble.  ONE.  The police and D.A. are worried enough about how their actions look on camera that they don’t want ANYONE recording them.  And for that, they should be ashamed of themselves, quite simply.

About the only positive here is that they are prosecuting based on a Massachusetts state law meant to protect citizen’s privacy.  But for public servants charged with special privileges and powers by  our society to claim they are not subject to citizen oversight, is, well, extraordinarily scary. The potential consequences of accepting the contention that oversight is unnecessary are dire.  Politically motivated prosecutions,  prosecutorial overrreach, police harassment and beatings, etc. Not that they’re inevitable, but enough of this is already happening, and telling our public servants they don’t have to worry about consequences of these actions just cannot be good.  Thank god our President would never make such a claim to be above the law! oh wait …