I Spy with my Little Eye...a load of rubbish.
One day during break, I took a break from watching wasp larvae destroy caterpillars from within on Animal Planet to watch the news. To be honest, it wasn't due to some deep seated desire to know what was going on in the world around me; rather I had missed the day's soccer games and wanted to know the scores. So I switched over to Sky News. It turns out I was about 15 minutes early for the sports news.
I sat through the news stories (quite frankly, the wasp larvae thing was rank) and apparently President Bush was in a bit of a jam over his decision to spy on people without a warrant. I sort of tuned out as I do when I see a politician speak. It didn't seem like a big deal to me, and it still doesn't right now having researched it for this piece.
It seems to be all about principle. Most people don't have anything to hide and if you do and you're talking about it on the phone or emailing it from your Yahoo account which even a baby could hack into given enough time, then you are a complete and utter idiot who deserves to be caught anyways. However, much of the indignance comes from the fact that the Government (shock horror) might have broken the law and violated the constitution.
I'll give them that it is a little shady. The United States is not the only country to spy on its citizens. In the UK , there are CCTV cameras everywhere. It was these CCTV cameras that helped identify the July 21st, 2005 attempted suicide bombers and which led to their subsequent apprehension. The difference between the CCTV cameras and the eavesdropping without warrants is that the British people know there are cameras whilst most Americans were unaware until recently that their conversations might have been listened to. So why the secrecy? The White House will say something along the lines of "Well duh, how are we supposed to catch terrorists if they know we're listening?"
Nobody got hurt, though. In fact, the spying has probably been more of a help than a hindrance. According to the New York Times, the monitoring has been credited with disrupting some terrorist plots. The people who probably suffered the most through this are the monitors who must've had to listen to so much crap in the hopes of hearing a juicy conversation involving one of box-cutters, gelignite, and recin, among other things. They probably have some sort of NSA Spot It Pool going on where they give themselves points for something happening while they listen. For instance:-
- Person eating a burger - 10 points
- Person choking on burger - 100 points
- Person having phone sex - 10 points (100 points if they are members of the clergy; 500 points if they say "play with my/your fluffy pillows" or something similar.)
- Person receiving bad news - 20 points (100 points if they take it very badly complete with noisy sobbing.)
- Person calling in sick - 5 points (100 points if they then order in Chinese/Pizza)
- Person bitching out a telemarketer - 10 points (100 if it is particularly hilarious), and so on.
The bottom line is that a lot of the people will have problems with The President even if he saves the world from destruction by an asteroid, while feeding the homeless and eradicating unemployment. That's politics- the Science of Making a Big Deal out of nothing.