A 13 year-old chimes in on Privacy in the U.S.
This is an actual essay written by a 13 year old boy for his English class. This kid has an amazing amount of awareness.
Privacy? You see a lot more cameras everywhere these days. You hear that the government is tapping your phones, reading your mail and even going to the trouble of following what you buy at the store and the books you read at the library. For national security, they say. Bush has changed many of our privacy related laws and some of our Constitutional rights have been disregarded. My privacy is important to me because my beliefs of what "the right thing to do" may be different than those who are checking up on me. Who makes the decision of what is right and what is wrong? It is freedom to think for yourself and freedom to be yourself.
We are told that it is to keep us safe. However, the facts don’t lie. In the year 2001, there were 3,000 people supposedly killed by terrorists. In that year, 11 times more people killed themselves. A person was 145 times more likely to die by smoking, 133 times more likely to eat them self to death, 28 times more likely to die from alcoholism, 100 times more likely to be killed in a car accident and 145 times more likely to die by misdiagnoses by their doctor. Heart attacks are the #1 killer in America.That was 2001. In the years since 2001 your chances of death by obesity has been 499,000 times more likely than being killed by a terrorist! We don’t need more security and less privacy. Security is almost useless. Who is going to invade us? Unless we go into Iran and then there is a possibility of WWIII. If someone invades us Bush sends a bunch of nukes everywhere- were dead from nuclear winter. If someone shoots at us we shoot at them- everyone’s dead either way. Nukes now are something like a hundred times more powerful than what landed on.
If we were to have no privacy at all we would loose all that America stands for. When the early immigrants came to the US from England, they wanted to get away from their King. That King could imprison them without a trial, control their beliefs, and basically manipulate their lives. To lose our privacy is the first step to lose control of our lives. In our country the Bushies want to convince us that homosexuals are inferior, that the blacks of New Orleans didn’t need to be saved, and that greed is more valuable than life. To me the US under Bush is becoming like England under the King.
Bottom line: We do not need so many cameras. In banks maybe. But we do not need all of this tracking stuff. By the way there are tracking devices in credit cards so you don’t need to buy stuff anymore for them to be able to track you. Same with clothing, if you buy it with a credit card. If something is really important someone can always get a Court order or bring in a bunch of witnesses, and if Bush doesn’t want you to know about something you won’t. When the pentagon was annihilated the gas stations, banks, hotels etc. that had video surveillance pointing outwards from the buildings, was quickly and discreetly raided by Secret Service so that Bush could say that it was a plane. But if it was a plane why wasn’t there any parts left on the ground? Why were all of the Pentagons anti-missile and anti-aircraft weapons removed from where the “plane” struck? In 2001 when the twin towers went down,(plane actually did hit that) a lot of people said they heard something that sounded like successive gunshots, demolition experts say that it was charges that detonated in succession. Maybe. One point that leads to this conclusion is that all the security crews were changed before 9/11 and that all the dogs that could smell explosives were removed from the towers. That’s kind of strange. Could it also mean that people new that it was going to happen before it did?
That pretty much sums up my ideas about privacy. I think it is much more important than security if security is going to be used how I wrote about earlier. If security is being used I think people should be careful which is chosen over the other. Like the law Habeas Corpus was recently abolished. That said that an individual is now longer entitled to a trial. Or what about the new law saying that the US troops now for the first time ever are allowed to shoot and kill US citizens. Scary. A lot like that was an awesome movie. Maybe the government is getting ready for an uprising.I wonder which side the army will take. Throughout time we have gone through many wars and many casualties and never before have we lost so many important rights in the name of security. Why should we now?
"The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
-- Winston Churchill
The US government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials."
--The Washington Post
Privacy? You see a lot more cameras everywhere these days. You hear that the government is tapping your phones, reading your mail and even going to the trouble of following what you buy at the store and the books you read at the library. For national security, they say. Bush has changed many of our privacy related laws and some of our Constitutional rights have been disregarded. My privacy is important to me because my beliefs of what "the right thing to do" may be different than those who are checking up on me. Who makes the decision of what is right and what is wrong? It is freedom to think for yourself and freedom to be yourself.
We are told that it is to keep us safe. However, the facts don’t lie. In the year 2001, there were 3,000 people supposedly killed by terrorists. In that year, 11 times more people killed themselves. A person was 145 times more likely to die by smoking, 133 times more likely to eat them self to death, 28 times more likely to die from alcoholism, 100 times more likely to be killed in a car accident and 145 times more likely to die by misdiagnoses by their doctor. Heart attacks are the #1 killer in America.That was 2001. In the years since 2001 your chances of death by obesity has been 499,000 times more likely than being killed by a terrorist! We don’t need more security and less privacy. Security is almost useless. Who is going to invade us? Unless we go into Iran and then there is a possibility of WWIII. If someone invades us Bush sends a bunch of nukes everywhere- were dead from nuclear winter. If someone shoots at us we shoot at them- everyone’s dead either way. Nukes now are something like a hundred times more powerful than what landed on.
If we were to have no privacy at all we would loose all that America stands for. When the early immigrants came to the US from England, they wanted to get away from their King. That King could imprison them without a trial, control their beliefs, and basically manipulate their lives. To lose our privacy is the first step to lose control of our lives. In our country the Bushies want to convince us that homosexuals are inferior, that the blacks of New Orleans didn’t need to be saved, and that greed is more valuable than life. To me the US under Bush is becoming like England under the King.
Bottom line: We do not need so many cameras. In banks maybe. But we do not need all of this tracking stuff. By the way there are tracking devices in credit cards so you don’t need to buy stuff anymore for them to be able to track you. Same with clothing, if you buy it with a credit card. If something is really important someone can always get a Court order or bring in a bunch of witnesses, and if Bush doesn’t want you to know about something you won’t. When the pentagon was annihilated the gas stations, banks, hotels etc. that had video surveillance pointing outwards from the buildings, was quickly and discreetly raided by Secret Service so that Bush could say that it was a plane. But if it was a plane why wasn’t there any parts left on the ground? Why were all of the Pentagons anti-missile and anti-aircraft weapons removed from where the “plane” struck? In 2001 when the twin towers went down,(plane actually did hit that) a lot of people said they heard something that sounded like successive gunshots, demolition experts say that it was charges that detonated in succession. Maybe. One point that leads to this conclusion is that all the security crews were changed before 9/11 and that all the dogs that could smell explosives were removed from the towers. That’s kind of strange. Could it also mean that people new that it was going to happen before it did?
That pretty much sums up my ideas about privacy. I think it is much more important than security if security is going to be used how I wrote about earlier. If security is being used I think people should be careful which is chosen over the other. Like the law Habeas Corpus was recently abolished. That said that an individual is now longer entitled to a trial. Or what about the new law saying that the US troops now for the first time ever are allowed to shoot and kill US citizens. Scary. A lot like that was an awesome movie. Maybe the government is getting ready for an uprising.I wonder which side the army will take. Throughout time we have gone through many wars and many casualties and never before have we lost so many important rights in the name of security. Why should we now?
"The power of the executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious, and the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
-- Winston Churchill
The US government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials."
--The Washington Post
posted by Sam at 3:56 PM
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