Blog #8 Big Brother

According to the TED Talk by Catherine Crump, the government as a whole is gathering information on us. This is not just at the Federal level but at the local level. At the very local level the police are monitoring and recording where we go and even sometimes who we're with. They use Stingray technology, allowing them to see whose phones are in a house, and even cell tower dumps where cell phone providers give law enforcement all the cell phone action that occurred in a certain area. The Federal level uses this information gathered by the local level to develop databases and track where and what Americans do all over the country.

Not only that, but our governments want to be able to listen to our phone calls, they want to be able to read our texts. Even though the governments may be able to more easily catch criminals, they would at the same time be listening to people who have never before committed a crime. It isn't just the government gathering information on us, however. 

We give the government and many others plenty of information about us; who we are, where we go, who we're with, our thoughts and opinions, how we decide to vote, how active we are in politics, the list goes on. The government and anyone else that wants to profit off of our information does not have to even wiretap us to find all of this out. all they have to do is look at any of our social media pages. It's all right there for them to gather. The digital footprints we leave are us voluntarily giving away many identifiable markers to big companies, governments, or anyone that is simply just curious.

Some may not care about any of this. Sometimes there's this mindset of, "I'm not doing anything wrong, why should I care.". The issues listed above should spook anyone as these issues affect all of us. With just cell tower dumps, Stingray technology, and licence plate photography we're being monitored and tracked by our government without even doing anything wrong. The government should refrain from gathering such information on its own citizens. We live in a society where the law gives us the presumption of innocence. The government should not be bulldozing our privacy, especially without any reason or cause, and they certainly should not be storing it in any database.

What can we do in order to retain and protect ourselves from an overreach into our privacy? An easy start would be to make sure what we post on social media is not something we would want governments and other actors to be interested in. Another way to safeguard against breaches in privacy, specifically wiretapping, is to make calls over facetime audio, as they have default encryption features installed. Finally as suggested by Catherine Crump in her TED Talk, we can lobby our local city councils to have their local police departments erase the databases they've developed on innocent citizens.