The worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

BECOMING A PERSON OF INTEREST

Part of the US government's job is to keep track of domestic affairs. Since 9/11 this has seemingly evolved from hobby to obsession. Wiretapping with minimal legal recourse by 'secret agencies' is a controversial practice that is commonly assumed to occur. I speculate that deeper, more dubious intelligence gathering methods are being employed.

Except for ideological reasons, these practices are meant to be seen as irrelevant to the non-terrorizing population. Think again Mr. Brown. I have reason to believe that two seemingly innocuous actions on my part have put me on some sort of watch list.

How/if this will impact my future is unknown. In the least, I actually feel a little paranoid about writing this entry. I'm purposefully staying away from acronyms like N S A, or posting certain IP addresses. I would suggest that my freedom of speech has been compromised.



On a previous version of my .EDU webpage (now deleted) I described my research interests. I am sufficiently religious (Christian, as is 76% of the US population) that I mentioned God in my introduction--basically saying that he has given us a lot of natural tools to do some useful things.

I happen to keep some basic statistics about who visits my webpage. There were multiple hits from the pent a gon and a few others from Virginia while this page was up. I will not go into details other than saying it sort of creeped me out. My page is not frequented that often, so I am pretty sure these were associated with the gov ernment. When I removed the references to God, the hits ceased.


A second instance of me stumbling towards possible infamy occurred back in my undergraduate days post nine-eleven. I was vacationing in Eastern Washington: hiking, exploring, etc. I thought it would be fun to visit the Han ford nu clear re search facility. My map (circa 1995) indicated there was a visitors center.

As I drove to where I thought the center would be, I was stopped by a roadblock with a humV. A sol dier, complete with mach ine gun and green ades came out and asked me questions for a while. He took my ID information and lic plate number.


I can not say whether the information was retained for years. Although I imagine a little black book with my name on it with a page for each of these 'incidents'. Once my book gets say, 9 pages, it gets bumped up to a higher level of surveillance.

As with any passive surveillance system, it is nearly impossible to determine what information is collected about you. And this is the problem. The checks and balances of our democracy break down in the area of national security. In a sense, we have to 'trust' that the government is behaving decently.

The founding fathers knew that power leads to corruption. If information is power, then the secret agencies have more power than any other segment of the population. Will the moral control poorly demonstrated by wiretapping and illegal interrogation techniques snowball into greater decay? What will the limit of their 'power' be as information about citizens becomes more available? To what end?