When Richard Nixon illegally wire tapped a hotel and tried to cover it up, he became the first president in U.S. history to resign.
Fast forward to today, and Obama and the NSA’s PRISM Program, the largest surveillance program in history, is spying on ordinary citizens leading ordinary lives. If some student Facebook messages a close friend saying “I think I’m pregnant,” it’s now a record in government files forever.
But the worst part? No one seems to care.
The government has violated everyone’s Fourth Amendment right to privacy, and there is no major
outcry.
Now an eerily similar system is being implemented in Louisiana.
Operation Recall is a Board of Regents program that seeks to attract the 15 percent of students who graduate and leave Louisiana. They do this by compiling data on the students who leave, including details such as their incomes, majors and lifestyles.
What the Board of Regents is trying to accomplish is not necessarily bad in regard to its goals, but it is a sign of the surveillance culture that is now a part of life.
When we hear about government surveillance, we often are suspicious and divided on the issue. The decisions aren’t usually up to us — we all simply live under it.
From the NSA to the Board of Regents, this level of
profiling and data mining is
becoming dangerous.
On one hand, the Board of
Regents is trying to boost the economy of Louisiana by compiling a database of graduates who leave and figuring out how to bring them back here. Meanwhile the NSA is violating every American’s right against search and seizure.
Since when is this level of surveillance necessary or even OK? It’s no wonder the NSA’s breach of American civil liberties isn’t on the radar for public reactions. It seems that only those on the fringes of the left and right have this big brother fear as a common grievance. We all should though, because this affects all of us.
For example, some employers now check applicants’ Facebook accounts before hiring and judge to see if the prospective hire drinks too much, gets into trouble or
isn’t what the employer is looking for.
The surveillance doesn’t stop with hiring. A credit score company called Lenddo now looks at user’s Facebook friends when providing loans to its customers.
Kreditech, a German company, compiles data from Facebook, PayPal, eBay and Amazon in order to create a data profile on its customers.
At this point, it’s only a matter of time before US companies start doing the same.
Edward Snowden, a former NSA agent, said as many as 38 embassies, including those of Brazil, France and Germany, have been under surveillance. These revelations show the program isn’t so much focused on counter-terrorism as much as simply being the world’s Big Brother.
Maybe this is just a shift in the zeitgeist of what kind of world we live in today, a world where we are all being watched and monitored. Nothing shows this to be true more than Operation Recall, PRISM, Kreditech and Lenddo.
Joshua Hajiakbarifini is 24-year-old political science and economics senior from Baton Rouge, La.