Why I Joined OP (or How I Spent My Summer for the Last 16 Years)

 

by Cristina

On October 26, 2001, “in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet.”  (from an ACLU page)  source: https://www.aclu.org/infographic/surveillance-under-patriot-act

In 2006, I ran into an article (source: https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2006/04/6585-2/) on the Internet that stunned and frightened me: “AT&T installed powerful traffic monitoring equipment in a ‘secret room’ in their San Francisco switching office at the behest of the NSA…The equipment used and the vast scale of the information being monitored [more than 10 billion bits of data per second] both suggest that the NSA is sifting through massive amounts of user data and phone calls.”
A year or two later, I hear about a government program called PRISM.  Seems the government really IS watching us, watching everything we do, via our computers and telephones, but this really hasn’t gone public, and people don’t seem to know about it.  Or, for that matter, care.  “The sky is falling!” I yell to some of my friends.  They think I’ve dropped into the black hole that is becoming the Internet.  I’m collectively ignored.

I became aware of Benjamin Franklin’s quote, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  Since then I’ve read that it might not mean what we think it means, what we want it to mean, when we discuss “liberty” and “security”…but when I read it for the first time, it becomes burned into my brain.  It sets fire to what already smolders there.

Edward Snowden himself figuratively falls out of the sky a few years later and drops more things on us from that height, including PRISM, which now it seems everyone has heard of, but at which many scoff and cry “paranoia.”  But more troublesome than disbelief is the stance I’m finding lots of people are taking, that if a person isn’t doing anything wrong, what’s wrong with the government knowing what they’re doing?

Attending “Occupy” events and walking the streets of Oakland and San Francisco for various causes, I wear a mask because I’m there for the people who can’t be, so I’m “everybody.”  But I am also happy my face is hidden from the ranks of police in riot gear that line the sidewalks and hover in helicopters, cameras rolling to ensnare the images of average, unarmed and peaceful citizens engaging in their first amendment rights.

Facial recognition software; TSA radiation searches; telephone wiretapping and cell phone trapping; televisions that watch back…it’s a long list.  I joined OP because we’ve been swept up in a cascade of events designed to strip us of our civil liberties, one piece at a time, a surveillance and police state that would truly have us believe that “freedom is slavery.”  I want to be one of the people who stems and finally turns that tide.