Ever since Thursday's blockbuster reports from the Washington Post and the Guardian revealing the existence of the National Security Agency's PRISM — the government program that allegedly works with major Internet companies to collect (some) U.S. citizen data — tech companies have been fighting to distance themselves from the potentially privacy-violating government programs. The Post and the Guardian allege tech companies that participate in the PRISM program — Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple —offered the government "direct access" to their servers full of user information. "From inside a company's data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes," the Post's Barton Gellman and Laura Poitras reported.
We may not have gotten the promised most transparent administration ever, but we do have the most transparent citizenry ever.
As Mark Steyn writes:
When the state has the capability to know everything except the difference between right and wrong, it won’t end well.
Remember, this is what an administration that doesn't even think we are at war is willing to do.
UPDATE: And yes, when everything is a crime, government knowledge of everything we do is a problem. Which fits with my long-running frustration that our federal government is criminalizing everything. Tip to Instapundit.
Remember when the expression "Don't make a federal issue out of it" was saying "don't make such a big deal of a small issue"? That was when states handled crimes and the federal government criminalized only the most important things of national importance or those that spanned state jurisdictions.
Now the expression doesn't make sense since the federal government is in everything. Which makes our constitution's protections against double jeopardy almost pointless since more and more crimes are crimes at the state and federal level, making it possible to prosecute twice for the same crime but under different levels of law.
Are we getting closer to finding that the Soviet practice of defining what is legal and assuming all else is illegal is more efficient than our practice of defining what is illegal? And they could boast of reducing the U.S. Code and administrative rules!
