When Big Brother becomes actively dangerous

I'm sure that by now most readers are aware of demands by the Federal government that internet service providers hand over the passwords of their users.  This is, of course, an egregious overreach of government power, and a slap in the face to anyone who values what few shreds of online privacy we have left.  I'll never willingly surrender my passwords to them - in fact, this might be an occasion to move to highly encrypted passwords, and change them more frequently, to thwart this kind of bureaucratic overreach.

There's a dangerous side to it as well.  We've all read about how the present Administration used the IRS to target opposition political groups.  Just think what a politically-motivated bureaucrat could do with the passwords of an opposition figure.  For example, that figure might suddenly find him- or herself accused of promoting terrorist activity, or plotting to commit a crime, or accessing child pornography, with 'incontrovertible' evidence of their 'misdeeds' being uncovered on their e-mail or social media accounts.  That evidence would have been put there by someone with their passwords, and it would be almost impossible to prove that the accusation - and the evidence - was false.

Can't happen, you say?  Guess what?  It may already be happening.  Only yesterday Oath Keepers reported an attempt to inveigle its founder and another senior member into accessing child pornography.  That attempt was uncovered before it could succeed . . . but what if the hackers try again, this time using account passwords to actually access the data from the Oath Keepers' officers' own e-mail accounts?  Do you really think the news media would give them the benefit of the doubt when the story breaks?  Yeah . . . I thought not.

This nonsense must be stopped, one way or another.  We have got to defy attempts by the NSA and other government security agencies to monitor every detail of our lives.  If we don't, they'll be able to manipulate, victimize and penalize us to their hearts' content . . . and there won't be a damn thing we can do about it, except to vow to take some of them with us when we go under.  I don't know about you, but I've got no intention of going out that way.





Peter