Drunk Terrorists

2/1/11

There should never be anything placed in front of personal security and safety, and that certainly includes personal privacy.  I like my free space as much as anybody else, but if it's a choice of getting wanded down at a sporting event and having to come to the game 15 minutes earlier or potentially having a random guy come in with a knife and stab a coach, I'll leave my house earlier. In his interview with Wired News, Barry Steinhardt, associate director of the ACLU mentions how the government is impeding on personal privacy of people, and how he believes in no way does it help provide Americans with safety. His efforts to communicate this point include a reference to how the government put a keystroke monitor on a man's computer to track his communication.  The man he references here was involved with a Philadelphia Mafia family, essentially. I would say without a doubt personal privacy is worth the sacrifice for safety.  I have no idea how Steinhardt can argue otherwise.  Maybe it's just a differing sense of what safety is, as he states the Patriot Act is not effective because it only catches "ordinary criminal offenses."  I guess to be worthy of having your information tracked, some people feel you have to produce an act of mass murder.  While I know weapons and stabbings in ballparks are not common, I would throw that under the criminal offenses category, maybe even on the more extreme side.  But if giving up a little of my privacy could lead to stopping that, I think it could have a trickle down effect to lower "ordinary criminal offensess", and while The Patriot Act may not have immediately effected national threats, if it did its part to lessen lower crimes all around, I feel it was successful, as it did its job in providing safety.