by Mike Payne
Newsflash, people—you are much easier to find than you realize. As Americans, we get all huffy and puffy if we think someone has personal information about us that we consider none of their business. Protest all you want, the fact is—they do. If it isn’t bad enough that the vast majority of the stores we do business with sell our information to marketers for other purposes, consider how much of our personal information is on the internet. Did you know the government monitors your social media? They revealed this troubling tidbit in 2012 when the Department of Homeland Security revealed that they search Facebook and other social networking sites for “key words.” Of course, they do this in the name of detecting potential terrorist or national security threats, and there is a list of words that are monitored. Many are common terms, including cops, police, airport, attack, bomb…You get the point. And these are just a few. The government is, in fact, compiling our digital communications and various government records into an easier searchable database.
Just in case you think your phone is protected, turns out it is not necessary for police to have a warrant to track your location from your cell phone. Phone companies will do that for police agencies. Some police agencies have even purchased their own equipment so they can skip the middleman.
It is also legal for the government to take photos or video from the air above a house, and they are. The Supreme Court decided in 1989 in a case Florida v. Riley that police didn’t need a warrant to observe your property from public airspace where they observed a marijuana growing operation from a helicopter.
If you live in a city, smile you’re on Candid Camera, and Candid Camera, and Candid Camera. In fact, you probably should have your own show for as many times as you’re caught on camera walking down a street, entering or exiting a business, or just laying on a blanket in the park. Remember the word, “panopticom.” It’s the little bugger of a camera that provides 360 degree, high-resolution, real-time and storable video imaging. Yes, it has facial recognition software in most cases.
Here’s my point: I’ve never really given much thought about who is watching me (although now I’m quite sure those pesky “itching spells” that require discretion when exercising relief make for interesting conversation in a monitoring station somewhere), however, recently my Sirius radio service in my car was interrupted after one of our credit cards was hacked. My son and I were sitting in Golden-Chick in Georgetown last week, when I received a call on my cell phone, asking if I wanted to reinstate it. After I updated my payment information, the agent asked me to go to the car and turn the radio on to the Sirius setting. Within five seconds we were listening once again to our favorites. My sixteen-year old observed that if it only took Sirius Radio a few seconds to locate us in the parking lot of the Golden Chick in Georgetown, Texas, how much more did the government know? I’m afraid I know the answer.
