#233 Yahoogle

I was reading a news article about Google standing up to the Feds. The same Feds who are currently directed by a political party whose declared agenda is that it wants no government interference in business. Privatize, they say, and get big government off the backs of American business. You know.
Anyhow, apparently big business Google has refused to turn over its search database to the NSA. Something about privacy. The NSA or one of those alphabet organizations of government spying—excuse me, surveillance—thinks it would be a good idea to track searches on Google to find terrorists’ home bases. They’ve asked Google to open up their records. Yahoo had already complied. You can bet I won’t use Yahoo again. Not because I’m a terrorist but because nobody has any right to monitor what I’m doing. No one has the right to monitor my calls and my conversations and yes my internet searches on the possibility that I may be a terrorist. Why? Because people are people, whether they work for the NSA or McDonalds, and I don’t want some government hack who’s maybe had a bad day deciding it was my plate he was going to hawk a figurative loogie into. Guess what? People are subject to mistakes, and yes, vendettas. So if some right-wing yahoo sees that I was checking the Al Gore website and decides, since he thinks Al is one step shy of a terrorist anyhow, let’s just string together an incriminating search trail and whisk me off to Guantanamo, what’s to stop him? Once I’m in Guantanamo I can’t get a lawyer—terrorists don’t have rights you know—and there I’ll sit. Or maybe the NSA operative is a left-winger and he sees I’ve gone to Bill O’Reilly’s t-shirt sale website and he figures Bill’s followers are one step shy of Tim McVeigh and he does the same thing. Farfetched? I don’t think so.
I’ve written two detective novels. In the course of my research on those novels I’ve done internet searches on skin contact lethal poisons, bomb making, fertilizer in the use thereof, FBI crime labs, DNA identification, anthrax, drilling methods, shipping and container requirements, dehydrating, and police tracking, All perfectly legitimate intellectual pursuits. But string em together and what do you got? Someone who’s very interested in crime detection and investigation, perhaps with the intent to avoid such. Someone who’s interested in various forms of dealing death, perhaps contact poisoning by firing a unregulated paintball gun, perhaps a dirty bomb that blows anthrax everywhere that could be shipped through the UPS, FedEx system where security is not as tight as the, ahem, going postal service. Hmmm. And now I’m about to post this on my blog. I’ve always wanted to see Cuba. And I hear Guantanamo’s nice this time of year.
America, ya gotta love it.