cross-posted
here
I ruffled more than a few feathers
yesterday when I railed against Russ Feingold's blatant, self-serving political stunt yesterday. I argued that the domestic spying issue may be intellectually important and all that jazz, but that it really isn't an issue that the American people will ever care about until we are able to prove that it has been used for political or nefarious ends.
Oh how they moaned and groaned yesterday about how I am nothing more than a Republican who is afraid to hold the administration accountable for "trashing" the Constitution.
more after the flip...
Blah, blah, blah. Cry me a river. I'm not interested in wasting time talking about things that don't advance our agenda. The domestic spying story isn't going anywhere because it doesn't directly impact the lives of most Americans.
The Google snooping story, however, does hit people in the gut right away:
The Bush administration will renew its effort to find out what people have been looking for on Google Inc.'s Internet-leading search engine, continuing a legal showdown over how much of the Web's vast databases should be shared with the government.
Here we have the Bush administration trying to snoop directly in to our home computers. THIS is something that people get right away. How many Americans do you think have searched for something in Google that they probably don't want anyone else knowing about? 80% 90% of computer owners?
Most people are not the political/news junkies that most of us are. They don't have time for it. Thus, it will be stories like this that penetrate the demands of everyday life.
Although the Justice Department says it doesn't want any personal information now, a victory over Google in the case would likely encourage far more invasive requests in the future, said University of Connecticut law professor Paul Schiff Berman, who specializes in Internet law.
"The erosion of privacy tends to happen incrementally," Berman said. "While no one intrusion may seem that big, over the course of the next decade or two, you might end up in a place as a society where you never thought you would be."
For me, this gets more directly at the privacy concerns we all share. The NSA domestic spying question has already been successfully framed by the White House. This Google madness is ripe for the taking.