Welcome to the new America

Our government has been caught in numerous scandals lately. Before getting into that, I think a few datapoints are in order:

About half of the U.S. constitution is dedicated to protecting the people from their own government.

Governments acting against their own populations murdered more people than all the wars of the last 120 years. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc. Most of these governments were communist or lesser forms of leftism, with a few exceptions.

The East German secret police, called Stasi, had as their stated goal: "To know everything."

The CIA program "Total Information Awareness", or TIA, was cancelled in the early 2000s due to public anger.

Direct and unfettered access to Google and Facebook and other large Internet companies, as well as computer and phone wiretapping and wholesale data collection, accomplishes the same goal as TIA. In effect, TIA is fully operational.

The reason all of this is happening: we are allowing it. Apathy. Ignorance. We allowed DUI checkpoints, which clearly violate the 4th Amendment, because they "keep us safe." Government saw that there is no strong voice of dissent, so the power of government grows. Politicians are now telling us, such as Dianne Feinstein -- a leftist -- that the NSA information grab is "keeping us safe."

We have the government we wanted, or at least the one forced on us by an ignorant majority of voters.

President Obama -- the same leftist who is using the IRS as an attack dog against his political enemies -- told the American public last week in a speech that the NSA is not recording phone calls. Anyone who believes this deserves to lose his freedom. I would guess that the recent revelations about information gathering is less than a tenth of one percent of what is really happening. To think anything else is dangerously naive.

Welcome to the new America, where government knows best. They're "keeping us safe." Do you still want your data in the cloud?