Background: CBS News
Law enforcement groups have discovered another way to make their lives easier at the expense of your privacy. Now all that they have to do is get enough congressmen (who accept cash and checks, by the way) to agree with them and the deal is done.
In case you haven’t heard yet, they are proposing to store every text message that passes through every cell phone of any cell phone carrier in the US for a period of 5 months or more. With every text message conveniently stored for their viewing, they can become even lazier when doing good old fashioned police work. No more looking for clues, talking to people, or gathering information like real detectives do. Now they can just write a fancy data-mining query against the text message database and see what you’ve been up to.
The irony is that it’s illegal for them to do that and they are “law enforcement”.
Personally, I have a job where we have rules and access to things is restricted… on purpose. People come up to me and ask for access to something “because it would make their life easier” and I get to say “no”. We do not care how easy it would make your life. Controls are in place for the protection of our overall system. Making your job easier is no justification to relax protection of important assets. Likewise, our freedoms and right to privacy are an American’s most precious asset. Making some corrupt cop’s life easier doesn’t even register on my reasons-to-give-up-freedom-meter.
To all the lazy law enforcement groups: You have a job to do: protecting freedoms. If you can’t do that then you are a failure at your job. Don’t violate my freedom in the name of protecting me. I don’t need it.