A rant about electronic privacy issues.

Electronic surveillance has progressed to the point of infringing on the rights of everyone on the planet. The thought of privacy is a vanishing notion. There are government agencies and private individuals that have the technology to decipher what is being typed right now on this paper. There are cases in the court system at this moment that addresses the issue of vanishing privacy. Some of the areas of concern are the way the worlds governments and individuals have been spying on the worlds population, the need for some kind of regulation on this technology, and the moral dilemma as to who is going to be the guardian of our privacy.

Has electronic surveillance gone too far? Some people would answer a resounding yes. Other people, on the other hand, would say no. There should be a point that we can assign to the right amount of watchfulness. There is not a point that we can define at this moment in time. The interception of communications has been one of most powerful tools in fighting crime. In fact this type of crime detection goes back as far as the seventeenth century in the colonial United States. In 1640, Governor Bradford of the Plymouth Colony boarded a supply ship headed for England. Once he was on the ship he opened a letter from one of the inhabitants of the new colony. He returned to Plymouth with the letters in hand and made a public accusation of the person that wrote the letters. Bradford stated that he was justified in searching out and opening the letters. He was quoted as saying that it was "to prevent the mischief and ruin that this conspiracy and plot of theirs would bring on this poor colony." 1 The interception of information has risen to what...