Big Brother gets what Big Brother wants

Using Fourth-Party Data Brokers To Bypass the Fourth Amendment from Slashdot by Soulskill An anonymous reader writes "Coming out of Columbia Law School is an article about commercial data brokers and their ability to provide information about individuals to the US government despite Fourth Amendment or statutory protections (abstract, full PDF at Download link). Quoting: 'The Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment does not protect information that has been voluntarily disclosed to a third-party or obtained by means of a private search. Congress reacted to these holdings by creating a patchwork of statutes designed to prevent the government's direct and unfettered access to documents stored with third-parties; thus, the government's access is fettered by various statutory requirements, including, in many cases, notice of the disclosure. Despite these protections, however, third-parties are not restricted from passing the same data to other private companies (fourth-parties), and after the events of September 11, 2001, the government, believing that it needed a greater scope of surveillance, turned to the fourth-parties to access the personal information it could not acquire on its own. As a consequence, the fourth-parties, unrestricted by Fourth Amendment or statutory concerns, delivered — and continue to deliver — personal data en masse to the government.'" SlashDot

This is something that Big Brother wants. To the people in charge of our government, it is just obvious that any available avenue to tracking information on people will eventually lead them to complete control of those people. What they fail to understand is the price for this control is a loss of will. The society becomes an ant hill with drones going about their business. Any one who comes along as an individual is squashed and eaten by the other ants. There emerges another class of leaders who get whatever they want while someone else pays for it.

It never lasts forever. Eventually, the queen dies, the workers revolt, another insect comes in and takes over, or some jerk with a spray bottle of poison decides to take back his yard. 

One by one our rights and freedoms vanish. One by one people who stick their heads above the crowd are shouted down by the very people who need the new ideas to survive. One by one the things we depend on every day are controlled by the very people who control everything else. How much power and money can they control? Well, all of it. Then they start in our future dept and run that up to the stars.

When are they satisfied? Never. They cannot be satisfied. They must be stopped. For, as soon as one member of this greedy elite falls off the wagon, then more try to climb on so they will not ave to be part of the victim class any longer. The only escape is to become the bad guy.