NO! JUST SKIP ANYTHING WRITTEN BY THIS ASSHOLE!

A GVSU psychology professor friend just posted this on Facebook:

"I enjoyed reading this." 

That's right... Blowing A Whistle... by Thomas Friedman.  My heart immediately sunk.  Here's what I wanted to reply:

"I didn't. 

Friedman sets up the usual tiresome dichotomy of "less Government power" OR "more 9/11's." Then he adds some tortuous logic: IF you get too worried about your civil liberties THEN you shouldn't be surprised when another 9/11 happens AND another 9/11 would make Thomas Friedman sad since another 9/11 would inevitibly lead to even fewer civil liberties.

Did I mention 9/11?

He writes that "we don’t live in a world any longer where our government can protect its citizens from real, not imagined, threats without using big data."

Citation needed.  No professional terrorist is dumb enough to hatch a plot on Facebook.  They use courriers who need to be tracked by men on the ground, not by a digital Panopticon.

And PRISM clearly failed to prevent Baby's First Bombing in Boston, probably because one can carry out such an attack without picking up a phone, or logging on to the internet, just as terrorists have been doing all this time before the Internet existed. 

So we're being asked to shrug and go about our business, and just trust the government and all future administrations to do right thing, and never abuse for political reasons its practically unfettered ability to collect and store the personal information of everyone (well, only people who have a phone or use the internet).

By the way, anyone with clear eyes would see that this is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment, but hey, that's just the Constitution talking.
 
All this because we have to live in fear for the rest of our lives that evildoers are lurking around the corner. We don't know why they want to hurt us, but they do.  And that's all I need to know.

So go on, spend billions on the gigantic data centers needed to house all of this data. Pay contractors like Snowden $200,000 a year to sit at a desk and determine if you're more than 51 percent foreign.

Remember, you can’t have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience!  And since 100% security is an attainable, realistic, and necessary goal, go right ahead! Hey, I wasn't using my privacy anyways."

I'm going to wait until I get home to talk to her about it in person.