Privacy Threats, Hackers or Our Government?
Ever wonder why the Puritans set sail for America, they left because of a couple reasons. For one, they were persecuted in England for practicing their religion, and despise England’s culture. The main reason they left though was to escape the tyranny of the king. The United States was founded on the belief that each citizen should have his or her own individual freedoms and privacy. This belief has held up well over time, but was a hard won battle. At first, our colonists wished there to be no government, and to have a sort of self rule, but this didn’t work out. Shortly thereafter, the bill of rights and the constitution were written. These spelled out and put every American’s rights onto an indelible piece of paper, and made sure that they could not be taken away.
Even though our guarantee is still there, preserved and well, some people are still wary of the government. The government has done some things that make privacy advocates a little nervous. It started with the Patriot Act; this allowed the government at any time to intercept, record, and save any sort of communications you are having, provided they are solely used for national security threats. This Patriot Act was quite intrusive and Americans hadn’t seen anything like it since the days of being harassed by England for taxes we owed and other petty matters. This matter was acceptable though, as our nation was in a time of grieving after the terrorist attacks on 911. These attacks made the Patriot Act a smash hit with Congress, who would pass anything that would bolster security; we were quite scared at the time.
Recently, the government has set up with an ISP’s (Internet Service Provider) to intercept and record emails coming from a supposed terrorist by way of the Patriot Act, which requires the snooping to be authorized by applying to national security, and terrorist activity certainly meets this criteria. It turns out though that the government department intercepted way more than one email; they actually read entire mailboxes of multiple people. This causes some to raise eyebrows at the integrity of the situation, because all of those people couldn’t have been suspected terrorists.
Although there is not much you can do from having the government snoop on you, you can block every day hackers with a change IP proxy. By using an IP changer, you can change your IP address and effectively throw off anyone tracking you to your real life location.
