Paranoid or Realistic?

A couple of days ago I purchased the DVD V for Vendetta. I sat down to watch it yesterday (it is a very good movie by the way, highly recommended), and I started to feel uneasy.

The movie itself is set in a not-so-distant future England. It has become a police state a la 1984. The governement surveilling their people's every move and feeding the public lies through the controlled media. The movie could almost be classified as subversive, which is exactly why I like the movie due to our countries similarities to that in the film.

I was struck with a certain level or "paranoia" and started wondering if any government agency monitored the purchase of items that they deem "subversive" or questionable. I did, after all, purchase the DVD with my credit card.

This really isn't a far stretch for me to think that the US government may actually do this...They do monitor phone calls and bank information. Also, the PATRIOT Act gives them permission to access library records, which I imagine is to look for those with a pattern of checking out such questionable material. Believing that the government was doing these types of activities 10 years ago would have you labelled "paranoid" in a heartbeat!

My mind started racing thinking of all the other ways the governement might collect information about me for their giant NSA database. Whether any of my ideas were correct is almost irrelevant. The point is I HAVE LOST ANY TRUST THAT I ONCE HAD FOR MY GOVERNMENT.

I know that they monitor my communication and they would like to get their hands on as many people, US citizens or not, as possible so that they can sift through it with their fancy database Artificial Intelligence software. If this sounds unreallistic to you, then you are not up-to-date with what technology...I used to work for one of the biggest online companies in the world and we would us AI software to search through tons of collected information about our users actions on our website and look for anything suspicious. sometimes it was right, sometimes it was wrong.

I am not the only one that has become uncomfortable with the goverments domestic spying programs. The goverment has gone way to far and has violated the civil rights of millions of people.

We are being terrorized more by the elected officials in this country than we are by Bin Ladin. It is not right that we should live in suspicion of our own leaders, and it is time for this path to be reversed.

Will the NSA spiders find this post due to my "suspicious" language? Perhaps...

"People should not be affraid of their governement, goverments should be affraid of their people." - V