Americans now is a bunch of cowards - something that the Founders Fathers did not expect.

Privacy is an intrinsic and fundamentally necessary right of a free society. Its horrible that you would give up your freedom and privacy to live in a police/nanny state.

But it is not so simple, for example. Everyone who watches the series 24 seems to love when Jack Bauer essentially beats, tortures, or shoots a bad guy to spill his guts about some evil act about to transpire. Everybody loves Jack because he saves the day and those who love 24 cannot seem to separate what happens on TV series with the real world.

In the real world the Jack Bauers do not always have the right man or women. Innocent people are tortured and killed on the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. In the real world those who have taken an oath to represent us in government or sworn an oath to protect us are more often unethical, and immoral than the TV persona we would like to believe in.

If a family member of yours wrote an e-mail to you telling you of a matter they were not proud of or hiding, say an affair, they’re gay, that they bought/viewed some porn, or that they cheated their employer in some way, they are expecting a certain level of discreet privacy from you.

Now say you decide to run for office, or run a business, and over time you become pretty influential. And let’s say that you decide to take a stand against something that people with more money, power and influence than you are for. Out of no where comes a disclosure of the fact that you knew about the issue that your family member had confided in you. The scandal not only tears you down, it tears your family, and more specifically the family member with the secret down commits suicide. Your business closes up, your friends distance themselves, etc, etc. Think it can’t happen?

Take a look at the McCarthy era, blacklists, the secret files of the FBI’s Edgar Hoover. Now imagine what is possible when the government can siphon all the electronic communications in the US and use powerful computers to do analysis creating massive files of those who had affairs, those who cheated on their taxes, those who have sexual fetishes, etc, etc. Now imagine that they want you to do something for them that you would normally tell them to get lost. Is all of your communications over the phone, the internet, and US mail squeaky clean. Or is there something somewhere that would cause you to blush, be ashamed, or be ridiculed? Would it be enough to make you conform to government demands against your will?

No, there is no need for a new definition of privacy. What we really need is a new oath of office for all of our elected officials and government employees. It should go something like, I will defend the constitution, I will defend it ethically and morally, and if I am found to violate this oath in any manner I will face either the death penalty or life imprisonment dependingon on the severity of my offense. In China, a government official failed to protect the people, he was put to death. If government types are going to say we need to give up our privacy in order to be protected it seems fair to say that they should give up their lives if they fail to protect the people from corruption, and unethical and immoral acts by its elected and hired personnel.

They want us to give up our privacy but they don’t want to tell us how many people are Dick Cheney’s staff, or even who. They won’t tell us who was in a meeting 7 years ago with Cheney over a discussion about energy, somehting that has skyrocketed its costs. They lost e-mails of record which would show who knew about what when it comes to the Whitehouse outing of a CIA operative’s real name, and who knew and orchestrated the firing of attorneys because they would not unethically protect republicans while manufacturing cases against democrats.

As for Iraq and terroists. Iraq was invaded for oil, it had no ties to 9/11 nor Bin Laden. As for Bin Laden, Bush will never really seek to find him since he is of Saudi Royal Blood and the Bush Family is financially connected to the Royal Family. As for the risk of being attacked again and again, even Bin Laden sought to bring down only the World Trade Center and if we have the courage and will to see our government and certain oil interests in the real light of day we will discover that those who attacked us felt they were justified from decades of betrayal, exploitation, and our presence on holy land on foreign soil.

We don’t need a new definition of privacy, we need a new definition of what it means to be an ethical and moral government representative, corpoate leader, or all around American. Until that happens I don’t want to hear about any American giving up his or her right to privacy. If yo want to end terror, end exploitation or in other words end trading beads for oil. All the promises of oil companies to help the countries they asked permission to take their oil have not been kept. If you want to end the anger and hatred in the world, you simply need to end the unethical and immoral running of the oil industry.