This NSA issue has got me to thinking about how we, who may oppose the government from time to time, are going to be able to avoid detection and ensure that our movements and communications are secure.
How does one avoid an Omniscient all-seeing Government Machine like PRISM?
If one wants to communicate something privately through a digital system, the way to do it is to Encrypt the code. I am certainly no expert. But, as I understand it, PGP is one simple, yet powerful way to send and receive a secure message.
It has occurred to me that, in a Surveillance society, Encryption is just as dangerous to a tyrranical government as guns.
And yet, we have no codified Right to Encryption. And we can be pretty sure that, as citizens become more and more aware that we are never truly alone (without the government snooping on us in some way), we will all find that various forms of encryption (or screwing with the code) will become ever more important and even necessary.
One of the brilliant things about the Bill of Rights, as framed by our Founding Fathers, was that they it is based on the concept of Natural Rights. These are rights which exist, just like logic and mathematics, separately from the human mind. They are true because they are true, not because human beings invented them.
We are Free because we are Free. If one is a believer in the Judeo-Christian religion, then one believes he is Free because God Created human beings to be Free.
Our Freedom of Speech, our Freedom of Conscience, our Freedom to own weapons to protect ourselves, these are not Rights given to us by the Laws of man. No King bequeaths us these Rights. These Rights are ours because they exist before the vote, before the decree of a King. They are axiomatic. They are Universal and Inalienable. They are as true as 2 + 2 = 4.
The Bill of Rights only codified what already existed. Just as Biologists who discover "new species" have not really done anything new, but have instead merely noted the existence of something that was already there, so the Bill of Rights merely noted that we have these Rights. The Rights came before the Bill. The Bill merely enumerated them.
Before the Bill of Rights, the Rights existed and had not been noted.
Now, even as the Bill of Rights exists, we find ourselves in ever new situations, as the world changes, and sometimes, we, like the Biologist who finds a "new species", may find a "new Right."
There are two Rights which I believe are just as Universal and Inalienable as the original 10.
These are:
1) The Right to the absolute Privacy of our own minds, and the contents, and issue thereof.
2) The Right to have, as our property, the necessary Encryption technologies to maintain the Privacy, contents and issuance of our minds.
Just as the Right to Bear Arms naturally follows the Right to Free Speech and Religion, so the Right to Bear Encryption naturally follows from the Right to the Absolute Privacy of our own minds.
As technology develops in the 21st century, the line between computer and the human mind will become more and more blurred.
Already there are chips which can be planted in the Retina which can transmit data to the human brain which can help a blind person to see. That is uploading of digital data directly to the human brain.
Already there are computers which can be controlled by the thoughts of a human brain. That is downloading of digital data directly into a computer.
This downloading and uploading of information between brain and computer will only become more and more sophisticated as the 21st Century winds on. Before we know it, we will be truly thinking with the help of Google. We will wonder about something and immediately the answer will come to us. We will have a thought and immediately it will be transported out onto the worldwide web of digital information.
At this point, the question becomes, what separates one individual human being from another? Will we be doomed to think with a hive mind? Will our thoughts always be directed by Web Browser Systems, just as the web pages we visit now are filled with Advertisements tailored specifically to our "needs"?
Or will we devise the necessary means to keep ourselves separate, to ensure the Absolute Privacy of thought necessary for a human being to function as an Individual, created by God with Free Will and Creativity?
I believe Privacy is absolutely necessary to the exercise of Free Will and the genesis of creative processes in the human mind.
I believe this is axiomatic; Universal, and Inalienably true.
I also think we'd better start having some serious conversations along these lines, because the genie is out of the bottle, my friends. The future is rushing at us with a speed that is almost, but not quite, faster than the human mind itself.
Now, what are we prepared to do about it?