What the Government will know: when you order a Pizza - ACLU

[Ichingcarpenter]

Don't order the double meat or you health insurance will charge you extra
because they have your medical records as does the government.


The government and corporations are aggressively collecting information about your personal life and your habits. They want to track your purchases, your medical records, and even your relationships. The Bush Administration's policies, coupled with invasive new technologies, could eliminate your right to privacy completely. Please help us protect our privacy rights and prevent the Total Surveillance Society.


This is a frightening possible call that could happen in the future.


Link to hear the call
http://www.aclu.org/pizza/

[MercutioATC]

1. Old fearmongering.

Anything taken to the extreme is scary.

There's no indication that anything like this would ever be done. While data mining is mildly disturbing in its present form, this creates a boogeyman by taking the potential abuses of data mining to extremes.

[Arctic Dave]

3. ??? If your not doing anything wrong what does it matter?

You could get a pretty accurate description of your life if every transaction you make is recorded and analyzed. Why do they need to know or record any of it if you are not under suspicion for anything.
They have "tapped" phones and spied on peaceful groups to name a few, so what makes you so positive they would not or have not taken it to another level.
If insurance companies can use your credit score to charge you more what is to stop another group of doing something similar.

[JackRiddler]

5. "Mildly disturbing"

[tom_paine]

7. "There's no indication that anything like this would ever be done."

What the hell has happened to you, Mercutio? Are you the same Mercutio, or just someone usurping his monniker?

Just where the hell have you been living these past seven years?

Have you failed to notice that there is not one single thing the Bushies haven't lied about? Not one single area where they took the power that was given them and abused it, often criminally (oh, for a Nations of Laws for just one day!)?

How could you say that and keep a straight face? Have we not been staring at the exceeding of our worst nightmares for seven long years and more?

"No indication"? I guess, by your logic, there's "no indication" that serial child molestors or murderers will strike again if released, eh?

I am staggered, astonished, simply aghast to hear you speak so.

You have been a DUer from a long ways back, and I have always respected you as a voice for Liberty and the Founding Fathers, who's voices are now so still that they might be in the unmarked grave with the Constitution and Bill of Rights. But now you voice seems not to be for Liberty, but for the timid meek closing of the eyes to the reality of life in Occupied Amerika.

"No indication". :puke:

Just trust the Bushies, eh? :puke:

[MercutioATC]

10. I didn't say that the potential for abuse wasn't there...

...I'm just (IMO, accurately) stating that the ACLU piece is a stretch designed to scare people.

I completely agree that our freedoms have been eroded and that data mining (because data mining is the issue here) has the potential for abuse...but it's a business thing, not a government thing. Insurance companies partially base rates on credit scores. True. That's wrong in many people's eyes, but it has nothing to do with the government.

If one wants to argue that mass collection of personal data has the potential to be used by corporations in ways that hurt the average citizen I'll wholeheartedly agree, but it's no different than basing life insurance rates on actuarial tables. Businesses are increasing profitability by using more data sources...and while that disturbs some, it is their prerogative.

The OP was "What the government will know when you order a pizza"...

...the "government", IMO, doesn't care when you order a pizza. The ACLU ad attempts to link a trivial everyday occurrence to a "Big Brother" state. We have enough real issues with the intrusion of the government into our daily lives. We don't need to make deceptive arguments like this one.

Weak examples weaken the whole argument.

[tom_paine]

12. the government doesn't care if you order a pizza. The Bushie Totalitarian "government"

DOES care about Total Information Awareness, about creating a whole picture of you. And yes, your eating habits are part of that picture, as are your buying habits, your medical history, and your financial history.

Were you not paying attention when the Bushies, in a rare moment of candor, allowed their true intentions to be revealed (not that anyone heard about it or saqw it on our de facto State-Controlled Toady Media), when Poindexter said, "We are going to eiliminate the stovepiping" between industrial and intelligence collection, way back in '02?

It is the same principle as Bushiganda, essentially. Inverted Totalitarianism dares not used any of the brutal tools of Classical Totalitarianism, such as death-squads or overt brutal intimidation (except in small doses where Plausible Deniability, the mother's milk of tyrants since the dawn of history, abounds), it simply slithers it's velvet chains around our collective necks, unobtrusively. So long as we prisoners do not test the bars of the cage, we can believe we are free.

In the same way that the Bushies could care less about your specific ordering of a pizza, yet they care very much about creating a full picture of who you are and what you believe...are you free or a slave? Do you pose a threat to them or will you help round up the "disloyal" (i.e. freedom loving Americans with a love of the Constitution and Bill of Rights) when Inverted Totalitarian reverts to it's Classical Form. This, I suspect will happen when the "comfortable cage" is no longer possible to maintain. After a few more years of looting the nation, Peak Oil, and Global Warming, I suspect the hothouse of the "comfortable cage" that allows Inverted Totalitarianism to flourish in Amerika, Russia, and China (they are the least inverted, and the most classical, yet they are our Sister Nation because at heart we both have the same surveillance state, a curious fusion of capitalism and authoritarianism, regardless of what the Bushies or Chinese call themselves).

But I digress. The simple fact of the matter is that Total Information Awareness is real and it is ongoing. Project Genoa is real and is ongoing, likely under another name, as the Bushies did with TIA. Due to the exponential leaps in computing power, none of the things mentioned in the article are the least bit beyond our technological capabilities, right at this second, let alone next year when computing power will exponentially leap forward again as it has virtually every year since computers were invented.

You can claim it is a weak argument, but I disagree. It is simply reality as it stands today and I guarantee you if we knew half of what was being done with our data, how it was being stored and used against us, we would, well, we would...ummm, keep watching TV and doing as we are told?

Yes, that's about right. The principal charateristic of the Amerikan Imperial Subject is slack-mouthed apathy and obedience. Don't blame the messenger because reality sucks.

Even IF what you asserted about data mining being abused in this way was true, in spite of the growing reports and evidence to the contrary, in a lawless nation such as we have become, the potential for abuse is not a possibility, it is a dead certainty (99.99% chance).

That, Mercutio, is the difference between Free Nations and nations like our Amerika. Nations that have the Rule of Law have the potential of dissuading abuses by fear of being caught and perhaps imprisoned. This does not guarantee abuses won't happen, but does tend to inhibit them.

In nations like Amerika, where the heads of the law enforcement agencies are criminals themselves (and it doesn't matter how many honest underlings are following their orders, history has shown) dedicated only to their own survival and that of their Bushie/Nazi/commie/Authoritarian Masters, there is no such impediment.

Like the Bushie who mailed the anthrax? You think he didn't know from MOMENT ONE that he was eminently safe from invetsigation and prosecution for following Bushie Orders?

You think he didn't know that any Bushie FBI "investigation" was going to be purposefully tanked and himself go free free FREE? You think he didn't know that, if there were any honest FBI agents pushing to find the truth wherever it lay, they would be ordered off the investigation, demoted, fired, or otherwise silenced?

He knew, all right. But I digress. In the end, Mercutio, you remind me of Sebastian Haffner's father in the book "Defying Hitler", which I would highly suggest you read so that you know that not only is their nothing new under the sun, but that the Nazis and the Good Germans were not all that different (except in the areas of violence and overt racism) from the Bushies and the Good Americans of today.

In early 1933, Haffner could see it all clearly from the very beginning. He could see it so clearly that when his book was found published by his son in 2000, many thought it was a forgery because how could he have predicted so much so accurately.

In any case, Haffner was freaking out, and who wouldn't? His father, a stolid old liberal Prussian bureaucrat, kept counseling him, same as you counsel, Don't get hysterical. It's not that bad. You're taking the argument to the extreme... and so forth.

But as time went on, it became clear that the "ravings" of the son were far more accurate and prophetic than the calm musings of the father.

You might argue that the Nazis were atypical, but THAT is a weak argument. ALL totalitarianisms share vital characteristics with the Nazis, not the least of which are the shamless use of propaganda and the shameless repetition of the Big Lie. From Bush and Pinochet to Pol Pot and Stalin, they are all vitally similar at their core, regardless of whether they are as violent as Pol Pot or as relatively nonviolent as the Bushies are (for the moment).

No, at times like these in Amerika, and 1933 Germany, and 1920 Russia, and 1975 Cambodia, it is not the time for timid words and measured phases. It IS time to princippa obstis, finem respice (resist the beginnings, foresee the ends) and to do whatever we can to wake the larger populace up before it is too late, futile as history shows that to be.

Can I make my disagreement more strongly known?

[MercutioATC]

14. Again, I'm not dismissing the potential for abuse, I'm simply objecting to the nature

of the presentation.

It's farfetched and weak and, IMO, it weakens our argument.


And, while I respect your opinion and agree on certain points, I think there's just a touch of paranoia in your argument. My point is that we have enough blatantly valid issues to work with that we don't need to resort to tilfoilhattery to make our point.

[tom_paine]

15. Of course there is a touch of paranoia in my arguments. We live in an Inverted Totalitarianism.

Paranoia is warranted in such situations. The less free a nation is, the more paranoia is warranted. As this Inverted Totalitarianism, this Managed Democracy, seeks for the moment to camoflauge itself, it is easy to turn away and deceive one's self.

I also respect your beliefs and your arguments, and you.

Besides, I think it has been pretty conclusively proven these last seven years that calm, well-reasoned arguments gets it's ass kicked by Bushie-Nazi propaganda every time. One shout from O'Lielly or Insannity blows it all away in the minds of the Imperial Amerikan Subjects.

When does it not become tinfoilhattery, then, to speak what becomes more obvious every day, and will become moreso after Emperor McBush assumes the throne next year? When?

When the Bushies start putting those shiny new Halliburton detention camps to full use? When we nuke Iran? When black helicopter raids (how ironic the miltias used to be afraid of the UN and Russkie "black helicopters", when it turned out the black helicopters full of Nazis were going to be full of "patriotic" Amerikans only following orders?) are commonplace? But only for illegal immigrants, of course.

First, they came for the illegal immigrants, but I was a native so I didn't speak out...

No, Mecutio, the time to speak of "tinfoilhattery" (which in totalitarian nations more often than not turns out to be the truth) is NOW, while we still have a chance to turn things around.

It's NOT when the mass roundups start or when liberals start being beaten and murdered at random.

And even then, perhaps as many as 50 years from now, though I think it will be decades sooner that Classic Totalitarianism will begin to assert itself over the artificial creation and hothouse flower of Inverted Totalitarianism, which can only exist in the era of Cheap Energy and huge wealth. And even in it's looted, beaten and disgraceful condition, Amerika is many times more wealthy than any other nation ever in history...even then there will be people to say

What are you getting upset about. So what? A few liberals got beaten up. It's not like they got murdered or sent to a concentration camp, is it?

Plausible Deniability, the mother's milk of tyrants everywhere and everywhen.

As I respect your opinion, so I also hope that you are correct and I am wrong. But that is up to We the People (if such an entity can still be said to exist among the beaten, overworked, apathetic, confused toadies that are 90% of our fellow Imperial Subjects) and time.

And only those who are unfortunate enough to live to see the 2050-2070 era will be able to verify which was the case.

Remember Sebastian Haffner and his father. Read "Defying Hitler". There really is nothing new under the sun. Oh, the snake sheds it's skin, coming back anew with new markings, but it is still the same snake.

Ignore reality at your own peril. And read the book.

http://www.amazon.com/Defying-Hitler-Memoir-Sebastian-Haffner/dp/B0013TFBNS/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211866105&sr=8-1

We must agree to disagree. Peace.

[TheMadMonk]

13. The govt may not care that you order pizza, but it may very well...

...care that you bought the collected works of Chez Guevara and order five pizzas every Tuesday night.

It is not the one call/purchase that you make, it is the pattern of calls and purchases made by you that TIA is about.

And what you say about Insurance companies and actuarial tables is theoretically correct, but the reality is that insurance companies now view such tables as worst acceptable case in their planning models.

They use the tables when deciding a client's eligibility to give THEM money, but when it comes down to actually paying out on a claim, they are suddenly interested in all the minutiae that those tables were specifically designed to statistically even out and make irrelevant to any one specific claim.

[wellstone dem]

8. Pizza delivery information is regularly

used by people seeking to collect child support, it is how they get correct addresses.

[populistdriven]

2. This one loads BIG

http://www.aclu.org/pizza/images/screen.swf

[AndyTiedye]

4. It is a Legitimate Concern

though possibly also a bad example.

Any pizza parlor that sold its customer data to the insurance companies would be out of business as soon as their customers found out about it.
Who would buy ANYTHING from that establishment once word got out?

[tom_paine]

9. What if word never gets out? Or if it does, then follows the Bushie/Toady Media Paradigm?

You know what I am speaking. Like me, you have seen it thousands upon thousands of times since America fell in 2000, and it wouldn't surprise me were it revealed that such has been going on a lot longer than that.

Most recently, this "non-brutal" censorship common in Inverted Totalitarianisms can most recently and obviously be noted when the Pentagon Propagandists Scandal was "found out", yet I guarantee you that in November, fewer than 1 in 10 Imperial Subjects will have heard of it. I can also guarantee that if you try and tell any of the other 9 out of 10 Imperial Subjects, they simply won't beleive you because it hasn't been on their TV screens.

I hate to be so cynical, but I have literally seen it happen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. I also have some empirical, if anecdotal, data, derived from seven long years of aggressive "Paul Revere-ing" to people who are the rough mental equivalents of the Chinese Subjects of their variety of BushPutinism or Inverted Totalitarianism, or equiavelnt to those who vaulted Hitler into power, Good Germans and active Nazi-Bushie supporters alike.

I have gazed into the face of the New Totalitarianism so many times I am nauseous. I have conversed with those who would have gladly follow Hitler, if only he had the right PR.

Yes, in a Free Country with a Free Press, you would be absolutely correct. But Imperial Amerika is none of those things, has none of those things.

And who says the Pizza Parlor needs to sell it, anyway? Use your credit card for the purchase, and you are on the record in the computers of Total Information Awareness (anyone who thinks the Bushies disbanded that when they said they did is a fool, and out and out fool, a sucker).

[pscot]

6. Pay cash

Wear polarized shades.
Walk, don't run. The cameras home in on rapid movement.

[muntrv]

11. ...And if you order a veggie lovers pizza, you'll be deemed an eco-terrorist.

[Elspeth]

16. Damned if you do and damned if you don't

:(