After a major exposure by media outlets of these classified operations, the government spearheaded a bill that would allow ‘retroactive immunity’ of any private corporations, specifically Verizon and AT&T in this case, that complied or aided the government in illegal activities. This bill was proposed as necessary for our safety, well-being, and privacy; a move so blockheaded that I’m surprised the writers of the speeches that the telecom PR drones were giving didn’t explode in a giant fireball of Irony.

Obviously though, governments aren’t the only culprits. Those responsible for breaching upon our rights as citizens and manipulating information for their own gain come in more flavors than Baskin Robbins ice cream. Corporate fraud has no better figurehead than Enron Corporation, a former American energy corporation based in Houston, Texas. The corporation used offshore entities, with full anonymity, to hide the extent of their annual monetary losses from investors and create the illusion of profitability. Paperwork was smudged and trades were insided, resulting in the executives, as well as those working closely with them, to come out of the entire fiasco able to use hundred-dollar bills as toilet paper, while the stockholders’ investments and the actual business worth plummeted toward the ground faster than George Bush’s approval ratings (zing!).

If all (or any) of this makes you think, “Hey, what does Enron have to do with me?” or, “If I have nothing to hide, why should I be so concerned with my privacy anyway?”, you’re in for a treat. President George Bush signed the Patriot Act into law as a response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in September of 2001. The U.S.A. Patriot Act, which is actually an acronym that stands for “Uniting and Strengthening America by ProvidingAppropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act”, in a nutshell:

What this basically means is that while you’re at work or school (or anywhere, really) the government can allow an official to enter your home, search and confiscate anything you own, access your library or financial records without your consent, sift through your telephone or internet records, and search your personal information. All of this without a court order, all of this without notice, all of this without cause or reason for suspicion, and all of this without explanation afterward. The 4th amendment of the constitution, a guard against unreasonable searches and seizures, has been rendered obsolete by now.

The Pentagon, within as recently as the past few weeks, was also exposed as manipulating the media in order to brighten its own image over reports of prisoner mistreatment and generally inhuman conditions at its now infamous Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The government enlisted CNN military analysts, former U.S. military officials, and hired journalists to spin a web of positive propaganda for them in order to combat Amnesty International’s scathing report about Gitmo, which called the center “the gulag of our times” and detailed years of extreme abuses that had taken place there. 