The US Constitution does not use the phrase "right to privacy." It does say, however, that all rights not specifically assigned to the federal government are reserved to the State governments or to the individual citizens.
The Supreme Court ruling in the Roe v. Wade case recognized privacy as one of those "unenumerated rights."
Some people still think the fuss about Roe v. Wade is or was about protecting fetuses from being killed in the abortion process.
But no. For the informed members of our governing class, Roe v. Wade was about whether or not government is still willing to recognize individuals' right to privacy. The Left wanted to strike down the Supreme Court's historic decision in order to suppress that right from consideration. And the voters let them--many feeling good about the idea that reversing Roe v. Wade was protecting fetuses.
But what really made the control freaks in Big Government and Big Business want to erode women's medical privacy, to make abortion a decision for the State government to make as opposed to one for the individual woman to make, was a different kind of invasion of privacy.
Without ever taking a vote on the constitutionality of government agencies directly "monitoring" our electronic communication, during the War on Terror W Bush signed legislation requiring private corporations to spy on our electronic communication...and authorizing them to finance all that "monitoring" by allowing private businesses to peek at our electronic communication, too. And now Trump's allowing Thiel's Palantir corporation to put together electronic dossiers on all of us.
After all, don't you want all those ads they shove in front of you to be "relevant" enough that you want to click right over to the sponsors' sites and buy things?
Oh, you didn't? You think it's obnoxious when people presume to know that (based on your age and gender, not because you're stupid enough to take polls about your medical profile) you might be at risk for a disease that people of your age and sex get, but sort of entertaining, in a sick way, when they try to sell you patent remedies for a disease you're absolutely certain never to have? Well you're an outlier. A nasty, secretive outlier. You wouldn't be cackling, "I love being sterile and, if I didn't, Viagra would be the last thing I'd try!" if you were a the kind of person the corporations approve of.
And maybe the service you get when you stay in a hotel, or in a hospital, is being influenced by the corporations' disapproval of your protecting your privacy. The fact that you're secure enough in your marriage, or lack of one, to be willing to grow older without any "male performance enhancement products" may be creating prejudice against you. A regular fellow would be insecure enough to pay whatever the ads tell him is a good price for Viagra.
And matters of religion or politics? Well, as far as the former is concerned, the corporations have determined that you shouldn't have one. Despite the existence of CEOs who want to testify to their faith, the general consensus of those who want to rule the world through manipulation is that religious faith makes people more resistant to manipulation and is, therefore, a bad thing. Politics is different. You should have politics if they're the globalist kind of politics that make it easier for huge multinational corporations to eradicate smaller local competitors. You may be subject to punishment for having a religion or a more realistic type of politics.
Consider the wreck that used to be Twitter. The same people who urged W to mandate that Twitter be "monitored" then pressed Jack Dorsey to impose censorship on it. Preferably through "shadowbanning" in a way that people couldn't say for sure was happening to them, that could be used, most noticeably, to mute even the blandest members of the other political party during an election season--and it was--but, most importantly, to protect Bayer, Lilly, Merck, and some other corporations from having to deal with tweets about the fact that their most profitable products were killing people.
Don't be deluded about this (the corporations want you to be). When you've seen vigorous opposition to a harmful product, and you continue to see that product on the market, you are not looking at proof that the problem with the product has been solved. You're probably looking at proof that the complaints have been censored.
If chronic diseases that involve internal bleeding are being discussed, and glyphosate is not being mentioned, what you are reading has been censored. Glyphosate is still causing chronic diseases that involve internal bleeding. Some manufacturers are now replacing glyphosate with glufosinate. Glufosinate is likely to cause more dramatic and dangerous internal bleeding.
If homicide-suicides are being discussed, and serotonin-boosting "antidepressants" are not being mentioned, what you are reading has been censored. Serotonin boosters are still producing a very specific psychotic syndrome involving pain, pseudomemories of past abuse that may never even have been possible but is congruent with the pain the patient feels, and a resolution either to kill innocent people to spare them from what the patient thinks s/he survived or to kill people the patient blames for what s/he thinks s/he survived, then kill oneself. Most psychologists are being successfully pressured not to recognize this disorder and give it a proper name.
If vaccines are being discussed, and the risk of contaminated vaccines doing more damage than the diseases they're meant to prevent is not mentioned, what you are reading has been censored. For a long time the focus of discussion of vaccine contamination used to be Merck's measles vax. Then the urge to get a vaccine for COVID "Out There," even if it had to be a new untested type of vaccine with new unknown risks, produced much more dramatic statistics of bad results with the COVID vaccine. The majority of people who've had one or more COVID jabs have shown no ill effects, at least, though they've also shown no very good ones--most people received vaccines formulated against an irrelevant strain of the coronavirus and were not actually immunized at all. If you think people who remind us of these unpleasant truths are just "vaccine-phobic," you have been successfully deceived by censorship.
Elon Musk wanted to show Dorsey that Twitter could be made profitable. Simple! Just turn what still had the look of a free social media site into another outlet for corporate-sponsored commercial messages. Anybody could post anything on X, Musk proclaimed, but "freedom of speech does not equal freedom of reach"--tweets from free accounts would no longer reach even the non-paying Twits' followers, and even tweets from paying "subscribers" might not be allowed to reach anyone but the paying Twits' followers if they were unsupportive of sponsors' products. Wasn't that clever...for a few months, anyway. Every time I look at anything on X I see less activity by real people, more by corporate accounts and bots. People are paying to say what they want to say, then finding no real people listening any more.
I became a leader of Glyphosate Awareness by adopting an abandoned Twitter hashtag, hosting a series of chats, and compiling a series of newsletters. I happen to be unattached to the idea of "being the leader." I wish more people were. Being a Christian first and an activist only later, I'm comfortable with the idea that we're all supposed to be following one Leader, that this is not done by worrying too much about who else may or may not be following whom. I want to be as close as possible to the Truth. If other people believe that I'm following the Truth more closely than other people are, all to the good. I don't want to lose sight of the Truth by letting my focus shift to concerns about who's following me.
So I welcome updates, of course, and I think it might be a good thing if people fought to keep a Glyphosate Awareness web site active on the Internet, but I really think we've done what can be done in cyberspace, before censorship. People who use the Internet, who mostly don't feel like a global elite class but we are one, already know how toxic glyphosate is. Fresh news fills in gaps and supplies details, but we're preaching to the choir. We have to keep spreading the word out to the technologically illiterate. We have to keep spreading it out to the same ones, in some cases, because some of these people have minds like sieves. And yes, I still think that's where the action is in our movement. We need to be making sure the workers on the highway--especially!--and the ninety-year-old volunteer groundskeeper for the church and the panhandler on the corner know how dangerous glyphosate, and glufosinate and similar things, are for them too.
But here I stand to testify that we do not need any young people to be publicly identified as leaders in Glyphosate Awareness, at this stage. "Young," in this case, meaning under age 50. We need young people in the movement but we need them to maintain a low profile. Because the leaders in Glyphosate Awareness are in real physical danger. Ask Karen Kingston. Ask Anna Lappe.
This is one of the very few, not even top-downward so much as front-backward, statements I ever intend to make as a "leader" in Glyphosate Awareness.
I say, if you have children at home, or if parenthood is still ahead of you, you need to be a leader of your children's education now and be a leader in Glyphosate Awareness--if it still needs to exist--later on. Be aware! Teach your friends and your children what we've learned about glyphosate and these other chemicals. Send a postcard to an official and sign a petition now and then. Plant butterfly gardens. If you live in a city where US PIRG sends students from house to house on hot days, bring them inside, give them water, sign their petition sheets, donate money if you can spare any, even give them a Save The Butterflies water bottle. But don't call attention to yourselves as being more aware of these things than everybody in your generation is.
It may be the best strategy, in any case, to let the evil corporations get a nice healthy scary sense of the rising generation all being forearmed with Glyphosate Awareness, and COVID vax awareness, and awareness of dioxin as the carcinogen in cigarettes, and all the other kinds. Let them feel like, "It's no good even trying to advertise our profitable toxic product to the young any more. They're all onto us. We can't sell them anything." As distinct from "If we can make this or that activist look stupid, other young people will trust us and buy our profitable toxic product."
One difference between Glyphosate Awareness and the US Army is that a nineteen-year-old can say "I flunked out of college. I don't care if I live or die. I want to join the Army," and the Army will test him and probably enlist him. Glyphosate Awareness will not. We're all about young people having complete adult lives. And we know that that's not a priority for the chemical corporations, at all.
Why am I such a privacy fanatic? Why can't you write to me at a street address instead of a post office box? Why don't I use anybody's real-world name? Well, for one thing, anyone who knows my home town knows who I am, if they've ever wanted to know. And guess what some people could and would do with that information. Guess what's been sprayed on the property of The Celiactivist. Repeatedly.
What has this to do with privacy? Need you ask? I've suffered enough from one glyphosate goon knowing where I live. I want the Internet to be regulated in such a way that no other glyphosate goon is going to find out where I live, or where Carey Gillam or Michael Balter or Ralph Nader live. Corporate goons can get very nasty when there's a chance of even a small reduction in profits.
The Internet with privacy creates the possibility that people can blow the whistle whenever a corporation's most profitable product happens to be toxic, can get dangers recognized before a harmful product becomes enmeshed in our culture the way Prozac and glyphosate have become. The Internet without privacy creates the possibility that corporate goons can kill the public-spirited person who is warning others about the toxic product.
Lack of Internet privacy creates a lot of other ugly possibilities, of course. In Babylon Rising, Tim LaHaye imagined a professional assassin cutting off someone's fingers to be able to use person's fingerprints to foil biometric security devices. It could happen. It's not happening now, at least not often, because for people who grew up with computers (as LaHaye did not) it's so much easier to use computer code to foil those security devices. But the more elaborate and biometric we want to make ways for computers to recognize individuals, the nastier the possible abuses can be. Even easier than fooling a computer security "app" into thinking you connected to it from my phone, you know, the one the computer is eager to imagine that I have, is for the good side to recognize that things posted on their web site should not be identifiable with individuals.
Instead of trying to make sure that nobody else uses my laptop to read an e-book, why not just accept that lots of people should be able to share a computer. Don't try to tie my Kindle account to me personally; it's for anyone I allow to use my laptop. Amazon needs to strip the account of any personal information.
Instead of trying to find ways to sell our contact information to sales pests while keeping that information "secure" from evildoers, web sites need to get comfortable with the fact that they don't know whom they're trading with. Should not be a problem--matters affecting national security have no business on the Internet.
Anybody has a right to order a T-shirt online. It might be better to use a prepaid, printed, postal money order, to order that T-shirt, rather than put any bank or credit card information online. All e-commerce sites need to be required by law to accept (and mail out!) postal money orders.
Instead of trying to verify that independent contractors who do writing, coding, or graphic design online are citizens of the US (or anywhere else), the sites that handle those transactions need to let the appropriate tax office verify that...by mail, not online. After earning enough money at an online job site to be required to report the income on your taxes, you should inform the tax authorities. But you should send them a photocopy of your tax information, rather than putting that information online where hackers can get at it. No web site should be allowed to ask you to transmit your tax information online.
Don't use any electronic device that has a flat screen. Don't touch screens--period. For one thing nobody else wants to try to read the screen through your fingerprints. For another thing, digital images of law-abiding North Americans' fingerprints have resale value.
The push to eliminate online privacy is coming from people who want to reduce private citizens' freedom by setting up "social credit systems," as in China. Americans should not allow this idea to get off the ground. For a start we can all agree: "I have NO 'social credit' and I don't want to work or trade with anyone who has. Anyone who has failed to oppose 'social credit systems' publicly, in real life and on the Internet, is not welcome here." And then we can demand that electronic devices be built with touch controls that are solid and opaque, that don't allow hackers to gank images of our fingerprints.
Don't use devices that allow hackers to gank images of your face, either. Don't use "apps" that do. We don't like to waste plastic or rare minerals so it's nice to know that manufacturers can easily fit opaque covers over laptops with slick camera-friendly covers through which "apps could use your camera" to see what's in your house.
How many times did your laptop show that obnoxious message about "Lower your finger if you don't want to have to choose from lots of different fonts"? Nobody has to choose from different fonts; the option of using the default font is always there. How long did it take you to figure out the correct answer, for those who want to keep their fonts or who just don't like that kind of slimy message? The correct answer was to hold up both middle fingers and tap the button to start the computer with your knuckles. How long did it take Microsoft to stop showing you the question? Right.
When anybody, whether they're in the federal government, the police, Microsoft, or anywhere else, can sneak a peek at you or your house through a computer screen, that's a search without a warrant. That's unconstitutional. It's a crime even if the person trying to peek into your house is not a burglar. We need laws requiring any programs or "apps" that enable that kind of spying to be disabled, and any further use of such things to be prosecuted as a felony. People who use computers in private homes have a right to work in their underwear. If they wear underwear. The computer should not be able to tell.
The work people do at job sites, the content they post at forum or "social" sites, should tell people which accounts belong to one real person, a group of people, or a bot. That is all anyone in cyberspace needs to know about anyone else. People choose whether to identify with one screen name, as I've come to do, so that the main difference between what "Priscilla King" writes and what the writer known as Priscilla King says to her friends and family is that "Priscilla King" doesn't mention other people's names, or to have a dozen different screen names and even give them different personalities and relationships with each other. Nobody else needs to know.
Nobody should be able to identify a real person with things you post online...
Unless, of course, the person is a Least Competent Criminal who insists on posting content about the crimes he intends to commit, which should alert local law enforcement. Then they can take out a warrant, trace the location of the computer, and knock on the criminal's door while he's still typing a blackmail letter. We've already seen the uncensored Internet help fight crime.
The Internet is designed to make it easy to trace evidence of real criminal activity, sufficient to obtain a warrant for a criminal's arrest. The rest of us need more safeguards to prevent the criminals using the Internet to track us, to search our homes (for valuables) and monitor our interests (for scamming). The easiest way to do that is to ban any storage of information that identifies a person "in the cloud."
Don't encourage the "we can keep your information safe" scam. The way you keep people from stealing your friends' keys from you is not to carry your friends' keys. If you've not already seen firsthand how this works in cyberspace, trust me: We need to stop letting banks, stores, schools, and other legitimate businesses that are managed by fallible humans put the information that is "key" to our accounts on the Internet where criminals can steal it.
The Internet can help--any requests for a home address, a credit card number, use of your camera app, etc., could easily be made to cause the offending business computer's screen to flash red and display a message like "This information can be accessed only with a warrant obtained from a local magistrate."
Amending the Constitution is expensive and tedious and a long hard slog. That's as it was meant to be, and as it should be. Still, I see many benefits and no real risks in making privacy an enumerated right in the Constitution. (Abortion might be said to violate a fetus's privacy, so abortion should just be left out of this discussion). The Internet, in any case, needs to be regulated in a way that respects privacy.
It will happen if we demand it, Gentle Readers.
