'Outrage' over data mining is a case of too little, too late

I can't help but be amused at all the faux outrage being displayed at the news that the government might be listening in on phone calls or reading e-mails.

After all, sauce for the goose ...

When Congress passed the Patriot Act less than two months after the Sept. 11th attacks, there wasn't a whole lot of dissent or even discussion. The bill was introduced one day, passed the House of Representatives by a 357-66 vote the next day and passed the Senate by a 98-1 vote the day after.

I don't remember if anyone even bothered to mention old Ben Franklin's well-known warning that people willing to surrender freedom for security would wind up with neither.

Someone must have.

Of course, we had already surrendered all sorts of freedom long before 2001. It's tough to imagine anyone not objecting to being injected with a chip that would tell the government where they were at all times. But that's effectively what you do if you carry a cellphone. Nearly all cellphones include GPS chips, which ostensibly enable them to help you get from one place to the other.

And of course cellphone calls are extremely easy to listen in on. Essentially they're radio transmissions, and anyone who can find your frequency can listen in on what you're saying.

Don't even get me started on e-mail. Anyone who believes their e-mails are secure should wake up. If you put a letter in an envelope, seal it, stamp it and drop it in a mailbox, you've got a chance to get it through to its destination without any snooping. If you write an e-mail and hit SEND, you have no idea what copies of it are going where.

So what's it all about? Most of what is happening is called Data Mining, where computers are programmed to react to certain code words that might be clues to terrorist activity. That's all well and good -- if you trust the government to act responsibly.

These days, though, nobody seems to want to trust anyone on the opposite side of an issue. When Republicans held the levers of power, conservatives were pretty much okay with Gee Dubya Bush and Dick Cheney protecting them from terrorists. But with Democrats running the government, they don't much like it.

It all depends on whose Al is gored.

If there's one thing that has been a bit of a surprise to people who voted for him in 2008 and again in 2012, it's how conservative President Obama has turned out to be. He certainly wouldn't be part of the modern conservative movement, which would look at Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and see dangerous liberals. But he passed a health care plan that was originally proposed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and his national security stance would be in the same neighborhood as mid-century Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

Don't expect much to change. Once you give away freedoms, they're awfully hard to get back.

And America isn't about to elect a real liberal who would push back.

After all, anyone in Washington will tell you that the War on Terror is never going to end.