The other day half jokingly I noted on Facebook I didn’t want to leave my truck parked in the city with the stuff I needed for camp on a ninety degree day – with the propane tank, fireworks, ammunition and even the second battery sitting in the heat potentially posing a fire or explosion risk. I apparently watch too many cartoons or take the printed propane and battery warnings too seriously but I’d be unhappy if my truck burned. That said I was even more concerned about the heat decimating the ice I had to keep food prematurely.
Some random person that follows my personal Facebook feed commented that, that’s the kind of thing that gets you put on the government’s terrorists watch list. About the same time, reading the news for work, I saw this article about the Buffalo FBI surveillance of domestic terrorists and mass shooting threats. They mentioned that they had a unit that surveilled people of interest. That said, I was pretty bemused by the whole thing, noting that at least I’m creating good paying government jobs and the federal government has some of the best paid jobs in the Capital Region.
I’m really not that worried about government surveillance. If there is somebody in the government who sits around reading my blog posts and tries to psychoanalysis them, I’m glad I’m helping to keep them employed. I hope they enjoy watching my camping videos, stories about Big Red, my maps, photos and other content I provide. That said, more likely, they’re just read by an automatic spider run by the government like a Google, processed into some kind of intelligence like millions of other pages but ultimately not that useful. With 325 million Americans to keep an eye on plus six billion other foreign actors I’m sure I’m not that much of a priority or interest.
Sure as a staunchly independent individual, a single guy, who likes spending weekends in the wilderness, owns a few guns, are part of several pepper and off grid Facebook groups, plead to a misdemeanor a decade and a half ago, who has some conservative and some liberal views, I’m probably not the lowest of priorities by law enforcement monitoring. But I’m also not the highest either, and there are a lot more dangerous people out there like White Nationalists, religious extremists, racists and other hate groups. I’m certainly none of those things and there is a lot bigger fish to go after then me.
I also am aware that law enforcement has a lot of restrictions on monitoring citizens. Most monitoring when it occurs is probably broad-based and occurs on a lot swath of population and is fully automated. They have to have reasonable suspension that a crime is likely to occur in the near future and can only monitor people in public places or public utterances without a court order obtained by a judge after showing probable cause of a crime. Because of the cost and time involved, only when they have compelling evidence are law enforcement likely to investigate.
