You know, it's not really anything new that the American government spies on its people, but what's disturbing about it is that they're so open about it now, as if to say that they have so little respect for the American people now that they don't even bother to hide their methods anymore. Before, it was hidden, and a lot of people didn't know or realize or understand how these things happen. Well, now, it's out in the open and the people accept this as a necessary evil. It's amazing what governments can get away with in the name of national security, and it's unfortunate how much people will trust their government and give up rights because they're told it's for their own good.

As Milan Kundera put it: A man who loses his privacy loses everything. And a man who gives it up of his own free will is a monster.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4534488.stm

Oh, but it's just terrorists they're spying on, so why should the rest of us worry? Well, apparently it's not just terrorists who are a threat to national security. And national security is at best a bullshit excuse for spying on citizens. It's not just post-9/11 phenomenon because it's been going on for a long time, and it can't be dismissed by saying, "Oh, but they did that a long time ago. The government doesn't do that sort of thing anymore." Because it's obviously still going on. So it's not the policies that change - just the excuses.

WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.

“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It’s an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We’re not doing anything illegal.”

The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.

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The military’s penchant for collecting domestic intelligence is disturbing — but familiar — to Christopher Pyle, a former Army intelligence officer.

“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.

The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens — many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.

But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes.

“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says.