Are We Living in a Police State?

Technology can be so great. We can do so much with tech, so much so, to the point in many cases that tech helps extend our lives. But then there’s the dark side of tech. When tech is used for unlawful purposes such identity theft, and stealing money from another. When someone breaks into a bank account of another person they are basically entering the persons home and stealing from them. The crooks are just using other means and tactics to steal from people. With all the online crime of people’s identities and bank robberies of the online type we have become a fearful populace. The police have responded to the rise in crime with a heavy handedness that strike me on the verge of arrogance. Take for example the zeal with which the FBI exhibited in hunting down a group of hackers. They were told which three servers to take for the cause of their investigation. How many servers did they cart off? 67! None of which had anything to do with the crime that they were investigating. Such heavy handedness by law enforcement officers smacks of arrogance. Sure the Feds have every right and obligation to investigate a crime, but to take off line 67 servers that had absolutely nothing to do with their investigation, then I have a problem with their actions. Those servers were part of a larger cloud network, one in which people had important information and data on them, not to mention the services that were provided on those servers. How does the FBI explain the excessive collateral damage that it inflicted by the taking of those servers? Does it just say “oh well we goofed. Sorry.”? What if there had been real time mission critical applications for a power plant and the Feds suddenly take those off line, are they going to say sorry that they caused a melt down? Or what if a hospital had real time mission critical apps on those servers and patients lives depended on those servers, are the Fed’s going to say sorry that they caused a death but they were investigating a crime? When the police do something like this they have to be cognizant of the fact that in this day and age their actions have consequence's, maybe physically right next to them but some where any where and police forces in this country need to be reminded that they are PUBLIC SERVANTS FIRST! Police officers second. Perhaps we as a society ought to consider stricter protections for data in the cloud. What kind of rights or restrictions should we place on data and info in the cloud? And maybe we ought to consider laws that would restrict how far law enforcement can go in confiscating servers. But there’s another option, the American way, the lawsuit! Let’s tie up American courts some more! All because law enforcement gets cocky and decides that they can do whatever they want, without any repercussions. I think it’s time that we have discussions about the rights and protections that our personal, businesses, and private data ought to have in the cloud.

Those are my two bits......................Eric