Privacy and Propaganda

the following piece is a work from early on in my writing career. It remains largely unedited (since the published date), and largely not fact checked. Published date is an approximation

The issue of privacy in the United States has recently been a very important one, and an issue that many journalists in the world want to get their filthy paws on. If you haven’t been alive for the past year or so, here’s a rundown of what’s going on: National Security Administration (NSA) hires a new system admin, Edward Snowden. Snowden blows a whistle and all the NSA’s important documents fly into the hands of a news agency called The Guardian. News agency reveals that the NSA is spying on everything, Edward Snowden runs away to Russia saying “Jokes on you NSA!”. NSA retorts back, “Daw, you got me good Eddy!”, and runs off to try and kill him and his family. Russia defends ole’ Edward whilst releasing propaganda about how Russia is more free than America, and The Guardian slowly reveals more and more documents on how the United States is violating the rights of its constituents by spying on their every move. Now that you have a basic idea of the situation actually is, I’m here to express the two main issues that I have surrounding that violation of privacy; the US’s vast amount of anti-terrorist propaganda and the average citizen’s knowledge of what a computer actually does.

The first topic I’m going to glaze over today is anti-terrorism. It’s becoming more and more apparent that the United States is using terrorism as a scapegoat for spying on its citizens to keep them “safe”. Many forms of mass media portray terrorists as being the big scary bad dudes that muscular shirtless men with machine guns mow down to protect America’s so called “freedoms”. These types of of motifs are displayed prominently in movies, games, and occasionally in edgy rap music (and are invariably popular and lucrative at that). Many citizens portray any person from the middle east as a potential terrorist, and most Muslims have to go through additional security at airports and undergo extreme forms of socially acceptable racism. One of my favourite movies I have ever seen (shown by my favourite history teacher) displays these points in an emotional and long-lasting way. In the movie, there is a Muslim man with Asperger’s syndrome that is on a quest to tell that world that “My name is Khan, and I am not a terrorist.”. Without spoiling too much, he faces large amounts of racism and bigotry due to 9/11 and anti-terrorist propaganda. The movie is called My Name is Khan, and it is by far one of my favourite movies of all time. If you ever get the time to watch it, I highly recommend you do as it further proves my points about how bad this racist propaganda actually is. As if this extreme racism couldn’t get any worse, the US fuels along this racism, and uses it to spy on the American people. Let’s be real here, there isn’t a terrorist hiding under your bed waiting to murder you in your sleep, and if there was the NSA isn’t going to call you up and say “Oh boy, you better watch out! There’s a terrorist under your bed!”. Why would they do that? That’s a bit silly don’t, you think? They’re too busy finding out what you eat for breakfast to protect you from the big scary terrorists! That is the issue surrounding the NSA, unhelpful espionage with no tangible basis.

The second, more important issue at hand is the citizen’s (and congress’) lack of knowledge of what a computer and the internet actually is. I’m going to use Jenny as an example (sorry if your name is Jenny). Jenny is a highschool sophmore that recently had her sweet sixteen. For said birthday, she received a new pink Jeep, iPhone 5, and most importantly, the most expensive Macbook her parents could find. After a fun and exciting day of school, she comes home and opens her laptop, opening a new browser window. She then types in to the search bar the word “google”. After slowly arriving to the google on here 5kbps connection, she then types into the Google search bar, facebook.com. After five or so hours of talking to her friends and looking at pictures of parties, she then closes her computer and is off on her way. She repeats this every single day until her Macbook decides that it can’t take it anymore and blows up. This here is a disgusting picture of what I call the average American, and it is the reason why the NSA will continue to spy on us.