Quote:
Originally Posted by Barcey
The Joseph McCarthy trials were before my time but I'm sure he would have loved access to this kind of data. I'm sure that people that lived through it have a strong opinion about it and they probably aren't wearing tin foil hats.
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Joseph McCarthy was neither the first nor the last, simply the most stupid and notorious. During World War I, for example, Woodrow Wilson authorized his postmaster general, a very illiterate man, to censor anything sent through the mails and Congress passed a law authorizing the attorney general to prosecute anyone who might even encourage someone not to volunteer to fight. Well worth reading is
Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent by Ernest Freeberg. No one was safe; thousands were prosecuted simply because they were feared or because of what they read, not because they took any overt action, and judges, including the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the convictions and the act.
We should be very much on guard about what will be done with the data being collected.