Data mining and you.

If you’ve been asleep lately (and we all hibernate during the winter) maybe, you’ll have missed this jewel:

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.

But wait, it gets better!

Below are excerpts from search engine's privacy policies regarding the disclosure of information for legal purposes:

Just where is the information about all this coming from?

“I specialized in what’s called special access programs,” Tice said of his job. “We called them ‘black world’ programs and operations.”

But now, Tice tells ABC News that some of those secret “black world” operations run by the NSA were operated in ways that he believes violated the law. He is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the NSA in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.

So, the question for today is: if we give up the civil liberties making this nation a becon for the world’s oppressed — if, in an attempt to make our lives ‘safe and secure’ we relinquish all those wonderful checks and balances put into place through the years to prevent the abuse of power by our own government — will the terrorists have won?