By Chris Benevento, News Staff
Edward Snowden’s dispersal of classified National Security Agency (NSA) documents last year raised numerous questions about how much of our lives the government actually sees. Since the release of this information, the public has thrown around words like “big brother” and “spying” to describe the NSA’s information gathering methods. The public outcry has seemed, at times, near-universal – this was a serious breach of trust.
This all seems a bit much for something that we, the public, do with devastatingly more efficiency than the US government. It is hard to conceptualize the actual fears associated with a government tapping phone calls and reading emails. If you are an American citizen who follows the rules and leads a normal life, what is the worst thing that could happen, provided you were even remotely interesting enough (most of us are not) to warrant surveillance?
People get so caught up in the big brother hype that they forget that there have not been any cases of the government using information gathered by the NSA to harm non-criminals. Many citizens are worried about the NSA invading their private lives. And with good reason, it’s unnerving to think you might be the subject of government observation.
Today, however, these citizens should be more afraid of the people next door.
With the dawn of social media, it would appear that more and more ordinary citizens are looking for ways to catch members of their communities in controversial situations. You need only to flip on the news to hear about some teacher getting fired or reading a half-assed apology for an “inappropriate” tweet or a vacation picture posted on Facebook.
And it’s sure not the NSA doing the whistleblowing. It’s the ordinary citizen out to ruin someone’s career by drumming up some bogus outrage in the community over social media. The news media then perpetuates this lunacy by actually granting it coverage. Human error has become an impossible concept with the dawn of social media – especially when it comes to teachers.
The people teaching our children are just that – people. They don’t act like they’re in front of kids in all aspects their personal lives, just as the idiots who get off on reporting them don’t. Today’s Internet-age parents are so deluded by getting the best for their kids that they don’t realize the devastating effects of their means.
While it is important to maintain some level of online decency in any profession, teachers deserve just as much freedom online as anyone else. Just because a teacher has your child in class does not give you the right to go through her honeymoon photos.
But the problem is not completely on the shoulders of all the creeps in our communities stalking other’s social media. It is shared by all of the purposeless dummies who are more than happy to jump on the bandwagon without a moment’s hesitation.
For example, back in November, an Idaho high school basketball coach, Larraine Cook, posted a picture on her Facebook page of her fiancé on vacation. In the picture, the two are posing in bathing suits and her fiancé’s hand is resting on her breast.
The picture was quickly brought to the community’s attention and Cook was terminated – for a goofy picture with her soon-to-be husband. It’s the mindless, compassionless masses that make this kind of foolishness possible. While one angry person might be background noise, an outraged community has the potential to get national attention – and that’s when people lose their jobs.
Communities have become drunk on the power that social media has granted them. While the power to enact proper change is an important part of any community, when it is abused, it is devastatingly effective and cruel. So to the people laying awake at night wondering if the NSA will see that private email or listen in on that important phone call – start worrying about the real enemy – the person two houses over who is going through your vacation albums.
-Chris Benevento can be reached at [email protected]
