What an atrocious example of federal intrusion.

This is yet one more step towards the Feds knocking on your door without a warrant.

This is no longer the United States of America. This is two steps away from a police state.

Those are comments on a news story I read this weekend. What horrible new and invasive policy could they be talking about? What is the government up to now? Eeeek! Well, put on your tin-foil hats.

Apparently, in the event of a terrorist attack, natural disaster, or other big emergency, the Department of Homeland Security will monitor certain web sites –like Twitter– for situational awareness and to assist in first responders and law enforcement in making decisions about what needs to be done where. The way people in the comments were carrying on about it, one would think they’d just announced they would be opening everyone’s mail before delivering it or putting cameras in everyone’s living rooms, right?

Here’s a little news flash: if you Tweet it, it’s public. If you comment on a news story, it’s public. In a great many cases, if you post on a blog or forum, it’s going to be public. All of it is the equivalent of standing on a street corner shouting or carrying a placard. I have no expectation whatsoever that anything I post on my blog, on Twitter, or on public forums is private. It’s all out there for anyone to read, even the government. If I or anyone else has a problem with that, then I or anyone else shouldn’t be posting things publicly on the internet. It’s ridiculous to be complaining about someone reading –or as in this case most likely scraping for keywords– information people willingly put out into the public sphere.

What makes a great many of the most outrageous comments on that news story even more hilarious is them screaming about the government monitoring Facebook, which the story explicitly says they aren’t going to do, because they aren’t monitoring any web sites that would require them to log in to view content. Everyone’s Facebook updates and filtered Livejournal posts aren’t on the list. Why, it’s as if some people don’t even bother reading a story before their head explodes and the only thing their two remaining brain cells can get their mouths to sputter is FASCISM, SOCIALISM, NAZI, NAZI, NAZI!

I don’t have a problem with this for two reasons. Twitter and other sources of instant information provided by normal citizens on the scene has proven to be an effective way to know what’s happening on the ground and in the area during a crisis, and most importantly, any information anyone chooses to make public themselves is, well, public. Don’t want the government knowing you just ate a peanut butter sandwich? Don’t Tweet about it. Don’t want the government to know you are a raving loon who posts stupid crap on public web sites, shut the hell up. Though if people stopped commenting on news stories, I would be lacking many great hours of amusement.

And read stories before commenting on them! Not doing so only makes one look more stupid than one is liable to look anyway when insisting that reading Tweets is an invasion of anyone’s privacy.

So many people totally fail at the internet.