Citizen Rights... Individual Freedoms... In the past 50 years, are they increasing or decreasing?
Globally, nationally, are citizen rights and personal freedoms increasing or decreasing over past fifty years?
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This has really changed so much because of the internet. We have so much access now to information and to freedom of speech, BUT, now, situations are occurring to curb the free flow of information and ideas. Sampling a speech by someone on a network is deemed to be a breech of copyright, when it SHOULD be deems public domain. It is criminal. On the other hand, I get that the torrent sharing and streaming of copyrighted materials need to be controlled in some way….. I know it gets out of hand. I would watch ads if it meant I could get TV shows otherwise not aired in my region of the world.
As a traveller, my privacy has been completely violated. TSA can go suck on a garbage can. They are trying to fool themselves that by taking away baby milk (which they did to me….) is going to make the average citizen feel safer in the US is absolute bullshit.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHFhHa2ZbsA&feature=related
Note: It takes a Brit National to make the point that Americans need to take note of.
If anything, increasing. Modern day communications have made it this way.
They have taken a terrible knock in recent years. Who would have thought the President of the United States would ever authorise the use of torture and let’s not forget the 173 people who remain locked up in Guantanamo Bay without charge without trial and without lawyers.
Rights of individuals & individual freedoms have definitely decreased both in the US & around the world. There has been a tremendous decrease in personal freedoms & rights in the US since 9/11, especially with the passage of the PATRIOT ACT & the establishment of the Dept. of HomeLand Security….. & this was capped off by the passage of the NDAA which was signed into law on 12/31/11 (which allows for the permanent/indefinite detaining of American citizens who have been accused of terroristic activities, with no recourse to have an attorney or a trial). America used to stand against torture, but now our government says torture is “necessary”. There is no personal freedom, no individual rights in a Police State & this is what the US has become.
@flutherother I agree. From the No-knock Law and FISA Act from the ‘70s, to the Patriot Act and it’s products of legalized torture, rendition flights, unwarranted wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus under a dangerously broad spectrum of special circumstances, the powers of the TSA (as referenced above by cazzie), the NDAA, the creation of Free Speech Zones (isn’t all of America a free speech zone?), the two year old Citizens United v. FEC which enhances the definition of corporations as people and money equivalent to speech, FCC decisions such as the 1987 repeal of the 1949 FCC Fairness Doctrine and the FCC decisions in media ownership and control of the airwaves and Internet of the past twenty years, up to and including the recent attempts to rein in the Internet under the SOPA and PIPA (both sinister misnomers)—there is no doubt whatsoever that civil rights are under concerted attack in the US as never before and the bad guys are winning because they are passively assisted by a complacent, apathetic citizenry who are more inclined to vote for the next American Idol than to track the issues and vote to protect their democracy.
On a global level: increasing.
Isn’t it funny? The USA is becoming the new ‘China’ and China is becoming the new USA?
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