March 24 Class Period

When we walked into class today and were given our assignment there was a lot of confusion as to the best way to go about this process. There were so many different ways to go about the assignment so we all through out a few different ideas. After much debate we came to the consensus that the best way to proceed was to spend the first part of class discussing the readings and then we could all blog for the remainder of class. This seemed to be the only way to be able to accomplish this assignment as we quickly figured out how difficult it would be to blog and discuss the readings at the same time. The way I went about it all was taking notes as we discussed the readings and then started my blog post about the reading.

Chapter 6 is about how the government is instilling fear into the citizens which in turn tricks us into giving up our privacy rights. By giving up our privacy rights to the government it allows them to take a closer look into our lives and have tighter surveillance of the American citizenry. This is the first time that the government has done this as we enter our first war that has began during the technological age that we are now in. Because of this, the government adapted new ways to fight the war and this is one of these new strategies.

Chapter 7 takes a look at the new intrinsic ties between politics and surveillance. There has always been a form of surveillance that was used by the government to keep track of the citizenry. However this often created huge problems when this was discovered. A great example of this was when Nixon was busted during his presidency for authorizing the wire-tapping of citizens. This is ironic because when it was discovered that Bush was wiretapping citizens, we turned a blind-eye to this because it was deemed appropriate in the interest of our national security. People have let their guard down when it comes to issues of national security as we discussed as a class when talking about Chapter 6. The government has instilled so much fear in us that we are willing to do so much, and give the government the liberty to do anything that we think may make us safer.

This all begs the question of how ethical this surveillance is? As a citizen are you alright with the governments increase surveillance in the interest of national security (or so as they claim?).

While working on these posts we were joking around about this whole project and said, Do we think Professor Dean is watching us right now as we work together on this project? Is there a hidden camera somewhere that she is watching back in our office? This was a pretty funny joke that we all got a laugh from, but the truth of the matter is that we would never know. You never know and that is the fact of our modern surveillance culture.

Overall, this was a very interesting and for sure different way to go about class. I will admit though, I feel that we do get a lot more accomplished during a regular class when we spend the majority of class discussing the readings. I feel the problem that we encountered today was that it was hard to have a good discussion when the main emphasis of the class was on writing our blogs.