All week I’ve been asking myself this question of whether or not we are free. Now thats a hard question to ask because it’s very broad. In my day to day life I believe that I am free, i’m able to go where I please and relatively do what I want, but what about on the internet? My theory is that we are all slaves to the internet and technology and this isn’t by choice or anything, but rather forced on by our own government. This week in class we were told to watch a movie called Snowden and this movie really changed my view on our government. It didn’t click in my head until after watching the movie of how little to no freedom we have on this technology that we love so much. Then this scary fact hit me, we have no where to hide. The government is able to track all our movements and they know what we are gonna do before we even do it. It almost reminds me of this app parents can get on there phones to track there children called Life360. This app allows the parents to track there kids wherever they are, which I don’t agree with doing, but thats a topic for a different time. I believe that by the government being able to track are movements, look at our calls and emails, this has in turn stripped us of our freedom not physically, but mentally on a bigger scale than we realize.

As I was saying about the movie Snowden it consists of this man named Edward Snowden who is a contractor. He leaves his job at the National Security Agency after finding out mountains of data is being assembled to track all forms of digital communication. Not only from foreign and terrorists groups, but from regular Americans too. So he decides to leak all this information to the public because of his belief that the public has a right to know that the U.S government track everything that U.S citizens do. He does all of this while knowing he’d never be able to go home, see his friends, family and his girlfriend again. It’s pretty inspiring to be honest, you have this guy who has everything to gain from getting this information, but instead of handing it over to other governments he gives it to the people and lets them decide what to do with that information.

One of the articles I read this week about the Sony hacks and the reason for Sony being hacked in the first place is very similar to why government data was leaked. It also goes over the media aspect of it and how the media processes what information to send out into the public. This happened to Snowden as well when deciding who to trust to leak this information. Even when he did find people to put this information out there, they had to worry about the government stopping them. Suppressing this kind of information does not represent freedom, but instead takes it away. A quote from the movie that I like and think ties this all together is “Whatever justification you are selling yourself on, this is not about terrorism. Terrorism is the excuse, this is about economic and social control and the only thing you’re really protecting is supremacy”. Snowden saw that what the government was doing was wrong and acted upon it how I think most of us would. He believed one of the many true conspiracy theories, everything you do you can be and could be used to track you.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/02/us/breonna-taylor-grand-jury-recordings/index.html

This article is about the officers involved in the botched raid in which Breonna Taylor was killed announced themselves as police multiple times before forcing their way into her apartment, according to recordings of grand jury testimony released friday.