Citizen Writers Fighting Censorship by Helping Americans Understand Issues Affecting the Republic.
The Founders built a system based on an assumption that now sounds almost quaint: government power would be limited by reality. Communication was slow. Information was scarce. The federal government had trouble collecting taxes, let alone tracking the daily movements of its citizens. If the government wanted to watch someone in 1790, it needed a horse, a spy, and probably a tavern receipt.
There was a time in America when you could punch your Army captain, skip town, grow a beard, head west, and become “Samuel Whitaker, cattleman and church deacon.” Today? You can’t change your Instagram handle without a two-factor authentication code, three archived screenshots, and your ex forwarding it to your employer.
Every few years, Washington discovers a brand-new way to make ordinary people miserable in the name of “security.” The latest brainstorm? A proposed rule requiring visitors from 42 friendly nations—including Australia—to hand over five years of their social media history just to enter the United States.
While we may no longer enjoy the luxury of true privacy in the digital age, young people can still take proactive steps to reduce their long-term exposure and reclaim some control over their online lives.
Today’s young people are growing up in a world where the mistakes of adolescence are not only remembered but digitally archived, searchable, and weaponizable.
In the final part of this series, we’ll explore how the SSN metastasized into the backbone of modern identity. We’ll look at how it crept into private industry, how data brokers and governments exploit it, and how the “Mark” has evolved
In this part, we turn to the early years of the SSN itself, the numbers that were forbidden, and the unlikely rebellion that began not with violence, but with a strange, silent act of civil disobedience: using a fake number on purpose.
What does it mean when an essential employee (like a President or cabinet secretary) stops doing his essential work for days on end, and nobody notices?
Greetings my fellow Americans! Having spent 30 years of my life immersed in the world of Information Technology innovation and development (IT), I witnessed firsthand the 20th-century evolution and revolution of the machines known as computers. The very first computer on which I worked, as I was earning a degree in Computer Engineering, contained what …