</kidding>
But on a serious note. Besides 'terrorists winning' in this game. You know who else won? Every little vindictive pest that you could run into in your daily life. Your neighbor hates your lawn? -- He can report your for suspicious behavior or just donate $5 to Wikileaks in your name.
You got a bigger bonus than your co-worker? He puts a nasty comment about the president on a liberal forum somewhere.
Possibilities for abuse abound. Once the collection of data has been enabled, data will be siphoned through. It could be decades before a court case, a new employment opportunity or overseas travel all of the sudden will trigger a search and will open that archived file and all this stuff will be there. No way to correct it. You would have forgotten about that one incident with your neighbor 20 years ago, but it will be there.
What I fear will happen is that one of the triggers to open and inspect that file will be you participating in any kind of protest. It will be a Constitutionally legal thing to do. However, once you do it, you end up on a list, and now that 'ol file gets opened again and all these things from the past start appearing. You get pulled for random searches in airport. You miss every single flight you book. Every time you enter the country you get interrogated for an hour. All your electronic devices get confiscated.
Basically, once the government is acting irrationally it opens the door for others to exploit that -- angry neighbors, scorned lover, upset employees. How do I know? This is what happened in the Soviet Union. It was for a while common for neighbor to denounce each other for 'anti-Soviet' activities, if they didn't get along. In the best case and best times, those get ignored, in the worst time, whole families disappeared overnight.
"This is what happened in the Soviet Union."
Be careful when you're choosing your enemies. You become them.
If a secret set of rules is making you less likely to express your viewpoints (and support certain press organizations), that is already a consequence. It's unfortunate that rational people don't feel free to exercise their freedom in today's United States.
Apparently commenters here feel that I must be irrational, because I feel free to express my freedoms every single day in the US without repudiation. I'd love to hear the personal stories of those who downvoted me for how they know that no rational human being in American can express their freedoms.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/05/u-s-military-bans-personnel...
Reading or accessing wikileaks cannot threaten your security clearance. As stated, it is the possibility of being compromised that will threaten your clearance. The more you are scared of accessing wikileaks because you are not aware and assertive of your rights, the more you could be compromised by blackmail, which is the threat. It's mostly not what you do, but whether it can be leveraged for manipulation that threatens clearances.
Self censorship at work. And your real name is in your profile.
But if we really believe that, and we believe the nation will further slide in a fascist state then we probably shouldn't say _anything_ online or over the phone.
Who would have thought that Obama would bring back the Espionage Act? We used to imprison people for publicly supporting Communism and/or publicly denouncing wars, and the courts upheld it. The Overton Window makes people really complacent in a pretty rapidly changing world, and the civil liberties regressions by Bush that are being institutionalized and explicitly legalized by Obama could give a future Santorum (or his ilk's) administration a bunch of scary options.
In the future, we may regret having had conversations like this on the internet or over the phone. I'm taking that risk.
edit: sentence fragment
edit - relevant: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4259441
We need to encourage people to speak their mind. Can everyone be an enemy of the state? There is strength and anonymity in many voices, many who would not speak, do.
I suppose they could automate the persecution of dissidents by denying them services or charging them more taxes. That way there wouldn't be a labor shortage for actually carrying out persecution.
Can you cite people being jailed for supporting Communism or denouncing wars under Obama.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/02/27/is_the_obama_...
liberals politicians increase police power, conservative politicians increase social spending. their bases let them get away with it because they're "on their side", and their opposition let them get away with it because it's what they wanted anyway.
also note that the leadership in doing this came from Lincoln and Wilson....
So - Bitcoin won't keep you anonymous.
Edit: Sorry - I was reading your comment in the context of the previous commenter worrying about ending up on a government watch list.
In that vein I'm polling HN users: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4261481. Please participate.