If anyone questions the data gathering of the government, sure, but this particular story is a non-story IMO.
If anyone questions the data gathering of the government, sure, but this particular story is a non-story IMO.
So to be truly safe I guess the government should know all the books we each buy and those we borrow from a library. They should also track what everyone reads online.
And it would be very easy for the government to find out all the books I ever bought from Amazon and everything I read online. I wonder sometimes whether Amazon has some kind of PRISM-like arrangement with the NSA.
Defeating a voodoo ritual is cheating? Isn't it more like protecting yourself from false accusations?
No, it doesn't. That's the point.
When you start assuming that mere interest in a subject or an attempt to research it necessarily implies any particular moral position on that subject or future action, you're walking a very dark path.
I have read about, and in some cases seen videos of, things that I find horrifying. That doesn't mean I condone the actions involved, and it certainly doesn't mean I have any desire to emulate them.
What next, I'm obviously interested in cracking secure networks because I studied mathematics and understand how a bunch of exploits work? I'm a potential terrorist because I studied chemistry and know many ways to make something go bang? I'm a Nazi sympathizer because I have studied European history and seen some video footage of horrible things?
The logical conclusion if we follow your line of reasoning isn't even thoughtcrime, it's penalising people on the mere suspicion of thoughtcrime, and that suspicion doesn't even need to have any rational or objective justification. You might as well throw any pretence of justice out the window by then. And the danger of that is very much greater than the danger of a few curious people reading a book about something that might or might not work anyway.
You can't stop every problem, but you can minimize it as much as possible.
The only way you can secure against this is to control who you hire, and control as much as possible what they can do. To that end, sharing of this data is perfectly reasonable, as long as safeguards are in place for who uses the data, which is almost always there from my experience.