Bernice:

> Poor security systems that are in place. .... god help my great grand kids.

I think a lot of people don't realize the extent of government secrecy, and what it holds for the future. Today everything is computerized, and computers are very good at collecting, sorting and storing data. Every time you buy something with a bank card, credit card or debit card, it is catalogued. Credit card companies (and their ugly cousins, the credit reporting bureaus) know EVERYTHING of our financial comings and goings. Every time we make a phone call it is processed through speech recognition systems. The telephone companies know EVERY person we have ever called. Banks know EVERYTHING we have bought using their bank accounts. When we walk anywhere with digital; cameras, our faces and bodies are potentially scanned for anatomical features that can identify us individually. Every medical procedure we ever had is now computerized.

Our governments have access to all that data, plus all the other data they collect themselves, like fingerprints, social insurance numbers, taxation data and even DNA.

At the present, nobody cares, but the day will come when governments will see political opponents as a threat. Anybody who does not agree with the system is a potential target. And we have given our goverments the rights to act in SECRECY under the guise of NATIONAL SECURITY.

I am not paranoid, but those people who fear big government should think twice before continuing to support the kind of power that computerized systems have placed in the reach of governments and the power-hungry men that run them.

Our grandkids will be scrutinized even more. I might not entirely agree with Wikileaks, but anything that starts dismantling the power apparatus that the new BIG BROTHERS have can only help to ensure that our grandkids will not be emprisoned in a digital gulag that controls every aspect of their life, from where they spend money to who they talk to on the phone. We have written laws that give our governments that kind of power (take the Patriot Act), we should set about dismantling those laws and ending the culture of secrecy that threatens everybody's freedom.