No such thing as being too insignificant any more. The "them" is nothing more than a software that indiscriminately flags you based on key words and phrases it picks out of our email, web posts, social media posts, etc.. Go to amazon and buy a backpack for your kids first day of school, a pressure cooker for your grandmother's birthday and them charge a box of nails at the local home depot and then wonder how many alarms just went off at DHS. I probably just sent some off just posting this innocent example.
Abso-freaking-lutely.
Decades ago, NRO (National Reconnaissance Office - it's been out for a long time) satellites were eavesdropping on international phone calls to and from the US. Keywords related to tax evasion or international terrorism set off a recording that would end up in some analyst's office for evaluation. Back then, during the Cold War, it was necessary and acceptable monitoring for national security.
But since the Patriot Act, the NSA scandal and what Snowden revealed I think we all know now that everything is heard and read today and that the monitoring and analysis are completely automated. This means that the old thinking that they didn't have the time to sort through all the data, or that humans were necessary (and too busy or lazy to care about our small lives) no longer applies. When you realize that the giant corporations we trust to carry our communications in reasonable anonymity are in bed with the system and turn over anything without warrants (simplifying here, but that's what it comes down to)... you know that every word counts. What you buy, read, watch, write and say gets dissected. So the "I'm not doing anything wrong" mentality becomes very naive when everything we are and believe in can be portrayed as a threat. Male? White? Conservative? Gun owner? Suspicious of big government? Well, how do 'they' know that you're not planning anything? Better look into that.
I've been hawkish and a 'law and order' guy for a long time. And I'd always viewed the loss of 'some' liberties as a necessary evil to ensure national security. After 9/11 I actually welcomed the measures taken as I knew they would help identify muslim cells stateside. Not long ago you could've heard me say that the fact that we haven't had any major attacks on our soil validated the whole thing, and that one day, once the smoke cleared, we'd have to roll everything back and recover our privacy. But what we knew then was only the tip of the iceberg and a trojan horse.
Given who is in power right now and how quickly the Big Brother, NWO agenda is being implemented shamelessly, I am now rooting for a system failure of some kind. The government is meant to be a servant, not the big eye in the sky cracking down on the free exchange of words and ideas in a supposed democracy. Unfortunately the public has been largely brainwashed to accept and demand a Big Nanny, and to give up all weapons and privacy. The commies embedded in schools and universities, the media and showbiz have seen to that since the '60s.
