If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, He’ll Want a Glass of Milk

            We live in a country that was founded on freedom.  We believe in the freedom of speech, religion, and to live the way we wish as long as there’s no harm done to ourselves or anyone else.  Being a country that is based on freedom gives us certain liberties that should never be taken away from us. 

            In recent decades, with the development of new technologies, much of our freedom has been slowly taken.  We can no longer walk down a street without the likely possibility that we are being watched through the glass eye of a camera; whether it is on the side of a building or on a satellite that we cannot even see looking back at us.  We can no longer drive a car somewhere and have the easy feeling that we are alone on our trip.  We receive tickets in the mail for unknowingly barely making a red light, when no one was even present at the time it happened (or so we thought).  Money transactions leave a digital trail of breadcrumbs wherever we go.  People are filed into demographics for companies to advertise to based on where they go and what they do with their phones.  With recent advancements in technology, it is nearly impossible to go anywhere or do anything outside of our own homes without someone being able to find out exactly where we are or what we are doing. 

            Now, this statement is not entirely true.  The government not only has the power to monitor our public lives, but also our private lives.  The United States government has resorted to filtering through, watching, and listening to the things we do on the Internet and on our phones.  Before, we were aware of some of the ways we were being watched while in public.  Now, we are not only being watched in public, but the data we access and the conversations we have inside our own homes are being monitored.

            Having an Internet Terms of Service takes away an even greater portion of the freedom we have been promised.  By agreeing to this Terms of Service, we give government agencies such as the NSA open permission to monitor our activity on the Internet.  America, being a country that was founded on freedom of the people, should not be a nation full of citizens who are forced to give their government permission to monitor their data, watch their every move, and listen to their every conversation 24/7.

            Perhaps the most important reason that we should not have to be forced to give our government the open invitation to watch what we are doing on the Internet has to do with the way the law works.  Many actions in politics and law are taken based on the idea of precedence.  When a judgment is decided in a court case, precedence is set.  Cases thereafter that are similar to that first one are very likely to have the same outcome because the people involved will look back on how it was dealt with before.  This in turn shapes the ideas of society as a whole, as they grow on top of each other as time goes on.  The infringements on our freedoms over the recent decades have not happened all at once.  Tiny steps have been taken by those who oversee the laws and practices of the government towards slipping our freedoms slowly out from under us.  Whether this has been intentional or just by circumstance is irrelevant, but stepping-stones have been set, leading our country astray from the path of democracy.

            An Internet Terms of Service will set a large precedent for the relationship between our government and its people.  It is said, “If you give a mouse a cookie, he’ll want a glass of milk.”  The eerie question lurking in the backs of the citizens of this country’s minds (or at least should be) is this: what comes next?  If in fact we are forced to agree upon this Terms of Service, what is the next step that our government will take in order to infringe on our privacy?

“When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.”

-Thomas Jefferson