breakingbrown | A recent Pew Research poll shows that blacks are more willing to accept curbs to privacy than others polled.
According to the poll, 45 percent of Americans say the government should be able to “go further than it is” to increases security, while 55 percent of blacks are accepting of additional curbs to privacy. In all, 52 percent of those polled said broad based monitoring of Americans should not occur. Among blacks, only 44 percent of those polled found the extra measures unacceptable.
Among all adults, 62 percent said investigating possible threats was more important. The figure was 60 percent among whites, 67 percent among nonwhites and 75 percent among African Americans.
Overall, 56 percent of Americans consider the NSA’s accessing of telephone call records of millions of Americans through secret court orders “acceptable”, according to the poll.
But this posture among blacks is curious given the impact of the surveillance state on the civil rights movement. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes brought up this point during his Tuesday show, describing how Martin Luther King was harassed by the FBI.
“They stalked his every move, broke into and bugged his office, they bugged his hotel rooms and they wiretapped his phones,” Hayes said.
“But there’s a pretty major sticking point, and that is the as long as it’s not abused part, because history tells us that is not actually a thing. A nonabused massive government surveillance apparatus. That is not what Dr. Martin Luther King tells us.”
“When you construct a massive surveillance apparatus, history tells us that it will be brought to bear not just on ‘the enemy,’ but on the people who threaten society’s power structure,” he added, “on whoever exists at the political margins, whether it’s Martin Luther King Jr. or some Occupy Boston protesters. It’s not some Orwellian abstraction. It’s America’s history and America’s recent history.”
According to the poll, 45 percent of Americans say the government should be able to “go further than it is” to increases security, while 55 percent of blacks are accepting of additional curbs to privacy. In all, 52 percent of those polled said broad based monitoring of Americans should not occur. Among blacks, only 44 percent of those polled found the extra measures unacceptable.
Among all adults, 62 percent said investigating possible threats was more important. The figure was 60 percent among whites, 67 percent among nonwhites and 75 percent among African Americans.
Overall, 56 percent of Americans consider the NSA’s accessing of telephone call records of millions of Americans through secret court orders “acceptable”, according to the poll.
But this posture among blacks is curious given the impact of the surveillance state on the civil rights movement. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes brought up this point during his Tuesday show, describing how Martin Luther King was harassed by the FBI.
“They stalked his every move, broke into and bugged his office, they bugged his hotel rooms and they wiretapped his phones,” Hayes said.
“But there’s a pretty major sticking point, and that is the as long as it’s not abused part, because history tells us that is not actually a thing. A nonabused massive government surveillance apparatus. That is not what Dr. Martin Luther King tells us.”
“When you construct a massive surveillance apparatus, history tells us that it will be brought to bear not just on ‘the enemy,’ but on the people who threaten society’s power structure,” he added, “on whoever exists at the political margins, whether it’s Martin Luther King Jr. or some Occupy Boston protesters. It’s not some Orwellian abstraction. It’s America’s history and America’s recent history.”
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