I'm with you too, Badknees. A government that would put an electronic shackle on the governed deserves a cap in its ass.
I hear you on the 1st Amendment too, but the more pertinent document would be the one that says this:
All governments, regardless of system, are determined to stay in power by whatever means necessary. In the case of dictatorships violence is used, in the case of socialists groupthink and poverty are used, in the case of democracies fear and 'it's for your own good' are used. Threaten that arrangement and you aren't a team player.
These are the fundamental issues the declaration of independence, constitution and bill of rights were fashioned to avoid in a time of relatively unsophisticated political systems...meaning monarchies, oligarchies and caliphates where succession principally was familial, stable, and without competition.
When you have a substantial percentage of the US population that has no clue about what these documents say and mean, coupled with a climate of fear based on external threats and economic downturn which clearly is exploited by the government, you get what we are experiencing.
A citizenry that is irrationally afraid is easily controlled by a government that promises (or insists) that protected civil liberties be surrendered because it asserts it can effectively save us only if we all go along with insidiously creeping restrictions under the guise of 'security'.
FDR was right. 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself'. While he mostly was referring to the dire economic conditions of the early 1930s it was more than that. There already were ominous signs of misadventure in Germany. In many ways, he was addressing the same issues we face today. And, there were loss-of-rights parallels then as well.....internment camps. In retrospect, everyone can see (or say they do) that those actions were unfortunate and wrong. Since we cannot seem to learn from history, we are going down the same road, only this time it is way more pervasive.
