Although I’m a conservative expat (one of only 3 in this country that I know of), I never considered myself the ‘black helicopter’ type that sees a government conspiracy around every corner and measures windows for tin foil.  However, I’m increasingly worried by the headlines I read in the states and what it might mean for civil liberties.

Take this story, for example:

Sixteen-year-old Ashton Lundeby’s bedroom in his mother’s Granville County home is nothing, if not patriotic. Images of American flags are everywhere – on the bed, on the floor, on the wall.

But according to the United States government, the tenth-grade home-schooler is being held on a criminal complaint that he made a bomb threat from his home on the night of Feb. 15.

The family was at a church function that night, his mother, Annette Lundeby, said.

“Undoubtedly, they were given false information, or they would not have had 12 agents in my house with a widow and two children and three cats,” Lundeby said.

Around 10 p.m. on March 5, Lundeby said, armed FBI agents along with three local law enforcement officers stormed her home looking for her son. They handcuffed him and presented her with a search warrant.

“I was terrified,” Lundeby’s mother said. “There were guns, and I don’t allow guns around my children. I don’t believe in guns.”

Lundeby told the officers that someone had hacked into her son’s IP address and was using it to make crank calls connected through the Internet, making it look like the calls had originated from her home when they did not.

Her argument was ignored, she said. Agents seized a computer, a cell phone, gaming console, routers, bank statements and school records, according to federal search warrants.

The article goes on to say that the teenager has been held in a federal prison for two months and has been stripped of due process, courtesy of the Patriot Act.  Scary, isn’t it, that someone can fake your IP address (the address your router or computer uses when accessing the internet and which can identify you online), and you get arrested and held in jail indefinitely.  There’s an interesting analysis of the story here.

Then there’s this article, about how the US Census bureau (recently politicized by being moved under White House control rather than the Commerce Department, where is has previously resided), will now be geo-tagging every residence in the United States as part of an effort to count and track citizens.  According to the Census Bureau:

Address canvassing should conclude by mid-July. The operation will use new hand-held computers equipped with GPS to increase geographic accuracy. The ability to capture GPS coordinates for most of the nation’s housing units will greatly reduce the number of geographic coding errors caused by using paper maps in previous counts. … During the address canvassing operation, census workers may ask to verify a housing structure’s address and whether there are additional living quarters on the property. All census workers carry official government badges marked with just their name. You also may ask them for a picture ID from another source to confirm their identity. In addition, some census workers might carry a ‘U. S. Census Workers’ bag.

I would think this is one of those issues that liberals and conservatives could agree on, but as so many of you have pointed out to me, those distinctions are increasingly irrelevant when party control in D.C. may change occasionally but the people running things day-to-day all share the same basic ideology of maximizing power and tightening their grip.

My liberal friends thing I’m an apostate for not hailing the coming of the Messiah and find my assertion that I’m safer in Guatemala than in the US absurd.   Comment below and let me know if I’m slipping into Black Helicopter Paranoia.