Millenials: go ahead spy on us, it isn't like we're actually doing anything

(ACLU)

Laura Murphy

All the politicians are chasing after “millenials,” (that is the generation that doesn’t have jobs, lacks ambition, and lives at home as far as I can discern). When [mc_name name=’Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC)’ chamber=’house’ mcid=’E000291′ ] committed her perfidy by scuttling a very popular anti-abortion bill last week, she claimed that millenials didn’t think abortion was important, a claim that is at odds with most public opinion polling and an odd case to make when claiming your reproductive organs give you a unique ability to decide when it is okay to dismember a child in utero.

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Another politican who is about to be hoist by his millenial petard is [mc_name name=’Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’P000603′ ]. From Breitbart.com, [mc_name name=’Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY)’ chamber=’senate’ mcid=’P000603′ ] Talks NSA to Millenials:

This assault on personal privacy affects the Facebook generation more than anyone else. Your generation is completely digitized and uploaded. Everything you do is traceable via phone, email and bank records. And it is you, more than anyone, who should be outraged by this astounding assault on your constitutional right to personal privacy.

I hear people say, “Well if you aren’t doing anything wrong, then the government will leave you alone.” But over the last month and a half, this administration has proved that they will target anyone. Under this administration, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has targeted political dissidents, the Department of Justice has seized reporters’ phone records, and now we’ve learned the NSA seized an unlimited amount of Verizon’s client data. So, do you really expect us to trust a government that admittedly targets innocent citizens without probable cause? These overreaching acts are unacceptable under any president, whether Democrat or Republican.

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This may be an appeal that is falling on deaf ears. From Pew Research:

nsa

The American Interest has a good insight here
We’ve often said that American public opinion on civil liberties swings with the times. In times of low-threat peace, Americans clamor for privacy and government restrictions. In times of war, they are comfortable with, even perhaps desirous of, restrictions on liberty. But though that cycle will likely continue to drag American politics first one way, then the other, it may be that there’s a more permanent generational shift going on. Perhaps younger Americans, weaned on Facebook and Twitter and other low-privacy internet tools, simply don’t care as much about civil liberties as traditionally understood. They might be much more comfortable trading privacy for services or protections they like than their parents ever were.

That makes a lot of sense. The expectation of privacy is much lower among millenials than older generations and a generation that is numb to sexting and sharing intimate information with hundreds or thousands of people who are only a virtual presence in one’s life may find it difficult to get excited about email and phone metadata being harvested. And given what we know about millenials, it is going to be damned hard to change that.

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