You’re familiar with the old saw that a prosecutor (persecutor, more like nowadays) can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich if he wants. Yeh, law enfarcement really is about that bad.
More than a few years ago, a client (who shortly thereafter moved with his family to an undisclosed rural, off-the-grid location–really) warned me to be careful what I said in phone calls, because the feds were listening in. I didn’t dispute his warning, because it didn’t matter. No matter how innocent one’s actions or speech may be, there are so many laws and regulations on the books now, that we are all “ham sandwiches”–open to be indicted for “crimes” thought up by our overlords any time they wish to have our blood.
Yeh, the “feddle gummint” has you by the short and curlies any time it wants to hang you. So? All one can do is live as best one can, as morally and ethically as possible, and let the chips fall where they may. *meh* Oh death, where is thy sting and all that.
Hell awaits law enFARCEment and bureaucraps who abuse their power. I wish them the joy of their final destination.
I kid you not: my own spouse litterally said, “we are NOT talking about explosives over the phone,” to his own brother when they were talking about route clearance.
Just think if a few million Americans went to ONLY using “burner phones” for everyday communications; same folks start using PGP on all email communications (and steganography embedding “Nanny-nanny boo-boo” and “Your mother was a hamster. . . ” etc. in LOL Cats pics attached to emails) and (sandboxed) anonymous proxies when cruising the web, why the NSA could spend its time on THAT sort of thing. . . We’d still be living in Surveillance Nation where ANYONE could be jailed if the feds wanted it, but at least a few NSA supercomputers could be slagged that way.