This article on Yahoo News talks about Venezuela's Hugo Chavez spying on his political rivals, taping their phone conversations, and then using them in television commercials in an attempt to discredit them. HOLY CRAP! is probably our first reaction... and yet how different is this really for the transparency laws that I talked about in my last blog post? If one argues that a person's private life becomes open to the public when they put themselves in a place of public status, is this really that much different? If a President has to worry about sending e-mails because of transparency laws making his private correspondences public, how are his phone conversations any different? And if they are public couldn't they be used against him? We look upon what Chavez is doing and we think it's pretty ridiculous, but it's not too far off from what's already being done. It seems that anybody is willing to spy on someone else for "juicy gossip," without much moral consideration. Sure some journalists may take ethical considerations and refuse a story, but there are plenty out there who don't and will put it on the air. It seems more and more likely people are interested in airing out each others dirty laundry, the concept of privacy seems to be disappearing all together... Privacy isn't just turning on my privacy settings on facebook, in fact technology has enabled this sort of mass form of global gossip.
This might be a good place for me to say "So watch what you put online," but in all reality anyone can post anything about anybody. It's a weird and scary world we live in, and will we see more people using Chavez's mud slinging methods? This last Presidential election was pretty brutal, will it only get worse from here?
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