What I find to be troubling is some people are actually okay with this. Another one of those “public fill-in-the-blank” excuses again. Some folks are fine with trading liberty for security and those people deserve neither. As Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” For example, let’s look at Cherie Anderson from southern California:

Cherie Anderson runs a travel company in southern California, and she’s convinced the federal government is reading her emails. But she’s all right with that.

“I assume it’s part of the Patriot Act and I really don’t mind,” she says. “I figure I’m probably boring them to death.”

People like her are the problem. She appears she doesn’t care about the constitution, particularly the 4th Amendment nor the rule of law. As long as it doesn’t bother her, so what? Well it is a big “so what”. By her ignoring the loss of liberty means we all lose a little liberty, and as John Adams once said, “Liberty once lost, is lost forever.” Like I said, it’s people who think like Cherie Anderson that are the problem and the poster children for what’s wrong with America today.

It’s likely Anderson is not alone in her concerns that the government may be monitoring what Americans say, write, and read. And now there may be even more to worry about: a newly revealed security research project called PRODIGAL — the Proactive Discovery of Insider Threats Using Graph Analysis and Learning — which has been built to scan IMs, texts and emails . . . and can read approximately a quarter billion of them a day.

“Every time someone logs on or off, sends an email or text, touches a file or plugs in a USB key, these records are collected within the organization,” David Bader, a professor at the Georgia Tech School of Computational Science and Engineering and a principal investigator on the project, told FoxNews.com.

PRODIGAL scans those records for behavior — emails to unusual recipients, certain words cropping up, files transferred from unexpected servers — that changes over time as an employee “goes rogue.” The system was developed at Georgia Tech in conjunction with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Army’s secretive research arm that works on everything from flying cars to robotic exoskeletons.

Initially, PRODIGAL will scan only the communications of military volunteers and people who work in federal agencies. But the very existence of such a project is sure to unnerve citizens like Anderson. Is the government reading my emails? Are they already monitoring me?

Some may think, “Well, that’s okay, it’s only military volunteers and government workers…” The problem with that line of thinking goes back to what I said in the beginning of this post, and, aren’t military volunteers and government workers American citizens too? It doesn’t change the fact that government is spying on you without a warrant.

“Some people say it’s one step further toward a police state,” said Anthony Howard, a book author and security expert who has consulted for the Department of Homeland Security.

It is. Period.

Like the TSA, the Department of Homeland Security needs to be eliminated.