Twitter’s making it just a little bit harder for the US intelligence community to surveil your online activity.  As Kevin McCoy of USA Today reports, the company “told Dataminr, the business partner that sifts through and provides access to the full output of Twitter’s social media postings known as tweets, that it didn’t want the service provided to government investigators …”

I’m sure the National Security Agency and other organizations will come up with their own tools to monitor your 140-character descriptions of what you had for lunch, but it’s still a nice gesture on Twitter’s part — the latest little bit of welcome pushback against the surveillance state by American tech companies.

From the use of “warrant canaries” — a way of getting around government orders to not reveal government demands for information — to an increasing ethos of companies making it impossible for themselves to decrypt their users’ data, to Apple’s refusal to build a backdoor into its iPhone operating system for the FBI’s use, there’s a seeming sea change occurring in the relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington, DC.

To what extent that change is real and not just public relations theater, I can’t say. But  either way it reflects increasing public understanding of two key lessons taught to us by Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers:

First, almost nothing you do could possibly be any of the US government’s business; we should make it as hard as possible for government to pry into our affairs.

Second, everything the US government does is YOUR business.  You pay the bills and the people claiming to be “your employees” have proven, over and over, that they can’t be trusted with the privilege of keeping secrets from the boss.

For those two reasons, if there’s going to be a differential in technological power between citizens and government, that differential should work to the advantage of citizens, not government.

Somehow the US government managed to win World War Two without digital computers and put men on the moon with, rumor has it, less computing power than most of us have on our desktops these days. Let’s get back to that ethos.

Instead of letting politicians limit our computing power and access to encryption, let’s limit theirs. Because I’m a moderate, I won’t call for a complete regression to pen and paper. I think we can allow the FBI and NSA to have old circa-1983 Commodore VIC-20 machines with 4.5 kilobytes of RAM, cassette tape drives for storage and 300-baud acoustic coupler modems for communications, don’t you? Heck, in the spirit of compromise, maybe even Commodore 64s with floppy disk drives!

But modern computers, smart phones and strong crypto? Sorry, bureaucrats. That stuff is reserved for your bosses.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Government and Technology: A Modest Proposal,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 05/11/16
• “Government & Technology: A Modest Proposal,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 05/12/16
• “Government & Technology: A Modest Proposal,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Key West: The Newspaper [Florida], 05/13/16
• “Government and technology: A modest proposal,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Libby, Montana Western News, 05/13/16
• “Government & Technology: A Modest Proposal,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Uintah Basin, Utah Standard, 05/17/16
• “Government & technology: A modest proposal,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pahrump Valley, Nevada Times, 05/20/16

As a callow youth, I cast my first vote in a presidential election for Michael Dukakis, the Democratic Party’s 1988 nominee. Since then, I’ve never again voted for a Democrat or Republican for president. If George HW Bush had bothered to read his own lips in 1992, he’d have had my vote and I might never have ended up as a Libertarian Party member, activist and candidate. Thanks, George.

Nearly a quarter of a century later,  160 years into its life as a national political organization and 156 years after it became the most recent new party to put up a winning presidential candidate,  the Grand Old Party seems to be coming apart at the seams thanks to Donald Trump.

That’s probably an illusion. Fifty years from now this year will most likely have been, in retrospect, just another inflection point. It would be far from the first. Eisenhower’s defeat of Taft in 1952 made the Republicans the party of Cold War instead of non-interventionism. The period connecting Goldwater and Reagan spanned several major changes including but not limited to a rhetorical co-option of libertarianism at those end points and Nixon’s actual co-option of the formerly Democratic “Solid South.”

The Republican Party may be imploding, or it may just be shifting gears. Either way, I’m relieved. Not because I necessarily think New GOP will be any better than Classic GOP. But at least it will be less vexing on one front:

For my entire adult life, Republicans have campaigned as libertarians and governed as Democrats. I doubt we’ll see any major change on the latter point. But it will make my year (heck, my decade) if this election cycle means America stops running off to bed with a beer-goggles-induced Thomas Jefferson on the first Tuesday night every fourth November and waking up next to Hubert Humphrey the following morning.

If you’re a conservative or a progressive, okay. Just be that, take pride in it, and openly act on it instead of trying to convince yourself (and everyone around you) that you’re something else.

If you love freedom, though, this election cycle should be the point where you stop screwing around and get serious. You’ve GOT a political party, the Libertarian Party. We’ve been around for nearly half a century. We’re America’s third largest political party. We’ve elected hundreds of local officials and even some state legislators.  Let’s hit the next level together. And welcome home.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

• “Rumors of the GOP’s Demise are Exaggerated, but There’s Still Good News,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 05/09/16
• “Is the GOP dying or just shifting gears?” by Thomas L. Knapp, Libby, Montana Western News, 05/10/16
• “Rumors of the GOP’s Demise are Exaggerated, but There’s Still Good News,” by Thomas L. Knapp, CounterPunch, 05/10/16
• “Rumors of the GOP’s demise are exaggerated, but there’s still good news,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Woonsocket, Rhode Island Call [web and print editions], 05/12/16
• “Rumors of the GOP’s demise are exaggerated, but there’s still good news,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pawtucket, Rhode Island Times [web and print editions], 05/12/16
• “Rumors of the GOP’s demise are exaggerated, but there’s still good news,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Montgomery, West Virginia Herald, 05/25/16