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Source: Erie Times-News, Pa.迷你倉沙田Aug. 25--The plans for my first-ever visit to the Crawford County Fair on Monday evening involved picking up a friend whose place I'd never been to, so I typed his address into Google to get a look at the street grid.What came back a second later included a color, street-level photo of his house. My first thought was that it was cool, and the second was that it was a little creepy.Then our graphics artist mentioned offhandedly at Wednesday morning's news meeting that a package on the completed runway extension project at Erie International Airport would include a "view from space." Nothing to it.It's not that I didn't know this stuff was out there. I've peered at the top of my house on Google Earth.But I've been reading about how National Security Agency spooks, in the name of security, have taken to systematically sifting through the voluminous byproducts of Americans' digital lives. It's reminded me that there's a dark side to this modern magic.I'm not one of the people they're concerned about, obviously. I'm mildly subversive, sure, but my schemes aim only to overthrow the established order locally -- the kind of thing that worries the people with Destination Erie/U.N. Agenda 21 signs in their yards.But I've also never bought into the notion that if you're not doing anything wrong, you don't need to worry about when, how and why the powers that be are snooping. Human nature and the nature of power being what they are, we'll always need to be vigilant about that.Later in the week I was reading in the New York Times about something under development by another federal leviathan, the Department of Homeland Security. The Biometric Optical Surveillance System -- or, ahem, B.O.S.S. -- aims to combine computers and video cameras "to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces."The Times report said the program started with the goal of helping the military to detect bad guys at polling places in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2010, however, B.O.S.S. was transferred to Homeland Security for eventual use by police in this country.What could go wrong?Meanwhile, many of us are enthusiastic participants in conducting de facto surveillance on ourselves. Some of us compulsively share our activities and whereabouts via Facebook, Twitter and other virtual hives.I da迷你倉價錢ble on Facebook and have found Twitter to be an engaging and useful tool. But I cling to a zone of privacy and reserve, and cringe a little when folks live every moment out loud.Curiosity and my evolution at work recently prompted me to get up and running on Instagram, a social network revolving around photos and video. But I balked when an online specialist in our newsroom explained how we could set the app to automatically catalog and share where each image was taken.Excepting my wife and occasionally my co-workers, anyone who needs to know where I am is probably already there. But I could tell my young colleague found my objection to be, well, quaint.How much people share freely about themselves is their business. How much that would otherwise be private is now intercepted by the government is everybody's business.While I honor and support law enforcement, I've also long been a fan of judges who are sticklers about the details and limits of probable cause, warrants and such. Official power always bears watching closely, and those who end up abusing it often begin and delude themselves with good intentions.Because our enemies are relentless and murderous, we'll never get past the need to have people in the shadows looking out for us. At least as important is having adequate checks and balances in place to ensure our protectors don't branch out into spying on us.What's being brought into focus by the NSA controversy is how the usual mechanisms of political and judicial oversight have been marginalized by the ubiquity and complexity of our digital networks and the secrecy, speed and power of the surveillance tools. The judges assigned to keep an eye on our cyberspooks are essentially signing off on algorithms rather than evidence.That makes potential misapplications and abuses of that extraordinary power more subject to concealment and manipulation. And for now that leaves the keepers of these programs asking citizens to just trust them, which history teaches is always a bad idea.Write to Managing Editor Pat Howard at 205 W. 12th St., Erie, PA 16534, or e-mail him at pat.howard@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/ETNhoward.Copyright: ___ (c)2013 Erie Times-News (Erie, Pa.) Visit the Erie Times-News (Erie, Pa.) at .GoErie.com Distributed by MCT Information Services迷你倉