Now then, you probably don't want to be put on a watch list, but the intelligence agencies in the United States have grown so large, with so many people and so many algorithms searching out potential anomalies within our society that might cause trouble, then at one time or another generally everyone gets on the list of potentials to be looked at to possibly be placed on a list.
And with the Internet, and Facebook and other social networks you may find yourself talking to someone from another country, who maybe on a list, or might be someone checking to see if you ought to be there.
The reality is it's very hard to keep track of which terrorist activities are going on in which countries, and generally the citizens don't know everything that the CIA, military intelligence, or the NSA knows.
But in their due diligence to catch potential terrorists online, they will generally attempt to contact US citizens from outside the country and start some sort of chat with them.
Once engaged in a conversation through international lines, or via satellite through e-mail, Skype, or other forms of communication like telephone, then our intelligence agencies find it their prerogative to find out which are talking about.
Of course, if you're not talking to a real person, or if you're talking to someone who is trying to find out information about you, because perhaps you hit one of their red flag anomaly items, they might lead the conversation into the realm of unpleasant things, topics which you may not have wanted to talk about.
In their overzealousness, and this is intelligence agencies worldwide not just the United States, in fact, least likely to be the US, the intelligence community inadvertently creates more surveillance targets.
If a foreign surveillance agency, which is allied with the United States is led to believe that you might not be a quote good citizen, then they will share that information with our intelligence agencies.
You can see the problem, which occurs, and makes it unsafe for you to correspond with friends in foreign countries.
So on one hand we are trying to bring the world closer together, but on the other we should all realize that not everyone we talk to is a real person, or the person they claim to be.
And it's not my intent to make you paranoid, as some people are already paranoid enough (which is another real problem), and perhaps that's something they're looking for, I don't know - but it's something you should probably consider.
I find it amazing how many people contact me from overseas, and rant and rave about various things in their own government, or in mine - but I can tell when they are get the information from, I can tell if they are watching Al Jazeera, listening to the BBC, or watching Russian TV.
I can tell by their opinions which seem to be custom tailored to the various news outlets around the world.
If you have any comments, questions, and/or concerns about any of this, please feel free to shoot me an e-mail.
I hope you will please consider all this and think on it.