Sometimes the Internet makes a mistake.
The other day, one of my favorite websites embedded a Fox News video about NSA spying. Fox News entitles their video “Citizens Treated As Suspects.” At the site showcasing Fox’s story, though, the headline reads: “The NSA Grabs Information from Non-Suspects; Ninety percent of those spied upon are under no suspicion.”
Can this be right? When you’re treated as a suspect, you are a suspect, aren’t you? You’re being suspected of … something. At least of being somebody who might be up to something worth snagging in an all-embracing fishing expedition. If you’re not guilty, somebody else leaving comparable data traces is, surely.
On the other hand, no matter how innocent you feel, you gotta be guilty of something for which the government could come after you, right?
I do not say you have done something actually wrong. Only something some policeman or bureaucrat could hassle you for. We live in an era when parents get arrested for letting their kids play in the park 
Fox News reporter Shephard Smith says that most Americans caught up in the particular NSA surveillance net discussed in his story are just ordinary, everyday blokes — not reasonably suspected of anything NSA-spy-worthy. This is unsurprising given all we’ve been learning from the NSA documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden (see ProPublica’s revelation-chart).
These days, in the eyes of our government we are all suspects. Continuously.
And there’s something very suspicious about that.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.