The Pandora’s box of safety

Dave Newton, Las Vegas

Wednesday, June 19, 2013 | 2 a.m.

Americans are at far greater risk of being victims of local crime than we are from a terrorist attack. If we justify government tracking of individual Americans’ phone and Internet activities to keep us safer from terrorists, shouldn’t we expand the use of that data to allow the government to protect us from domestic crime?

We’re currently nowhere near the situation George Orwell envisioned in his book “1984,” but we’re clearly going in that direction. And once you decide that you’re OK with the government being able to look at every aspect of your life, in hopes of making a tiny reduction in the already slim chance that you’ll be a terror victim, how do you decide where to stop?