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Human
Events
Farmers blast EPA for attempting
to release their personal
information
By
John Hayward
7/22/2013
Bob
Stallman, president of the American Farm Bureau, wrote a fiery
editorial for the AFB’s August publication in which he castigates the
Environmental Protection Agency for attempting to release private
information
it had collected about farmers – a scandal which attracted the
attention of
Congress last month.
The
Environmental Protection Agency recently was planning to
publicly release personal information about tens of thousands of
farmers and
ranchers and their families in response to several Freedom of
Information Act
requests from media and other companies. The result? Farmers’ and
ranchers’
names, home addresses, GPS coordinates and personal contact information
would
be up for grabs by anyone who asks for it. The American Farm Bureau
Federation
said, “Not so fast.”
Protecting
farmers’ and ranchers’ right to privacy is a top
priority for Farm Bureau. That’s why we took legal action. AFBF filed a
lawsuit
and sought a temporary restraining order to block EPA from releasing
the
private information into the public domain.
What
many people don’t realize is that the majority of farmers and
ranchers and their families don’t just work on the farm – they live
there, too.
By turning over farmers’ names and addresses for public consumption,
EPA is
inviting intrusion into farm families’ privacy on a nationwide scale.
EPA is in
effect holding up a loudspeaker and broadcasting where private citizens
live
and where their children play.
I
think most of us would expect this type of behavior if we lived
in a different time and place or if we were watching a spy movie. We do
not
expect it, and will not tolerate it, from our own government.
Stallman’s
editorial refers to the NSA surveillance story, which
he describes as something out of a “spy thriller.”
His comment about “living in a different
time
and place” comes just shy of dropping an S-bomb on the EPA, with the S
standing
for “Stalin…
Read
the rest of the article at Human Events
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