The InfoStride Forum

A well-placed government source leaked ReadWrite this draft memorandum from the White House.*

Announcing Citizenship 2.0—The Same Civil Rights You Love, But Better! We're super excited to announce Citizenship 2.0—now enhanced with extra monitoring for your safety and security!

We know that many people have enjoyed the old version of American citizenship. But as with any product, times change and require adaptation and upgrades to stay current.

Your old freedoms were delivered in conventional ways. Now you can get just the freedom you need, when you need it. It's freedom as a service. It's Citizenship 2.0.

New And Improved! In recent years, this administration has learned a lot from Silicon Valley—and we're not just talking about the communications we've been intercepting for years (http://readwrite.com/2013/06/07/prism-fallout-in-cloud-we-dont-trust) from some of the biggest Internet companies. We've been very interested in how innovative business models can be applied to government.

In particular, the freemium style of product has proven very compelling, where most users get a basic service for free and others pay to get an enhanced version.

Of course, as taxpayers, you're already paying the government to provide services. But our expert governance innovators—"governovators," we call them—have figured out a way to apply this model to the rights you enjoy as a citizen.

Get excited, people—freedom is no longer free. It's freemium!

Big Government, Big Data, Big Changes! You may ask, what's enabling this move? You may have read something about PRISM (http://readwrite.com/2013/06/07/prism-fallout-in-cloud-we-dont-trust).

PRISM doesn't exist, of course. But let's say we had a secret program to monitor all Internet communications with the tacit cooperation or nonresistance of major tech companies. For argument's sake. If something like that existed, that would merely be a back-end foundation for the front-end interface improvements to your government that really matter. That's Citizenship 2.0.

Here's what you're going to get:

• Unlimited storage for all your communications. You won't have access to them—but we will. And that's what matters. If you or your parents come from a foreign country, or you just have a funny-sounding name, or you ever Googled the name of a political organization, you also get extra backups—for free!


• In-app purchases. Benjamin Franklin once said, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." First of all, that was, like, soooo three centuries ago. Second, what's with the crazy capitalization? Anyway, we have all this new technology that's a complete game-changer. With Citizenship 2.0, you don't have to surrender your essential liberty up front. You can trade little bits of it as you go, for all the temporary safety you want!


• Access to your leaders. We're all about transparency—at least when it comes to what you're doing online. Thanks to Citizenship 2.0, what you do online might end up in a report that the president himself reads! Isn't that cool?

Note: If you prefer the old version of citizenship, you can opt out of these changes and stick to the original version guaranteed by the Bill of Rights by marching, protesting, or writing your Congressman. But let's get real—no one's going to bother to do that.

*We're kidding. We hope.

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