When Bill Clinton was a troublemaker.
Let this be a cautionary tale about the dangers of government dossiers on ordinary citizens. (This information comes from the biography First In His Class.)
We all know that Bill Clinton disapproved of the Vietnam War and like many young men of his age, went to certain lengths to avoid being drafted in the Army. In particular, he promised to enroll in the University of Arkansas Law School and serve in the university's ROTC program in order to get an exemption. Later however, he changed his mind, withdrew from ROTC, entered the draft, drew a high number, and escaped joining the military. In late 1979, he sent a letter to Colonel Eugene Holmes of the ROTC unit explaining his beliefs and his actions.
What else happened as a result? Well, the ROTC program also started a file on Clinton in its Dissidents File, into which this letter was placed. Apparently it was common practice at the time to track news about ROTC participants known to oppose the Vietnam War.
Fast forward 12 years later, when Clinton was running for president. Somehow, Holmes' daughter, a Republican activist, working with the office of former GOP House member from the district, got a copy of the letter, and released it. It didn't turn out to prevent Clinton from winning the 1992 election, but it wasn't for want of trying.
Remember that in the same campaign, some Bush administration officials thought it would be a great idea to look into Bill Clinton's passport files prior to election day, hoping to find negative information.
What's the lesson here? Information in the hands of the government can easily be abused, even if it was originally collected for benign purposes. A national government is an extremely powerful entity, and capable of great destructiveness in the wrong hands. To keep it in check, it should not know more about its citizens than is strictly necessary, nor keep it for longer than is necessary. Even if we trust the people currently in charge of it (despite my deep opposition to the NSA's phone records collection, I don't think Obama plans to do anything nefarious with the data), we should realize that even when officials change, the data will remain.
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