Well, look at that. Here all these years you thought Microsoft products were just buggy. But where the NSA and MS are concerned, those aren’t bugs; they’re features. (H/T H)
New: Prism-Break.org. Products to use instead of the Usual Suspects.*
Jim Bovard (that is, Mr. Bovard, according to the WSJ bio; have I been too informal all these years?) on the virtues of AmeriCorps.
“The Soul-Rape of Bradley Manning.” This superb piece by Wendy McElroy has already and deservedly gotten a lot of electron time. I’ve been meaning to base a think piece of my own on it, but since I haven’t quite gotten there, I thought I’d just add one more link to the masses it’s already received.
I’ve been kind of sorry that the local Big City has only a Home Depot, not a Lowes. I like ‘em both, but always liked Lowes a little better. But damn, the co-founder of Home Depot has him some style and some guts.
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Some are highly tested and reliable; others less well vetted. Some are open source; some maybe not. But considering the alternatives …
A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA “may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States.” A possible interpretation of that language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can domestically — on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to “target” a specific American citizen.
NSA admits pretty much the whole shebang. Filthy, lying, spying, Orwellian, totalitarian, anti-Bill of Rights scum.
I’ll bet they — or their kissing cousins in the Injustice Department — turn out to be responsible for this, too.
* Dear alphabet soupers, and Lives of Others creepers and peepers: The above is not written as a threat. Merely an observation. Frankly, I don’t think any decent person would want to dirty their hands on the likes of you.
I’ve been trying to figure out the worst thing about the NSA revelations and it’s been hard to put my finger on that.
It’s not the loss of privacy. I hate that. I really, really hate that and I assume that everybody with a brain hates that. But it’s Not News.
It’s not the destruction of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Again: hate, hate, hate — but Not News.
It’s not the lies or the preposterous Hollywood scenarios the securitators are cooking up to obfuscate the fact that they’re spying on everybody. (Hey, look! As long as we make up Bourne-ish, Bondish stuff about terrorists, you won’t notice we’re spending more time peering at YOU!)
It’s not the sad fact that millions of people who “have nothing to hide” are so blind to even the most obvious potential dangers of the supposedly innocuous “metadata.”
It’s not even that the country is being run by unelected madmen. (That, too, is despicable and not so new.)
It’s not even that the country is being run by unelected madmen and most people don’t give a damn.
It’s not even that secrecy has run amuck and hardly anybody seems to notice that you can’t have both secret government and “representative” government at the same time — that secret government is by definition dictatorship.
No, all of that is horrible, but none of that is the worst. So what is it? What is it? What is the elusive thing that is even more horrible than all that?
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I think the word might be impunity. Or better yet, that term our grandmothers might have used: effrontery.
It’s that all of the above is being done with the bland assumption that they (and I mean all the “theys,” from the No Such Agency to the rubber-stamp FISA court to the unholy union of Feinstein and Graham to the legions of enforcers to, of course, the Lecturer in Chief) will get away with doing whatever they want to do to us. They assume they’ll never be stopped and never be forced to bear any consequences.
And why should they assume otherwise?
Even when they’ve been caught in the past and had to weather mediastorms or even storms of congressional ire, those “theys” have always gotten their way in the long run. Look back at the frenzy of the 1970s, when Watergate and the COINTELPRO scandals crashed simultaneously over the nation — and thinking people, utterly disgusted with the illegality and overreach of “their” government, rose up and demanded change!
What did they get for their indignation and their efforts? They got things like the FISA court. That is, they got the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that, at bottom, just created a way for all the abuses to go on exactly as before (with perhaps a slight pause in the worst domestic surveillance) — but now to go on with a nice cover of “legality” — and complete, permanent secrecy.
And of course, we got all that — and worse. Because the fundamental wrongs never get addressed. They just get legal-ified to make them appear acceptable. (Legalification has the same relation to natural law as truthiness has to actual truth.)
The fundamental wrongs never do get addressed — within the system. And that’s what all the “they’s” are counting on. Public outrage. Followed by cosmetic reform. Followed by business-as-usual. Followed by all kinds of delicious new laws and regulations they can use to game the system even more completely in the future.
And so their game goes on. And on.
To a point.
—–
Of course, behind all the impunity and effrontery, there lies that one ever-present fear: the knowledge that at some point even the most regulated, cowed, well-bribed, and spied-upon population won’t take it any more.
The “theys” of the world know this even as they deny it in the media and their everyday doings. Perhaps that’s why creatures as allegedly diverse as Feinstein and Graham are humping each other so vigorously on this one thing — the real thing not being that surveillance is good and comfy and protective and absolutely harmless as they keep insisting, but that the status quo (that is, elites overseeing the rest of us) must be maintained at all costs.
Because these days even some fairly mainstream people (or some some formerly mainstream people) are starting to use some alarming words.
No, not those words. But words like “illegitimate” and “revolution.”
Hm. This is the first thing I’ve heard that makes me think a smartphone could be a great idea. (I’m sure there are other things; just none that grabbed me.)
Double hm. What exactly is Governor Sandoval of Nevada up to? Might be worth the 15 seconds it takes, especially if it ticks off Bloomberg.
While I disagree with her lumping us with “we,” whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has a point. (Heard on NPR this afternoon that a solid majority of Americans is still all in favor of NSA phone snooping; made me wonder what they’d say if they were first informed about … Oh well. Doesn’t matter what they think. Majorities don’t change the world.) (H/T JJ for the link.)
Twenty open tabs in three browsers on two computers. I read and think about last week’s shocking-but-utterly-unsurprising revelations about NSA snoopery. A thousand thoughts run through my head but not a single word makes its way into electrons.
No, it’s no surprise at all that a government agency that was created in secret and is still called “No Such Agency” now reigns so powerful — and will continue to dominate presidents and congresses, no matter who elects them or what letters they have after their names.
It’s also no surprise that not a single MSM news source mentions the Fourth Amendment when discussing whether the latest-revealed snoop programs are legal. They talk about the FISA court and changes to FISA law. They refer to the Un-PATRIOT Act and decades of Supreme Court decisions. They wring their hands over the fact that the Obama administration has never showed the media a copy of the memo that it used to justify these data-gobbling policies to itself.
It feels unreal. You know things are bad, but has the state of things in the U.S. really gotten so dismal that some supposedly educated people believe that a secret memo, written by the executive branch to itself … makes law?
Of course, we’re assured by everyone from the Lecturer-in-Chief to minions at Slate that we’re silly — just hysterical, paranoid, and silly — to be alarmed. Because after all, there are “safeguards.” And no mere safeguards. No! We can rest assured that all three branches of government are scrutinizing every snoop program every day to make sure that the rights of We the MarksSuckersVictimsPeasants Cherished Citizens of this Great Representative Democracy are protected.
And of course, snooping on everyone is absolutely necessary because it’s for security. And it even stopped a terrorist attack! Not the one in Boston, of course. Not the one in London, either. (Even though the perps of those attacks were investigated after giving off multitudes of warning signs — then ignored.) But some terrorist attack was stopped, we can be assured (even if we can’t be informed). Because our Masters tell us so.
My “favorite” comment from Officialdom came from a person called James Clapper, a creature hardly anybody had heard of until last week, but who’s Big Brother the man in charge of national intelligence this week. He predictably claimed that merely knowing that the fedgov is spying on us all may have already compromised Vital Ongoing Anti-Terrorist Operations. But the better part was that he bemoaned the fact that The Guardian and other media sources (bless Glenn Greenwald) had the nerve — the audacity — the chutzpah! — to reveal the existence of a secret snoop program without also revealing the secret safeguards on the program, which are carried out in part by the secret FISA court and secret backroom meetings in congress.
But really, never mind the secrecy! Don’t even notice it! You are protected! Not only by your Duly Elected Representatives, but by nameless, faceless, unaccountable people you’ve never heard of — and if we have our way, you never will hear of them!
Can we seriously be living on the same planet with creatures like James Clapper? With journalists who cry, “Show me the memo!” — or for that matter, with the growing crowd of R&D tyrants who actually expect us to believe it’s all “for our own good”?
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Of course there’s nothing new here — except the degree of perfidy and the increasingly Orwellian nature of the claims from Above.
We can assume that every electronic thing we do is being recorded and stored on fedgov servers. We can even guess (if we’re nearing a level of sufficient paranoia) that the current revelations are deliberate leaks from the USSA security apparatus to gradually condition us so we’ll be less alarmed when we eventually learn the full extent of the powers of the Ministry of Truth. Some of the “revelations” may also be lies to keep us cowed and guessing about how much real reach Mordor-on-the-Potomac (or The Dark Star in Utah) actually has.
As the great Bruce Schneier notes, what we don’t know about fedgov spying is scarier than what we do know. And that’s partly because we have to imagine it and wait for the hammer to fall.
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Of course, there’s nothing new there, either. Let’s never forget that the original self-designated terrorist organization was a government — and governments have used terror to grab power ever since (and before).
The only real question is: What do we do about it?
And there I come up — almost — empty.
“Elect the right people”? “Reform government”? Change the laws? Riiiight …
Shoot the bastards? Conduct a revolution? Nice thought, maybe. Ain’t happening this week. And besides, fedgov bastards are worse than hydras: shoot one, 10 (even nastier ones) spring up in its place. And a revolution in this era when over half the population depends on government and “journalists” think a memo or an order is all that’s needed to rule us? Riiiight ….
Of course, we have our good old solutions of declaring personal freedom, outwitting, and (hopefully) outliving the bastards.
He also notes that we can run away — and that many of history’s best people have and do.
Never mind that, in the present case (which Rosenberg wasn’t directly addressing), “running away” — as in going offshore — just means that those secret laws, regulations, and memos decree you now to be fair game for the worst of their snooping.
We can’t — and shouldn’t have to — stop using the telephone or the ‘Net just because James Clapper, Barack Obama, or some other creepazoid might be peeping.
We can take (and I hope, have taken) reasonable precautions, but few of those can go so far as protecting our “metadata,” such as whom we called or whom we emailed and where we were when we did it. And it’s hard to protect ourselves against tyrannical threats whose nature has not yet been revealed.
So I don’t know. I really don’t. I’m at a loss — where I hate to be.
We can defy. We can ignore. We can feel ever-greater contempt. We can hope the entire evil system collapses. We can keep the usual low profile and hope The Ministry never plugs in our individual wire.
I wish I had better to offer you. But today, I don’t.
So just let me close with a hearty TO HELL WITH THEM ALL. And when the day comes that their regime collapses in on itself, may the entire weight of it collapse on those who thought they could rule free people through secrecy and terror.
Anybody who grew up in a dysfunctional family knows one of the cardinal rules: The person who mentions a problem is the person who caused the problem.
Let some low-on-the-family-totem-pole person raise a destructive issue that’s hidden in plain sight and all hell breaks loose.
No, the family doesn’t suddenly wake up and say, “OMG, you’re right. We have to do something about that!” Instead, everyone within earshot rounds on the poor sap who dared mention the family secret and the bullying begins:
“Why are you always such a troublemaker?”
“If you’d just learn to keep your mouth shut, everything would be fine.”
“If you were a better person, your mother wouldn’t drink so much!” (Or your uncle wouldn’t come on to you or your parents wouldn’t argue so much or your father wouldn’t have deserted the family or whatever.)
And so on and so on and so on. It’s absolutely depressing how alike dysfunctional families are. Worse, let said poor sap, in desperation, take his complaint outside the family in an attempt to get help and … well, you ain’t seen hell until you’ve seen that.
Because then said sap is not only a liar, a troublemaker, a tramp, a faggot, a weakling, or whatever else s/he’s being scapegoated for. Then the sap is disloyal. A traitor to the clan. A violator of the code of silence.
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It’s even more depressing how alike dysfunctional governments are.
The suffering of Bradley Manning, on trial this week after three years behind bars (nearly a year of that spent in horrific, punitive conditions), reminds me just how much a dysfunctional government is like a dysfunctional family.
Manning saw evidence that U.S. government soldiers were committing war crimes — and the government was covering those crimes up by classifying the evidence. (Classifying is used absurdly indiscriminately, in any case; and the Obama administration itself leaks classified documents when it suits their own purposes.)
Nobody could be more of a low-man-on-the-totem-pole than Bradley Manning: an Army private; 5’2″; gay; young; and wearing big, thick, blocky glasses. But he bravely — or foolishly, or both — put the evidence in front of the world, especially the shocking, infamous, truly unAmerican Collateral Murder video.
What happened was oh, so predictable. Were the murderers brought to justice? Are their names plastered across the media? Are they in prison? Were their commanders called to account? Did journalists and criminal investigators across this great land start delving into the crimes and the culture behind them? Were presidents and cabinet members held accountable? Anything … anything?
Of course not. Because we’re dealing with a dysfunctional “family” writ large.
Therefore, the problem is not that agents of the state murder and get away with it. No, that’s not the problem at all. We can all just ignore that. The problem is that Bradley Manning brought the matter to light. And the cardinal rule is: The person who mentions a problem is the person who caused the problem.
Bradley Manning is evil. Bradley Manning is a traitor.
Did Manning break laws? Apparently. But so do we all, all day long. Did Manning give the enemy (whoever they are this week) information against the U.S.? He gave the world facts that anyone could use; but those facts and that video only harm the U.S. because of the actions of the U.S., not because of Manning.
Here’s a thought: You don’t want to be hated? You don’t want your enemies to have propaganda tools to use against you? Then don’t commit war crimes.
Did Manning actually cause any problem? No.
He’s just the poor little sap who saw a terrible problem in his government/military “family” and thought it needed to be brought to light so it could be discussed in the open, the issues dealt with, the problem solved.
Maybe with a little more age and experience, he’d have known what always happens after that.
Daniel Ellsberg, the last guy to do something similar, had age, experience, status, solid help, and the fact that people already hated Richard Nixon, on his side. He still got crucified. Poor Bradley Manning, without all of the above, is like the hapless low-status kid in the world’s biggest and most vengeful dysfunctional family.. Without a miracle, they’re going to crush him as only a dysfunctional clan can.
I haven’t been at the computer much today. Have actually had Things To Do and a Life To Live. But several times in my very brief newsly perusals, I’ve encountered the oh-so-shocked question: “Did Holder Lie Under Oath?”
The question always leads to this or something like it — Our Esteemed Attorney General denying all knowledge of targeting any reporter under the handy-dandy (to tyrants) 1917 Espionage Act just days before getting caught doing exactly that. He personally signed the warrant to go after Fox Newsy James Rosen as a “co-conspirator” in the supposed espionage.
It’s not the targeting of reporters that’s so fascinating here (though that, too; since Nixon, no one else has dared).
It’s this: How could anybody in this age of well-earned cynicism expect anything other than lies from any of Our Glorious Rulers? Especially from one who’s already weaseled his way through years of Fast & Furious?
Of course he lied under oath. That’s the norm for power these days.
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Holder? He’s just doing what’s done. Just following his boss, the famous Professor of the Constitution who’s more opposed to that document than any previous president since Lincoln. And who uses vox populi as a cover for the fact that he thinks he’s the one-and-only, far above law or anything else vox dei.
Yes, we know the MSM is woefully out of touch. But we usually assume it’s mostly out of touch with things going on beneath the glossy surface. How is it even possible that people who watch politicians for a living seem so stunned observing the obvious?
You see the wonderful thing about equality for women? We get equal opportunities for political corruption — and equal opportunities for paid vacations when we’re caught being bad. Boy, now that’s progress.
“America isn’t Greece. Not yet.” Another reminder of the value of good old System D. (Tip o’ hat to JG)
