I”m reading Glenn Greenwald’s No Place to Hide now and keep recoiling in horror. I’ve been tracking NSA surveillance for years and thought i knew pretty much the whole story. Hardly. Greenwald’s book covers everything i knew about and adds much more. Read this book.
Yes, not only are all our phone calls and texts being recorded and saved, but also our our cell phones can be used to listen to our conversations when they are turned off, etc. etc. So the world is safe from unmonitored communication.
Oh, but wait. There’s one area left uncovered, the proliferation of American Sign Language use. Thousands of people who are not deaf! are learning and using ASL and are thus able to sign about anything they want in privacy, leaving a huge gap in our national security.
To close this loophole, we might have legislation to make it illegal to learn ASL if you or a member of your immediate family is not deaf, but that would be difficult to enforce. A much better approach would be to take a tip from George Orwell and require the installation of telescreens in every room of every building.
After all, there are now increasing numbers of video cameras watching our streets and public places, not to mention inside our stores and public buildings, thus keeping us safe from public misbehavior, so let’s take the next step and extend this safety everywhere.
A fringe benefit is that installation of ubiquitous telescreens would also address the problem of people writing each other notes, and i look forward to Senator Feinstein introducing this legislation in the near future, excepting, of course, the homes of the wealthy like herself.
A recent photo of Big Sister:
The above image has appeared in many places on the Internet and, not being the NSA, i’m unable to finger the originator.
2 Comments
I think you and I and maybe a few thousand other people in this benighted country are concerned about the NSA knowing everything there is to know about us and spying on our every word. The lists of who’s going to be rounded up are already drawn. You’re on one and so am I.
Tom, I’m hoping that there are tens of thousands of us who are following this controversy, led by Senator Wyden and other patriots, and that our numbers will increase exponentially as the full scope of NSA surveillance becomes more widely known. And oh yes, folks like me are already on the list but so far i’ve not become a buzzing insect so annoying to be worth swatting. When my buzzing stops, take that as a sign.