“Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Benjamin Franklin
The shrill spokescreatures of our police state continue to squeal that Snowden wrought “Incalculable damage”. Of course he’s done “incalculable damage”. How else can you describe the evil traitor’s release of incontrovertible evidence that the NSA, with cooperation from our tech industry that ranged from full to eager, was collecting everything loyal Americans said or wrote, all the while stoutly denying that they were doing so? I mean, won’t demonstrating that our government is a pack of lying knaves undermine our confidence and make us less willing sheep? And is that not tantamount to treason?
Where will this lead? Our local police forces are now being outfitted with a range of military gear from Apache helicopters to tanks, the better to increase security to protect us. At what point, i ask, did the American people become The Enemy?
IMHO, we ought to erect monuments to Snowden. Oh, but wait, we already have….and our security apparatus sprang into action immediately to protect us.
Even after Snowden’s revelations proved our leaders had been lying to us, nobody expects them to stop lying and giving us “least untruthful” answers to our questions. Lying is their default mode…when they’re not distracting us with red herrings, as when a White House spokesman said, with his thumb on the scales, “government and the [computer] industry can cooperate in a way that finds a balance between civil liberties and security”. Ummm, yes, you will permit us to encrypt our communications so long as you have the key. We give you our civil liberties and you give us security, and what greater security can one have than in a maximum security isolation cell?
The Orwellian name of the secret court that rubberstamps the secret surveillance of all American domestic phone calls and Internet use is the Foreign (italics mine) Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA). It is located in the Ministry of Love.
Meanwhile, here’s a pic i took at a little demonstration i attended back in May, the operant word there being, alas, “little”, as there were precious few of us.
