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Wednesday, June 26, 2013

The Constant Fight for Privacy


For John, BLUFIf you want total security, you will have neither privacy nor security.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

I am glad I am not the only one using the Stasi reference.  Here comes the ¡No Pasaran! blog with "Obabush in his element in the heart of the Land of the Stasi".  The poster is Eric, who has been at this blogging for a while.

He is the spy who came in from the West, writes Arnaud Leparmentier in a column in which the Le Monde writer also reminisces about such things as JFK's speech to Berliners (1963) and Ronald Reagan's (1987), as well as Bill Clinton's many official visits to Germany when he was president (1990s).

Und who ish zhis shpy vrom de Vest zat ve are shpeakink apout?  Well, about the White House's current resident, aka "Obabush", and his trip to the land of the Stasi.  Indeed, this time (in contrast with his 2008 speech), Barack Obama's visit was held in the part of Berlin that was part of the former East Germany.

In the final analysis, the American president is in his element:  at the heart of the former communist dictatorship, which spied upon and filed reports on all its citizens with its sinister political police, the Stasi.  Shocking?  We will not let him off the hook, this president, a curious winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who refrained from closing Guantanamo, and whose spying on our emails, our phone conversations, and our Facebook accounts has just been discovered.  It was a promise, this Democrat was to break with George Bush.  Wake up.  At least for the present column, we will call him "Obabush."
We, as a nation, have been around this rock before:
  • The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1789.  These laws were designed to quiet criticism of the US President, at the time Mr John Adams.
  • The Espionage Act of 1917.  Amongst those convicted under this act was Mr Eurgene Debs, who had run against Woodrow Wilson in 1912.  Mr Debs was a socialist and was convicted for speaking out against WWI, the War to End All Wars.
  • The Church Committee in 1975, which exposed to the light of day the spying by the Federal Government, including the US Army, on US Citizens, and not just during the Nixon Administration.
  • Edward J Snowden and NSA.  This we know about.
Here is the deal.  Our right to privacy, Griswold v Connecticut notwithstanding, is being eroded.  If you think the right to privacy is just about being free to perform sexual acts out of the mainstream and to engage in acts to prevent unwanted pregnancies from any sexual acts, then you are just fine as things are—until police agencies become more prurient.

I want more.  I want to be able to think and write without worrying about the Government monitoring what I am up to.  I want to be able to oppose a war and oppose a new draft, without the fear of going to jail as did Eugene Debs.  I want to be safe to oppose things that I think are wrong, and not worry about some Government Agency keeping tabs on me, unlike the Rev Martin Luther King.

Up to this point I have felt comfortable, knowing that the government has been checking everyone's EMails and phone conversations (see ECHELON), believing I am hiding in plain site.  My thought has been that the information is so massive and I have no ties to Drug Cartels nor do I have contacts with Christian Identity Movement folks, so I will be passed over.  On the other hand, I am on a local Tea Party EMail list and I know my way around the so called religious right—I know there is a difference between Church of God, Cleveland, Tenn (Pentacostal), and Church of God, Anderson, Indiana (Holiness).  Worse, I am a Roman Catholic.

The present may be secure, but the future is uncertain.  IRS revelations are not comforting.  Nor are the ones about NSA and the Post Office comforting.

I don't expect folks are opening my EMails and listening to my cell phone calls this evening.  But, what about the future?  If the US Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Act in 1789, and we are still using (making more use of) the Espionage Act of 1917, why won't the Congress, at Administration urging, do the same in the future, unless we the People make it plain that we don't want it?

As for the item in Le Monde, those French have a way with words.  I wonder what Emile Zola would make of the situation?

Regards  —  Cliff

  The Stasi is not about torture chambers as much as it is about collecting limitless amounts of information on people.

6 comments:

Neal said...

Information is power!!! The more you have, the more you have. More important, the mere thought or fear that "they" are watching is chilling for many if not most.....encouraging if not compelling a majority to simply go along to avoid being subjected to real or imagined actions for wrong thinking.

And it is this very aspect of government that drives the minority to demand much smaller, well circumscribed government. Certainly what we have today is beyond the wildest imagination of even FDR....and unrecognizable by the Founders.

For the greater part of the life of America, the people were the government...We the People were firmly in charge. That is no longer the case. That We the People have a deciding voice is one of the greatest ruses of modern times. Government has become an entity in and of itself.....with the people subjugated to its self sustaining whims.

Fight for privacy?? That battle was lost long, long ago.

Craig H said...

Your wish to remain hidden in plain sight has long since past becoming quaint. The heuristic analytics possible over every last bit and byte of the gargantuan cache of data collected by the NSA are remarkably and disquietingly effective. Speaking first-hand from the software I work with every day, (nowhere near as sophisticated or powerful as that developed by the MIT nerds hired by the NSA), the effort to follow every citizen is even simpler than following any one citizen. Tea Party would be one of your more obvious vulnerable attributes. Prisoner outreach work likely connects you to drug cartels via minimal steps for a second one. Opposing the President in writing would contribute a third. No, none of these need to be incriminating--they just need to trip the analytical sensors. The list of trigger word contains things like "beach"--we are all on the list, and we are all Winston Smith.

C R Krieger said...

Kad

I am hoping it isn't yet to that point.

Regards  —  Cliff

Neal said...

Cliff....long past the point. When we have a President who goes on national media and says that the conservatives (and anyone else who oppose him) are enemies and must be eliminated......and his handler Valerie Jarrett follows up with "its payback time for those who are against us....there will be hell to pay for them..." AND they have the means to identify those people NOW....I submit we are long past freedom of speech and all the other rights Obama and his gang so deeply oppose.

In fact, though at the moment there are no clear indications of such, the means and the data are available now with which to engage in a purge like nobody has ever seen before.

Sheep NEVER are aggressive....so relying on the people to right all these wrongs is simply fantasy. As long as each little sheep gets his or her benefits....that is all that matters. THAT is the silent majority!!!

Craig H said...

You can hope all you please, but it doesn't change the fact you and I are already regular topics of software-driven analysis and scrutiny, and have been for some time. To this, Section 215 of the "patriot" act empowers the government to force anyone at all, including doctors, libraries, internet providers, etc., to turn over client records without any evidence of agency of a foreign power, suspicion of any crime, or judicial oversight, and these orders are free to be based on books read, websites visited, and/or correspondence. To make matters worse, parties relaying such personal information are disallowed from even acknowledging the information was given. FISA allows pen-register wiretapping on a national basis including the internet and all other transmission channels. And, if this was all not bad enough, journalists have documented testimony of NSA employees demonstrating their arbitrary ability to play back recorded conversations on any citizen at whim.

The US stands accused of "cruel and unusual" in the case of Bradley Manning, and I'd be interested to know if you'd be willing to argue any absence of our guilt as charged. It's not just a surveillance state--it's a fully-empowered fascist engine just waiting for unscrupulous operators, if we haven't let any slip through the checks so far. (We can't screen out whistle-blowing types, I wonder what makes us think we can screen out closet fascists?)

Neal said...

Kad makes an excellent point....to which I would add that we already have an unscrupulous fascist in chief....and I believe that he has no intention to, in the words of General Douglas MacArthur (aka the American Caesar) "just fade away." This is only the first quarter of the second game.....lots of time left on the clock.....lots of plays yet to be played. Don't forget....Obama was quick to sign into law the authority to essentially declare martial law in cases of "national emergency." What a wonderful smokescreen for a pogrom. Remember Cliff.......the Feds can essentially hold a person uncharged and incommunicado forever.......as a threat to "national security."

I am absolutely dumbfounded that nobody seems to see the future here.....we keep making excuses...."Oh they really just want to have us clean before giving us new clothes....."

Free people never see the end coming......