The media, backed by corporate, are fogging this NSA/Snowden (snowed in?) discussion by conflicting what he did — whistle-blowing to draw attention to crimes –to focus instead on false issues like personal privacy. They are doing this by linking every sugar-spun reassurance to their own agenda.
The crux and core of what is really going on here, and what began the entire alleged controversy, is not the fact that he told everyone what we have known for decades anyway — the NSA is spying on every possible signal intelligence source. That has always been their mandate.
It was the 1974 Private Security Act that, in the wake of Watergate and Nixon, steeply restricted NSA from domestiic surveillance, but not forbidding it. With warrant and within tightly-restricted reason, it could be allowed in national security cases. Inadvertent trespass onto verboten areas required immediate reporting and review and could and did cost careers.
The real problem now is the use of this domestic surveillance with increasingly wider nets and decreasing oversight by various government agencies. They are illegally using SIGINT thus gathered to suppress investigative journalism and to crush journalists.
In short, a destruction of freedom of speech is well underway. These corporate fascists are enjoying Cart Blanche. What they’re trying to do is create a chilling effect so investigative journalists stop doing their jobs for fear of having a ton of GITMO fall on them. Who wants to risk indefinite imprisonment and torture for a poverty-level job?
At the moment, this juggernaut of shadowy pressures is having exactly that chilling effect, according to the editor of Mother Jones and other, very few other, sources of independent investigative journalism. “Investigative journalism has all but stopped,” is a typical comment.
We the people are being systematically deprived of rights and now privileges too. We are being disk informed, even as our attempts to be actually informed are being crowded out by bullying crimes from the top down. Back door bribes paid in corporate money means we don’t stand a chance of challenging this in the usual ways.
There must be a determined and concerted effort to keep investigative journalism alive, and to protect journalists and their sources. Whistleblowing is a vital component of this. When it becomes a crime to point out that a crime is happening, then justice becomes capricious and arbitrary. Do we leave justice in the hands of corporate fascist thugs or do We the People comprise a democracy? If we are a democracy, then we are our own government. As such, we have a right and in fact a duty to know about crimes being committed, malfeasance being permitted, and thuggery in the deniable realm of espionage. We have the right and duty to clean such things up so our government of, by, and for the people can operate all the better.
That means we have the right and duty to know about these things. And all of this is embodied in the Bill of Rights and United States Constitution. We must stop this assault on the health of the body politic. Cut out the cancer of corporate fascism. Dissent is not to be feared or crushed into mocking Free Speech Zones (holding pens). It is to be welcomed as useful criticism that helps us improve.
Rise Up Now against oppression and the growing informant society.
We must assert democracy now.
All of this by way of saying, inequivocally, that the side one must be on is that of freedom, liberty, and Constitutional rights. Inalienable rights. The other side opposes those things. That other side is vile and must be stopped. This is true throughout history.
It is pretty to think that there might actually be a politician somewhere who does things out of admirable motives. However, once you realize that motives are assessed in a subjective manner, and once you remember that benefiting from certain decisions tends to force those decisions, you realize that the system had checks and balances built into it for very good reasons. Reinstate them.
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