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Thomas Drake: You're Automatically Suspicious Until Proven Otherwise
colinneagle writes "RT had a very interesting interview with former NSA official turned whistleblower Thomas A. Drake, who said, 'Security has effectively become the State religion; you don't question it. And if you question it, then your loyalty is questioned.' 'Speaking truth of power is very dangerous in today's world,' he added. The interviewer pointed out that investigative journalists are labeled as 'terrorist helpers' for trying to reveal the truth, to which Drake said the government's take is 'you go after the messenger because the last thing you want to do is deal with the message.'"
Network World also has a pretty good article on William Binney's keynote at HOPE 9, wherein he revealed some technical details and a bit more background on the NSA's domestic surveillance program. Unfortunately, neither audio or video of the talk are available yet.
'Security has effectively become the State religion; you don't question it. And if you question it, then your loyalty is questioned.'
Sounds exactly like the conditions that people lived in under the rule of the Nazis and Communists. The "the land of the free and the home of the brave" have become what they fought so hard against - "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Heil Amerika!
Guard that 2nd amendment right people, since you are dealing with people that are armed to the teeth and have no issues killing civilians. Simply look at the body counts in the Middle East, Africa. Do so with unbiased corporate owned media, or check numerous sources.
Do you honestly think that you could fight the U.S. government with any amount of weapons you as an individual, or even organized with your buddies, could ever accumulate? Were you not paying attention to stories about Ruby Ridge, Waco, etc.? Or hell, for that matter, the Civil War?
I always have to laugh when I see this "We might need to fight the government!" argument people make about the Second Amendment. If it ever comes to the point where we have to have an armed revolution, your little pop guns aren't going to do diddly against our domestic police forces. The only way it would ever happen is for individuals that make up the police forces (that is, the police, National Guard, Coast Guard, and other domestic security agencies) to be on your side.
You would be "removed" before you ever got to the point where you could seriously fight the government. If you're lucky, that means you'd be shipped somewhere like Guantanamo Bay (or more likely, extraordinary rendered to some godforsaken hellhole where they torture people).
If you're going to change the government, you're going to have to do it by changing the hearts and minds of the U.S. citizenry to elect people who are willing to change the laws and give up some of the power the State has accumulated over the centuries. Not an easy task, I'll grant you, and many people believe that that will never happen. But if not, well, you're going to have to accept what we're stuck with today because armed revolution is not, nor will it ever be, the answer.
Haven't you heard? They're all in the secret FEMA death camps.
You are. If you think the US is anywhere NEAR anything that can be described as tyranny, you have no clue what tyranny actually is. The irony is that anything which weakens the US will only give nations like China an advantage, and that's exactly what they're waiting for, and those aren't nations which respect anything resembling freedom or liberal democracy. Oh, I know: you'll say, "the US doesn't, either." I sincerely hope you don't get the world you wish for, because it will be one where you are far less free.
What do you mean by "anything which weakens the US" ?
Because from where I'm watching, continued abuse of the US political system by monied interests (be they civilian or military-industrial) is weakening the US, weakening it's freedoms, weakening its civil rights, and weakening the prosperity of the majority of its people.
But Americans have been hugely keen on giving more and more power to their federal government
Sigh. No. The ignorance of history by the average American is appalling. No, this is nothing new. It goes back to the 1798 Alien and Sedition acts, at least. There's nothing "more and more' about it-- you do remember the domestic spying of the 1960s and 1970s, right? Or the Kent State incident where National Guardsmen shot a bunch of students on the quad (who, as it turned out, didn't even have anything to do with the protests over which that the Guards had been called out?) Well, no, probably you don't. What is new is the large amount of push-back against giving power to the federal goverment.
There's been for the last two centuries a give and take between cries for security and the desire for non-interference; or, if you like, the battle between fear and freedom.
, so this is in inevitable byproduct. Of course there must be some government, but not one that grows without bound and attracts power hungry, corrupt authoritarians. But hey, keep on voting for those Republican and Democrats, because that's been working out so well thus far, amirite?
You're ignoring large amounts of debate and back-and-forth in order to phrase things as simple freedom-versus-evil. Even in the two-party system, the parties are not monoliths; opinions are not uniform nor black-and-white. However, if you don't like the two-party system, you might try to see if you can advocate changing the ballotting system that we currently have, which drives the politics to two parties. Try advocating approval voting, for example, which is a system that is not biased toward two parties: http://www.electology.org/approval-voting http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/approvalvote/center.html (or any of several other methods that don't fail badly with multiple candidates).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Right now, a lot of public money flows to private enterprise because of the military, but there's a shit-load more money there. Communications, transportation, energy and education are all cash-cows that they're just starting to seriously milk to varying degrees.
I take it you weren't. A small group of irate people with zero support can cause massive problems for the federal government? So what happens when half the houses in a region go Ruby Ridge? Then you segue to Civil War status. And there we see that a group of states can indeed give the federal government a run for the money.
So did you notice the part where the federal government won in each and every case? That afterwards, there was exactly zero meaningful change, except possibly to push the pendulum even further in the direction of unfettered federal power?
As opposed to, I dunno, say, Martin Luther King, Jr.? Yeah, all of those weapons he was stockpiling sure helped shake things up. And all of those 60s hippies who were so gung ho about engaging in armed conflict really made the difference in stopping the Vietnam War. Wow, remember that bloody clash when the students at Kent State started firing back at police? Even today in, say, the struggle of gay people much much recent success to gain acceptance in society, I can't help but notice how it finally came about when they started espousing arming themselves to defend their rights.
Except... Oh yeah, right! None of those things happened! All of those fundamental shifts in how government has changed were accomplished through non-violent campaigns to win the hearts and minds of the American people.
Look, I know it's fun to romanticize the Revolutionary War, as if that's the One and Only Way to solve government oppression. Maybe you missed out on the history of things like 1) England was across the Atlantic Ocean, which posed a significant logistical disadvantage, 2) England was also mired in conflict with France at the time, and 3) England didn't have a massive arsenal of modern weaponry to use against the colonists. Yes, we won, but anyone who doesn't recognize that such an example is practically useless in today's world is an idiot.
There is nothing inherently evil about Christianity or Islam.
Sure there is: they both require you to put non-Bayesian means ahead of Bayesian means as a way of knowing reality, and that is the root of all evil.
In the case of religions, scripture and ecclesiastical authority are the favoured non-Bayesian means. In the case of political organizations, party doctrine and ideology are the favoured non-Bayesian means.
Whenever anyone attempts to induce someone to abandon the only possible consistent way of knowing reality--Bayesian reasoning about systematic observations and controlled experiments--they are committing the most fundamental act of evil possible.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Our choice nowadays is between Romney and his Gestapo, or Obama and his Stasi.
Nazi Germany or East Germany, choose your hell. Personally, I'll take modern Germany, they have more freedoms than we do.
Well sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. I'm not sure though, what the rest of the world will have to go through, while the US goes through it's Third Reich Phase.
Not really. In order to be of any relevance in the US system a new party would need to instantly get about one third of the votes. That's extremely implausible. If we look at Europe where proportional systems are the norm, new parties considered to be undergoing a meteoric rise to power gain single-digit percents - and that's in a system where the notion that a vote for anything but the biggest party is a wasted vote doesn't exist.
It's easy to form a party and get the message out. It's hard to do so and instantly gain the support of a third of the country, especially when you consider that the incumbents can most likely outspend you by orders of magnitude and have the bonus of voters who always vote for the same party without thinking.
Unless the entire nation completely loses faith in one of the two big parties it's extremely unlikely that any new entrant will have any chance of making their voice heard. At least not until they're willing to spend the equivalent of a mid-size corporation's market cap on their campaign.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
False. People comparing Obama to the Russians are stone cold drunk. The choice is between Romney and his corporate fascism, and Obama and his corporate fascism. Both use the policies and methods of right wing totalitarianism. The difference is Romney will mean a more conservative than now supreme court, is entirely in the corporation's pocket, and is going to pander to religious conservatives out of desperation. Obama will mean a possibly liberal-lite supreme court, is sticking out of the corporation's pockets (and sometimes isn't in there at all), and won't always pander to religious conservatives so much as give in to them.
The supreme court is really the big reason to vote one way or the other.
Do you honestly think that you could fight the U.S. government with any amount of weapons you as an individual, or even organized with your buddies, could ever accumulate?
Sure, get enough buddies, enough organization, and eventually enough military hardware and you can beat the pants off the federal government.
Do you honestly think you and your buddies could stand up against the full wrath of the US military, against unrelenting 24/7 aerial bombardment, against battalions of tanks, against biological and chemical agents, and nuclear strikes? Unless your "buddies" include major superpowers like China and Russia, you haven't got a prayer.
How long do you expect the federal government to continue to exist after they decide to use biological, chemical, and nuclear strikes in a genocidal extermination of their own cities? Which soldiers do you expect to push the button to launch a nuke at, say, Ohio? And were that to happen, do you think the rest of the world WON'T get involved? They didn't stay out of our first revolution, they didn't stay out of our civil war, they didn't stay out of Libya...
Were there to be some kind of large and violent revolutionary movement, there would be FAR more resistance from the police forces than the military. Most soldiers would probably go AWOL. They joined to _protect_ the citizens, not kill them. That's the police's job. Aside from the fact that any soldier fighting a domestic insurrection would be in violation of federal law (though I'm sure that would change.) Yes, there are some SWAT teams with tanks, but we wouldn't be facing A1M1s, we wouldn't be facing aerial bombardment, and we CERTAINLY wouldn't be facing chemical/biological/nuclear weaponry. And if we did, that is exactly the point at which we would win. Just look at recent events in the middle east.