Slashdot Mirror
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!
It was a good talk. I found it interesting.
I think the big take away from his insights was that the root of this evil was the corruption that consumed the NSA, and the pressure to send money out to the military industrial complex that surrounds government agencies.
It seems to me, in the context of this article, that the security religion is used as a veil to hide that corruption. By now, they may be using doublethink to believe their own lies, but that is the root cause. To fix it, we have to remove the dirty ties between the NSA and the MIC.
He repeatedly said in his talk that no matter what he did to solve a problem, he was never allowed to call it solved. There was always more at stake, more danger around the corner that would be used to scare Congress into spending more money. As he said... keep the problem going so the money keeps flowing.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
I'm so glad I was born into the land of the [REDACTED] and the home of the [REDACTED]
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.
Because third parties that gain power never get corrupted, right? Oh wait, they do (see Republican party).
The point is that it's cyclical. When a party becomes corrupt, they ought to be ousted. But the political party system in our mathematically flawed election process is built to prevent those in power from losing it to upstarts. This is how political parties become corrupt: because they become entrenched.
Electoral collect, first past the post, no alternative vote, these are concessions against fair voting in an era where it took weeks to get a message from one end of the country to the other. Today? Not so much.
More Twoson than Cupertino
In another recent development: The country of the USA is officially changing it's name to "East Germany". If geographically misleading, it seemed fitting in a number of other essential details.
The name was cheap, through recent disuse. The US was able to obtain it through a swap for their equally abandoned Constitutiuon.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
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.
Look, I have no issue with some people wanting to be a pacifist. All causes need martyrs. What I take exception to is someone telling everyone to be pacifist. Historically large populations that believe this is their only option end up being the victims of genocide. Just ask the 80 million or so Chinese pacifists that were murdered by Mao, or the 30 million Jews that were murdered by Hitler, or the 60 million or so that were murdered by Stalin and Lenin.. Oh wait, you can't because they were all murdered.
No where do I state that a gun is your only option, what I state is that people need to protect that right.. just in case there are no peaceful alternatives.
Lets remember something which you neglected to point out. MLK was assassinated right? As was JFK, as was Bobby Kennedy, as were at least hundreds of other people that spoke out publicly regarding Political Corruption, Equality/Human Rights, the dismantling of our Education system, and the MIC.
This is long but there is a point. Keep this in context as you read.
Would you care to really test your level of reality? How about you review some of the music figures that were assassinated relatively recently and find out their political affiliations and who they were being investigated by? Of course, it's just "those crazy gangsta rappers" right? Keep your hat on your head, I'm not claiming that all of the rumors and stories are true. I'm claiming that it's interesting that certain people were being investigated by certain agencies and ended up dead by assassination. Coincidences with the JFK assassination are interesting, such as police being removed from areas just prior to the assassins starting to shoot, and the same Police showing up at locations over and over and having no reports or reports that were completely fabricated, security video tapes vanish, evidence being destroyed, etc... If you investigate you will start to think, and thinking is pretty scary right? How many times can something be coincidence before it becomes a plot? Interestingly, there were specials on the news regarding the East/West Rap Wars that had no mention of Government agencies investigating and tailing these guys for years, the evidence tampering, etc... we only heard about those "Violent and Crazy N-words". Have you been manipulated in to believing in a reality that does not exist? Since I have been investigating, the preponderance of evidence clearly shows that I have been presented a manipulated reality regarding many of those people. I am not convinced yet, but the best argument for the media presented reality is "The alternative is so far fetched it can't be true" which I hope you see as the self protecting fallacy it is.
The point of that last paragraph is really this: All of those people were publicly asking for peaceful and progressive changes to the Government for the betterment of society. They were pacifists for the most part as well. Who won, the dead guy or the corrupt? I think you know the answer to that question. (The use of the term "corrupt" there is very intentional since I have invested a lot of time investigating many of these assassinations. That is my opinion of "who" and may not match your opinion of "who".)
Now you are probably going to cry "Begging the Question" when you get done reading those two paragraphs but keep the fallacy card in your pocket. That would only be true if I stated that it was all factual, and I was very clear that I was not sure of all the facts. I stated that it was interesting, and worth investigation. Once you start to realize that your reality is being manipulated, I hope it pisses you off and you start to dig in to the truth in more areas.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.