Slashdot Mirror
NSA Still Funded To Spy On US Phone Records
Reader turp182 notes that the Amash Amendment (#100) to HR 2397 (DOD appropriations bill) failed to pass the House of Representatives, meaning it will not be added to the appropriations bill. turp182 writes "The amendment would have specifically defunded the bulk collection of American phone records." Americans can see how their representatives voted here.
Rogue? Seems complicit to me.
What I wonder about right now are the NSA employees who - some surely being geeks who read Slashdot - are reading this comment. How do they sleep at night?
Do they speak like so many mid-20th century "soldiers", absolving themselves because they're only following orders? Have they been brainwashed into thinking that there's suuuuuuch a threat from terrorists to the American Way Of Life that what they do is essential? Or do they just enjoy the power trip in a dying empire? At least one such NSA employee will be reading this, and their conscience will twinge, just for a second.
If you don't know your representative's name in a representative democracy, something's very broken.
At least one such NSA employee will be reading this, and their conscience will twinge, just for a second.
No, no it won't. Cognitive dissonance will prevent it. They have convinced themselves that they are good people on no basis whatsoever, and in order to protect that belief they will convince themselves that there is no way to achieve their goal but to ride roughshod over the constitution. Then they'll tell themselves that it's OK to violate the constitution as long as you're doing it to protect the constitution. Unfortunately, holding such a clearly contradictory belief is a kind of insanity.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Given that Pelosi and Boehner both voted against this bill, I'd say this is a much bigger problem than most of the others we've talked about around slashdot. When those two agree, you know something is severely wrong with the world.
What karma? We didn't vote for the spying. We knew, or rather some of us knew, that Obama wasn't going to change much when it came to national security theater and control, but at no point was that a question that was put to us. We brought it up with the patriot act and others, those efforts were obviously unsuccesful, and looking back, I'm still not sure how that campaign could have succeeded. Seriously. If I had to go back to before 9/11, I STILL wouldn't know how to keep it from happening. Let alone how to turn it back now.
Not to say I'm giving up, and hopefully neither is anyone else, but this seems like saying to someone who lost their house to a tsunami "Karma's a bitch: you should have prevented the tide from coming in."