Turnkey Tyranny

In the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, the greatest American whistleblower of all, and carrying on the honorable tradition of civil disobedience practiced by the likes of Thoreau, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., Edward Snowden has put his freedom and his life at enormous risk simply by shining a spotlight on what our government is doing. Revealing the "architectural repression" that's been put in place. The "turnkey tyranny" ready for the next Underminer-in-Chief-of-the-Rule-of-Law. What did he gain for his "crime" of revealing the government's sweeping crimes against its citizens? A lifetime of watching his back -- but with a clean conscience. Quite unlike the majority of those in Washington, D.C. As far as Citizen Mofo is concerned, Edward Snowden is a true patriot and a courageous and righteous hero of civil disobedience in the face of great wrong.

Edward Snowden interviewed in Hong Kong:

'When you're in positions of privileged access like a systems administrator for these intelligence community agencies, you're exposed to a lot more information on a broader scale than the average employee. And, because of that, you see things that may be disturbing. But over the course of a normal person's career you'd only see one or two of these instances. When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis. And you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses. Over time, that awareness of wrongdoing builds up, and you feel compelled to talk about it. And the more you talk about it, the more you're ignored, the more you're told it's not a problem, until eventually you realize these things need to be determined by the public, not by someone who was simply hired by the government.

Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded.

And the storage capability of these systems increases every year consistently by orders of magnitude. It's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong, you simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis to derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrongdoer.

The gravest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures, is that nothing will change.

People will see in the media all of these disclosures, they'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society.

But they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things, to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests.'


EDWARD SNOWDEN DID HIS PART.
NOW WE NEED TO DO OURS.

A Perfect Engine of Fascism

The NSA is building a perfect engine of fascism as the control center of a vast and rapidly growing surveillance cartel that includes 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations across the U.S. This cartel of private companies and their government collaborators has conspired to violate the 4th Amendment to the Constitution as well as numerous other laws in uncountable ways. Under cover of the black shroud of secrecy they are collecting all possible digital data on the activities of all Americans and storing them in massive - and massively expensive - new facilities - just in case. Just in case some unnamed bureaucrat decides that you are a possible threat because of an "anomalous event", such as: "your language is out of place for the region you're in," "you're using encryption," or "you're searching the web for suspicious stuff."

This illegally collected data now comprises a "turnkey tyranny," to use Edward Snowden's phrase, which any tyrant can put to oppressive use against U.S. citizens in a way that is indefensible by us citizens - because, once again, the entire operation is hidden under a black shroud of secrecy. But there is no need to wait for this turn of events - this tyrant to show up. He's already there. The system of illegal surveillance set up by the NSA under the fuck-the-Constitution leadership of General Keith Alexander has already been turned to nefarious purposes against Americans - for attacks and reprisals against whistle-blowers who have exposed some of the NSA's multiple billion-dollar boondoggles; for propaganda and misinformation attacks against critics of the NSA's illegal programs; and to spy on suspected drug dealers and tax cheats.

This is only the beginning of this slippery slope. As long as it gets away with its illegal activity, the NSA will continue to expand its list of targets (who have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism or national security) and activities, until any routine traffic stop (for example) will result in your entire digital history being analyzed by any one of 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies in 10,000 locations across the U.S., all focused on profit and growth at all costs, funded by taxpayer dollars. This focus on profit and growth that is the engine that drives the surveillance cartel will ensure that we accelerate down this slippery slope of fascism. And I don't use the term "fascism" lightly, but in the sense of Benito Mussolini (quite an expert) who defined fascism as the merger of the government and the corporation. As the NSA builds its perfect engine of fascism, it has replaced the Constitution as its guiding law with the financial bottom line of the surveillance cartel.

This must change. The NSA is the greatest threat to the security of the United States, and it must be defunded and destroyed - and a great many of its employees jailed - before it destroys the America that has thrived under the rule of law for nearly two-and-a-half centuries. The NSA is moving fast to complete its perfect engine of fascism. We must act now. We must restore the primacy of the Constitution.