I heard part of this on Allan Loudell’s noonday news, … the radio was on and I caught just a snippet. I hope someone will clue me in on who it was who said it….
In discussing spying through evesdropping, he said probably the quote of the year.
“There was a reason we spied on the Soviet Union. There was a reason they spied on us. We didn’t trust each other…….”
He may have gone on, or maybe it was myself carrying the conversation forward in my head…. “but that would explain why the Soviets spied on their own people; why the East Germans spied on their own people, why the North Koreans and the Chinese are currently still spying on their own people…”
They don’t trust their people….
So, the question must be asked. Why does the NSA, or Obama administration, or the Illuminati, or the Galactic Battlestar Cruiser,… whoever it is who makes the big decisions these days, not trust the American people?
For this would not occur otherwise, would it.
Now it stands upon all reason, that if there is nothing wrong with you…. I’ll take your word for it, and there is nothing wrong with me, ..take my word for it… and we are being spied upon…. then there has to be something wrong with the NSA….
Now if we open all our minds, and look at all possibilities, possibility number one could be that they are sinister. They are gathering information to be used against us at a later date, when it suits them.
However there are more logical possibilities. My favorite is that if you give someone unlimited power, and no oversight, they will exercise all capacities open to them. After all, to them, there are no consequences. With unlimited funding, and no oversight, it becomes very easy to say: lets do one better than what we have.
In the real world, when we get ideas like that, someone steps up to challenge us, and if we can’t defend ourselves adequately, .. it simply doesn’t get done. But the NSA doesn’t live in the real world, now do they? In their bubble, once you realise you can suck up all the information out of a state, you build to suck it all up out of all the states… When done, you realize your territories are wide open, so you suck them up too. Basically it is an ongoing process that like cancer, once started will grow unless some outside influence kills it.
Third, these people could just innocently mean well. Having every transaction or conversation on record, even if one does not use any of it, can be very useful if a bomb goes off to backtrack and find who is connected to it…. It would be a shame to launch a missile strike at Russia, when Somalia was the culprit. These phone records would prevent such a mistake from occurring.
So in synopsis, the motivation behind collecting everything could be a) sinister; b) a natural progression because of no oversight; or c) innocently benign and even well meaning.
Those are some of the causes. What are some of the consequences?
Mistrust. As mentioned in my initial thought process, knowing that someone does NOT trust you, makes you immediately question why and therefore not trust them. Everyone who picks up a phone these days, volunteers as a joke mostly, but still volunteers: “Oh, I have to be careful; the NSA is listening.”
That has a chilling effect; just knowing that a stranger is listening. Those elders who are familiar with state-run societies, are familiar with how the Soviets behaved, the huge difference between the West Germans and the East Germans, how much different North Koreans were and still are from South Koreans…. One does not live their lives as fully, when they can be whisked off for something someone thought they heard them say….
Creativity is ruined; productivity dries up; patriotism turns into hatred of one’s country; and thoughts of revolution swill in the air. Consequently, life becomes black and white, devoid of color. Soviet bloc cities were all gray.
Trust is vital. Spying dissolves it.
Currently Europe is serious debating the future of doing business with the US. Knowing the US negotiators have been briefed in advance what the Europeans are going to offer. Safer to make those deals with China; one can still argue in good faith.
And remember all those encrypted banks broken into and money siphoned out of accounts? Everyone suspected Russian criminals. We now know the NSA has had the access codes for years. Of course we’d trust that no one in the NSA would steal money out of Bank of America or Citibank, especially to pay for cost overruns in their data mining efforts. But oops… for some reason… that trust is not there anymore.
So, how can we get that trust back?
A) All those who lied to Congress = fired, goodbye.
B) Remove legal protection for Version, Comcast, ATT, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and all other telecommunications companies that enabled the NSA. If someone gets hurt by information taken and given to a third party, those companies with deep pockets may again be sued. The point is not to hurt the companies, but to make sure they keep a tighter control over what reach they give the NSA. If they can be sued, it will be much tighter.
C) Scale back funding. With less income, less chance to do harm. Even if one eliminated the NSA completely and let the CIA take over the monitoring, we would have more accountability than we do now.
D) Create and ensure that jail time is used for any Federal employee who uses information for reasons other than national security. Really, why ARE we listening to Merkle’s cell phone?
E) Have hearings on the NSA. open its culture to the sun. Let people know the workings that go on. We do for the FBI. We do for the CIA.
The big one is B). If we can just get the telecommications companies to say… “no, unh-unh, too riskey” a huge chunk of spying is removed at once.
The problem is not the government spying on you. The problem is individual members of the government spying on you, then trying to figure how to rip you off…. Americans have the right not to be ripped off….
If the NSA were a company, say like a division of DuPont, and were asked the questions of what did you do, how did you spend your money, what results can you show for our investment, they would have been sold off long time ago….
kavips 