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Machines Don’t Leak: NSA Moves To Replace Humans With Machines To Stop Leaks

200px-national_security_agencysvg256px-HAL9000.svgNational Security Agency has been reeling from leaks showing massive warrantless surveillance programs capturing communications for every American. These disclosures have further shown that officials like National Intelligence Director John Clapper committed perjury before Congress, though the White House and Congress have protected him from any charge in America’s Animal Farm system. Now, NSA director General Keith Alexander has indicated that he has a solution. With the public saying that it is more afraid of the government than terrorists and NSA workers balking at participating in such authoritarian programs, Alexander wants to replace the workers with machines. Machines don’t leak. Indeed, they have no sympathy or morals at all. They are perfect. That would leave citizens as simply the objects rather than the objectors for surveillance. So, the Obama Administration has finally found the barrier to the creation of the perfect government: the citizens themselves.

With Democrats now joining Republicans in attacking privacy and civil liberties, the only unpredictable element left for the government is people. Without pesky people, government will run far more smoothly. It appears citizens are to be monitored not listened to in the new American political system. Presumably, with an automated system of warrantless surveillance and the courts allowing the Administration to classify evidence to dismiss challenges, Alexander will simply outsource constitutional complaints to India where customer service will ask them to call back later.

Alexander is quoted as saying that he wants to reduce human administrators by 90 percent to be replaced by machines. What he sees as the “problem” is not the false statements by Obama, Clapper, or our leaders. It is those troublesome humans with their nagging consciences and individual will. He explained that his new machine operators

“cuts down number of system administrators. That would address vulnerabilities. It would also address the number of system administrators we have, not fast enough, but we plan to reduce the number of system administrators by 90 percent to make networks more defensible and secure . . . At the end of the day it’s about people and trust and I think we can get that almost perfect but we can’t solve that issue.”

The vulnerability is the involvement of humans. The government will finally create the perfect automatons to do such work without question or complaint. Congress will then be able to continue to mislead the public without fear of contradiction and continue to expand the burgeoning security apparatus that is pouring billions into the pockets of contractors and companies and agencies.

It is also another wonderful example of the open hypocrisy on display in our government. On the even of declaring, “Whistleblower Day” Congress and the White House are moving to make whistleblowers impossible. Machines don’t blow whistles. They don’t speak to reporters. They carry out any abusive or unconstitutional act that you ask of them. In other words, problem solved.

90 thoughts on “Machines Don’t Leak: NSA Moves To Replace Humans With Machines To Stop Leaks”

  4. Key quote from Michael Hayden:

    “… I freely admit, you don’t get to do this at all unless the American people feel comfortable about it.”

    Yes. So don’t do this at all since obviously the American people do not feel comfortable about it. Just make sure President Obama and General Keith Alexander and James Clapper get the message. They seem to think that they can make us feel comfortable with their spying on us and lying about it.

    And one more thing. Free Bradley Manning. Then award both him and Edward Snowden the Presidential Medal of Freedom for starting the vital debate that President Obama says he wants but has done everything in his power to prevent.

    Descending Spiral

    Caught with his pants down
    Trying to act nonchalant
    While still tap dancing

    To keep in practice,
    Just so he won’t forget how,
    He chooses to lie

    See his lips moving
    Senseless vocables* emerge
    To befoul the air

    Above the swamp hangs
    A fog of word-like noises
    Stinking miasma

    Vibrating Larynx
    Doubleplusgood duckspeaking
    Unconscious slogans

    Obama behind
    Truth ahead, lies can’t catch up
    Snowden in the lead

    (* Thanks to Charles Sanders Peirce for the apt expression)

  6. @Squeeky,

    Nicely done with the Elizabethan dialect and allusions to Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, all in the form of a variation on the Italian sonnet. Putting such historical literary resources to work in the service of contemporary polemic put me in mind of something another great Elizabethan, Sir Francis Bacon, wrote in The Advancement of Learning (1605):

    Martin Luther, conducted no doubt by a higher providence, but in discourse of reason finding what a province he had undertaken against the bishop of Rome and the degenerate traditions of the church, and finding his own solitude, being no ways aided by the opinions of his own time, was enforced to awake all antiquity, and to call former times to his succours to make a party against the present time. So that the ancient authors, both in divinity and in humanity, which had long time slept in libraries, began generally to be read and revolved. Thus by consequence did draw on a necessity of a more exquisite travail in the languages original, wherein those authors did write, for the better understanding of those authors, and the better advantage of pressing and applying their words.

    President Obama — a man apparently without a sense of irony — would probably read your sonnet as a memo from his legal minions, written at his request to justify wolves destroying the Constitutional village in order to save it from the lambs. To which I would reply, pressing and applying the old forms anew:

    Butt Out, Obama

    You claim you must observe me and I say
    That you may not. But if you should insist,
    Feign no ersatz offense when I resist
    Through every year and month and week and day.

    I know you’ve grown accustomed to the ease
    With which my countrymen now genuflect
    And passively accept what you have wrecked.
    Just whisper, “secret,” and their brains will freeze.

    I’ve rowed your boat, but I escaped to tell
    The tale of servitude for nothing gained
    Your Ahab act you think you still can sell
    To customers in crass consumption trained
    But citizens who think say “Go to hell.
    And leave us to clean up what you have stained.”

    Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller”

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