National 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.
Interesting article that points out that this 90% reduction in SysAdmins will probably backfire in implementation:
http://programming.oreilly.com/2013/08/automation-myths.html
Execs From Apple, Google And AT&T Secretly Met With Obama To Discuss Surveillance
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/09/tim-cook-obama_n_3731630.html?utm_hp_ref=technology
The NSA Is Commandeering the Internet
Technology companies have to fight for their users, or they’ll eventually lose them.
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)
Michael Hayden, Former NSA Chief: After A Major Attack, U.S. Likely To Seize More Surveillance Powers
Posted: 08/11/2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/11/michael-hayden-nsa_n_3739610.html
@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):
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”