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.
Pete,
Now that’s scary….. Would you please define what she would consider a real reporter….
pete9999
1, August 11, 2013 at 3:14 am
http://washingtonexaminer.com/dianne-feinstein-reporter-shield-law-should-only-apply-to-real-reporters/article/2533812
Hard to argue with such a grim but truthful assessment, especially after that pathetic excuse for a Presidential press conference the other day. How I miss Helen Thomas. Who now remains in the White House press corps with an ounce of independence and integrity?
Comforting the Comfortable
Obama offers
Confidence in secrecy.
Have some or have some.
When he says “spying”
He means what he means he means
Like Humpty Dumpty
Instead of using a magnet or metal detector to find a needle on the open ground, the NSA piles mountains of hay over every possible place where a needle might conceivably lay and then complains that it doesn’t have sufficient resources, manpower, or public subservience to authority to locate even more hay. Parkinson’s Law meets the Peter Principle. No doubt about it.
@MichaelM:
OK, me didst one in sonnet form! Crapeth, it is hardeth to quitteth the speech of that fashion! Anyway:
How Do I Stalk Thee???
by Squeeky Fromm, Girl Reporter
How do I stalk thee? Let me count the ways!
Soaring upward, the breath and height of skies
Provide no impediment, my drone flies,
And Fairy-like, my Ariel surveys.
Then, far beyond the exospheric haze
In orbits, geosynchronizing lies,
My Host of SAURON, which forever spies;
Whilst below, PRISM nabs communiques.
I stalk thee always, even in thy car,
Or ‘pon a sidewalk, with my many cams,
For wheresoe’er Thou art, I am not far.
And thinkest not, that Thou canst stoop to jams!
For each ebon box, has back doors ajar,
Open to me, a Wolf, ‘gainst thee, the Lambs!
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
Notes FOR ESL’s: Ariel is the fairy from Shakespeare’s Tempest, who Wiki says: “Ariel is Prospero’s eyes and ears throughout the play.” -Arial survey- is a pun on “aerial survey.” Quoting the Internet Chronicle, “SAURON, or the Semi-Autonomous Ultra-high-Resolution Orbital Network, is comprised of a series of hundreds of low-orbiting cameras that can make out objects on the ground as small as 1 centimeter in size.
There are so many satellites in this network that they are able to effectively monitor the entire planet’s populated surface without interruption. According to slides Snowden shared, taken from the NSA presentation on SAURON, each spy satellite feeds directly into a data bank so large that it is able to retain the captured imagery indefinitely.”
Ebon box is an electronic “black box’. Wiki says “A backdoor in a computer system (or cryptosystem or algorithm) is a method of bypassing normal authentication, securing illegal remote access to a computer.”
http://washingtonexaminer.com/dianne-feinstein-reporter-shield-law-should-only-apply-to-real-reporters/article/2533812
How would this apply to Ben Franklin?
Since when does your employer determine your constitutional rights?
The wonderful thing is that modern electronic communications makes it possible for literally anyone to be a serious journalist. That does not mean that any particular person is. But the point is with persistence, intent and purpose they can be.
Millions of users of the internet understand that.
We have to make sure the government recognizes that as well.
“If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Then quit. No sense being a damn fool about it.” — W. C. Fields
Iraq-Nam-Istan Syndrome
Misfortune telling:
“We lost the day we started.
We win when we stop.”
Literal Interpretation
As I. F. Stone said:
“Governments lie.” The Truth is
Uncomplicated
Black helicopters
A prism polarizes
Gasping canaries
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
President Obama claims that he now wishes to restore public confidence in his administration’s wanton spying on everyone even though he says he has done nothing to undermine public confidence other than what Edward Snowden has shown that he did.
Furthermore, President Obama now claims to have started the debate that he now cannot avoid having because Edward Snowden started it.
Primitive Word Magic
If a name exists,
Does that mean a thing does, too?
“Unicorns” explained
NSA “reforms”
Things Frank Zappa warned, “Don’t eat.”
Like the yellow snow
Obama is a liar. And a hypocrite. Just like Bush (and Clinton and Bush) before him. I cut Reagan some slack in his second term because I’m not sure he was fully functional mentally by then, but he was a liar too. We haven’t had a remotely honest man in that office since Carter and before then, you have to go back to Eisenhower to find one with good character.
I am so not a slave to fashion.
It is unfashionable to call the president a liar.
Yet we know the president has made statements that are not in accordance with the facts that we now know.
It would seem that we are left with only two uncomfortable alternatives:
(1) the president is profoundly ignorant of the policies and practices of his executive branch
(2) the president has intentionally mislead the American public regarding the policies and practices of his administration related to spying.
Doe anyone seriously propose that an incompetent speech writer accidentally put false words in the mouth of the president?
It would seem the President therefore lied on the non-confrontational stage of Jay Leno.
Ezra Klein writing in the WAPO:
“Binyamin Appelbaum, an economics reporter for the New York Times, summed it up sharply on Twitter: “Obama is really mad at Edward Snowden for forcing us patriots to have this critically important conversation.”… “What makes us different from other countries is not simply our ability to secure our nation,” Obama said. “It’s the way we do it, with open debate and democratic process.”… If that’s so, then Edward Snowden should be hailed as a hero. There’s simply no doubt that his leaks led to more open debate and more democratic process than would’ve existed otherwise.”
Lots of people are beginning to recognize that without Snowden the current debate on issues vital to an open democratic society would never have taken place.
Lots of people now realize that Snowden is a hero and patriot.
Jon Walker of FireDogLake asks the pertinent question:
“If Snowden wasn’t whistleblowing on wrongdoing then why would there be a need to call for reforms based on what he has revealed?”
A commenter translates President Obama’s Newspeak response into plain English:
“We weren’t illegally spying on you but we’ll stop anyway.”
Actually, the translated response still gives President Obama credit for something he did not mean. Regardless of the word-like noises he uttered, President Obama actually meant:
“We weren’t illegally spying on you but we promise to come up with some new-and-improved bullshit that will make you feel comfortable with our illegally spying on you.”
There. Fixed it.
Obama’s Press Conference Restores Confidence
Pinocchio’s nose
Increases in length as his
Pants burst into flame
You do not trust me?
No sign of dirty dishes.
The cupboard is locked.
Surveillance reform
Committee meetings ongoing
Oh! War is over
Can’t seem to stop now:
Deconstructing Dystopia
Speaking only Truth
Emmanuel Goldstein lives
As Edward Snowden
Power fears nothing
So much as the powerless
Thinking for themselves
When you’ve got nothing
You’ve got nothing left to lose.
Emancipation
As Jay Gould once said:
He could hire half the workers
To kill the others
Just like the sixties
Hired pigs in their cop costumes
Enforcing “Order”
Les Misérables
Not miserable enough
Let them eat some cake
Jails overflowing
For-profit prisons need more
Future can’t-voters
“Classify” the past
Then say it never happened
Then who can compare?
Looks like George Orwell
Got it right in predicting
Nineteen Eighty Four
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller”
Transparency site
Pages opaque but trust us
Did you mean “spiral”?
~ Me, just now
Switching verse formats from structured to experimentally loose, we see clearly the looming twilight of:
A Historic Presidency
A poem doesn’t have to rhyme
Or march to beats and meters.
No doubt about it.
A poem can, of course, straggle about for a time;
Its discordant noises refusing to harmonize or chime;
Its arbitrary lineation obscuring sense, feeling, tone, and motives,
Until lost for some way to conclude
Its strutting, fretting interlude,
Up, the ghost it gives
And out, it
peters.
Michael Murry, “The Misfortune Teller,” Copyright © 2012