More thoughts

"The progress of science in furnishing the Government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wire-tapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home. . . . Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?"
                                                                                      Justice Louis D. Brandeis
 

I spent some time during the last couple of posts talking about how the internet is not secure and can never be secure.  Since no one commented and flamed me, I think that I will continue this line of thought and talk more about Messrs. Snowden and Manning.

Their lives are going to suck huge from here on in.  Neither of them appear to be all that stupid, so this thought had to go through their heads before they went into the light with their information, and they still did it.  Both of them appear to have done so as an attempted antidote to what is more and more appearing to be an overweening federal intelligence apparatus. 
 
Now, the boyz at the top of the heap have every intention of taking these boys down.  Now, I realize that these two gentlemen are young men, but a geezer my age has a tendency of labeling a 29 year old and a 25 year old as boys.  Sorry guys, but it is just the way it is.  So when the big boyz get them (and you can rest assured both of them will rot in prison), all that one can hope for is that folks out there won’t forget the sacrifice and begin talking rationally about what kind of power we are going to allow the security state.

That being said,I am kind o proud of these two.  I hope that their sacrifice will have the effect that they hoped it would have, but the deck is stacked against them.

Chances are you think that I will start a rant about the governments seizure of power.  That is about the farthest thing from my mind.  What I want to talk about is the passive nature of the American people and how they are getting exactly the government they deserve and which they have worked so tirelessly to elect.

It is every government’s prime directive to protect its own power and perquisites.  This country is no different.  What makes this whole issue a tragicomedy is the extent that the American people have actually worked at making sure that the government has greater and greater power.  They have done this for the most sad of all reasons, because the greater bulk of the American people really and truly feel that the government will take care of them.  

Government jobs, government mandated and supported education, government courtship of the media, government sponsored retirement plans, government roads, all these things say security and prosperity to the run of the mill American.  It would appear, from conversations with my fellow Americans that the government protecting itself is not a thing to be feared, but an activity to be supported, because that same government will act as the backstop for their lives.  The government will provide.

What Snowden and Bradley do is hold up lens to what the government is doing.  It would appear that the bulk of American people prefer their benevolent myth of government to the ugly truth that Messrs. Bradley and Snowden show us.  You may rest assured that, following the in-the-media-full-court-press by those currently holding the reins of power, around 60% of Americans will be baying for the “Traitors” blood.

 Take a while and read this paper.   There is also a shorter article (with more lively writing) located Here

I find it interesting that the folks who wrote the article noted in the PDF used well-loved historical figures for their examples.  The founding fathers were probably considered “terrorists” by the authorities in London.