The NSA Scandal is a Bipartisan Cluster Fuck. [View all]

[Warren Stupidity]

Last edited Fri Jun 21, 2013, 10:26 AM - Edit history (1)

This is not about Obama. It is about the future of this country as a democratic republic. It is about the aggregation of unconstitutional, unregulated, and above all secret power into the executive branch, a process that started with World War II, accelerated with the Cold War, and cascaded into a crisis of governance with the neocon perpetual war on terror initiated after the attack by al Qaeda in 2001 .

The documentation provided by snowden confirmed what had been rumored back in 2006 - that the NSA, under secret provisions of the patriot act activated a program of massive surveillance of the entire population. The program is roughly Poindexter's TIA program, nominally rejected by congress and then implemented by the Bush administration under secret provisions of the patriot act. The Obama administration has simply maintained the existing programs. It is a bipartisan scandal.

We now live in a state that has a established a comprehensive internal monitoring and surveillance program targeting the entire population. Call it Stasi State 2.0, the totalitarian dream of comprehensive monitoring of its entire subject population, enabled by computer database and monitoring technology beyond the comprehension of the original Stasi State, East Germany, which basically coerced everyone to spy on each other and maintained vast paper dossiers on all of its citizens.

It is a crisis of governance. The executive branch is an institution with a life of its own, it has an institutional memory, protects its acquired powers, and has developed comprehensive barriers against any oversight and regulation from congress or the courts. Using national security as justification, neither congress, the press, nor the people of this country have knowledge of what is being done within the occluded security state. What we do know are the bits and pieces that leak out, either deliberately or not.

Perhaps you trust Obama to not abuse the unconstitutional power acquired by the executive branch. Certainly five years ago partisan republicans trusted Bush. But the history of state power is that it will be abused. We have a congress captured by corporate interests and both incapable and unwilling to even attempt to reign in the executive branch. We are in a perpetual state of war, and the federal courts have made it clear that they will use that as an excuse to do nothing as well. Who will the next president be? How long before the system supposedly being used to protect us from phantom external enemies is used against internal dissidents? How long before the database is routinely mined for evidence in all sorts of criminal cases? How long before it is used to disadvantage the opposition party?

J Edgar Hoover was the most powerful man in Washington for decades because of the dossiers he kept and his willingness to use them for political gain. One man, a small paper database. You think, you really think, what the NSA is doing is not a problem?