the rogue government

In taking original FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's own words, that the FBI's mission includes to "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit and otherwise neutralize" specific groups and individuals, we can probably now better substitute the word "out", for the word "expose", given contemporary usage and for a clearer understanding.

In Senator Rockefeller's (now where have we heard that family name before?) apologetics for the telecoms, he paints a picture that companies like AT&T are some kind of witless, hapless and unwitting dupes of the government's overreach.

They are anything but. Evidence abounds that AT&T is an instigator, that they are actually often out front, pitching Big Brother technological possibilities to government, (much like SAIC is known to do, as with their plans for Total Information Awareness, and also with their bleeding-edge work in the field of psyops). It is all about the data mining.

In a truly revealing microcosmic example of what government is doing, consider how regular folks currently utilize Usenet and BitTorrent. All manner of downloads are available to those in the know on these two layers of the Internet: binaries of music, movies, software, child porn, etc, despite copyright or taboos. Unfettered political commentary and analysis often even leads ahead of the blogs there. It is still like the Wild, Wild West, or like pre-copyright conscious China, where the brightest minds were sampling everything and discerning in real time, all that is best.

Now scale that up a gazillion times and you have a picture of how government grabs virtually everything and crunches it to see how it might serve government as a means for political control. And realize why government knows it must stop individuals from doing what it does, on their much contrasting scale. Usenet and BitTorrent are the closest things to genuine equalizers that the People have going, at the moment.

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Subjects now instead of Citizens?

This earlier post has made its rounds in the blogs and deserves a second look. It may very well qualify for one of the compelling issues being promulgated as a distraction from the pending Telcom Immunity vote:

A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

'Privacy no longer can mean anonymity', says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. 'Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.'"

America rose up to the abuses of government and forged its separation from England for those reasons as delineated in the Declaration of Independence. What Donald Kerr proposes above, is nothing less than a return to life as "subjects" rather than citizens of this powerful nation.

"Publius" was the moniker for "Anonymous" in those days. It is what helped win the revolution. Gentlemen's affairs were their own business. The notion of a "nanny state", to micromanage every detail of the People's lives would have been held anathema.

The Operations flip-side of the Surveillance Society has hidden hands that make bad things happen, in order to shape people's lives in a Mission Impossible-like scenario. I can assure you full well that Operations works in real time along side Surveillance using psychological and behavioral science to shape behavior in real time. Better known examples of this are the BSCT Teams, or "Behavioral Science Consultation Teams", such as reported at Guantanamo.

While "Operations" is complex, I can give you a simple example, such as when I make strongly worded posts to blogs, I often immediately receive (a) phone call(s) (clearly on a speaker phone on the other end), displaying an intimidating caller ID such as, (to paraphrase): "Extrord Renditn", or "Re Ed Camp", or the like. Accusations that they are stalkers draws an enthusiastic response of, "Yes!"

What good does actual jury service play in a world like this? When all is known and clearly deviating from the government's side will result in reprisals?

If Socialism is condemned because it robs individuals of incentives towards accumulating private property, what happens to incentive where the government is stealing private information and essentially file-sharing with others, who are in a much better position to profit from it than the ones it has been surveilled from?

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