Maybe it's because I've held a Top Secret security clearance once...

[napoleon_in_rags]

3. The making of a Crystal Ball.

Last week sometime I came upon a really old declassified document from the Hoover era, in which a security hole in phones, which allowed an attacker to use the (hung up) phone to listen in on the room, was detailed. No apparent measures to recall the phones were discussed as I recall, the knowledge was to be used for "national security reasons" only, the memo said.

But what kind of national security threat would justify needing this and thousands of other extreme things back then? Well, one example of such a group would include, say, a mafia group who's able to tap anyone's office phones even while hung up. Or a KGB cell doing the same. And the policy was to leave open the security whole which let those groups do that, so that it could be used as well by the administration as needed.

So with the national security state, we're talking about a complex: One one hand are these forces that protect us from national security threats, on the other hand we're talking about the threats that necessitate their existence. What we have to see is how they feed in to each other.

You can call Snowden an idiot all day long, but the fact that he's a pretty intelligent guy basically shines through in his interviews. And this guy, when he saw what's going on, knew he had to act. He believed he had to do something extreme. He described what he saw as a prison built for Americans, and he was unwilling to live with it.

So he leaked, and in so doing became a national security threat. He saw the national security apparatus, and he became a threat. That's happening to people all over the middle east, in marginalized places in the US, in Asia, and on and on. They will take extreme measures to stop the world from turning into a prison, which is the sort of thing they believe is happening. They become national security threats. And why? Because they saw the machine which exists to defend us from national security threats in action. No where has it been clearer than in the Arab spring conflicts, where the rulers become harsher and harsher, and the people became more and more resolute in their opposition. Didn't somebody say "softly softly?" Maybe we should be thinking more about that here.

Anyway, some food for thought on the good points you bring up. I don't have the answers here either, but I think that there's good reason for people in power to really, really look at the methods of non-violence that have been used so successfully: I don't believe there is some arch villain pulling the puppet strings behind this perpetuating complex, I think it has arisen naturally out of a lack of questioning and innovation on how we create peace and stability globally.

Peace!