Rationalizing an authoritarian surveillance state is naive. [View all]

[JackRiddler]

Making up stories about why Big Brother is necessary and good is not realistic, not pragmatic, not hard headed. It is naive.

Delusions that it's bad when China or Iran do it but not the USA are naive.

Delusions that it's bad under Bush but okay under Obama are naive.

The surveillance beast, the militarized police and the military as police, the gradual melting together of all security, intel and law enforcement agencies through "fusion centers" and JTFs, the empowerment of warrantless lawlessness by the rollback of FISA and unconstitutional laws like the PATRIOT Act and the Indefinite Detention Clause... this has been the direction of USG development for decades. A president who resists it will be ground up.

Believing that we the people should accept all and that it will not set up ever-worse tyranny is naive.

Accepting secret government is naive. Not fighting it is naive.

The idea that the national security state "defends" this country when it has evidently created most of the "enemies" is naive.

Don't be fucking naive means, wake up, this is a business. National security is a racket of the military-industrial-intel-LEA complex.

Those of you work in it may not be running the racket, but don't come tell those of us who see the racket and want it to end that we are naive.

If it's naive to prefer constitutional government over the arbitrary power of a national security state made up primarily of corporate contractors who profit from fear mongering and war, then I AM NAIVE.

The national security state is highly compartmentalized. By definition most people in it have only a tunnel vision of their small part, don't even know what's going on next door.

I do not consider experience in this state to be a special qualification that makes your justifications of an unaccountable national security state to be any more worthwhile than some pundit's.

I consider people who reject this state and courageously stand up for the right thing to be the real experts. If Snowden was an Iranian or a Chinese, he'd be this board's new hero.

Laura Poitras, Snowden, Greenwald, these are titans. We should all aspire to a fraction of their courage to fight wrongs when we see them, and not to come up with cheap conformist excuses for evil.


ON EDIT - PS - When I hear about a Snowden or a Manning, the last question I ask myself is going to be, "Oh no, how did this happen?" (Despite all our best efforts to brainwash people into blind patriotism since childhood?) If freedom and justice and democracy and transparency and humanity mean something, then the sad question has got to be, "Why are there so few of them?" Why aren't there more Snowdens, more Mannings? During the US invasion of Indochina, resistance to the essentially genocidal war eventually became widespread within the US military itself. There are several possible causes for why it's different today. So far, it's different. Let's hope that also changes.