The important questions - by Tom Tomorrow

[caseymoz]

70. I used illegal instead of unconstitutional

for stylistic reasons: word variety. I wasn't going to repeat "unconstitutional" again. I'm a writer, not a lawyer. I understand the distinction. I don't practice law, so for the purpose of communicating my point, the distinction was insignificant, or should have been. It's not like anybody was going to be extraordinarily renditioned because I used the word wrong.

So, I understand the distinction. You don't understand relevance.

And you don't understand the difference between editorial and factual. Greenwald's columns have facts, and he refers to sources when he cites facts that definitely aren't opinion pieces. If he didn't do that, I'd agree his work is completely editorial. The column you cited, doesn't do this. It starts by singling Greenwald out for ad hominum attack. An article like that isn't useful, editorial or not.

I had never heard the word "metadata" used before the Snowden incident. In fact, I don't know what it means. It's definitely not a technical term coined by computer engineers. What I am tempted to presume it means (data about data) is probably far from the what's actually gathered in practice. It probably means, "beyond data" or "greater than data."

It should set off alarm bells all over your brain when the government is coining a brand new word (or popularizing an obscure one) to describe what they're doing, especially the NSA, which specializes in code.

If they meant data like the purchase of a Camry, why wouldn't they call it data? That's what other companies would have called it. The government wants to say they informed you when they didn't.

If you think Snowden is no good because he lied. Then why do you feel inspired to support the NSA against him, which is an intelligence organization, which gathers information through deceit and spying.

Snowden did exactly what our intelligence services do routinely, but they do it on a massive scale (and I'm not talking about just PRISM).

Yet, when the NSA does it on citizens you support it; it's caught lying about it, and you support it, and say you're dedicated to the Democratic Party because it's the party of truth. I'm sorry, there's only so much hypocrisy a "party of truth" can take before it mutates into something else.

Like Republicans are going to say they're not the party of truth? You think they just lie when they say that? Apparently what's wrong with Republicans is not that they don't have true believers.

I believe the Democratic Party is a political party. Up till recently, I thought it supported my interests at least approximately. Now, I'm having doubts.

Chicken Little? Paranoia might be a mental illness, but there's also an opposite to it that's even more dysfunctional. It's the inability to feel alarmed when you should be. Paranoia is not the belief there are conspiracies, it's the falsified belief in impossible conspiracies. Believing the NSA is turned against the 99 percent of us is completely plausible when you look at the social class of people running the agencies and who founded them.

Maybe paranoia is insanity, but in the wild, who would get killed faster? The one who feels alarm and tries to interpret what every sound in the jungle is, or the one who denies the sounds could be anything dangerous?

And if you think our intelligence agencies protect us from anything now, you're wrong. They, and our military, have created the all problems we're trusting them to protect us from. We should have never let those organizations continue to exist after the Cold War. Only a struggle for existence barely justified the trouble they were making for us.