Former Top NSA Official: “We Are Now In A Police State”

[OnyxCollie]

119. In order to save face,

(like I said, I needed the grade), I offered a lengthy mea culpa (21 pages) where I attempted to explain myself.

Hello Dr. C____,

I would like to offer an apology to you. Since I was unable to properly define the terms of our
debate, I should have dropped the subject, particularly a subject as sensitive as that one. Instead,
I pursued it to its inevitable, unpleasant end. I also may have given you the impression that this
was the subject of my paper. That is not the case.

The definition of totalitarianism I that I poorly attempted to recite is this:

Totalitarianism is a system where technologically advanced instruments of political power are
wielded without restraint by centralized leadership of an elite movement, for the purpose of
effecting a total social revolution, including the conditioning of man, on the basis of certain
arbitrary ideological assumptions proclaimed by the leadership, in an atmosphere of coerced
unanimity of the entire population (p. 754).

Brzezinski, Z. (1956). Totalitarianism and rationality. The American Political Science Review, 50(3), 751-763.

Brzezinski also offers this:

If one could imagine the entire United States run like some executive department, with its myriad
of minute, and often incomprehensible, regulations, routinized procedures, even sometimes
arbitrariness of officials, one would be all the more inclined to be thankful that the rule of law
(rooted in a traditional regard for the individual) and legislative fears of administrative expansion
(a democratic "irrationalist" feature) act as a check (p. 761).