The REAL ASSHOLES are the traitors who lied America into war and still walk free.

[Octafish]

68. Edward Snowden and the Real Issues

Will We Pay Attention?

by CHRISTOPHER H. PYLE
CounterPunch June 13, 2013

EXCERPT...

This scandal is not just about Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency, and Snowden’s profiteering bosses at Booz Allen Hamilton. It is about secret government in general, the militarization of intelligence, the privatization of governmental functions, and the role of secret campaign contributions to prevent adequate oversight of the executive branch and its pet companies.

Senator Feinstein and her colleagues don’t want to admit it, but the secrecy system does not permit her and her colleagues to restrain secret government. Once they get a secret briefing, they are pledged not to discuss what they have learned, even with their staffs. Feinstein is such a weak overseer that she could not even persuade the secret FISA court to declassify its sweeping surveillance orders or the legal rationale behind them. But Mr. Snowden could do that with his leaks. He, not the senator, revealed that the secret court had, with its rubber stamp, rendered the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonably broad seizures meaningless.

SNIP...

Since 9/11 private corporations have greatly expanded the intelligence community. Seventy percent of the community’s budget now goes to private contractors. So members of Congress, reporters, and suspected leakers are not just vulnerable to government surveillance; they are vulnerable to corporate reprisals, should their investigations or disclosures pose a threat to companies in the intelligence business. These surveillance powers can be used not only to protect secret agencies from criticism; they can be used, as General Motors once used them, to try to discredit critics like Ralph Nader.

Many people believe that they have nothing to fear from government/corporate surveillance because they have nothing to hide. But every bureaucracy is a solution in search of a problem, and if it can’t find a problem to fit its solution, they will redefine the problem. In the 1960s, the surveillance bureaucracies redefined anti-war and civil rights protests as communist enterprises; today the same bureaucracies redefine anti-war Quakers, environmentalists, and animal rights activists as “terrorists.” So political activists, no matter how benign, have good reasons to fear these bureaucracies.

Again, most Americans do not worry, because they are not political activists, reporters, investigating legislators, or crusading attorneys general like Eliot Spitzer. Most Americans are like the Germans who did not fear the secret police because they were not Jews. But all Americans depend on reporters, leakers, and crusading legislators to keep government agencies and private corporations under control. So they should worry about government secrecy, the militarization of surveillance, the privatization of intelligence, and the role of corporate money in elections.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/13/edward-snowden-and-the-real-issues/

Thank you very much for your kind and reasoned response, smallcat88. People are giving up on voting, IMFO, because when they pull the lever for "Democrat" out pops "Republican." Sometimes it's due to the Supreme Court going 5-4, like in Bush v Gore of Florida; other times it's due to a politician stating one thing in the campaign and doing another in office, like too many to mention. As for the press? They are A.W.O.L., apart from a brave few like Greenwald, Palast, Pilger and Hedges -- and they usually get published overseas. Here in the Homeland, it's the Internet. And if the corporate merka FCC gets its way, not for much longer.