Breaking: Snowden has papers that will allow him to leave Moscow airport

[PorridgeGun]

21. Piece of garbage?

A superpower that flogs its supposed commitments to freedom, democracy, and human rights to the point of comical hubris while at the same time running the greatest secret mass surveillance operation in history (in addition to the drones, the torture, and the way Manning was treated) deserves to be exposed for its own sake, and damn the consequences.

I've read several (often sneering) posts directing those here who think we are living in a surveillance/police state to talk to someone who had lived in a "real" police state.

Such people know as little about history as they do about surveillance and intelligence work. The NSA? Surely you jest. The volume and quality of information at the fingertips of any employer conducting a full background check is something that could have existed only in the wet dreams of a 1950's agent of the Stasi or KGB.

It might be interesting and perhaps instructive to compare the per capita incarceration rates and the conditions of incarceration of the US at present and Russia under Stalin or East Germany under the Stasi.

Also, I don't seem to recall too many accounts of the east german police playing soldier dress-up and running around tasering mental patients to death or slotting family dogs. I guess even in a police state, some things are just too much. Until recently anyway.