Posts Tagged ‘NSA’

 

by @anarchyroll
4/16/2014

What would happen to you if you lied under oath in a court of law?

What would happen if you lied under oath in front of the United States Congress?

What has happened to anyone in the NSA for doing either? Nothing.

What does that mean? What do you think that means? When a person can admit under oath he lied under oath to not the legislative body of the United States of America.

Whose in charge here? Think about that.

If the NSA can lie under oath without penalty of any kind. Can admit to lying under oath without penalty of any kind. What is there place in the pecking order?

That is what stood out to me about this story. It made me think about consequences. It made me think about power and control.

Those in power, with control, are afforded luxuries that the common person is not. They are allowed to do things that other people aren’t.

Why does the NSA have a $52 billion “black budget”? How is a “black budget” allowed to exist in a democracy?

The go to line on that passé logic is that what the public doesn’t know won’t hurt them. I think that has been proven to be false in the post Edward Snowden era…

 

by @anarchyroll
3/14/2014

I’m not much for conspiracy theories. Mainly because I’ve been out in the world and seen more incompetency than ability to control an entire country with hundreds of millions of moving parts under wraps. However, I do believe that there are political and economic interests in charge who use shady methods to stay in charge and have the resources to keep their actions secret, quiet, and more hidden from the general public than obvious. The NSA bulk surveillance, war profiteering, media consolidation, and of course all of those political assassinations and military coups during the 1960s would be some examples of hard to ignore conspiracy theory fodder events.

I have been wondering what the effect of social media will have on the military, CIA and NSA. Specifically; as more people are able to instantly stream, document, back up, and show the world an event before they can be black bagged, put in a truck, and sent to Guantanamo; will daylight start to sanitize the shadow government(s)?

Obama, through Jay Carney has officially condoned the Bush era. By not only staying silent, not pursuing an investigation, and now obstructing a Senate investigation into the ‘enhanced interrogations’ Obama is now just as responsible and complicit as Bush and Cheney were and are. Change? Certainly change that big donors and shadow government officials can believe in. The illusion of change, the illusion of choice, truly the legacy Obama leaves behind after two terms. At least his wife is trying to publicly combat obesity, good for her. More and more people are seeing who is pulling the strings and making the machine that is the United States move. There will only be more people with more access to real time information going forward. What effect(s) will this have?

Will the ability to witness, share, and spread information around the entire world in real time get more eyes on the activities of our military/defense agencies? When more people are more aware of the budget sizes and activities of these agencies how will they react? Will this generation spur change or follow the hippies and become even more greedy and war hungry than their parents? I think change will happen slowly, as all important change does. Forget morals, I think people in ‘Merica will not want to be taxed to pay for these trillion dollar defense budgets. They’ll want those resources that are going to other continents being used in their counties. Just a guess…or a hope, whatever.

by @anarchyroll
2/26/2014

Nothing quite says business as usual in Washington DC like simply creating the illusion that change is being enacted. The latest chapter in the NSA bulk surveillance fallout thanks to Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing is the NSA trying to hand off and wash their hands of the metadata bulk collection to the FBI.  Republican Jim Sensenbrenner from Wisconsin has become the legit face of the anti NSA movement for those who consider what Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden did wrong.

Sensenbrenner’s stance is very simple; “Bulk collection has never been authorized by Congress and I intend to stop this blatant abuse of the law.”

Privacy advocates and the ACLU object to FBI option, as well as the other four options being considered since the FBI’s history of abusing the civil rights of the American public is, quite ripe. A full breakdown of the proposal is available at The Guardian. That is the news source Greenwald was working at when he first interviewed Snowden in June which became the whistleblowing bananza.  So they are always a trustworthy source for most hard news stories internationally.

by @anarchyroll
2/17/2014

Journalism made front page news today across the world as opposed to celebrity gossip and the weather. The three reporters/journalists whom Edward Snowden leaked the NSA documents to received a prestigious award today. Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras who met with Snowden in Hong Kong in June of 2013 will all receive the George Polk Award in Journalism.

As an aspiring journalist, it is great to see great reporters get their due. They will receive this award in the heart of Manhattan, the media and financial capital of America. These three are role models for me. Greenwald is as much of a living hero for me as is possible. I hope to meet and work with them all in the future.

Being awarded and rewarded for their work rather than shunned or arrested as some in the US and UK government would like shows that what these journalists did in blowing the lid off the NSA mass surveillance program was the right thing to do. Barack Obama has been forced to take action due to the public uproar that has followed Snowden’s whistleblowing. There are measures to cut off water supply to NSA operation centers in Utah and Maryland.  The tide has shifted, much like same-sex marriage, and marijuana legalization, a cultural shift has occurred. We are witnessing history being made before our very eyes every day in America. There is a 1960s feel to the cultural upheaval going on.

I hope to cover and contribute to it beyond just this blog in the future. I thank Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras for their fearlessness, patriotism, and journalistic integrity in taking the shadow government of the United States and United Kingdom head on. Exposing their shadow to the sanitizing light of public transparency. I am grateful to them. Keep up the good work, and take a deep breath in the knowledge you are fulfilling your purpose on this planet. You have all earned it.

by @anarchyroll
1/30/2014

I’ve never downloaded a game onto my smart phone. No I’m not being pretentious, my overuse of social media, online dating, email, and news apps makes me no better than those who spends their days killing time Gatling gun style via game apps. Angry Birds honestly never appealed to me, neither did Farmville, Words with Friends, or anything Zynga related.

I’m sure the NSA has my metadata, along with yours, under digital lock and key by now. I only started being cautious with my web usage like two years ago, much too late in the game.  The privacy concern equivalent of wanting to buy a VHS this past Christmas.

It gave me a minor chuckle, and an even bigger headache to hear that the NSA has been using Angry Birds as a patsy for bulk collection of meta data through smart phone applications.  With reportedly $1 billion spent, I guess it should come as no surprise that the NSA and GCHQ (the UK’s NSA equivalent) is able to scoop up this information at will as well as “monitor YouTube and social media traffic in real-time” of anyone accessing the internet in any way on any device. No joke, didn’t 1984 have something just like that?

Look on the bright side, you know you should have uninstalled these games off your phones months ago.

But remember, thinking or saying to yourself or out loud; oh the hell with it, it’s done might as well go about my business anyway, is what they want. Why return to feudalism when peoples’ ego, cynicism, and self defeatism castrates their power voluntarily with the illusion of knowledge empowerment?