Once Private Now Public
What most in the States have come to believe is a Right to Privacy has been replaced with the Right to Remain Silent. Like from where did Americans get this idea of a Right to Privacy in the first place? Hummh, like maybe the Bill of Rights established by the Supreme Court of the United States more than a half century ago -- that's from where. Oh well, sorry to be the bearer of bad news; but, privacy is no more.
The right to privacy has been eclipsed by the straw man argument of “National Security.” In reality, many things could be morphed into a national security argument which in reality has no such relationship to national security. To the contrary, the government has become exceedingly more rogue and greed driven, which has led to the inevitable determination that the only way to sustain power to advance the rogue-greed driven government agenda is to cast privacy to the wayside. In casting privacy to the wayside, the public can much more easily be controlled, manipulated, and led like sheep to the slaughterhouse. And make no mistake about it, virtually every empirical nation has been down this road, in some form or fashion, including Rome (Italy), Greece, and Persia to name a few. Alas the mantle has been passed to the USA.
The shroud of government secrecy is the mother of corruption. And it has been studied for god knows how many years i.e. a millennium or more that a society absent trust of its government cannot thrive, just as vice versa is very much true. And to the extent a valid argument can be made with respect to national security, surely it is the exception to the rule – not the rule. Where the exception swallows the rule what you will find is a society that is dysfunctional and spinning aimlessly. For a society to reach the point of being dysfunctional, the problems giving rise, to the same, have never been shown to arrive out of thin air. This is not a David Copperfield show. In real life, dysfunctional government constructs are by design to obtain and retain power or the natural result of blundering asinine incompetence at the highest decision making levels in government i.e. The Peter Principle.
Gone With the Wind
No, not the Clark Gable kind; but rather, your privacy is gone with the wind; but, if it is any consolation it's foundation has been gone for sometime now. If anything, what is mostly visible, today, to those who bother to pay attention, are the more current privacy word play trends. Let's take a dive shall we?
Do you video conference with friends, coworkers, or loved ones afar (If you do, you might want to consider keeping your clothes on after reading)? Use the internet regularly? Work remotely? Use online banking? Use cloud backup services for files and pictures? And on and on and on...
Quote:
“Skype – owned by Microsoft – was changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, Corporate Vice President Mark Gillett took to the company's blog to deny it. Turns out that wasn't quite true. Or at least he – or the company's lawyers – carefully crafted a statement that could be defended as true while completely deceiving the reader. You see, Skype wasn't changing its protocols to make it possible for the government to eavesdrop on users, because the government was already able to eavesdrop on users.” We Have Root 2019, @ pg. 99 [Originally published in CNN.com, July 31, 2013].
Quote:
“At a senate hearing in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured the committee that his agency didn't collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans, He was lying, too. He later defended his lie by inventing a new definition of the word “collect,” an excuse that didn't even pass the laugh test.” We Have Root 2019, @ pg. 99 [Originally published in CNN.com, July 31, 2013].
Quote:
“Google and Facebook insist that the NSA has no “direct access” to their servers. Of course not; the smart way for the NSA to get all the data is through sniffers.” We Have Root 2019, @ pg. 99 [Originally published in CNN.com, July 31, 2013].
Quote:
“Ronald Reagan once said “trust but verify.” That works only if we can verify.” We Have Root 2019, @ pg. 100 [Originally published in CNN.com, July 31, 2013].
Quote:
“Accountability means that those who break the law, lie to Congress or deceive the American people are held accountable. The NSA has gone rogue [...]” We Have Root 2019, @ pg. 101 [Originally published in CNN.com, July 31, 2013].
Quote:
“The NSA has repeatedly lied about the extent of its spying programs, James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, has lied about it to Congress.” We Have Root 2019, @ pg. 104 [Originally published in TheAtlantic.com, September 4, 2013].
Quote:
“Comparisons are springing up between today's NSA and the FBI of the 1950s and 1960s, and between the NSA Director Keith Alexander and J. Edgar Hoover. We never managed to rein in Hoover's FBI – it took his death for change to occur. I don't think we well be so lucky with the NSA.” We Have Root 2019, @ pg. 106 [Originally published in TheAtlantic.com, September 4, 2013].
Let's review a few important highlights. If memory stands correctly was it not President Obama in office in 2013 to whom James Clapper would have reported either directly or via a dotted line? Was not the theme of President Obama – “Hope?” How can one have “Hope” when the government is spying on you and violating your civil rights?
And to what extent did these programs continue under President Trump's first term and the, now, first term of President Biden. As to the latter it is more than reasonable to assert that such programs have escalated under President Biden evident by the WOKE agenda which is nothing more than a government sanctioned form of spying cloaked around the gang land myth of “Social justice.” As for President Trump not much is stated with respect to how privacy has been affected under his first term; but, it is more than reasonable to suggest that President Trump is going to have a problem to deal with in terms of reestablishing public trust with respect to the messes made as confirmed under Presidents Obama and Biden – both staunch Democrats -- and balancing genuine legitimate national security interests. Hey wait a minute, aren't the Democrats for the “Little guy,” and “Civil rights?” [Looking up at the ceiling, boy it's getting late now isn't it.]
Let that digest for now. More to come.
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