I heard a lot of mall shoppers interviewed on National Party-line Radio on Friday, none of whom expressed the slightest interest in preserving their privacy and free speech rights under the fourth and first amendments.
The oft-repeated (catapult the propaganda) line was "if I'm not doing anything wrong, I am glad they're protecting us. Better no privacy than dead."
Sheep.
The upside down world lunacy of this is that these Republican shopping mall sheep, who vote religiously for the party of low taxation, are PAYING TAXES for the collection of their own personal data which will be used to track their every breath in years to come. They won't have to bother voting soon, because Big Brother will do it for them!
I thought everyone read 'The Diary of Anne Frank' as a schoolchild, and if they don't read, didn't they see 'Schindler's List' a few years ago?
Doesn't everyone know the quote about creeping fascism! It begins something like...first they came for the Jews, but I wasn't a Jew, so it didn't affect me...
Don't they have any historical consciousness?
Why does this matter?
Ted Rall says it best in Who Will Inherit the NSA?
Published on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 by Uexpress:
The CIA estimates that there are between 2,000 and 10,000 al Qaeda members worldwide. Even if there are dozen or two "sleeper cell" members in the United States, they don't use the phone unless they're complete idiots. NSA data-mining will never uncover a terrorist or terrorist plot.
Then why--why really--are government spooks sorting through our phone records? Because information is power. Calling logs, coupled with analogous databases of e-mail, wire transfer and fax transmissions, could give the FBI the information it needs to pressure a reluctant witness to turn state's evidence in a crucial case. The SEC could scan for calling clusters between corporate officials and investors in its investigations of insider trading. Politicians could neutralize their rivals by threatening to reveal their personal indiscretions.
If the NSA were truly interested in monitoring and capturing Islamist terrorists, it wouldn't give a damn about your call ordering a large pizza, half pepperoni/half onions. It would buy records from outfits like the satellite telephone company Thuraya, the dominant telecommunications provider in the remote regions of Middle East, Central and South Asia where America's enemies live. Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, uses a Thuraya.
It's hard to accept but the truth is obvious: our government doesn't want to catch the 9/11 murderers. After all, Bush could simply call his friend Pervez Musharraf, the military dictator of Pakistan who seized power as a Taliban ally, and ask him to pass the phone over the dinner table to Osama so he could get a Hellfire missile lock from a nearby Predator drone plane.
Americans' first instincts are probably correct. In the short term, most people have little to fear from the NSA data-mining and other domestic surveillance programs. Besides, there's nothing new here. During the 1990s a Clinton-era NSA chief freely admitted to the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur that its Echelon keyword and voice-recognition software system sought to intercept "every communication in the world." Although the current Administration is headed by fascists who would love to toss every Democratic voter into the ovens, they haven't yet managed to transform America into the police state of their dreams.
If I didn't believe there was still plenty of life left in our democracy, after all, would I be writing this?
Still, it is odd to hear the same Americans who would shoot their neighbor for watching them through their bedroom window say they don't care if some faceless bureaucrat listens to them have phone sex. Despite Watergate, Iran-Contra and a hundred other scandals that provide ample evidence for the opposite reaction, most Americans trust the government.
Even if you trust this government, however, there is no way to know what form of government will rule this country in the future. Someday, and this is certain, a revolution or civil disturbance or invasion will topple the system created by the Founding Fathers in 1787. Some successor regime, run by people you don't know and may not like (and more to the point may not like you), will inherit the security apparatus currently being put into place.
That's what happened in Europe during World War II. When the Germans invaded a country they inherited its police files and other records. It was easier for the Nazis to find and arrest Jews in nations that listed their citizens' religion in their records.
Right now, you may be a Republican voter living in a red state, and you may find yourself in perfect agreement with your political leaders. What will you do if someone like me becomes president? What about my pal the radical anarchist who believes that the country's salvation lies in murdering every registered Republican? He's a smart guy. You never know.
True, some future American tyrant could order the creation of a huge database of information to track everything you do--if such a thing doesn't already exist. But why make it easy for him? It's smarter to never create such a dangerous set of records in the first place.
Ted Rall is the editor of "Attitude 3: The New Subversive Online Cartoonists," a new anthology of webcartoons.
© 2006 Uclick, LLC
Now read this explainer by Greg Palast that I copied and pasted from Buzzflash:
The Spies Who Shag Us
The Times and USA Today have Missed the Bigger Story -- Again
by Greg Palast
May 12, 2006
I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed in 1997, called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?
ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.
I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.
And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply rewarded by the man the company elected.
And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States …linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.
And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.
"And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence ... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.
But it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).
But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex -- and they want you to be afraid. Back to today's New York Times, page 28: "Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime." And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times.
"Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family," says the Times -- which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.
It doesn't end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won't stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone's going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.
The knuckleheads at the Times don't put the three stories together because the real players aren't in the press releases their reporters re-write.
But that's the Fear Industry for you. You aren't safer from terrorists or criminals or "felon" voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter.
And that's their program. They get the data mine -- and we get the shaft.
A BUZZFLASH GUEST CONTRIBUTION
Greg Palast is author of Armed Madhouse: Who's Afraid of Osama Wolf?, China Floats Bush Sinks, The Scheme to Steal '08, No Child's Behind Left and Other Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War, out June 6. You can order it now.
For more horror and humor from the War on Terror, listen to an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Armed Madhouse, Double cheese with fear.
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