In 1969 I designed a three room psychedelic house for the Fender Bass Company’s display at the National Music Makers of America Convention in Chicago. The house, the purpose of which was to display Fender’s instruments, balanced on gimbals; it’s walls and floor, made of flexible steel mirrors were moved in various directions by hydraulic pistons in time with whatever music was playing. The movement of the pistons and therefore the walls and floors was dictated by a computer, which was twenty feet long, by eight feet wide, by six feet high. We transported it to Chicago from New York on an eighteen-wheeler. Today my Iphone can do the same job.
What I’m saying here is that the computer is truly an amazing item, and the basis of most of our modern technology. It has created a world that we only dreamed of, as little as twenty years ago. It has become the basic tool for most of what we do in business and industry, and through its use, we have been able to increase our productivity exponentially. It has also become the tool that will eventually end civilization, as we know it. Why do I say that? Because it is the ultimate weapon of war and the technology by which George Orwell’s predictions, laid out in “1984” will certainly come to fruition.
Is that a depressing concept for such a wondrous tool? Maybe- but there it is. There’s no question that the computer is the single most important innovation of the 20th century and possibly in the history of man but it has already been corrupted by man’s universal greed and innate desire for power All hardware and programming are obsolete in a year and a half or at most two years. With the way everything is speeding up it’s only a matter of time, and a very short time at that, before technology will be obsolete before it leaves the factory.
Why is this? Because the manufacturers make a lot of money by selling us new stuff, before the stuff they sold us last year, wears out. One of the big selling points of computers when they first appeared on the market was that they were going to create a whole new kind of filing system, one that would reduce our use of paper and allow us to never worry about mis-filing our paper work again.
Well, if you believed that one like I did, you are now thoroughly screwed. If you were silly enough or naive or trusting enough to have believed these lying profiteers, you have now lost a good percentage of your work, either through crashing computers or even more infuriating through deliberate obsolescence caused by the manufacturers of programming changing their support systems so that documents you may have created as little as three years ago are no longer supported by their technology and can no longer be accessed.
But that’s the small change. The big bucks, as in everything else, are in military and intelligence systems and that’s what has brought the nation and one particular young whistleblower to crossed swords.
The major headlines for the last week or so have involved Edward Snowden and his revelation that NSA along with a number of other intelligence organizations have been collecting billions of bits of information about everyone who uses a phone, a computer or any other type of electronic communication. This means just about every person on earth.
The government is hot after Snowden, reviling him as a traitor and spy who has sabotaged our entire system of intelligence and calling for at least his dismemberment or failing that burning at the stake. The fact is that Snowden hasn’t revealed much of anything that wasn’t already known to anyone who cared to look into it. Unfortunately the government blundered badly allowing the whole situation to backfire, allowing a leak that could and should have been quickly shuffled off to the back pages, to become headline news all over the world.
As it turns out Snowden’s revelations have made a lot of people aware that legally or not, the NSA is in fact invading our privacy. They say it’s for our own good, that they are finding all kinds of terrorists, and maybe they are, but one question seems to have leaped to the forefront of the discussion; do we really need them to keep us that secure?
The number of American citizens killed by foreign terrorists since 911, is in single digits. We kill over 30,000 people in this country every year with guns and almost 40,000 more with cars and we’re worried about an average of less than one person per year killed by foreign terrorists? Who are we kidding? This isn’t about safety, this is about power and greed.
Power is the most addictive substance known to man. Those that don’t have it want it and those that do have it want more. If you don’t believe that you just aren’t paying attention, but let’s get back to Edward Snowden.
The government is trying to trash this guy because he has displayed to the American people exactly what our intelligence forces are doing to take away their privacy and eventually their freedom. Their attack is largely based on the fact that he published the information through The Guardian a British paper and then ran off to Hong Kong and because he ran, it must be assumed that he is a traitor. This is to put it tastefully, bureaucratic fantasy. The government claims that they have a system in place through which whistleblowers can make their discoveries public without getting into trouble. Sure they do, just like the military has a system in place for servicemen and women to report rape. Need I say more?
But don’t believe me, ask Jesseleyn Radack, a lawyer for The Government Accountability Project, who represented Thomas Drake a whistleblower who went through the existing system, trying to do everything the right way and instead of being congratulated, ended up being charged under the Espionage Act. The government doesn’t want anyone telling it that it has screwed up. Then they have to go through the whole process of proving that they aren’t blundering idiots. Of course the bureaucracy couldn’t prove anything but they couldn’t just let him go, thereby proving their incompetence, so they forced him to plead guilty to the unauthorized use of a computer. Really? And how much of our taxpayer money did they waste to get to that point? If that doesn’t do it for you just look at what is happening to Bradley Manning.
Even Michael Hayes, former director of both the CIA and NSA has shown his ambivalence over how the whole affair is being handled. He can’t, because of his former positions, come right out and say that NSA is out of line and he, in fact, may not believe that they are, but he has called for a review that would put the Patriot Act, the law under which these invasions of privacy are allowed, under a new microscope.
The Patriot Act, a law signed into being by George Bush in October 2011, a little over a month after 911, was a hastily complied, bi-partisan bill that was put together amid the panic and terror of the first ever invasion of mainland America. After 12 years and no equivalent recurrence it is fair to say that 911 was an anomaly, though not one which we wish to revisit.
So it’s fair to ask, what are we protecting here, with all this overkill? The answer seems to be power and greed. The power of the federal government through its intelligence services to firmly control what goes on in your lives and the greed of the military industrial complex,
The Patriot Act needs to be changed so that the privacy and ultimately the freedom of the American people, is no longer compromised. And the changes need to be completely clear and transparent so that they are obvious and not open to interpretation. I say that because there seems to be a secret interpretation of the Patriot act and FISA, The Foreign Intelligence Service Act, which is known only to the members of the Congressional Intelligence Committee, none of whom are willing to discuss it because it seems that it’s classified. Classified? We’re speaking here, about an interpretation of a law that is on the books. How the hell can an interpretation of something on public record get to be classified? The answer, of course, is simple. It’s classified because those who are using it don’t want the American people to how they are twisting that law to their own purposes
Knowing the interpretation isn’t something that will expose us to danger from our enemies. This has noting to do with our enemies, it’s just something that NSA and their colleagues in intelligence don’t want the American people to know about. Why not? I don’t know for sure, but how about an educated guess. How about if we did know how they were interpreting the law we would see that their interpretation is not in keeping with the spirit or the letter of that law and we would call them on their actions. Can there possibly be another explanation? Of course not, that’s exactly what’s happening and Edward Snowden, seeing that, revealed it so that the American people would have some say in how those who are supposed to be working for them are in actuality stealing their freedom.
There can be only one legitimate reaction to Snowden’s disclosures. It is that our intelligence agencies are running amok and that they have to be reined in and it has to happen now.