The Curmudgeon is back and very unhappy about our unscheduled departure. For those of you who have noticed, we haven’t been in your email for over a month and we only discovered that fact about ten days ago. It seems that our email delivery system was compromised and our whole subscriber base was deleted.
If you want to catch up on anything that you might have missed just log onto the site, urbancurmudgeon.com and you will find a list of blogs that were published after we were hit but before we were aware of it.
How did it happen? We’re still trying to find out. Our chief tech tells us that it was just a natural computer glitch but others point to far more sinister reasons and if I were a dedicated conspiracy theorist, given what’s going on out there, I might be inclined to start looking under my computer for spooks or hackers.
But a disturbing series of interviews by Bill Binney, a high-level NSA executive who is responsible for their mass surveillance, digital information program has put a whole new spin on what that agency can and will do and how it has already turned this country into a police state.
What’s fascinating is that Binney has been interviewed by damn near every reputable news agency plus Fox news and almost nothing has made it to print or onto the screen. CBS, ABC, CNN, The NY Times, USA Today and PBS among others have spoken to Binney and yet very little has made its way to public view, which speaks volumes to the truth of what he says.
Last year Binney made the traditional hair width gesture and said; ”We are like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.” Then, this week, he told a prominent blog that we have already become a police state.
Why would he say such a thing? Maybe because it’s true, maybe because big brother is watching everything we do and then it is giving that information to any federal, state or local police force, that asks for it. This would only be half as frightening if it weren’t for the fact that there are literally thousands of laws on the books in various localities all across the country of which almost no one has ever heard, but which apply to almost everything we do in our daily lives. These laws go all the way back to colonial times, and most have never been revoked, simply because of laziness or oversight. This leaves everyone open to violating laws that we have never heard of, and that we wouldn’t even consider in the course of our daily lives but these laws are being used by career minded law enforcement officials all across the country to prosecute people who have never heard of them and who’s intentions were anything but unlawful. One of the charges against the trio of senior citizen activists who walked into our supposedly air-tight nuclear facility in the south is based on one of those laws.
The fact is, that almost no one can live a normal life today without violating some law. This leaves us all vulnerable to the whims of the establishment. This is the condition of a totalitarian state.
Another condition of a totalitarian state is that the state moves to eliminate its real and perceived enemies regardless of constitutional guarantees or protections. J. Edgar Hoover turned this tactic into an art form in the fifties, unleashing career promoters like Joe McCarthy and his own mad dog enforcers to employ Gestapo-like tactics against any and all who disagreed or spoke out against him. It appears that NSA and other intelligence agencies are doing that now, only the current procedures preface the kicking in of doors, with computer attacks.
Now before you say that NSA has no interest in small time bloggers like the Curmudgeon, let me agree with that thought. Why would they? The Curmudgeon certainly has no power to damage anything like NSA. Hell, their boss, James Clapper can lie to congress and then admit he committed perjury without threat of prosecution by the US government, what would they have to fear from the likes of a small blogger?
So, no, I don’t feel that The Curmudgeon was mangle by NSA or any other government agency, but it could have been, and that gives us all something to think about.