Turnkey Tyranny

“I know everything that is said and done. And thought!” – Emperor Tiberius, Caligula (1979)

“…they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them.” – Edward Snowden (2013)

The genius of the American political system is that each administration is significantly worse than the one that preceded it. The effect is historical revisionism in the public mind. Nixon looks downright cuddly next to the abuses of Cheney/Rummy/Bush and company. Now Bush Jr. is starting to look like a civil libertarian when compared to the current Snoopmeister In Chief. As we plummet toward official Satanism, with a state unrecognizable and patently evil at its core, we can at least cling to the notion that things weren’t as bad as now in some past golden age. Then we can look around and fight amongst each other, assigning blame to the nearest uninformed yahoo, rather than to the high priests of human sacrifice and global misery and destruction.

We now have an utterly exposed fraud of a system unrecognizable as a democracy, but clearly within parameters of what George Orwell conjured up and Hitler before him.

A series of disclosures comes regularly from defective cogs, little technocratic machine parts, which no longer spin as directed. Edward Snowden’s classified leaks are the icing on top of a shit pile so towering as to be visible from orbit. As Snowden warned, “the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”

That is the modus operandi. Secret memos have replaced debate, law and Constitutionality.

If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards. – Whistleblower Edward Snowden

Snowden, a private contractor, a computer systems “analyst” at Booz, Allen and Hamilton, is recently out of a job. But that doesn’t seem to have stopped his employer from rolling forward with the mission, no matter what that mission actually entails. Buzzfeed reports that Snowden’s old job is open for candidates to apply. So if you’re a hacker with questionable morals and scruples, you are encouraged to take the keys to the kingdom. There you will be able to “wiretap anyone, from YOU or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president…”

Someone, somewhere in a uniform adorned with various gaudy medals, might ask why some off-the-street computer punk could get hired to wiretap his entire life, and with what oversight or legality? If said punk decides to wiretap high-ranking military officers, what then? And the President of the United States? And federal judges? What sort of Frankenstein’s worst nightmare has the National Security Agency concocted over there, and in what possible ways do such gaping security holes constitute “national security?” This is quite the opposite, in fact, a national insecurity on a scale unprecedented in all of human history.

Thanks for letting us know, Snowden, but, you’re still enemy number one to be silenced. Like Manning, and Assange, Kiriakou, Binney and Sibel Edmonds. You’re not supposed to tell the public. You see, the US government considers the public a hostile force to be propagandized, controlled, manipulated, kept ignorant, persuaded, sold, taxed, recruited or locked up. This is the triumph of “western democracy.”

Not a lot is new here, but the naked illegitimacy of the office of the president is a welcome development indeed. As the buck stops in the Oval Office, perhaps we can begin there with handcuffs and actual warrants for arrest that respect the 4th, 5th and 6th Amendment rights of Mr. Obama and company.

“I am not a crook!” said a former crook. But today, the very notion that the president is a crook has been defined out of existence as a “conspiracy theory” the wild, insane ravings of the lizard cult people awaiting the mother ship. For it is quite impossible for the president, or anyone else in government, to conspire to break the law. Such a thing goes against the divine. A religious aura surrounds the hallowed grounds of the White House, a place so sacred as to be beyond the worldly temptations of normal mortals.

As no US government official is currently capable of breaking the law, the tin foil adorned crowd must simply be shunned and silenced, ridiculed into irrelevance. Impeachment is another quaint anachronism. After all, there was no blowjob. No one lied about semen. Bodily fluids were not spilled.

This is simply a policy disagreement. Policy is, in the end, whatever the government decides to have typed up in a memo. This memo’s relevance to the law and to the rights of the citizens has been engineered completely into irrelevance. Memo trumps Constitution. Ask Dianne Feinsetin. They have a “program” and the program is approved by them – so what’s the problem?

The lunatic conspiracist and enemy of the state Edward Snowden claims, “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.”

Well what does he know, really?

…I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building. – Edward Snowden

Senator Mike Rogers disagrees. End of story. End of investigation – of the NSA – not of Snowden of course.

Can some rogue leaker take down the illegitimate surveillance state? Doubtful.

Have the people awoken? Remains to be seen.

Can they do anything about it? Will they? Will they be asleep again by Sweeps Week?

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. – Edward R. Murrow

Let me ask you, couch potato man, how many more Edward Snowdens will throw away their careers, their life savings and flee for the rest of their lives in order to save your sorry freedom that you don’t even value yourself? Why should they? Are you worth it? Are you even on the right side of history? Ignorance, in the hyper-information age, is rather pathetic, don’t you think?

The world of knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips, often 24/7, and yet they actively choose to know very little. They wallow in trivialities and banalities choosing ignorance 9 times out of 10. How long can such a people remain free?

Should they?

I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under. – Edward Snowden

Beer, Breasts and Cat Videos, that new reality show debuts at 9 pm.

Joe Giambrone publishes Politcal Film Blog (@polfilmblog), and he dares anyone to try thisHell of a Deal.