The Boot Stamping on Your Face

I'm not sure who to hate more in the whole Snowden fiasco. Michael Hayden, for losing his shit in a ludicrously partisan op-ed? Glenn Greenwald, for raising up a suburban American dweeb as the second coming for just reiterating what everyone with a clue already knew about the NSA? Or said dweeb himself, Snowden, who for all the good he could've done for some real government transparency has flushed it away in a half-baked stance that's devoid of historical awareness or anything approaching the political will to affect some good change for once?

Mostly, I'm going to hate You the citizen. You got your panties in a twist at the thought of some federal office drone reading your embarrassing emails and ignored the one really important aspect of Snowden's leaks - the outsourced, for-profit security state.

The real Ministry of Love...

This has been going on for decades and nobody wants to pay attention. Defense spending was crooked as all hell even before Reagen but it was under that reptile's for-profit revolution that you started seeing things in the budget that had no fucking use whatsoever. The B1, Star Wars, pretty much anything that threw money down the business hole so that contractors could buy bigger and uglier houses in the DC suburbs.

Fast forward to now and you've got government surveillance filtered through IT companies, most of whom like to put on libertarian airs. Like Palantir, a typical technogeek outfit that loves to harp on individual liberty while taking fat CIA contracts. And let's not forget how the only reason the spooks can root through your data is because Facebook and Google gave it away. That the government doesn't need to be clever to invade your privacy but just ask the sites you inexplicably trust for your info, that's what should be worrying. Unless you hold to the belief that corporations can't be as oppressive as governments, like Cato flunkey Glenn Greenwald.

"And as you can see here, I supported the Iraq War until the Koch Brothers told me not to."

It's not just that the public and private institutions you've placed your trust in have betrayed you. It's that, should a real threat be brewing, this outsourced surveillance is worse than useless. Remember, this was all going on in the lead up to Boston with Tsarnaev the younger posting straight-up jihadi videos on YouTube! Even without their super secret spy gizmos, every three letter agency could've spotted that! Didn't help in the least. In the aftermath, we had the amateur detectives of Twitter getting ready to string up a Saudi for the crime of being scared. I called that bullshit out as it was happening and as far as I can tell I was the only one. When it turned out to be a nothing story, everyone just went back to the usual white noise that substitutes for thinking in this country.

And that's what I find really troubling about all this - that national defense is reliant on a system with little grounding and even less interest in reality. If such a half-assed system continues, the events of Boston will be easy to repeat as anyone serious will just be lost in the noise. And you're all cool with it because Business Good, Government Bad.

You cretins don't deserve any privacy. You'd just drown in the toilet.