I find it interesting how the attention is focused on the young man who to my mind, did his duty and put the interest of the American people’s right to know, above the interest of a few shadowy spooks right to play god.
The Government is the servant of the people, and when it forgets that, it forfeits its right… to blithely be obeyed.
It forfeits its right to unquestioningly… govern.
There are such things as illegal orders and illegal acts, and any soldier’s or representative’s ultimate duty is not to his government but his country, and the moral imperative to know and act when those two things diverge.
The defense of the NSA in their criminal enterprise boils down to “our actions have stopped potential crimes”.
To that I would answer… you can not preserve freedom by eradicating freedoms, and you can not preserve the law by breaking the law.
Full stop.
That road lies in dark places that we have been before.
The NSA attempts to justify it like all overreaching totalitarian regimes justify anything, that their ends justify their means. And that has never been remotely true, and is not in this case. The NSA’s claim to have stopped acts of terror, misses the truth, which is… they have traded their greater acts of terrorism for others’ smaller, potential acts of terrorism.
It’s like Nazi’s Germany’s answer to any petty and supposed crime of the individual was the magnitude greater crime of the state, such as concentration camps. That we are walking down that road with the American government today is obvious and clear, from Darpa designing ever more sophisticated machines to kill men (in the event enough of our military wakes up to the idiocy of murder and assassination as government policy, well of course we need unquestioning machines there to do it instead) to the barbaric state of our prisons… we use the threat of terror to support an increasingly terrorist American Government.
It is a hypocrisy that must be recognized… clearly recognized… and opposed… vigorously opposed.
The person’s name we should be broadcasting is not the young man, that the culpable press (in the payroll of the very interests getting rich treating the common citizen as criminal before crime) calls demeaningly “whistle-blower”, it’s the ones who run the NSA. The shadowy directors and heads of the NSA and CIA and FBI and all those acronyms that hide their big crimes under the lie of persecuting small ones.
They are like the lynchmob hanging and castrating boys for whistling at women, they use the lie of petty crimes, as a smokescreen to commit great ones.
We’ve cut so many social and humanitarian programs for supposed lack of funds, yet so much of your tax dollars go into a black hole, where abhorrent individuals do abhorrent things under the lie of doing it in the name of “National Security” or “for the people” when the truth is, they do it for the reasons it has historically been done, they are diseased animals in positions of power and no one has told them no.
No one has put them down.
“No.”
And “Get down.”
It’s a start.
Maybe instead of cutting programs to feed and clothe and inspire and employ our citizens, maybe we start closing down the acronyms. This country ran before them, I reckon we’ll run after them.
And maybe run a damn sight better.
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