Let me start out with a disclosure and disclaimer: I am an employee of an agency that is part of the Department of Homeland Security (home of the "rainbow of doom"). I do not speak for them. They do not speak for me. It is fairly typical for management and employees to have differing opinions on the issues that affect them, whether those differences are of degree and emphasis or deep philosophical differences.
I work with a group of hard-working and dedicated individuals. We often work more hours than we are allowed to be paid for. It is not unknown for employees to spend their own money on equipment or software that our agency cannot purchase, in order to get the job done. We exist to help the public, whether directly or indirectly, and we tend to remember that. I enjoy my job and my co-workers, even when we don't have the authority to fix a locally-solvable problem, and must contact someone higher up to do what we should be able to do. We know that over-centralization is part of any large organization, DHS and its member agencies included.
Recently, another DHS member agency (TSA, which is not the agency that employs me) began using electronic scanners that produce high or medium-quality full-body imagery through people's clothing. Those who decline the nudescan are given highly invasive "pat-downs" of a type that would get any sheriff's deputy in the country fired. We're told this is to protect us, but this is actually a reaction to the "underwear bomber" and is not going to prevent a well-organized, determined, group from doing their evil deed.
Since we know that this is "security theater" and that it is highly ineffective, what reasons could be behind it? I don't know, and neither do you. But the temptation to violate the Constitution in order to protect it is among the most dangerous impulses to our republic. Unless Americans of all stripes wake up and replace the current Democrat / Republican duopoly with a good-sized number of competitive parties, including those that are committed to curtailing these privacy violations, our nation will become more like those seventy to one hundred years ago in Europe. Seeing what the result was, I personally wish to avoid that.
America needs change, and not the "change we can believe in" that comes of left-wing versus right-wing sloganeering. We need the kind of change that comes through informed, involved voters kicking party-approved candidates to the curb and selecting their own choices. We need the kind of change that comes when thinking people extrapolate the activities of corporations and advocacy groups and publicize the resulting actions. We need the kind of change that comes when individuals freely and publicly chastise politicians for going beyond their constitutional authority. We need the kind of change that comes when people stop buying the products and services of corporations and groups whose actions are hostile to our liberties or our economy.
Let me be clear. This must not be done through any kind of violence. America will only continue to be the shining light for the world around us if we figure out how to truly change our course at the ballot box. Reading about the French revolution will tell us what violence will bring. First, they executed those who they regarded as oppressors, then they executed a few other bothersome people, and soon, it was almost randomly-selected people who were beheaded. Thousands were killed, and then a power-mad dictator (Napoleon Bonaparte) was put into power. We cannot allow that to happen here.
We must remember how Pol Pot and his regime in Cambodia killed off anyone who wore glasses--because they were educated, hence part of the former power structure--and how the Communist revolutions in Russia and China led to millions of people being tortured, executed, or intentionally starved to death. The United States is a great country, and the way to preserve that is to go to the ballot box and to vote against all Republican party and Democratic party candidates and to vote for minor-party candidates that wish to reign in abusive acts by government officials.
Now, as for Wikileaks, as a federal employee, it would be downright stupid for me to visit their site, so all I know about it is what I see on the LA Times site. However, I do want to point out that a number of people on Twitter and elsewhere have said about the TSA nudescan, "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear." Wikileaks is like putting the whole government through the nudescan machines. If the government is doing nothing wrong, Wikileaks will have nothing to expose.
What? You say that the government should take that guy's life? Don't get me wrong. Whomever leaked these documents clearly broke the law, and should be punished for it. But Wikileaks is doing the job that the news media should be doing--exposing possible wrongdoing in high places--even if their methods are not acceptable. Do you think that the Nixon administration should have assassinated the two guys who broke much of the Watergate story? No? What about the guy who leaked the Pentagon papers? No? Well then why in the world would you think that Julian Assange, the leader of Wikileaks, should be killed for doing the same thing?
As for DHS agencies seizing domains of organizations that are believed to assist in violating copyrights, that is so far afield from the department's mission that it could cripple the whole department. Already, DHS covers the gamut from transportation security to immigration enforcement to disaster relief and recovery. Such a broad mission means that there will always be conflicts, and various agencies will be less effective than they could otherwise be. But imagine a time when resources are taken away from those who live in an area that has been hit by a hurricane in order to raise the revenue for a major music or movie company. If you think that will not happen, you are naive. I think we should leave assisting big corporations to the Commerce Dept and the Federal Reserve. They have years of experience and are good at it. (But it does point to the problem that the domain name system needs to be completely immune to government interference, whether ours or China's. The health of the entire Internet is threatened by such actions, regardless of their effect on file-sharing and copyright abuse.)
As for the leaders of our government, we need to expect and demand that they uphold the Constitution and their oath of office, in a spirit of reverence and submission to God our Maker. Vote against those who do not do so. Vote for those who seek to do that very thing.
Above all, become informed. Not just by listening to mainstream media or even NPR. Either one gives you what they want you to know and ignores what they don't want you to know. You need to find individuals who are on the scene of the events and involved in the organizations that matter to you. You should not be persuaded to vote for any candidate or ballot measure based on their advertising or your news outlet's editorializing. Neither one is trustworthy.
When a politician, a lobbying group, an advocacy group, a corporation, or a government agency has a news conference, they are not telling you the whole truth, just their group's edited version of it. When their competitors respond within minutes after the conference, they have not had time to think about what was said, so their response is likewise invalid.
Read, read, read. Ask for the raw data behind graphics. Throw the figures into spreadsheets. Play with cut-off values--if I raise the taxable income limit here, how does that change what is shown--and question the underlying assumptions. Turn off the television and log off of Facebook, so you can spend time exercising your brain. Do not accept what the mass manipulators media tell you, but question it.
We did not reach this point overnight. We should not expect to get over it overnight. It will take a sustained effort. There will be spies who will see a decentralized people's political movement as a threat. They will try and twist the words of individuals to make it seem like said movement is violent. There will be prosecutions against those who advocate or whose words can be twisted to make it seem like they advocate violence. Make it clear: comply with every law, and seek change only at the ballot box.
What would I like to see? I'd like to see our leaders being more considerate of the 4th amendment. After all, the people who are advocating the death of Wikileaks' founder are probably violating the law. We would not want them to be rounded up because hidden microphones captured a bit of unguarded speech, would we? Neither do we want old ladies and three year-olds subjected to nudescans and ultra-invasive personal searches without probable cause, just because some bozo from overseas once hid a bomb in his underwear. And I'd like to see us calm down over the Wikileaks thing. The Pentagon papers didn't destabilize our nation and neither will cablegate.
If anything, cablegate should teach us that any information we collect and store will be misused if we store it long enough. A disposal policy is a fundamental requirement of privacy and security, both for individuals and organizations.
NOTE: This does not represent government policy, and was not paid for or approved by the government. It represents the personal opinion of one individual. If you disagree, you may respond in the comments or in your own blog.
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