The Buzz of the Blogosphere
Over the last couple of days there's been a lot of blog buzz about this Wired story that details another possible NSA eavesdropping program. A digital rights organization has filed suit in federal court alleging that AT&T has given the National Security Agency (NSA) full, unfettered access to the telephone calls of its customers. The suit also alleges that AT&T has diverted all of its broadband data traffic through a data-mining surveillance hub, also run by NSA. The suit was filed back in January, but a recently filed affidavit from a former AT&T worker allegedly backs up the suit's claims about the data-mining hub.
Of course, the ever-self-obsessed blogger set is in a tizzy about the news. Brewert on the DailyKos takes a look at the super-fast, super-stealthy computer that, he says, makes the mining of so much data possible. Scuttlemonkey over at Slashdot has a blurb on the story, but it's the readers' comments that are fascinating. And the industry site SecurityProNews is watching carefully.
My question is why hasn't this bubbled into the mainstream media?
Buzz: Book Suggestion
Suggested reading... A Man Called Intrepid by William Stephenson. During World War 2 he was responsible for portions of British espionage including the interception of all messages, postal mail, telegraph, radio etc. from a transfer point set up offshore in Bermuda.
Without taking sides on the specifics of spying, let me merely suggest that naysayers read this book to get some idea of the urgency that exists in wartime, and how the leaders at the time of World War II answered that challenge.
At that time Churchill and Roosevelt did not succumb to the vastness of the task nor go passively, when facing Hitler's intent to destroy and subject the West. Interception of international communications was a given. The US and British effort were especially interested in covert or enciphered communications... since microdots, steganography, shortwave radio...anything sent with an effort to avoid interception woulld obviously be a likely place to look for hostile activity.
Americans and others (including France, based on the ethnic polarization and rioting there) may want to consider the price of inaction. Do we want to render up what we have of tolerance and liberalism, and live being dictated-to by the most violent and the most adamant? What becomes of those principles of pacifism when the de-facto ruler is a warlord?
If the will to live is alive in us... if in spite of our imperfection we think we deserve to live, then we need to answer the absolutism of militant so-called Islam with some meaningful resistance and example. We also need to air out the equivalents of monolithic thinking and absolutism here in this country, and somehow learn to voluntarily temper the destructive extremes from the public discourse. Otherwise, while this seed lives here, we will see our own face exaggerated yet again in an external enemy.
Big Bro: Great
This comes as no surprise to those of us who came of age in the 50s and 60s (that Big Bro was watching)... we just assumed they were and went on about our lives. It's refreshing to see the outrage coming from people half our age... can't say we didn't warn you all... it's a pity that it's still going on though.
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