The Fuse Has Been Lit: Seven Critical Points on Uncle Sam’s Spying Program June 10, 2013 First, if the PRISM program and all the rest of the government’s surveillance programs were so good and necessary, then why didn’t the feds catch the Tsarnaev brothers, who earlier this year blew up the Boston Marathon? Second, if and when everything is revealed about PRISM and all the rest, it’s likely that we will learn of important and inculpating connections between the National Security Agency (NSA), on the one hand, and many civilian agencies, on the other. Third, we now know that Silicon Valley, and the telecommunications industry, are the key to the Obama strategy for total information awareness. In fact, the internet companies, and the phone companies, were the spearpoint for PRISM. Fourth, it’s not an accident that these Silicon Valley companies are supporters of Barack Obama. The greatest among these Obama supporters is Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of the largest of these companies, Google. Fifth, Eric Schmidt, in particular, seems on his way to becoming a major Democratic powerbroker, bringing Silicon Valley smarts--and who knows what else--into the realm of partisan campaigning. Sixth, young Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old who leaked the PRISM information, is sort of a Zelig figure --if you remember your Woody Allen movies-- for our own time. That is, the naive figure who ends up in the middle of great events, without fully understanding what is happening all around him. Seventh, as far as the American people are concerned, this domestic spying is a big deal. Yet revealingly, to the political class--that is, our leaders in Washington DC--it’s not such a big deal. And there we see the central cleft in our politics today: the widening gap between the government and the governed !
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:02:30 +0000
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