The Social Network, NSA Version:"They took those programs that I built and turned them on you"

Laura Poitras's short take on William Binney, 32-year NSA veteran who quit the Agency in October 2011 when he saw the deep data-mining capabilities he had helped to develop for foreign intelligences turned on Americans, in violation of the NSA charter and the Constitution. This was published by the New York Times last year, well before any act of Edward Snowden.

"That gives you an outline of the life of everybody in the community.  ... That involves anybody in the country.  Even Senators, House of Representatives, all of them."

You'll learn a lot in 8 minutes.

“No matter what the law actually says”: The Snowden Revelations and the Eternal Surveillance State

The sudden cascade of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden through Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras in the Guardian, and Barton Gellman in the Washington Post has provided stark confirmation of our worst fears about the American government’s contemptuous disregard for our most fundamental rights.  As Greenwald, speaking on Democracy Now, succinctly summarizes the extra-Constitutional world we now live in:

[T]he objective of the NSA and the U.S. government is nothing less than destroying all remnants of privacy. They want to make sure that every single time human beings interact with one another, things that we say to one another, things we do with one another, places we go, the behavior in which we engage, that they know about it, that they can watch it, and they can store it, and they can access it at any time. … It is vital, in their eyes, for them to have full and unfettered access to it. And they do. [Emphasis mine]

Every single time is what they want, and – digitally, at least – they have it.

It’s hard to overestimate how radical this is. Any serious discussion about this issue has to begin with a clear understanding of what we are talking about.  We have to understand not only this or that discrete program – the Verizon/telco “metadata” order, Prism, Boundless Informant, etc. – but the whole matrix of the supercharged surveillance state that has been constructed over the past twelve years, of which these programs are the building blocks.  We also have to understand the legal-constitutional and ethico-political premises and consequences of this new techno-social construct.  It’s hard to overestimate how thoroughly this parasitic entity has already embedded itself in our polity, and how difficult it will be to extricate ourselves from it.  Referring to the East German secret police who kept voluminous, detailed records on virtually everyone, Daniel Ellsberg is on the mark when he calls what we’re becoming “The United Stasi of America.”

Pictures of the World

Yesterday, I posted this map on the Polemicist Facebook page:

After seeing some of the responses, I realized that many people may never have seen, and are not aware of, the famous Peters Projection Map, and the issues it addresses: 

To summarize the issue:  As pointed out on the Peters Map site, any flat map has a problem "projecting" a three-dimensional globe on a two-dimensional surface, and any such map will introduce some distortion.  No map will show both the size and shape of geographical formations accurately.  The map with which we are all familiar, the Mercator projection map, which was designed around 1659, was not designed to depict relative sizes of continents and countries accurately, but to show the shapes of continents fairly well.  The Peters Map, first presented by Dr. Peter Arno in Germany in 1974 (and first published in an English-version in 1983), is an equal area map that shows all countries, continents or oceans according to their actual size, and makes accurate comparisons possible.

The Reluctant Imperialist

Obama: "I may assume the right to attack any country, and kill anyone, anywhere in the world, whenever I want, but at least I'm all thoughtful and conflicted about it.  Just as I know you are in supporting me."

This hurts me more than it hurts you?  He's the victim, the focus of our sympathy, here?

He is fast winning the prize for the most manipulative and deceptive president I've ever seen.

Another fine analysis by Glenn Greenwald (see also, this at FireDogLake, and this at Miami Herald)..

Excerpts:

The hallmark of a skilled politician is the ability to speak to a group of people holding widely disparate views, and have all of them walk away believing they heard what they wanted to hear. ... I've personally never seen a politician even in the same league as Barack Obama when it comes to that ability...

what should be beyond dispute at this point is that Obama's speeches have very little to do with Obama's actions, except to the extent that they often signal what he intends not to do.
What Obama has specialized in from the beginning of his presidency is putting pretty packaging on ugly and discredited policies. The cosmopolitan, intellectualized flavor of his advocacy makes coastal elites and blue state progressives instinctively confident in the Goodness of whatever he's selling, much as George W. Bush's swaggering, evangelical cowboy routine did for red state conservatives. The CIA presciently recognized this as a valuable asset back in 2008 when they correctly predicted that Obama's election would stem the tide of growing antiwar sentiment in western Europe by becoming the new, more attractive face of war,.. However bad things might be, we at least have a benevolent, kind-hearted and very thoughtful leader doing everything he can to fix it.

The clear purpose of Obama's speech was to comfort progressives who are growing progressively more uncomfortable with his extreme secrecy, wars on press freedom, seemingly endless militarism and the like.  No progressive wants to believe that they placed such great trust and adoration in a political figure who is now being depicted as some sort of warped progeny of Richard Nixon and Dick Cheney. That creates internal discomfort and even shame. This speech was designed to allow progressives once again to see Barack Obama as they have always wanted to see him, his policies notwithstanding: as a deeply thoughtful, moral, complex leader who is doing his level best, despite often insurmountable obstacles, to bring about all those Good Things that progressives thought they would be getting when they empowered him...

the speech was heavy on feel-good rhetoric, mostly designed to signal that unlike the mean and simplistic George Bush - who presumably pursued these policies thoughtlessly and simplistically - Obama experiences inner turmoil and deep moral and intellectual conflict as he embraces them. ..
Obama may do things you progressives find distasteful, but at least marvel at how thoughtful and torn up he is about it all. ..

Benjamin Wittes similarly observed that Obama's speech seemed written to align the president "as publicly as possible with the critics of the positions his administration is taking without undermining his administration's operational flexibility in actual fact." In other words,... "the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has — but also to make sure that it could continue to do so." ...

That's what makes it such a classic Obama speech. And that's the point: his speech had something for everyone, which is another way of saying that it offered nothing definitive or even reliable about future actions. ... Until one sees actual changes in behavior and substance on those issues, cheering for those changes as though they already occurred or are guaranteed is the height of self-delusion.

Assumption

Arrogant assumption of theists, that is.

She saved her child, and the assumption is that she'll thank the sky-god. Do they ask all the people whose kids died whether they curse the omnipotent sky-god who sent the tornado? Which question is more insulting?