{"id":67682,"date":"2013-06-08T08:38:55","date_gmt":"2013-06-08T12:38:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=67682"},"modified":"2013-06-08T09:33:20","modified_gmt":"2013-06-08T13:33:20","slug":"spygate-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/spygate-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Spygate, 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Oh, to be young again, sizzling with juice and in love with the drama of epidemic scandal! Oh, to be so witless and trusting that it never occurs to you that it’s YOUR life that’s being remodeled by every vote and\/or obstruction of a dysfunctional congress! Oh, the shock to learn that the data mining of the bad guys’ communiques, exhaustively combed through by government worker bees, includes your phone calls to Grandma and your credit card splurges at Amazon!<\/p>\n

\"Political And last but not least, oh, the horror of discovering the country you love has betrayed you, even if you’ve smelled the perfume and turned a blind eye to the lipstick stains for seven — count ’em — long years.<\/p>\n

Settle down, America, there’s nothing new to see here, move along. Lawmakers like Dianne Feinstein have made it perfectly clear that what’s going on in the National Security Agency today is the same stuff that’s been going on for years in an effort to ‘protect the nation.’<\/p>\n

If we’re suddenly outraged and aghast at the level of information collected, or the fact that it’s been done covertly, we’re a day late and a dollar short by damned-near a decade.<\/p>\n

I hear your anguished cry: by Gawd, they know what we buy and where, they know where we’re going and when, they access our photos, our videos and our e-mails! Yawn. Anything else got yer goat today?<\/p>\n

You will have to pardon my cynicism but if all this comes as a surprise, shame on you for being as dense as the undiscovered bagel that rolled behind the refrigerator last November. If you’re in elementary school, you can be forgiven for not knowing the Patriot Act has us by the short hairs, but if you’re older than twelve, you must have heard about the National Security Agency and its access to the private communications of the average citizen.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

And given the speculations\u00a0toyed with for more than a decade of questionable governance, the angst of libertarians everywhere, and even the excessive paranoia of right-wing NRA card-carriers who are sure the Fed has their name on record next to their list of weapons, you can hardly be shocked to hear that anyone purchasing service from AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Skype, YouTube and Paltalk is subject to data mining.<\/p>\n

Study the ads on your ISP and you’ll discover how that looks. Shopping for a vibrator, a bong, fat pants or a better job on line and don’t want anyone to know? Then don’t open your e-mail in public. The ads along the margins define your taste and your interest, specific to your buying habits. You’ve been “targeted,” and it’s similar to inviting the boss\/minister\/cops to browse through your underwear drawer on their way to your medicine cabinet, only now that you’re aware that they’re snooping, you can’t un-invite them to the next house party.<\/p>\n

Hey, look here. (That’s my Uncle Si impression. What? You don’t watch Duck Dynasty<\/em>?) Anyone with a Facebook account or a blog has already given up a good bit of their privacy. What’s a little more, eh? You can’t possibly trust Google, given their imperfect record. And if you’re just awakened to the fact that you’ve placed the most personal details of your life upon the altar of perceived ‘safety,’ I haven’t got much sympathy for you. A little, maybe. I don’t want to appear too harshly critical of my fellow citizen, even the foot draggers. There have been tidbits of information on government spying revealed this week that many of us find unsettling if not surprising, so I’ll forgive a bit of squeal and spittle.<\/p>\n

We’ve learned about a covert surveillance program called Prism that has collected billions of e-mails, supposedly ignoring those of American citizens while tracking patterns to and from foreign addresses, but collecting them all. Meanwhile, the leaked authorization to collect Verizon’s phone records — all major carriers’ records, for that matter — has cast a wide net, tapping a\u00a0miles-wide river of personal information that proponents insist is not designed to target anyone in particular but everyone in general, a gush of data from some three billion phone calls a day, years on end, zipped for reference.<\/p>\n

The calls and e-mails, say the agencies — and the President, in televised comments meant to soothe the pandemonium — are not screened for content, which would require further legal authorization. Rather, they are collected meta-data: the larger picture, long on numbers, short on details. But even if that’s true, at minimum such information acts as a GPS tracking-device in each of our lives. Our privacy has been compromised, even if we don’t know it.<\/p>\n

So yes, such covert intrusion on our privacy is a dramatic discovery, but let me ask you this: what, exactly, did you think those quarter-million Homeland Security employees were hired for? The majority of them are sitting in cubicles in front of computers. Did you speculate on how such a job description might keep the nation safe? Has it occurred to you that the web pages you visit might be tracked, the contributions you make noted, the particulars of your lifestyle profiled? Is it possible that you might get caught up in a net of misinformation, somehow implicated by six degrees of separation, and unfairly targeted? And if any of that is worrisome to you, have you joined in protest over your lost privacy?<\/p>\n

None of this — not even allegations of whistle blowing on super-secret security programs — is new business. We’ve had plenty of warning about this tendency to Orwellian measures and threat to civil liberty since 2006, and well before. Over at Political Waves, we called it Spygate and it generated hundreds of posts, most begging for plain old common sense in the face of the xenophobia and paranoia that were pushing us into Big Brother’s arms. That conversation only took place among the lefties in those days, as the righties marched in lock-step toward the Bushie plan to liberate the world and its people to the joys of consumerism. The parties did not face off because the right had the left in a headlock.<\/p>\n

But no more. Today, cable news channels are having a loud, unruly conversation about security vs. privacy, long LONG overdue. This is, say advocates for the covert programs, necessary intelligence gathering, while others think this is misinterpretation of the Patriot Act and presidential overreach. Meanwhile, Obama says he and his team inherited the system and made necessary adjustments to the programs when he took office, including adding public safeguards. He insists that the rules are strictly adhered to regarding not listening to phone calls or reading private e-mails.<\/p>\n

Not good enough, say two Dems — veteran Senator Ron Wyden and newbie Mark Udall, both members of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee — who have been loud opponents of the surveillance programs, concerned that there has been “secret interpretation of a body of law,” sans public awareness. Not so fast, say Bernie Sanders, Al Franken, Henry Waxman and a handful of others who honor the old-fashioned notion of personal privacy, continuing to bang the drum for reform and accountability on data mining. Al Gore, speaking earlier this year, warned against the growing culture of surveillance when he said, \u201cThe government is about to complete this $2 billion facility in Utah that can sweep up everything from phone calls to emails … and the Supreme Court just ruled you can\u2019t sue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Let’s be clear: these voices have been ignored by the press, the public and their contemporaries, and if we took a vote today, we would still be erring on the side of safety rather than liberty. We didn’t want to know just how vulnerable we were back then and we still don’t, so this will not be an easy conversation to engage in, with the nation split along radical lines. But now that classified information has leaked, we have finally come to a point of awareness that requires us all to both look and think, and I hope we can raise that to an intelligent level.<\/p>\n

I fear that we’ll be like the guy who demanded that the government keep its grubby hands off his Medicare. The balancing act between the nation’s demand for security and the state’s need for surveillance is nuanced (and you know only some of us are good at that!). The solution is within the question itself, but it will require good sense to find it. We’re pretty short on that, these days, as well as patience.<\/p>\n

The left is highly critical of the continuation of policies they eschewed under George Bush and they question Obama’s cred as both a liberal and Constitutional scholar. Meanwhile, the right is thrilled that what George W. started has come to roost, claws drawn, on the neck of the black guy. Rudy Giuliani showed up on cable yesterday to loudly question such heinous overreach of presidential authority, but that wasn’t the song he sang in 2004, ’05 or ’06. If Romney was in the catbird seat, you can bet there wouldn’t be a split in the Republican ranks over the justification for wiretap and its necessity in a dangerous world. A recent look at what Romney had planned<\/a> for the nation — renamed AmeriCo. Inc. I presume — shows their ambitious agenda to rework the Republican brand and restore American exceptionalism.<\/p>\n

I hope we’re ready for a national security conversation, but part of our problem is how very very broken this system is. How can we have that discussion unless we also review our Pentagon budget and troop placement and plans for Syria? How do we fix one piece of the fabric if the thread is coming loose all around? That’s the challenge of our time, not just this little piece of it. We’ve gone far afield from our beginnings. Spying on the public is just one little thread in a weave gone erratic and flawed. Can we, a nation split, come together to repair, to restore?<\/p>\n

As we move into another restless summer, I’m praying we aren’t sinking into the mire of scandal mongering for the whole of the season. Seems like every summer, the conversation becomes more stupid, the attitude less flexible and the public more disenchanted. I hope these last two days — these last few weeks — aren’t portent for the hot months ahead.<\/p>\n

With so much energy shifting into Cancer to trine the other water signatures, we would do well to monitor our thoughts lest they rise and fall with the tide of our emotions. There is a difference between emotions and feelings. Emotions are like background noise, always present but stronger from time to time, occasionally rocking the boat of our reality like a sudden storm. Emotions come and go, the tiger pacing the jungle of our minds, our Inner Drama Queen holding a moment’s sway, always a little dangerous, always a bit explosive. Especially in Aries point energy, things can go south quickly if we follow our emotions.<\/p>\n

Better to push through to our authentic feelings, tapping our intuitive response, providing us a star to guide us. A Course in Miracles<\/em> tells us that every thought we think is either host to God or hostage to ego. If we are to bring happiness and healing to ourselves and the world, we must choose love over fear, choose service to the whole of us over defense of our tribe, our personal ambitions or our list of absolutes.<\/p>\n

As June plants herself in front of us, announcing a coming summer that is unlikely to provide a smooth ride, neither jumping to conclusions nor revving at a high pitch seems productive. Life is dramatic enough without our adding to it. I think today’s the day for a deep breath and a carefully crafted list of intentions for this Gemini New Moon of ours, seeding courtesy, cooperation and commonality into the ether. This is\u00a0the day\u00a0to affirm good sense, this is the month to develop our intuition, this is the year to bring\u00a0alchemy to the table, to begin to mend the torn fabric of our nation and our world.\u00a0God or ego, love or fear — as always, the choice is ours.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves Oh, to be young again, sizzling with juice and in love with the drama of epidemic scandal! Oh, to be so witless and trusting that it never occurs to you that it’s YOUR life that’s being remodeled by every vote and\/or obstruction of a dysfunctional congress! Oh, the shock … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67682"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}