With every new day that journalists dig through the secret files released by Edward Snowden, with every new astonishment as we discover the sheer enormity, nay, the truly pan-galactic scale of the NSA's baleen whale of surveillance, scooping up every nybble and bit of data that might contain, somewhere in its subatomic structure, the hint of an odour of a dream of a terrorist plot, the more I think that the great American writer Hunter S Thompson has already specified the only recipe that could possibly brace our minds to cope with this insanity.

"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls," said Raoul Duke, the drug-addled protagonist of Thompson's 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

"Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can."

The NSA has shown that once you get locked into a serious data collection, the tendency is to push that as far as you can too.

Once the NSA was tasked with collecting international communications and data, and analysing it for foreign intelligence matters. Now it seems to be tasked with gathering well, pretty much everything about everything by everyone everywhere.

Nice analogy provided by Stilgherrian over at ZDnet. (Full article here)

I turned out to have US colleagues, looking for ways to migrate to Europe .......... to get away from the US way of life, to bring their kids in safety.
...I did have US colleagues, who were looking for ways to migrate to Europe ..........

Nowadays I look westwards in fear.
Scared by a police-state where there is no freedom no more, where human-rights have no value.
A state that is to scary to live in.

Technology is not the problem. Laws are not the problem. PEOPLE in our GOVERNMENT are the problem.

Technology is not the problem.

Laws are not the problem.

PEOPLE in our GOVERNMENT are the problem.

Quote from: Renegade on July 20, 2013, 03:40 PM

Quote from: 40hz on July 20, 2013, 02:21 PM

PEOPLE in our GOVERNMENT are the problem.

I'm not so sure about that. I'm more inclined to say that government is the problem. It's just a silly bunch of "good intentions" that are paving the road to Hell. Does it matter whether you start with the psychotic, priviledged political class there, or is it too long to wait 6 months for the naive newbie to start down his own path to the dark side?

 I think he was saying it's the actual politicians that are the problem.  The "government" is nothing but a group of people running the show.  That group of people have turned out to be the elite "in crowd".  They are mostly people that have been groomed for their positions all their lives, like the Bush's, like father, like son....

The "government" is nothing but a group of people running the show.  

The "government" is nothing but a group of people running the show.  That group of people have turned out to be the elite "in crowd".  They are mostly people that have been groomed for their positions all their lives, like the Bush's, like father, like son....

Defund NSA Surveillance: A critical vote is happening tomorrow, July 24th, on the Defense Appropriations Bill in the House of Representatives. The bill gives taxpayer money to fund defense programs, including NSA surveillance.

Defund the NSA (misnamed, but oh well), and a link to HR-2397.

^Ok...and now that it's out of the closet

Plan to defund NSA phone collection program defeated   

Quote from: Tinman57 on July 26, 2013, 01:17 AM

Another article I just read states this was a good thing because it was so close of a vote.  Their thinking is once the word gets out who voted against it, they will get voted out on the next election, bringing in more politicians that won't support it (or claim to anyway) and eventually getting all this invasion of the U.S. Constitution crap repealed.

Who wrote that? Good? Yes, because the voting publicgoldfish has such a wonderful memory.

JP Morgan to eurozone periphery: “Get rid of your pinko, anti-fascist constitutions”
At times, I do marvel how antiseptic, bland even, that the language of the most wretchedly villainous documents can be.

Last week, the European economic research team with JP Morgan, the global financial giant, put out a 16-page paper on the state of play of euro area adjustment. This involved a totting up of what work has been done so far and what work has yet to be done in terms of sovereign, household and bank deleveraging; structural reform (reducing labour costs, making it easier to fire workers, privatisation, deregulation, liberalising ‘protected’ industries, etc.); and national political reform.

The takeaway in the small amount of coverage that I’ve seen of the paper was that its authors say the eurozone is about halfway through its period of adjustment, so austerity is still likely to be a feature of the landscape “for a very extended period.”

The bankers’ analysis probably otherwise received little attention because it is a bit ‘dog bites man‘: Big Bank Predicts Many More Years of Austerity. It’s not really as if anyone was expecting austerity to disappear any time soon, however much EU-IMF programme countries have been offered a relaxation of debt reduction commitments in return for ramping up the pace of structural adjustment.

The lack of coverage is a bit of a shame, because it’s the first public document I’ve come across where the authors are frank that the problem is not just a question of fiscal rectitude and boosting competitiveness, but that there is also an excess of democracy in some European countries that needs to be trimmed.

   “In the early days of the crisis, it was thought that these national legacy problems were largely economic: over-levered sovereigns, banks and households, internal real exchange rate misalignments, and structural rigidities. But, over time it has become clear that there are also national legacy problems of a political nature. The constitutions and political settlements in the southern periphery, put in place in the aftermath of the fall of fascism, have a number of features which appear to be unsuited to further integration in the region. When German politicians and policymakers talk of a decade-long process of adjustment, they likely have in mind the need for both economic and political reform.” [Emphasis added]

Yes, you read that right. It’s in dry, banker-ese, but the authors have basically said that the laws and constitutions of southern Europe are a bit too lefty, a product of their having been written by anti-fascists. These “deep-seated political problems in the periphery,” say authors David Mackie, Malcolm Barr and friends, “in our view, need to change if EMU is going to function properly in the long run.”

You think I’m perhaps exaggerating a smidge? They go into more detail in a section describing this “journey of national political reform”:

   “The political systems in the periphery were established in the aftermath of dictatorship, and were defined by that experience. Constitutions tend to show a strong socialist influence, reflecting the political strength that left-wing parties gained after the defeat of fascism.”

All this is a load of historical horse-lasagna anyway. Italy for example never went through a process akin to Germany’s denazification, and in Spain, the democratising king, Juan Carlos, played a major role in the transition. Only in Greece and Portugal were there popular socialist insurrections that resulted in or contributed to the overthrow of the regimes: the Athens Polytechnic Uprising played a key role in the Metapolitefsi or ‘polity change’ (although much, much more than the crushed student protests were involved here, including a failed coup d’etat and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus), and in Portugal a proper left-wing rebellion, the Revolução dos Cravos or Carnation Revolution, brought down the Estado Novo regime. Although it is true in the case of the latter three countries that their late-in-the-day construction of welfare states in the 70s and 80s was largely carried out by social democratic forces, the architects of the Italian post-war state were the Christian Democrats, who dominated government for 50 years.

   “Political systems around the periphery typically display several of the following features: weak executives; weak central states relative to regions; constitutional protection of labour rights; consensus building systems which foster political clientalism; and the right to protest if unwelcome changes are made to the political status quo. The shortcomings of this political legacy have been revealed by the crisis. Countries around the periphery have only been partially successful in producing fiscal and economic reform agendas, with governments constrained by constitutions (Portugal), powerful regions (Spain), and the rise of populist parties (Italy and Greece).”

Let’s parse that paragraph, shall we? Weak executives means strong legislatures. That should be a good thing, no? Let us remember that it is the parliament that is sovereign. The executive in a democracy is supposed to be the body that merely carries out the bidding of the legislature. There is a reason why liberal democracy opted for parliaments and not a system of elected kings.

Oh, and we want strong central states. None of this local democracy nonsense, please.

JP Morgan, and presumably the EU powerbrokers they are ventriloquising for, finally are being honest with us: they want to do away with constitutional labour rights protections and the right to protest. And there has to be some way to prevent people electing the wrong parties.

Thankfully though, the authors note, “There is a growing recognition of the extent of this problem, both in the core and in the periphery. Change is beginning to take place.”

In particular, they highlight how Spain has begun “to address some of the contradictions of the post-Franco settlement” and rein in the regions.

But other than that, sadly, the process of de-democratization (okay – I’m calling it that. They call it “the process of political reform”) has “barely begun”.

Well, the JP Morgan paper may have been written in English, but there is a venerable Spanish phrase that that all good anti-fascists right across the eurozone periphery know and is probably the simplest and best response to such provocation: ¡No pasarán!

A Google engineer with integrity?