Edward Snowden will be having a live Q&A at 11:00 am Eastern US time today. I will not be able to follow it live but it should be interesting, especially since he is in hiding and you can be sure that the NSA will be trying to track him down. They likely already know where …
Category Archive: Politics
Jun 17 2013
The menace posed by the best and the brightest
The late David Halberstam was an excellent journalist who worked within the establishment framework. His best know work is The Best and the Brightest (1972) that has become a classic in the genre of modern political history. It exposed how a group of elite, Ivy League-educated people in the highest reaches of government during the …
Jun 16 2013
Another fantasy plan to escape from government
Belle Isle is a 1000-acre island located in the Detroit river between the US and Canada. A developer plans to purchase the island for $1 billion and convert it into a sovereign state that the wealthy from all over the world can come and live in, free from those oppressive taxes that are taken from …
Jun 16 2013
Keith Alexander, the NSA, and the cyber-industrial complex
James Bamford has an detailed article titled The Secret War that look at General Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA, and what he has been secretly constructing. As the subheading says, “INFILTRATION. SABOTAGE. MAYHEM. FOR YEARS, FOUR-STAR GENERAL KEITH ALEXANDER HAS BEEN BUILDING A SECRET ARMY CAPABLE OF LAUNCHING DEVASTATING CYBERATTACKS. NOW IT’S READY …
Jun 16 2013
The attacks on Snowden increase
As we all knew would happen, there has been a concerted effort to discredit Edward Snowden the person, which is the usual means adopted by the ruling class. When they cannot defend their actions, they go after the messenger. The latest charge is that he is a double-agent, likely working for the Chinese. It is …
Jun 16 2013
The security illusion
No system of detection is perfect, whether it be in medicine or police work. There is always the chance of false positives and the wider you make your dragnet, the larger the number of false positives that you are going to get. While the massive secret databases of the NSA are touted as an efficient …
Jun 15 2013
More fun with the separatists
Yesterday I posted about the absurd plans of people who want to create separate armed enclaves where they hope to live free lives without the government imposing its will on them. As readers were quick to point out, while the military fortifications and weaponry envisaged may have been barely adequate in medieval times, it would …
Jun 15 2013
Opposition to NSA spying programs starting to build
Despite the massive efforts by the administration and leading members of Congress and elements of the servile establishment media to downplay the NSA spying revelations and attack those who brought them to light, opposition and anger about the programs is starting to build.
Jun 14 2013
The government’s talking points on the NSA scandal
In its effort to counter the fallout from the leaks of the NSA’s secret spying on people, the administration has handed out a set of talking points to its friends in the media and in Congress so that they don’t have to go through the chore of trying to figure out for themselves why they …
Jun 14 2013
Time for a diversion?
What worries me is that president Obama might try to divert attention from the NSA spying story by some sort of military adventure, say in Syria, the way Bill Clinton bombed a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan in 1998 when he was being besieged by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. No one was punished for that crime …
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