It seems like every day
the pelt of my Wookie Suit gets longer:
Ed Snowden got away with taking a trove of secret documents from the
NSA because an organization whose mission is to watch everyone failed to
watch him. The NSA failed IT Security 101: segregation of duties. A
single individual should not have the ability to access sensitive data
as well as the ability to control the audit trail.
If you own a bank, you don’t want the person you’ve hired to guard the money to be the same guy who’s keeping the books.
By the same token, though, the NSA and the UK’s GCHQ
are also operating with almost no oversight, despite what Barack Obama
or David Cameron might try to tell you. That’s because they’re the ones
who get to say who is and isn’t a terrorist suspect, then scoop them up
and lock them away.
In other words, a “terrorist” is anyone the spooks say is a
terrorist. In the past, we might reasonably assume our intelligence
agencies targeted people who presented a potential threat to us. With
the Miranda detention, it’s clear that a “terrorist” is anyone who
presents a threat to them.
Not to sound too paranoid, but: This is how totalitarianism starts.
This is a long and very interesting post, about the limits of trust in the modern Surveillance State. This is the canary in the mine shaft:
I worry that we will wake up to headlines that Greenwald has died in a
car accident. Or from a drug overdose. Or that he got caught by a stray
bullet in a convenience store robbery. Or maybe they’ll take a page out
of Vladimir Putin’s book and just assassinate him in broad daylight.
And all we’ll have left are a series of Internet conspiracy theories.
Because if this latest round of intimidation fails to work – and both the Guardian and Greenwald have vowed that it won’t – that’s the next logical step.
RTWT, which includes a plausibly convincing argument that it is simply impossible for NSA to win this.
5 comments:
I expect there to be an attempt (whether successful or not) on Greenwald's life within the next few months. Then we'll see some transparency as the "obvious" explanation develops more holes than the victims of the St Valentine's Day Massacre. It's the coverup, stupid.
However, people in power are constitutionally (heh) unable to just stand up and take the hit when they are caught in a no-no. ("If the President does it, it's legal.") The amount of mental gymnastics they regularly engage in would make the training regimens of the old Soviet women's teams look lazy by comparison.
It appears that the state criminals fail to appreciate that all that protects them is the law, that they are outnumbered, and that, once they stop even pretending to obey the law, things can go badly indeed for them.
I'm just a bystander and I can appreciate that. How foolish are those in the melee who don't.
M
Mark;
Excellently stated.
Yep, that was well done...
Greenwald will commit suicide. His body will be found in a wooded area of a park.
Where have we seen this before? Maybe 1993?
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