re: #99 simoom

Germans accuse U.S. of Stasi tactics before Obama visit

“… completely bogus.” There fixed that for you Justice Minister.

Anyway, thanks Greenwald, Gellman, Poitras & Snowden ///.

I keep harping on the idea of “futureshock” and of our human inability to keep up with what our modernity has brought us. This whole affair, I propose, in one example of this.

Such short memories and short attention spans allow those in the business of presenting information (true or not isn’t the question) before the consuming eye/ear to reuse old ideas/controversies (aperiodically, usually taking a window of a few years) and sell them again.

All these fear mongers are taking advantage of the expected, ordinary, and not unreasonable fears each of us have of being the victim of someone more powerful than us.

Computers, telephony, nearly instantaneous global transmissions - all are still magick to many people. And even for those with some expertise in one of these areas the human fear of being controlled/over-powered remains.

It’s easy to sell fear because we all have fears.

When the Patriot act came up, or even before then, right after 9/11, conversation turned to the trade off of “freedom” and “security”. We’ve had this discussion, countless times. Yes, we do trade away a bit of our privacy for (the belief/hope of) security. We’ve already made that deal, as we have in the past over numerous issues.

Yet the fear of big brother remains, and is sold in every corner of our society because selling fear is a relatively easy business to be in (compared to actually building things or healing people.)

I’m talking here about the very same human fears that cause all the Bible-clinging folks in Backwoods, KY to scream about Agenda21, Darwinism, Teh Ghey, and the like. It’s all about the other forcing their way on little old me, the powerless individual.

In a world where international communications can be exploited to execute coordinated violent attacks on groups or individuals there is the resulting requirement, if you want to try and prevent that violence, of monitoring communications. There is no way around it, and to whine about it may be cathartic or it may just be the dying screams of an old way of life that can no longer exist.