Goose the Blog 2.0

"Oh, ha! Sarcasm: The last refuge of sons of bitches!"

data mining, etc.

by John at 5/13/2006 07:17:00 AM

Billmon is worth reading today.

This also seems to be the intuitive position of many Americans when it comes to the new cyber-surveillance state. By giving up their privacy and - potentially - their civil liberties in exchange for a degree of protection (real or imaginary) from terrorism, they've sacrificed items that apparently are of only marginal value to them for something more important - their belief that the organization is looking out for them.

We can argue all we want that the deal is a sham, that any sense of security is an illusion, and that having gobbled up their privacy and some of their liberty, Leviathan will only come looking for more, because that's all it knows how to do. But an awfully large number of our fellow citizens have already decided, or have been conditioned to believe, that it's better to be subjects and let others make the hard decisions for them. After all, the organization must have its reasons.

Of course, this potentially sets the scene for the next loop in the downward spiral towards a full-fledged police state. If and when the next terrorist attack comes, the natural response of the national security bureaucracy (and its legal camp followers) will be to insist the tragedy never would have happened if it had been given access to all the data it wanted, all the money it needed, and all the investigative powers it demanded. It'll be the fighting-with-one-hand-tied-behind-our-back argument, re-imported from Iraq. And who's going to say no when another major American landmark is a smoldering ruin?

Leviathan, in other words, is almost free of any restraint, save the arbitrary limits - such as they may be - set by the Cheney administration or, perhaps more importantly, by custom and habit. The creature doesn't know all the things it can do, but only because it hasn't tried to do them yet. But it's starting to figure this out, and it's going to take more than an election and a few corruption probes to make it back down. Having entrusted their security and their liberties to the beast, Leviathan's subjects will be lucky not to wind up like Jonah, lodged in its belly.


Read it all, if you like.

Update: This too.
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