You have to wonder if tech giants like Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Verizon et al were so willing to hand over their customer’s data to the NSA, and comply so eagerly with other shady government surveillance programs like PRISM for one simple reason: Taxes. As in “Give us what we want (everything that has ever been digitally or electronically recorded in your data bases) or we will audit you”. Apple’s willingness to hand over its user’s private data just might have something to do with its alleged tax evasion scams that concealed $74 billion in profits. Something tells me they will pay a few hundred million in fines and behind the scenes celebratory champagne swilling will occur as Wall Street shills publicly bemoan ‘Big Government’s hatred of free markets and entrepreneurs. “Do no evil” will be the raucous toast, followed by the boisterous laughter of the assembled tech giants as they let rip streams of still bubbling urine into ice-buckets.
Still, the big question remains, why IS the US government concerning itself with the minutiae of its citizens daily lives, rather than focusing on . . . oh say, looking into alternative, sustainable energy sources, repairing crumbling, neglected infrastructure, fighting poverty and unemployment, ensuring the safety of food and medicine, regulating banks and other predatory lending institutions, collecting taxes from the highest earners . . . In other words, the dreamy, unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky, overly optimistic, hopelessly naive fixations of people who are inadequately informed about the encroaching threat of Sharia law in the nation’s playgrounds and drinking fountains.
Chicago is closing down 50 schools because “the money just isn’t there”. Amazingly, those “non-existent” funds seem to appear whenever a Bedouin thousands of miles away needs drone-murdering from an underground bunker in Nevada. It even paid for the golden platter that the presidential kill list is delivered on and held aloft by a coterie of ermine-draped minions in the Oval Office during the president’s daily briefings with his Grim Reaper advisors. And now we discover untold billions of taxpayer money is being spent to find out where citizens stand on the Brangelina/Aniston divide, and how often they enter “grumpy cat butt plug whore cam” into Google search engines and whether or not their ‘like’ of Bacon-themed Instagrams is indicative of a well-rounded personality, unencumbered by terrorist thoughts. Arguably, the Boston Marathon bombing could have been thwarted if NSA wiretappers had more resources at their disposal to analyze a 12 year old Belieber’s Twitter feed, and everyone who ever shared a delicious Dagistani pressure cooker recipe on Pinterest.
When the Berlin Wall collapsed, East Germans discovered that every mundane aspect of their lives were fodder for STASI record keepers, who painstakingly documented every perceived slight a neighbor/co-worker/boss/parent/child/teacher/employer/spouse/lover could level against a fellow citizen in a written dossier, and to what end, we shall never know. Certainly Fraulein Braun’s perverse habit of hanging out her fancy knickers on even rainy days, while Herr Schmidt’s noted tendency to gaze too long and too lovingly at the pigeons outside his window fire escape was hardly the stuff of national security urgency. Still, loyal STASI stenographers documented these ‘transgressions’ in much the same way secret US government agents are compiling your data. Are they merely trying to monetize fear and paranoia in the absence of dwindling, extractable fossil fuels? Or are they cognizant of their own declining power, and mounting a digitized defense to insulate themselves from the inevitable fall-out when the inmates escape the PRISM?
2 Comments.
@Ted: It’s none of that. The reason PRISM exists, and the reason whatever super-cedes it exists, is simple: We’re all going to be nice, obedient little boys and girls — fully compliant with the corporate nation state apparatus. That is the only reason for any of this.
So, for example:
Your organization (fully legal) is gaining traction and turning people against U.S. foreign policy? No problem. Disruption will be simple with PRISM, and members will be cut off from donating, organizers marginalized, and reputations smeared. Threat averted.
Your organization (fully legal) is gaining traction and exposing government/corporate corruption? No problem. Disruption will be simple with PRISM. Whistle-blowers will be threatened with life imprisonment. Journalists too. Rabble-rousers will have their jobs threatened, their families interrogated, their private property seized. Smear campaigns will be legion with all the “private” data now easily accessible. Threat averted.
Your organization (fully legal) is running a successful boycott of WalMart, to demand better wages and union rights? No problem. Disruption will be simple with PRISM. Union leaders will be smeared, and workers threatened — all by accessing their “private” data. Propaganda campaigns will blame movement leaders for imminent job losses, and potential economic collapse. Threat averted.
Your organization (fully legal) is turning people against the factory farming system, resulting in people buying local or not eating meat until meaningful reform is implemented? No problem. Disruption will be simple with PRISM. Movement leaders will be threatened or jailed for violating fast-track legislation meant to protect factory farm profits. Non-profits will be investigated and threatened with losing their status. Propaganda will disseminate from all media outlets to destroy gains. Threat averted.
In short: We’re all going to be good little obedient capitalists and ravenous consumers — or else. Those who don’t obey the authoritarians will be marginalized at best, imprisoned at worst. Anyone wanting to “protest” in an effort to make meaningful change will be allowed to do so — provided it’s all for “entertainment purposes only”. Provided such people stand in the corner, behind the ropes, and don’t really change anything. Provided it’s all for show. You know, like professional wrestling. The moment any real progress is made, the moment any momentum is gained — you will be stopped and your rights stripped away, no matter that you’ve engaged in completely legal protest or activities. Real change is not going to be allowed, under any circumstances. We’re under the thumbs of the MOTUs and PRISM, TIA, NSA, CIA, FBI, Militarized Police, the Military, and the constant surveillance state is going to make that arrangement permanent.
Just to clarify for Ted’s sake, so he doesn’t have to answer to an other author’s commentary. This post was a guest blogger contribution, submitted by yours truly. But I will try to respond. The following comments were provided by an anonymous commenter on a different forum:
This is a very serious crisis because the behaviour of the State elite and the ‘progressive’ faction is a sign of its weakness and not its strength. Weak elites with their backs to the wall are capable of terrible crimes and cannot but lie. The situation is particularly dire in the US but only because the European Union Project never got to the same level of constitutional federal power (everything must be done to destroy that monster). The reason it is dire in the US is that the elite have very few tools for controling the population in terms of hard power and so they must shift to trying to recover something that started to be lost about fifty years ago – adequate national consensus in support of Federal Power. They have very few tools but what they need is a) information (and lots of it), b) analytical tools (which will arrive with increased AI capacity), c) a theory of use (this is the application of the new cognitive sciences with funds directed much as funds were directed into hard weaponry and you will note that the Pentagon is heavily investing in such oddities as ‘narrative theory’), d) a population that is intellectually neutered by either fear and paranoia (the dimmer ones) or a withdrawn armchair ‘outrage’ at the world (‘the allegedly brighter but actually pig-ignorant graduate class) where government is the primary source of its enduring privileges.