Category Archives: Individual Rights

Media-Enabled MEGALOMANIAC Speaks

Barack Obama, Bush, Constitution, Founding Fathers, Homeland Security, Individual Rights

Barack Obama is an out-of-control megalomaniac—a mindset that has been mediated by media. The intrepid press sat in today rather quietly on a press conference, and listened to the monster speak about his willingness to “jiggle” his surveillance programs here and there so as to allay unnecessary fears (“provide greater assurances,” as he put it).

To quote the moron, “The men and women of our intelligence community work every single day to keep us safe because they love this country and believe in our values. They’re patriots. And I believe that those who have lawfully raised their voices on behalf of privacy and civil liberties are also patriots who love our country and want it to live up to our highest ideals. So this is how we’re going to resolve our differences in the United States — through vigorous public debate, guided by our Constitution, with reverence for our history as a nation of laws, and with respect for the facts.”

In remarks that are not yet all online (or may not find their way there), Obama said—in defiance of the evidence—that he was comfortable that “the NSA program is not being abused,” going on to promise that he’d outsource the matter to a … new hire: A Civil Liberties Officer.

Yes, this “ass with ears” will bring in a civil-liberties bureaucrat to calibrate our unalienable individual right to “be secure in [our] persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

This is the essence of the modern-day Managerial State: common-law and constitution is overridden; rights outsourced to the better judgment of bureaucrats and hired “experts,” in this case, Eric Holder’s Department of Justice. It “will make public the legal rationale for the government’s collection activities under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The NSA is taking steps to put in place a full-time civil liberties and privacy officer,” promised Big Daddy. (CNN’s Jessica Yellin was in estrus.)

After all, those white guys in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment: What on earth did they know?

To be fair to this clueless creature, George Bush The Decider had a similar disregard for the Constitution.

Glenn Greenwald: Guarding Liberty @ The Guardian

Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Journalism, Media, Technology, Terrorism, The State

More than “Smashing a CNN Government Apologist,” as EPJ’s Robert Wenzel put it, Glenn Greenwald “floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee,” Cassius-Clay style, around the unincisive, silly Jeffrey Toobin. Here Greenwald demonstrates why “Major media,” as I wrote, “is like a big amorphous amoeba. This simple, single-celled organism will instinctively act in unison to preserve its integrity.” To maintain equilibrium, morons have to keep the brilliant out.

I’ve searched in vain for follow-up headlines on ABC headline News, UPI, Drudge, Fox News & Business, on and on. US media does not wish to discuss the new twist in an “NSA program [that] reportedly allows analysts to track emails, chats, web searches.”

Liberty’s guardian at The Guardian, the American Glenn Greenwald, is responsible for revealing the following new and horrifying details:

XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’

• XKeyscore gives ‘widest-reaching’ collection of online data
• NSA analysts require no prior authorization for searches
• Sweeps up emails, social media activity and browsing history
• NSA’s XKeyscore program – read one of the presentations

“I, sitting at my desk,” said Snowden, could “wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email”.
US officials vehemently denied this specific claim. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said of Snowden’s assertion: “He’s lying. It’s impossible for him to do what he was saying he could do.”
But training materials for XKeyscore detail how analysts can use it and other systems to mine enormous agency databases by filling in a simple on-screen form giving only a broad justification for the search. The request is not reviewed by a court or any NSA personnel before it is processed.
XKeyscore, the documents boast, is the NSA’s “widest reaching” system developing intelligence from computer networks – what the agency calls Digital Network Intelligence (DNI). One presentation claims the program covers “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”, including the content of emails, websites visited and searches, as well as their metadata.

Read on.

IRS? Demolish That Den Of Iniquity

Constitution, Individual Rights, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Liberty, Morality, Private Property, Taxation, The State

“IRS? Demolish That Den Of Iniquity” is the current column, now on WND:

“House Republicans are waging a symbolic and futile battle to slash the Internal Revenue Service’s budget by $3 billion. Republicans, according to reports, want the tax-collectors to pay for ‘unfairly scrutinizing conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.’

As usual, the GOP finesses the matter, as does the press.

The Washington Post’s Michael Gerson understated the IRS’s abuse of ‘police power’ as a mere ‘intrusion’; an ideological targeting by federal investigation of a political movement. To its credit, the Post’s Editorial Board stepped it up, conceding, at the time of the scandal that, “Any unequal application of the law based on ideological viewpoint is unpardonable—toxic to the legitimacy of the government’s vast law-enforcement authority.”

More to the point—and likely with White-House imprimatur—the IRS persecuted American patriots for promoting the constitutional principles upon which America was founded, but which are no longer a lodestar for the country’s government. These groups were hounded for their principles—and for asking to keep more of what is rightfully theirs in the service of these values.

How perverse is that?

And how perverse is the sight of the same IRS bureaucrats getting their freak-on (as in groove-on) at your expense?

Watch this YouTube clip of a representative cross-section, no doubt, of the IRS workforce at a “training conference.” Look at these off-putting officials having a jolly good time on your dime. Chins and butts wiggling obscenely all over the show; these people belong in a Federico Fellini film.

You could not fan away the smell in that hall if you tried. …

… These repulsive IRS agents, stomping about with abandon in carnival-like conferences and getaways: Do they represent you? Do they reflect your habits, manners, demeanor, priorities or worldview?

…We are trapped in the deforming, deadly clutches of institutionalized freaks, the remedy to which is…”

The complete column is “IRS? Demolish That Den Of Iniquity.” Read it on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

JOIN THE CONVERSATION:

• At the WND Comments Section. Scroll down and “Say it.”

• On my Facebook page.

• By clicking to “Like,” “Tweet” and “Share” this week’s “Return To Reason” column.

Government Gone Wild

Government, Individual Rights, Intelligence, Liberty, The State

Government Gone Wild
By Myron Pauli

If there is one thing that I can guarantee, it is that “the government” does not listen to ME! In 1988, I was at an “intelligence community meeting” where they wanted a consensus over doing “engineering-level-drawings” of everything that “the Soviet Union” would be deploying 62 years later in 2050, when some dissident in the rear (me!) pointed out that 62 years ago, we did not know of “…the neutron, jets, transistors, computers, lasers, DNA, penicillin, inertial navigation ….” In frustration, I said, “We don’t even know if there will be a Soviet Union in 10 years!”. A USAF Colonel responded eloquently with “shut up!”

In fact, the government cannot be listening to most Americans. It certainly did not pay any attention to Major Nidal Hasan who was carrying on for months about killing Americans. The government could not even monitor that a buck private, Bradley Manning, was downloading 750,000 documents! Did they think he was a speed-reader?? Nor can the government listen to over 300,000,000 Americans – but it CAN archive everything – to be searched later, on any pretense. The odds of some nutcase Adam Lanza posting on FACEBOOK “I am going to shoot up P.S. 84” is remote and the odds of the NSA picking that up is even remoter.

After the fact, of course, they can datamine Tsardaev, Lanza, Ron Paul, Pope Francis, Glenn Greenwald or anyone of interest. And will millions of people having who-knows-what access to these databases, who-knows-what mischief can happen. The crucial issue, in my opinion, about Edward Snowden, who “outed” himself, is: Who else has access – how do we know that Putin and Xi are not accessing the American database on Americans – what could be more convenient to China but to tap into the database that the NSA updates – if Bradley Manning can do it, why not Xi? And since Uncle Sam shares intelligence with “our allies” – do they let the Germans spy on Americans while our government spies on Germans and share the data?

Keep in mind the old movie “All the Kings Men,” where corrupt Governor Willie Stark wanted this reporter to “get the dirt” on his enemy, Judge Stanton. How much easier with billions of dollars of computers and trillions upon trillions of bytes of information to access? Remember J. Edgar Hoover who had the goods on Presidents, Congressmen, and Martin Luther King? What a field day he would have nowadays.

But the ultimate tragedy is that most Americans care not a hoot for the Fourth Amendment or the rest of the constitution. Feeling safe is what counts. Arguably, locking up drunk drivers or all black men aged 14-34 might reduce drunk driving or reduce inner-city crime. But what is more appalling is how many Americans would support such odious rubbish in the name of “safety.”

“It can’t happen here? Ask the over 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent who were locked up in “concentration camps” (FDR’s words!) without a shred of evidence and in clear violation of the 14th Amendment and supported by a Supreme Court decision, Korematsu v. US.

TSA, NSA, DEA, DHS, HHS, IRS, whatever – it is all an unaccountable bureaucratic maze – keeping track of the American subjects who vote for the same Congressmen and Presidents who promise use everything from “health care” to “security” to “world leadership” – everything but liberty (an abstraction that few have any understanding of). The problem is not Bush or Obama or Pelosi or Graham or “federal employees” or “contractors” but the Americans who empower this government gone wild.

As for monitoring “the enemy”: Walt “Pogo” Kelly said it best. “We have met the enemy and it is us.”

P.S.: I recommend that everyone watch “Judgment at Nuremberg.”

**************

Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.