Category Archives: The State

UPDATE II: The Kid Is Alright. Ditto The British Guardian (Which Exposed Indirectly Corrupt US Media)

Ethics, Government, Journalism, Justice, Media, Morality, Ron Paul, Technology, The State

People like Edward Snowden are the very people to whom we should say, “Thank you for your service.” Uncle Sam will destroy Edward Snowden, as it is destroying Julian Assange and Bradley Manning. Snowden knew it, yet he did what he did anyway.

Via The Guardian:

The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.
The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said.

The kid is more than alright. He’s a hero.

UPDATED: Corrupt US Media Usurped. An heroic American whistleblower chooses, oh-so wisely, to expose Uncle Sam’s usurpations to the veteran reporters of the British Guardian, and not to the partisan hacks of the American press: This tells you all you need to know about the state of US press and the entity (the state) to which it has sworn allegiance.

The best of Edward Snowden:

I could be rendered by the CIA. I could have people come after me. Or any of the third-party partners. They work closely with a number of other nations. Or they could pay off the Triads. Any of their agents or assets,” he said.

…”We have got a CIA station just up the road – the consulate here in Hong Kong – and I am sure they are going to be busy for the next week. And that is a concern I will live with for the rest of my life, however long that happens to be.”
Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. “I am not afraid,” he said calmly, “because this is the choice I’ve made.” …
… he learned just how all-consuming the NSA’s surveillance activities were, claiming “they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them”.
…He described how he once viewed the internet as “the most important invention in all of human history”. As an adolescent, he spent days at a time “speaking to people with all sorts of views that I would never have encountered on my own”. …
…But he believed that the value of the internet, along with basic privacy, is being rapidly destroyed by ubiquitous surveillance. “I don’t see myself as a hero,” he said, “because what I’m doing is self-interested: I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”
…Once he reached the conclusion that the NSA’s surveillance net would soon be irrevocable, he said it was just a matter of time before he chose to act. “What they’re doing” poses “an existential threat to democracy”, he said. …
…there still remains the question: why did he do it? Giving up his freedom and a privileged lifestyle? “There are more important things than money. If I were motivated by money, I could have sold these documents to any number of countries and gotten very rich.”
…For him, it is a matter of principle. “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to,” he said.

AND:

“Snowden said that he admires both Ellsberg and Manning, but argues that there is one important distinction between himself and the army private, whose trial coincidentally began the week Snowden’s leaks began to make news.
‘I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,’ he said. ‘There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.'”

He purposely chose, he said, to give the documents to journalists whose judgment he trusted about what should be public and what should remain concealed.

“I don’t want to live in a world where there’s no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity.”

“The primary lesson from this experience was that ‘you can’t wait around for someone else to act. I had been looking for leaders, but I realised that leadership is about being the first to act.'”

UPDATE II: NO SURPRISE THERE; Edward Snowden had donated to libertarian Ron Paul.

Demolish The Den Of Iniquity And Vice

Natural Law, Neoconservatism, Private Property, Republicans, Taxation, The State

After recounting the “scale of depravity [in the IRS] hitherto unknown to the tax authorities of the United States,” neoconservative Mark Steyn concludes predictably and in error, that the IRS “should be disarmed and disbanded — and rebuilt from scratch with far more circumscribed powers.”

Suppose that disbanding and rebuilding this den of iniquity and vice, the Internal Revenue Service, were the solution here—which it most certainly is not—how does Steyn propose to get it right this time around? We live in an age unparalleled for moral relativism, plain immorality, lack of religiosity, debauchery, corruption and general decadence—all parading as normalcy. One thing we know for sure: As bad as they might have been, IRS bureaucrats at the agency’s inception would have been more virtuous than the degenerates that run it now and in the future.

Jack Kerwick follows the natural law and nails it: “The IRS … is inimical to liberty. Its very existence is a scandal to a liberty-loving people.” In other words, “The IRS Is the Scandal”:

The money a person legally earns is his. There is no morally conceivable justification, none whatsoever, for anyone else to touch one cent of his earnings without his consent. And there is certainly no justification for allotting anyone, like the IRS, the authority and power, to confiscate a person’s wages before he sees one dime of them.
There is no liberty unless property is dispersed wide and far. And it is only under a set of arrangements in which individuals are permitted to acquire as much property as their talents and good fortune enable that this situation can be secured.
In short, liberty presupposes the old Lockean notion of “self-ownership.”
But the income tax, to a far greater extent than any other kind of tax—for that matter, to a far greater extent than anything else the government does—undermines both the concept and practice of self-ownership. It undermines liberty. Indeed, matters can’t be otherwise, for as Walter E. Williams once said, the only thing that “fundamentally distinguishes” a free man from a slave is that the latter labors under coercion so that the fruits of his labor can be used to gratify someone else’s desires.
Whether the slave labors to satisfy the needs of one master or those of 300 million, and whether he lives on his master’s estate or thousands of miles away from it do nothing to change the fact that as long as portions of his property are confiscated to subsidize the desires of others, he remains a slave.
This isn’t hyperbole. When a person’s material assets are forcefully taken from him, it isn’t just his material assets that he loses. Taken from him as well are his resources in time and labor. Put another way, man does not live by bread alone. Work is as much of a psychological, and even spiritual, necessity as it is an economic and physical one. When a person is deprived of his bread, his sense of wholeness, his integrity, is assaulted as well. …

MORE.

Or, as yours truly put it in “SIXTEEN, THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST,” “However you slice it, there is no moral difference between a lone burglar who steals stuff he doesn’t own and an ‘organized society’ that does the same. In a just society, the moral rules that apply to the individual must also apply to the collective. A society founded on natural rights must not finesse theft.”

Prior Restraint Arguments As Pretex To Watch YOU

Argument, Constitution, Homeland Security, Individual Rights, Intelligence, Law, Liberty, Rights, Socialism, Terrorism, The State

If we accept state aggression based on prior restraint arguments, then aggress we must ad absurdum. Why not stop all statists from procreating, lest they sire proponents of state theft and aggression? Such a program would at least be in furtherance of liberty. (And we could all do with fewer Meghan McCains.)

Prior restraint arguments are being galvanized as justification for nation-wide information sweeps conducted by the state for over a decade. Another cow, “Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching,” said “that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future.”

It is quite telling that the story about the “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily” was broken by Glenn Greenwald (an American) writing for The Guardian (British).

Most serious libertarians have been shouting about state snooping from the rooftops for over a decade. Now you’re listening! I already told you weeks back that there was absolutely nothing new about state snooping.

Via The Guardian:

Under the Bush administration, officials in security agencies had disclosed to reporters the large-scale collection of call records data by the NSA, but this is the first time significant and top-secret documents have revealed the continuation of the practice on a massive scale under President Obama.
The unlimited nature of the records being handed over to the NSA is extremely unusual. Fisa court orders typically direct the production of records pertaining to a specific named target who is suspected of being an agent of a terrorist group or foreign state, or a finite set of individually named targets.
The Guardian approached the National Security Agency, the White House and the Department of Justice for comment in advance of publication on Wednesday. All declined. The agencies were also offered the opportunity to raise specific security concerns regarding the publication of the court order.
The court order expressly bars Verizon from disclosing to the public either the existence of the FBI’s request for its customers’ records, or the court order itself.
“We decline comment,” said Ed McFadden, a Washington-based Verizon spokesman.

(I believe “Entertainment Interruptus,” published on November 28, 2001, was my first column touching on the The Patriot Act.)

IRS Casualties

Government, Media, Taxation, The State

He has a history of hurting himself” is how Shepard Smith (Fox News) dismissed a man who stabbed himself “outside the Rockefeller Center studios of NBC’s ‘Today’ show,” yelling “the IRS is watching me.”

The Internal Revenue Service has a history of hurting people too, Shep. That too is irrefutably.

At the risk of alerting more surveillance to myself, Joseph Stack’s attack on an office building in Austin, Texas, that housed IRS offices: Do you get it?