[LINK] Snowden, Inteligence Gathering, Indonesia and Embarrassment

[Jan Whitaker]

At 01:05 PM 21/11/2013, Frank O'Connor wrote:
>failed to detect or predict the greatest economic crisis in 70 years 
>... despite all the signs and data being out there, they failed to 
>protect their own raw data from low level contractors and 
>operatives, they intrude on the privacy and rights of the people 
>they are supposed to protect ... and now they impact on our foreign 
>policy, trade and good relations with a neighbouring country and 
>relatively crucial ally because they thought tapping the phones of 
>that country's elite was a good idea and that they'd never get caught.
>
>When are THEY going to be held accountable? When are WE going to do 
>a cost-benefit analysis?

If you're on the Privacy discussion list, hid Delete now.

Here's a post I put there yesterday about this issue. See if it 
resonates. Note that this stuff is just a continuation of warning 
bells early last century.
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Time to reread Orwell's 1984 and as I did just recently, Huxley's 
Brave New World http://www.huxley.net/bnw/one.html .

I think we are actually experiencing a bit of both: fear of 
retaliation by government with little recourse under the guise of 
'anti-terrorism' and the bliss of control through reward (bread and 
circus entertainment, look the other way media spin), even in the 
democracies of the world, primarily US and Britain, and to a lesser 
extent Australia. It's interesting that the other two Five-eyes 
members, Canada and New Zealand don't seem to be going down this 
path, despite also having conservative governments in recent times.

I'm now reading Brave New World Revisited 
http://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/index.html , written in 1958 in 
the middle of the cold war where the Soviet Union totalitarianism was 
the big fear. The tables have turned in some ways. Huxley analyses 
the differences between the 1984 and BNW scenarios and how things had 
developed between his 1932 book written in 1931 in the midst of the 
Great Depression and Orwell's written just after WW2. Many of his 
major issues are still with us: over population and population growth 
effects on resource depletion, the impact of consumerism and the 
quest for happiness, bureaucracy gone mad, propaganda, and the use of 
drugs as chemical persuasion, which may not be soma, but is most 
definitely alcohol and more recently the move to decriminalisation of 
marijuana.

The other tension is science/technology and liberal humanism. Big 
topic that relates to our concerns over privacy, the expansion of 
technology to 'watch'/control by science, and how to maintain our 
humanity. When power wants to control, it must watch everyone for 
fear of losing control. As resources are reduced due to expanding 
populations (threat to life style), governments do these stupid 
things because of the existential threats by those who are exploited 
or have little to lose. At least that's the 
hypothesis/rationalisation for it. But at what cost to us as human 
beings and our relationships with one another?

We often talked about the nose under the tent and function creep. 
Spying is just a natural extension of governments who think they are 
invincible and make moral choices based on flimsy arguments of 
"everyone does it". Seriously?

It's a funny old world and time, isn't it?
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I've read even more in the BNW Revisited essay. There are comments by 
Huxley in there that you would swear were describing today's 
"crisis". Change a few names and they all line up, including Hitler. 
Huxley's analysis of propaganda is uncannily descriptive of the three 
word slogan and lack of attention to evidence. Each new paragraph 
made me want to repost it to some list saying: "Look at this!"

Rather than doing that, check out the link above if you have the time.

Jan


Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com

Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you're gonna die, so how 
do you fill in the space between here and there? It's yours. Seize your space.
~Margaret Atwood, writer

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