As National Security Agency surveillance programs have caught more and more (and much deserved) flack, the question of civil liberties–their meaning, importance and public officials’ duty to protect them–has quickly become a centerpiece of the debate. Here are nine great thoughts to guide your own thinking process.
The Article: Are We on the Verge of Total Self-Destruction? by Noam Chomsky.
The Text: For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves.
What is the future likely to bring? A reasonable stance might be to try to look at the human species from the outside. So imagine that youāre an extraterrestrial observer who is trying to figure out whatās happening here or, for that matter, imagine youāre an historian 100 years from now ā assuming there are any historians 100 years from now, which is not obvious ā and youāre looking back at whatās happening today. Youād see something quite remarkable.
For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves. Thatās been true since 1945. Itās now being finally recognized that there are more long-term processes like environmental destruction leading in the same direction, maybe not to total destruction, but at least to the destruction of the capacity for a decent existence.
Want to score a good summer job? Work for the IRS Determinations Unit. Thanks to recent GOP-fabricated scandals, you won’t have to do anything!
Because why work when there’s always the option of distracting people with something smelly?
The Article: Surprise, Surprise! All Occupiers Phones Were Logged by Natasha Lennard in AlterNet.
The Text: In light of news that everyday the entire of telecom giant Verizonās call system records are handed over to the NSA, news that attendees of Occupy Wall Street protest attendeesā cell phones were logged should hardly come as a shock. It nonetheless bears noting that cell phone metadata of march and rally participants was likely specifically logged, as security expert Steven Ramdam recently noted. This means that individuals were directly targeted for their engagement with First Amendment protected activity.
As Privacy SOS noted, the controversial security expert who gave a talk entitled āPrivacy is Deadā ā advocating that we āget over itā ā said:
I can tell you that everybody that attended an Occupy Wall Street protest, and didnāt turn their cell phone off, or put it ā and sometimes even if they did ā the identity of that cell phone has been logged, and everybody who was at that demonstration, whether they were arrested, not arrested, whether their photos were IDād, whether an informant pointed them out, itās known they were there anyway. This is routine.
