Do You Fear the National Security Agency Surveilling You?

I am befuddled by all the faux outrage in the online media bout the National Security Agency spying on us via our internet behavior and telephone calls.  Should we really be surprised by any of this?  After all, this sort of panopticonic staring by self-anointed government elites is nothing new.

Let’s take a quick Boles Blogs trip back through time to examine our intrepid reporting on this matter of the NSA spying on us.  We begin on June 30, 2006 — You are an Electronic Jigsaw Puzzle:

It’s horrifyingly fascinating how this government effort to connect all our dots appears to be orchestrated in pieces using separate private companies to deter detection of a non-severed surreptitious intent — banks for banking records; conservative ownership of personal web portals for access to MySpace data; internet providers who reply upon government regulation to stay in business are required to help monitor and analyze internet traffic patterns and process email keyword triggers — leads the cogent among us to question who we really are and if we actually own a right to any sort of privacy whatsoever.

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How to Create a Carceral Nation with a Private Prison System

It’s discouraging to see the steady progression of the prison population in America. Instead of dealing with social issues, we prefer to put people behind bars for smaller and smaller offenses in a blighted attempt to keep the peace.  We take our national cue from Obama who, too frightened to proactively move, leaves Guantanamo an open and seeping sore on our national visage.

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Acid Test Incarceration

George W. Bush finally said farewell last night and one of his gloats was his pronouncement that “Afghanistan has gone from a nation where the Taliban harbored al-Qaida
and stoned women in the streets to a young democracy that is fighting
terror and encouraging girls to go to school.”  It seems Bush missed the NYTimes report the day before about young women in Afghanistan who had acid thrown in their faces because they dared to attend school.

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Cheney Torture

Why is Dick Cheney sowing the whirlwind with his scare talk about Guantanamo and torture and the treat to America if his policy of torture and incarceration is abandoned?

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Blood on Barack: The Fifth Guantanamo Suicide

One of the risks Barack Obama takes in the infancy of his presidency is in keeping bad Bush administration policies in place for too long without taking proactive measures to dismantle the horrors.  The wages of that waiting is that some of the blame will rub off on Obama and new bloodshed will belong solely on his hands. 

Continue reading → Blood on Barack: The Fifth Guantanamo Suicide