Dear
Laissez Faire Today Reader,
Baltimore, MD -- What happens when you spend a day
at home searching the Internet for home appliances and maybe some
back-to-school supplies? For most people, you get a lazy afternoon. But
one couple in Long Island, N.Y., got a visit from their local police
department. They had some questions about their peculiar Internet
searches.
Better sit down before you read this. And move away any valuables you might throw at a wall in a fit of rage.
Michele Catalano was doing Google searches for pressure cookers. Her
husband was looking for a new backpack. A couple days later, six members
of the "Joint Terrorism Task Force" knocked on their door and asked
them to explain their actions. These weren't people from the FBI, the
NSA, or the Department of Homeland Security. Rather, they were local
police officers. Yet they had access to Internet searches that only a
few specific agencies were granted.
The news cycle is trying to draw the American attention away from the
ongoing spying scandal, but it's stories like this that keep it from
completely dying. This story of the Catalano family from New York merely
confirms your worst suspicions. So why would police be looking at the
Google searches of a normal, middle-class American family?
The government says that they can look at information of only
Americans who are connected to terror suspects by no more than two
people. And though it sounds small and limited in its scope, a simple
example shows just how far their reach extends.
Let's say on average, a person calls or contacts 40 unique people.
Under the current guidelines, the government would be able to mine the
records of "only" 2.5 million people. So when the people behind the
controls say they did "only" a few hundred searches, they're not
including all the other records that fall under their extended network.
Which brings us back to the couple from New York. They're probably a
lot like you and countless other people in America. People who
accidentally fell into a government surveillance net. All because they
knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who made a long-distance
phone call to someone on a government watch list.
Fortunately, there isn't a sad ending to this story. The joint
terrorism task force didn't arrest them for their inopportune Google
searches. But it makes you wonder just how anonymous you are in the mass
that is the Internet. Unlike getting lost in a physical crowd, there is
an electronic marker that distinguishes you from all other Internet
users. And now it seems like someone somewhere is always watching.
When Edward Snowden revealed just how deep the NSA spying rabbit hole
went, he revealed how little privacy we really have. And as his story
continues to unfold, America's reputation and honor quickly loses its
credibility. Before, people saw America as a refuge from oppression. Now
Americans are looking to our former enemies for the same protection.
But as Laissez Faire's own
Jeffrey Tucker writes in
today's article, America's fickle relationship with other countries
seems to be a familiar theme throughout our history. See what it means
for our current situation, and how Edward Snowden plays a key role for
the foreseeable future.
The best investment secret on the planet
...is one financial "experts" don't want you to know about.
Investment advisers won't tell you about this secret because it gives
you a low-cost, lower-risk strategy for bagging huge stock gains fast --
like 61%, 82% or even 119% -- without paying any fees!
Wall Street big boys don't talk about this secret because it's a strategy many are not even allowed to use.
But Jonas Elmerraji wants to tell you all about it. And you won't want to miss what he has to say.
Click here to see the video.
Introducing Jeffrey Tucker's... Thank You, Russia?
|
Jeffrey Tucker |
Lon Snowden, father of whistle-blower Edward Snowden,
gave an interview to the media this week. The venue: Rossiya 24, a
state-owned station. His message was one of gratitude to Russia for
considering his son's request for asylum. Edward, as everyone knows, is
on the run for having revealed to the American people that their
government is logging every communication and storing it for later use.
In other words, Edward is in big trouble for revealing that our
government is doing to its own citizens what the U.S. once accused
Russia of doing to its citizens. In what is really a bizarre turn of
events, Russia has become a safe haven for an American whistle-blower.
Any friend of freedom has to join Lon Snowden in expressing gratitude.
Because as it turns out, there are only a handful of countries in the
world that the U.S. government can't intimidate into compliance.
I'm as glad as the next guy that "we" won the Cold War. But sometimes
you just have to wonder: What was the point of those 45 years of
nuclear stalemate? All that time, we were told that this was a mighty
struggle between individualism and collectivism, between freedom and
tyranny, between capitalism and communism.
But at the end of the day, once everything has shaken itself out, it is Russia that is providing sanctuary to our best citizens.
Is this some sort of strange dystopian novel? Well, yes, and it has a name:
Nineteen Eighty-Four,
by George Orwell. Murray Rothbard once did a reconstruction of the
hidden meaning of that novel. He demonstrated that Orwell was writing
about the reality of the wartime and postwar period. A time when
Russia's status as an enemy turned to friend and back to enemy again in
the blink of an eye.
In Orwell's depiction, the world is dominated by three superpowers:
Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Alliances would turn on a dime depending
on political priorities. "We've always been at war with Eastasia," says
the slogan. Sounds just like something we'd hear today.
Islamic fundamentalists were U.S. allies in my living memory. They
were heralded in the 1980s as freedom fighters who held to traditional
family values and served as a mighty bulwark against atheistic
communism. After the Cold War, our friends became our enemies. Now the
right-wing talk shows speak daily of how we've always been at war with
Islam.
The Russia case is particularly interesting. In the 1920s, American
politics was sporadically consumed with the Red Scare. By the 1930s,
Russia had become a kind of paradigm of progress. It was a model after
which the New Deal copied its planning schemes for agriculture and large
industry. By wartime, Russia was our dearest friend, a heroic ally in
the struggle against Japanese and German imperialism. But only a year
after WWII ended, President Truman spun it again: Now Russia was the
biggest threat to Europe's freedom, and thus began the long Cold War.
But it is even more complicated than that. As Rothbard wrote in 1986:
"Our deadly enemies in World War II, Germany and Japan, are
now considered prime Good Guys, the only problem being their unfortunate
reluctance to take up arms against the former Good Guys, the Soviet
Union. China, having been a much lauded Good Guy under Chiang Kai-shek
when fighting Bad Guy Japan, became the worst of the Bad Guys under
communism, and indeed, the United States fought the Korean and
Vietnamese wars largely for the sake of containing the expansionism of
Communist China, which was supposed to be an even worse guy than the
Soviet Union. But now all that is changed, and Communist China is now
the virtual ally of the United States against the principal Enemy in the
Kremlin."
And today? Following some years of friendship in union with the
anti-Islamist cause (the U.S. has tacitly backed President Putin in all
his imperial wars), Russia is the enemy again. After all, this awful
state is protecting a whistle-blower from capture by the U.S.!
Meanwhile, Japan doesn't figure into world politics at all, while China
is said to be an unrelenting menace to our industrial superiority due to
its propensity to steal trade secrets.
As should be clear, Orwell was not so much writing about a future
that might come to pass as a present that had already revealed itself in
politics throughout the 20th century. This was the century of the total
state. What does that mean? It means that no aspect of life is
conceptually out of reach for the government. All your data belong to
them. All your products, services, and activities are their business.
Our property we own only at their discretion. No aspect of life is
unplanned by our masters, provided they have the interest and means to
make it happen.
The totalitarian mind is revealed in its fullness in the attitude
toward war. Beginning in the age of democracy of the 20th century,
entire populations were considered to be combatants and potential
targets. You know how during U.S. wars, we hear about how civilians are
just as culpable for tyrannical power because they are somehow
permitting the dictator to rule by failing to overthrow him? We heard
this constantly during the Iraq War.
This is a totalitarian mentality. No one is considered outside the political constellation.
Freedom and the total state are incompatible, except that, of course,
any state is happy to use propaganda to proclaim itself to be the true
land of the free and home of the brave. The reality is borne out in the
state's attitude toward dissidents. If you see something and say
something bad about the government, what happens to you? It's a basic
test of freedom. In this case, the U.S. has been failing miserably.
But the humiliation is increased for Americans to see our former
enemies (well, one-time enemies turned friends turned enemies turned
friends, etc....) now providing a safe haven to a young man who told the
truth about the U.S. surveillance state. Edward Snowden, said Doug
Casey last week at
Agora Financial's Vancouver Symposium,
is not just a hero, but a superhero. He gave up everything to do a
public service, all in the interest of making a dent in the inexorable
tendency toward total control.
What's fascinating is to see how completely lacking in cynicism
Snowden truly is. He thinks that the system can change. He wants
Congress to do something. He wants the American people to rise up and
demand that their government keep to normal standards of civility and
afford their citizens some degree of privacy. In expressing that hope,
Edward Snowden revealed himself as one of the last men to actually
believe that the system can work to the good. Most of the rest of us
lost that hope long ago.
Now he hides... in Russia.
Or as George Orwell might write, "Yet, after all, we've always been at war with Russia."
Sincerely,
Jeffrey Tucker
P.S. Try to remember for a moment what some of your
most recent Google searches were. Maybe they were just harmless
inquiries that popped into your head. But to some government employee
looking for a lead on the next big break, it could be an unlucky
combination for you and your family.
Police knocking on your door because you made an innocuous search at
the wrong time. Someone combing through your emails because something
you wrote as a joke could be construed the wrong way...
Imagine that one day as they're watching your Internet activity
everything goes silent. Your electronic trail goes cold. And there's
nothing on the Internet that ties you to anything. You've gone dark, and
the watchers have no idea what happened.
This isn't the beginning of a new science-fiction techno thriller.
It's what thousands of Americans are doing in response to the NSA's
surveillance program. Compliance means consent, and a growing number of
people in the country have not consented, nor will they ever consent, to
this level of government overreach. And now, if you haven't already,
you can join their ranks.
Click here to find out how to go dark