We are living in a new era of information and technology, of online access and control, where how we communicate and share ideas is being accessed, monitored, collected, and stored.
It amazes me how little regard people have over their own privacy, how little anger there is over what has been revealed to us in recent weeks and months as a result of what Edward Snowden has shared. If I had told you ten, twenty years ago that the government was opening every piece of your mail and photocopy it and storing it, if I told you that every conversation you were having with every person on the phone was being recorded and stored, or that there were cameras in your home that were recording your movements and a government agency was able to watch you, would you be upset? Or that a government agency had put a tracking device on you and your car and could follow your every move, would that get you riled up?
Yet the American public seems immune to such outrage. “They’re doing it for our own good, to protect us,” seems to be what people say. “They have to protect us from the terrorists,” is common as well. “I have nothing to hide, let them spy, snoop, record, listen, watch, monitor, and store every word we say, type, and send, who cares?”
There is so much more at stake here than just simple snooping. What is at work here are more than just government agencies, but the private contractors who are doing their bidding.
We are in a time in history when our government cares so very little for ensuring the safety and well being of our citizens. While media touts the broad overreach of our privacy is indeed for our own protection against “terrorists” the reality for many citizens is that they are being abused by not only our government agencies but also the private corporate entities that they protect.
Take, for instance, the typical American worker. I could offer endless statistics here, but I won’t, they are easy to find, that tell us how mistreated the typical worker is nowadays, and how unbelievable the corporate profit is, and how high the ratio is for the average worker vs. the income of the CEO. As a result of the breaking up of many unionized job markets, corporations have stripped workers of many rights and benefits, and wages have been so stagnant that full time employees at minimum wage still qualify for food stamps. I say full time, yet, even those jobs are becoming harder and harder to find. There has been an influx of temp agencies across the land, where unemployed gather desperate for work every day. Large corporate entities hiding in plain sight in massive, unmarked buildings use these day laborers by offering them minimum wage, part time hours, no benefits, no worker’s protections, and no loyalty. Many times workers are not paid their full wage, or are sometimes injured on the job. Yet if they complain, they are putting themselves at risk for not receiving work the next day. These are people who are working to feed themselves and their families, and are barely able to support themselves, yet the corporate entities who employ them as well as the CEO’s and board members who make the decisions are making profits hand over fist as a direct result of the conditions forced upon these low paid workers. Because people are shuffled around, there is no unity among the workers, which prevents them from organizing and uniting to demand better pay, safer working conditions, and steady hours. In this way, corporations have crippled not only the safety of unions that are meant to protect workers from such abuses, it is crippling the American family who must adjust to the poverty conditions that result from these poor working conditions. When American workers are forced to work many part time jobs, work odd hours, and stress over being able to feed their families, the harm it causes the family is never completely told.
Imagine, though, if workers were to try to organize to demand more fair working conditions. Do large corporate entities have ties with the private contractors who do the bidding of the NSA? There was a recent case where Chevron, in response to Ecuadorian activists fighting the large corporation over the devastation that country has suffered as a result of 18.5 billion gallons of oil waste dumped in the Ecuadorean Amazon, received a judgment of $18 billion dollars against them. They then went and won the rights to private information, including identity information, IP usage records, and email accounts for environmental activists, journalists, and attorneys through Microsoft.
Is this indeed the wave of the future? That when a population of concerned citizens fighting to protect their land, their people, their livelihood from corporate entities who would poison and pollute with no regard have their privacy compromised by federal judges in favor of corporations? https://www.commondreams.org/...
Another chilling example of such abuse was recently revealed that fracking companies were using PSYOPS against anti fracking activists who were fighting for their communities. http://truth-out.org/... These kinds of abuses of private information should be a wake up call to all Americans as to what is at stake by having all of our information collected, catalogued and stored.
The fact of the matter is, the information that has been collected can very well be used against us, for whatever reason the government and/or corporate institutions might deem fit. There is also information that the Occupy Wall Street activists were spied on. http://progressive.org/... Not only spied on, but possibly infiltrated and had aggressive tactics used to cause violence within what were supposed to be peaceful protests. http://www.motherjones.com/...
We are living in an age where our once prosperous Middle Class is descending into poverty conditions, when homelessness, unemployment, and hunger are rising, when worker’s rights and conditions are in terrible condition, when banksters and Wall Street crimes continue to go unpunished, and American citizens are discovering the $50+ Billion dollar industry being used to spy on us all. Those who have been brave enough to oppose these conditions, who occupied and marched in opposition to what they saw happening, were met with pepper spray and militarized police wielding batons.
We now have police departments using military style weapons and uniforms, an unchecked, unregulated NSA keeping tabs on every move we make, and corporations and CEOs requesting local law enforcement authorities to work on their behalf to provide security as well as scrutiny over any and all actions of American citizens who answer the call to become activists in the name of challenging the collective abuse of our rights by these said institutions. Journalists who are doing challenging work by pulling the curtain back and revealing the underhanded actions done by the NSA, such as Glenn Greenwald, are literally being told by other journalists that they are guilty of “aiding and abetting” and should be prosecuted. We are not only suffering the assault by corporate entities and unchecked government powers, but those who seek to tell us the truth about what’s really going on behind those large doors are being attacked by the very institutions who should be working for the American people to inform us all as to the truth.
What’s happening now is more than just the issue of worker’s rights, and NSA spying, police militarism and anti-fracking infiltration. Our planet has been under assault over the past several decades from untold amounts of abuse. This is a fight that is not just about saving ourselves, but saving each other, all of us, from the very real issue of climate change. It will make no sense to provide workers with better conditions if we are going to stand back and witness our planet becoming so polluted and poisoned it will be uninhabitable.
Over the past several years, we have had some brave truth tellers risk everything to inform us of what was really happening behind the scenes, from Chelsea Manning to Edward Snowden, Thomas Drake, Barrett Brown, even Julian Assange. Yet those who are supposedly working in the press, people in positions of access, are not interested in helping inform the general public as to the abuses that are being committed against them. Their talking points most likely handed down from their large corporate sponsors who sign their paychecks are to ridicule and marginalize the whistleblower, and President Obama, who when running for office claimed interest in protecting whistleblowers, has not only turned his back on them but prosecuted them more harshly than any other administration before him.
The next big case on a whistleblower is the case of Barrett Brown, currently facing a century in prison for posting a LINK. Mr. Brown was working on the connection between NSA and the private information industry who holds all of our information. There has now been a gag order placed on the case, another reason we should all be concerned about what exactly Mr. Brown found. The silence from the mass media outlets has been deafening.
Now is the time to focus attention on Mr. Brown’s case. What people need to wake up and understand is, it’s not just about your right to privacy, which indeed you should expect and demand. It is how the powers that be have stored your information and is willing to use it against you should you choose to challenge the powers that be to stand up for your rights as an American citizen in whatever means you deem it necessary, whether it means standing up to a fracking industry that is coming into your neighborhood to destroy your community, or fighting an oil company that is poisoning your land, or demonstrating with Occupy Wall Street against large banking institutions who have stolen the wealth of this country with their casino banking practices.
If we continue to allow the practices of militarized police brutality, NSA spying and infiltrating, and unchecked corporate power, then we are truly headed for 1984.