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to add to what will said above in response to ace...
beyond the privacy question as it pertains to individuals, there's also the long inglorious history of american paranoia with respect to political opposition, particularly from the left. now the extent to which this history is even present for you as an object of thinking has alot to do with where you happen to be politically yourself---so for a conservative fellow who himself is maybe horrified by the idea of a serious political threat coming from the left, maybe this is a non-issue--but if you identify via that category of "left" then it is present for you. and it is self-evident that when the bush people instituted this warantless wiretapping, the rationale was the "war on terror" and "terror" was NOT a particularly tightly defined term.
as the controversy about the various mechanisms that were either in place to planned mounted, the bush people issued various qualifications to what they claimed was their operative definition of "terrorist" or "suspicious"---but given the black box environment within which this warantless business was happening, there was and could be no meaningful oversight, no transparency---and given the administration's track record with this whole telling the truth question, there's no reason to think that this program was not, in fact, being used to monitor opposition to the iraq debacle within the united states, in that glorious tradition of cointelpro which we all know and love so much as one of the grander moments in the history of free speech in amurica.
so it's a particularly nasty little bit of business, this wiretapping stuff, which harkens back to more explicitly repressive versions of this glorious land of ours.
thing is that i have no reason to assume that the obama administration is operating on the same paranoid logic as the bushpeople did
so the question so *why* this program would be continued is strange to me--which is why i was putting up questions about possible relations between it and the changes that the obama administration is starting to attempt in military strategic orientation, which would result in---FINALLY--a dismantling of the national security state if they were taken far enough. within that, there's another question about trade-offs and intentions---because it's a whole lot clearer what's being moved away from than it is what's being moved into.
you can't blame a boy for wondering about this.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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