US pro-war propaganda reached new heights this weekend as Act of Valor hit the silver screens across America. Unlike other war movies, this one was backed by none other than the US war machine itself.
So how has the glorified recruitment tape fared with the critics? (more…)
SOPA has been squashed, ACTA might be on its final act, and Bill C-30 is now under close surveillance, but the battle for an uncensored Internet rages on.
Enter the Free Internet Act, designed to “promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship and innovation by preventing the restriction of liberty and preventing the means of censorship.”
By law, the United States President needs congressional approval to go to war. Yet no such approval was sought prior to bombing Libya. Now, should the bombing campaign continue, the Commander in Chief might find himself to be breaking the law.
To get around the tiresome trivialities of constitutional law, the Obama administration has drummed up in-house lawyers willing to argue that a bomb dropped from a drone is not ‘hostile’.
Talk about Orwellian doublespeak. Don’t they know that bombs explode the same regardless of whether the pilot is in the cockpit or perched in front of a computer screen?
In a semi-ironic twist, the Pentagon recently announced that computer hacking can be considered an act of war.
This means it is no longer a hostile act to slaughter Libyan families from across the ocean via computer, but if someone hacks into that computer to prevent further atrocities, that would be the act of aggression.
Absolutely absurd! It just goes to show how ridiculous the arguments surrounding institutionalized war can be.
It’s almost as silly as a Nobel Peace Laureate having to use lawyer-speak to weasel his way into perpetuating another armed conflict. But it’s not quite as inane as the utter lack of dissent coming from the left – dissent that would be coming in droves were Obama a republican.
Is the US Government spying on its own population? Yes. Absolutely.
The question is not longer “Does the US spy on its citizenry”, but rather “To what depths can America’s surveillance system reach into the daily lives of the people?”
And the chilling answer, says Senator Ron Wyden, is way more than most people think.
“We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says,” describes Wyden “When you’ve got that kind of a gap, you’re going to have a problem on your hands.”
Not enough American’s are aware of how integrated their surveillance state has become, and fewer still even perceive government spying as a threat. The end result of this is that too much power concentrates into too few hands, leading to a political system that runs more like a dictatorship than a democracy.
So what does the US government do already, using different interpretations of information gathering bills like the Patriot Act?
Of course, some have postulated they’ve been doing this for years. The Patriot Act only sought to make legal what the US Gov’t was doing anyway.
This begs the question, if America has long been spying on its own population without legal authority, then why even bother repealing the Patriot Act?
Well, it’s about swinging the pendulum back towards the side of freedom. If Americans can at least make it unlawful for their government to invade such depths of personal privacy, they will have some recourse to hold the violators accountable.
Otherwise, the more-surveillance-is-always-better mindset will keep pushing the envelope, eroding more civil liberties until the only thing left to protect is the surveillance state itself.
