Occam's Banana
07-31-2013, 03:09 AM
There's a very good article by Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com.
Highly recommended. You should read the whole thing.
FTA: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/07/30/bring-it-on-justin/
‘King of Bacon’ Attacks Libertarians
Chris Christie versus Rand Paul's "dangerous thought"
Asked about the national debate unleashed by the Snowden revelations, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie declared war on libertarians (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgAJ5YMeg0c):
“As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, I just want us to be really cautious, because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought.”
Asked if he was referring to Senator Rand Paul (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/29/sen-rand-paul-is-lone-dissenter-as-james-comey-con/), Christie said he is “one of them," and went on to sneer:
“You can name any one of them that’s engaged in this. These esoteric, intellectual debates – I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have.”
It’s funny how specific word choices lay bare our souls: "Dangerous thought," eh? This is precisely what those NSA "analysts (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/nsa-they-know-much-more-you-think/?pagination=false)" trolling our emails, our phone conversations, and God knows what else are looking for – dangerous thoughts that might conceivably (or inconceivably) lead to dangerous actions. In short, they look for evidence of thoughtcrime (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:r-NRiWjPyjkJ:www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-dict.html+crimethink&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us), to use a phrase from George Orwell’s classic dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four (http://www.amazon.com/1984-60th-Anniversary-Edition-George-Orwell/dp/0452262933/antiwarbookstore). And, of course, Sen. Paul has committed the one thoughtcrime punishable by political execution: he’s talking about the importance of liberty (http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/jul/12/las-vegas-rand-paul-laments-dangers-surveillance-s/) as the foundation of our society.
It’s just a coincidence – of course! – that this volley from Christie comes in the wake of a series of attacks (http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/07/21/why-they-hate-rand-paul/) on the Kentucky Senator from the neoconservative right as well as the Obamaite left – a polemical blizzard directed against libertarianism as such. The closer (http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/%E2%80%9Cwhy_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_reading_a_book _the_new_warrior_cop_is_out_of_control/) we move (http://progressive.org/rothschild0209.html) toward a full-fledged (http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files) authoritarian state (http://www.nbcnews.com/id/15960666/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/report-million-americans-justice-system/), the more "dangerous" libertarianism (http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp) becomes – at least in the eyes of the neocons (http://www.aei.org/article/politics-and-public-opinion/christie-vs-paul/) and Obama cultists (http://www.politicususa.com/2013/07/30/chris-christie-stabs-rand-paul-red-state-heart-reminding-jersey-donor-state.html) who are united in their hatred of individual freedom.
[...]
In making his case at Aspen, Christie averred President Obama hadn’t changed the surveillance programs put in place by George W. Bush "because they worked," yet he was careful to be specific in saying no terrorist attacks claiming "thousands of lives (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57595665/invoking-9-11-chris-christie-slams-libertarians/)" have occurred – because, after all, the Boston massacre (http://www.fbi.gov/news/updates-on-investigation-into-multiple-explosions-in-boston) carried out by the Tsarnaev brothers (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/30/world/la-fg-wn-father-tsarnaev-friend-fbi-claims-executed-20130530) is still fresh in our memory, along with all the other singleton (http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/02/16/10427398-nigerian-underwear-bomber-gets-life-sentence?lite) terrorist (http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130727/fort-hood-shooting-suspect-claims-us-at-war-islam) incidents (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/21/AR2010062102468.html) which have occurred since 9/11 – and since the Panopticon has been in place. Which points to the empirical weak link – or one of them – in Christie’s emotion-laden demagogy: even with all that "intelligence" vacuumed up by the NSA, and an explicit warning (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2312496/Tamerlan-Tsarnaev-Russia-asked-FBI-investigate-Boston-bomber-just-6-MONTHS-ago.html) from the Russians about Tamerlane Tsarnaev, terrorists succeeded in closing down (http://politix.topix.com/homepage/5832-boston-lockdown-more-frightening-than-bombing-says-ron-paul) a major American city (http://images.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=boston+lockdown&biw=859&bih=646&sei=kHX4UcWjGe2GyQGC6IHwAQ&tbm=isch) for 48 hours after murdering three and wounding hundreds.
Which brings us to a little-discussed but glaringly obvious problem with the rationale for all-pervasive surveillance, given voice by Rep. Mike Rogers (R- Oceania (http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/66-the-world-in-george-orwells-1984)) when he compared the hunt for terrorists to finding a needle in a haystack: "You need the whole haystack (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=2bCv3ufgKIE&t=148)," he insists. But this is nonsensical: it might be too much to expect a member of Congress to be familiar with the work of libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek (http://mises.org/page/1454/Biography-of-F-A-Hayek-18991992), but the impossibility of sifting through the entire haystack in order to find a few needles should be obvious to a child, albeit a mystery to the average legislator. What Hayekians call the "knowledge problem (http://www.econlib.org/cgi-bin/printarticle.pl)" – that there is simply too much information out there for economic planners to integrate into their decisions – applies equally to law enforcement (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113416/nsa-spying-scandal-data-mining-isnt-good-keeping-us-safe). To know everything is to know nothing, in this regard, because it’s impossible to know which particular facts are relevant.
This is where (http://www.dailycensored.com/we-are-the-enemy-whistleblowers-journalists-dissenters-and-the-people-2/) the "dangerous thoughts" come in: since the enormity (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/) of what the government has stored in those NSA databases is inherently unmanageable, the only way to navigate it is to separate it out in the broadest categories. A grandma emailing her grandchildren is of no value to our vaunted anti-terrorist "analysts" – but that email you wrote to your brother about the criminality (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2013/jul/30/soldier-mom-afghanistan-caryn-nouv/) of the Afghan war, and the heroism (http://scotthorton.org/2013/07/30/73013-daniel-ellsberg/) of Bradley Manning, is possibly of interest. When we are told (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130723/13325623909/senator-wyden-public-has-been-actively-mislead-government-officials-over-surveillance.shtml) by Senator Wyden that we’d be "surprised" and even shocked at the degree and nature of the surveillance, and by Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald (http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/06/greenwald-promises-more-nsa-revelations-166994.html) – whose reporting (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order) unveiled the NSA documents secured by Snowden – that more revelations are forthcoming, it’s not hard to imagine what the NSA’s surveillance techniques amount to. Greenwald has already given us a preview (http://www.mediaite.com/tv/greenwald-claims-private-contractors-can-spy-on-calls-emails-i-defy-nsa-officials-to-deny-these-capabilities/):
"The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years. What these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things … It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future. It’s an incredibly powerful and invasive tool, exactly of the type Mr. [Edward] Snowden described.”
While it’s true that the entire NSA program requires periodic approval from a secret "court," (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html?pagewanted=all) government spies can target Americans “with no need to go to a court [and] with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst," says Greenwald (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/glenn-greenwald-i-defy-the-nsa-to-deny-edward-snowdens-most-radical-claims-under-oath/278157/). "These systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever – telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents."
On what basis – by what standard – do these spies make the determination to read a particular target’s emails, and listen in on their phone calls? Surely by searching for certain words (http://www.heavy.com/comedy/2013/06/20-stupid-words-that-make-the-nsa-think-youre-a-terrorist/) and phrases deemed suspect. What these "analysts" are analyzing is, in part, the ideological proclivities of those they are surveilling. Furthermore, given the Knowledge Problem, it is no doubt necessary to categorize the entire population: there is simply no other way of sifting out the malign minority from the harmless majority. Given the number of Americans on the no-fly list (http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/many-of-500-americans-on-no-fly-list-dont-know-why?news=844334) – and the much bigger Terrorist Watch List (http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/terror-watch-list-counter-million-plus) – it’s plain to see the pool of suspects is enormous, and getting bigger all the time. How do you get on that list? By having what Gov. Christie calls "dangerous thoughts." How many Americans are on that list – and how many entirely innocent non-citizens? Big Brother isn’t telling – but the American people want to know.
Gov. Christie, on the other hand, doesn’t want us to know anything – and is perfectly content with the government knowing everything. In this he is out of step (http://www.mediaite.com/online/pro-nsa-gopers-have-made-a-terrible-case-for-the-post-911-surveillance-state/) with the grassroots of his party, and with the American people (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/13/nsa-surveillance-guardian-poll-oversight) as a whole.
[...]
The Establishment – both "right" and "left" wings of it – is scared to death of libertarians, and with good reason. We are the only organized tendency in American political life ideologically and politically situated to take on the emerging police state that is strangling what’s left of the Founders’ vision. And we are growing by the day (http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/poll-finds-a-shift-toward-more-libertarian-views/), by the hour, which is why their fear is so well-founded. So to the Governor of New Jersey – whose presidential aspirations are likely to wind up in the trashbin of history along with those of his doppelganger, Rudy Giuliani (http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/01/giulianis_59_mi.html) – we libertarians have this to say: Bring it on, Fatso – bring it on!
Highly recommended. You should read the whole thing.
FTA: http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/07/30/bring-it-on-justin/
‘King of Bacon’ Attacks Libertarians
Chris Christie versus Rand Paul's "dangerous thought"
Asked about the national debate unleashed by the Snowden revelations, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie declared war on libertarians (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgAJ5YMeg0c):
“As a former prosecutor who was appointed by President George W. Bush on Sept. 10, 2001, I just want us to be really cautious, because this strain of libertarianism that’s going through both parties right now and making big headlines, I think, is a very dangerous thought.”
Asked if he was referring to Senator Rand Paul (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jul/29/sen-rand-paul-is-lone-dissenter-as-james-comey-con/), Christie said he is “one of them," and went on to sneer:
“You can name any one of them that’s engaged in this. These esoteric, intellectual debates – I want them to come to New Jersey and sit across from the widows and the orphans and have that conversation. And they won’t, because that’s a much tougher conversation to have.”
It’s funny how specific word choices lay bare our souls: "Dangerous thought," eh? This is precisely what those NSA "analysts (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/aug/15/nsa-they-know-much-more-you-think/?pagination=false)" trolling our emails, our phone conversations, and God knows what else are looking for – dangerous thoughts that might conceivably (or inconceivably) lead to dangerous actions. In short, they look for evidence of thoughtcrime (http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:r-NRiWjPyjkJ:www.newspeakdictionary.com/ns-dict.html+crimethink&cd=3&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us), to use a phrase from George Orwell’s classic dystopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four (http://www.amazon.com/1984-60th-Anniversary-Edition-George-Orwell/dp/0452262933/antiwarbookstore). And, of course, Sen. Paul has committed the one thoughtcrime punishable by political execution: he’s talking about the importance of liberty (http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2013/jul/12/las-vegas-rand-paul-laments-dangers-surveillance-s/) as the foundation of our society.
It’s just a coincidence – of course! – that this volley from Christie comes in the wake of a series of attacks (http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/07/21/why-they-hate-rand-paul/) on the Kentucky Senator from the neoconservative right as well as the Obamaite left – a polemical blizzard directed against libertarianism as such. The closer (http://www.salon.com/2013/07/07/%E2%80%9Cwhy_did_you_shoot_me_i_was_reading_a_book _the_new_warrior_cop_is_out_of_control/) we move (http://progressive.org/rothschild0209.html) toward a full-fledged (http://www.theguardian.com/world/the-nsa-files) authoritarian state (http://www.nbcnews.com/id/15960666/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/report-million-americans-justice-system/), the more "dangerous" libertarianism (http://mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp) becomes – at least in the eyes of the neocons (http://www.aei.org/article/politics-and-public-opinion/christie-vs-paul/) and Obama cultists (http://www.politicususa.com/2013/07/30/chris-christie-stabs-rand-paul-red-state-heart-reminding-jersey-donor-state.html) who are united in their hatred of individual freedom.
[...]
In making his case at Aspen, Christie averred President Obama hadn’t changed the surveillance programs put in place by George W. Bush "because they worked," yet he was careful to be specific in saying no terrorist attacks claiming "thousands of lives (http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57595665/invoking-9-11-chris-christie-slams-libertarians/)" have occurred – because, after all, the Boston massacre (http://www.fbi.gov/news/updates-on-investigation-into-multiple-explosions-in-boston) carried out by the Tsarnaev brothers (http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/30/world/la-fg-wn-father-tsarnaev-friend-fbi-claims-executed-20130530) is still fresh in our memory, along with all the other singleton (http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/02/16/10427398-nigerian-underwear-bomber-gets-life-sentence?lite) terrorist (http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/afp/130727/fort-hood-shooting-suspect-claims-us-at-war-islam) incidents (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/21/AR2010062102468.html) which have occurred since 9/11 – and since the Panopticon has been in place. Which points to the empirical weak link – or one of them – in Christie’s emotion-laden demagogy: even with all that "intelligence" vacuumed up by the NSA, and an explicit warning (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2312496/Tamerlan-Tsarnaev-Russia-asked-FBI-investigate-Boston-bomber-just-6-MONTHS-ago.html) from the Russians about Tamerlane Tsarnaev, terrorists succeeded in closing down (http://politix.topix.com/homepage/5832-boston-lockdown-more-frightening-than-bombing-says-ron-paul) a major American city (http://images.google.com/search?sourceid=mozclient&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&q=boston+lockdown&biw=859&bih=646&sei=kHX4UcWjGe2GyQGC6IHwAQ&tbm=isch) for 48 hours after murdering three and wounding hundreds.
Which brings us to a little-discussed but glaringly obvious problem with the rationale for all-pervasive surveillance, given voice by Rep. Mike Rogers (R- Oceania (http://bigthink.com/strange-maps/66-the-world-in-george-orwells-1984)) when he compared the hunt for terrorists to finding a needle in a haystack: "You need the whole haystack (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=2bCv3ufgKIE&t=148)," he insists. But this is nonsensical: it might be too much to expect a member of Congress to be familiar with the work of libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek (http://mises.org/page/1454/Biography-of-F-A-Hayek-18991992), but the impossibility of sifting through the entire haystack in order to find a few needles should be obvious to a child, albeit a mystery to the average legislator. What Hayekians call the "knowledge problem (http://www.econlib.org/cgi-bin/printarticle.pl)" – that there is simply too much information out there for economic planners to integrate into their decisions – applies equally to law enforcement (http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113416/nsa-spying-scandal-data-mining-isnt-good-keeping-us-safe). To know everything is to know nothing, in this regard, because it’s impossible to know which particular facts are relevant.
This is where (http://www.dailycensored.com/we-are-the-enemy-whistleblowers-journalists-dissenters-and-the-people-2/) the "dangerous thoughts" come in: since the enormity (http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/) of what the government has stored in those NSA databases is inherently unmanageable, the only way to navigate it is to separate it out in the broadest categories. A grandma emailing her grandchildren is of no value to our vaunted anti-terrorist "analysts" – but that email you wrote to your brother about the criminality (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2013/jul/30/soldier-mom-afghanistan-caryn-nouv/) of the Afghan war, and the heroism (http://scotthorton.org/2013/07/30/73013-daniel-ellsberg/) of Bradley Manning, is possibly of interest. When we are told (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130723/13325623909/senator-wyden-public-has-been-actively-mislead-government-officials-over-surveillance.shtml) by Senator Wyden that we’d be "surprised" and even shocked at the degree and nature of the surveillance, and by Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald (http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/06/greenwald-promises-more-nsa-revelations-166994.html) – whose reporting (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order) unveiled the NSA documents secured by Snowden – that more revelations are forthcoming, it’s not hard to imagine what the NSA’s surveillance techniques amount to. Greenwald has already given us a preview (http://www.mediaite.com/tv/greenwald-claims-private-contractors-can-spy-on-calls-emails-i-defy-nsa-officials-to-deny-these-capabilities/):
"The NSA has trillions of telephone calls and emails in their databases that they’ve collected over the last several years. What these programs are, are very simple screens, like the ones that supermarket clerks or shipping and receiving clerks use, where all an analyst has to do is enter an email address or an IP address, and it does two things … It searches that database and lets them listen to the calls or read the emails of everything that the NSA has stored, or look at the browsing histories or Google search terms that you’ve entered, and it also alerts them to any further activity that people connected to that email address or that IP address do in the future. It’s an incredibly powerful and invasive tool, exactly of the type Mr. [Edward] Snowden described.”
While it’s true that the entire NSA program requires periodic approval from a secret "court," (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/us/in-secret-court-vastly-broadens-powers-of-nsa.html?pagewanted=all) government spies can target Americans “with no need to go to a court [and] with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst," says Greenwald (http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/glenn-greenwald-i-defy-the-nsa-to-deny-edward-snowdens-most-radical-claims-under-oath/278157/). "These systems allow analysts to listen to whatever emails they want, whatever – telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents."
On what basis – by what standard – do these spies make the determination to read a particular target’s emails, and listen in on their phone calls? Surely by searching for certain words (http://www.heavy.com/comedy/2013/06/20-stupid-words-that-make-the-nsa-think-youre-a-terrorist/) and phrases deemed suspect. What these "analysts" are analyzing is, in part, the ideological proclivities of those they are surveilling. Furthermore, given the Knowledge Problem, it is no doubt necessary to categorize the entire population: there is simply no other way of sifting out the malign minority from the harmless majority. Given the number of Americans on the no-fly list (http://www.allgov.com/news/top-stories/many-of-500-americans-on-no-fly-list-dont-know-why?news=844334) – and the much bigger Terrorist Watch List (http://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/terror-watch-list-counter-million-plus) – it’s plain to see the pool of suspects is enormous, and getting bigger all the time. How do you get on that list? By having what Gov. Christie calls "dangerous thoughts." How many Americans are on that list – and how many entirely innocent non-citizens? Big Brother isn’t telling – but the American people want to know.
Gov. Christie, on the other hand, doesn’t want us to know anything – and is perfectly content with the government knowing everything. In this he is out of step (http://www.mediaite.com/online/pro-nsa-gopers-have-made-a-terrible-case-for-the-post-911-surveillance-state/) with the grassroots of his party, and with the American people (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/13/nsa-surveillance-guardian-poll-oversight) as a whole.
[...]
The Establishment – both "right" and "left" wings of it – is scared to death of libertarians, and with good reason. We are the only organized tendency in American political life ideologically and politically situated to take on the emerging police state that is strangling what’s left of the Founders’ vision. And we are growing by the day (http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/poll-finds-a-shift-toward-more-libertarian-views/), by the hour, which is why their fear is so well-founded. So to the Governor of New Jersey – whose presidential aspirations are likely to wind up in the trashbin of history along with those of his doppelganger, Rudy Giuliani (http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/01/giulianis_59_mi.html) – we libertarians have this to say: Bring it on, Fatso – bring it on!