Yesterday, I signed a petition urging President Dilma of Brazil to grant Edward Snowden political asylum when his one year welcome in Russia expires. Since the rapidly increasing and totally unwarranted intrusion into our personal lives by our governments is a subject so close to my heart, I took the unusual step (for me) of posting a link on Facebook. In fact, I’m so incensed that I want to talk a bit more about it here.
I’ll start with a position of agreement with our covert observers – I can see a need for the shady spooky types – there’s some really ‘orrible people in this world – proper psychos, I’ve met some – there’s no cure for them, these wrong ‘uns really do exist and they mean us harm. We actually do need protecting from these people, we really do – it is beyond the average man’s power to defend against them, of this I have very little doubt. But does this justify the intrusive methods employed by the security services? I say no, the scope of the privacy invasions disclosed by Mr Snowden clearly demonstrate that our ‘protectors’ have massively overstepped the mark in enacting a stupendous abuse of their privileges with no legitimate reason for doing so. Since Obama’s recent shallow and fake capitulation on the matter made it very clear that these guys are not going to stop what they are doing, I want an answer to the following:
Why on earth do ‘they’ REALLY want all this information about us all?
If you are thinking ‘I’m no criminal, I have nothing to hide and therefore nothing to fear’ then I invite you to please think again. We need to question the motives behind all of this observation. The official excuse is to prevent terrorism, paedophilia and anything else that any rational human being would consider abhorrent. It’s an easy sell to those who don’t take much interest in the detail of what’s going on. But really, is this all just an exercise in ‘keeping us safe’? I for one, am not buying it. It just doesn’t stack up.
Before Mr Snowden’s revelations, before 9-11, I’d heard rumours of Echelon, the Aussie/ Canadian / Kiwi / British / Yankee data collection system operating on t’internet, monitoring everybody’s activities online. At that time, the very idea was considered ‘conspiracy theory’ – sadly, now a term synonymous with bullshit. Yet, what do you know – it was true. Every porn website you ever looked at is logged somewhere. Every message sent on a dating website is added to a psychological profile. Every political view expressed online is logged, analysed and profiled. Every email, text and IM analysed and available for perusal by whomsoever ‘they’ saw fit to give access to. But what possible use could they have for all this data?
Well, who is really in control of our governments? Who really drives their policies? Aside from election run up time, it’s the corporations and their lobbyists who determine all the significant changes in law, government and politics. If I were a CEO of a corporation, I’d have some use for all of this information, I’m sure. If I were also a sufficiently senior government representative, I’d have access to it too. Hmm.
Now this is where I will risk donning the shameful ‘conspiracy theorist’ label. To me there’s at least one use for all this data collection that is all too obvious. If you are not familiar with the term social engineering, then as an example, please read about Victor Lebow and his plan for society – to quote:
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.
This idea was adopted on a mass scale by the US government in the 1950s, and we are all living with the consequences to this day – we value people by their wealth, not their value to society. We feel worthless if we don’t have much money. Consider the word ‘thrift’. At one time not so long ago, thrift was considered a good quality in a person. Now, in this world of ever decreasing resources, we have been socially engineered to call this same quality something else – we now call it ‘being tight’ in the UK, or ‘being cheap’ in the US. We KNOW that an ever increasing rate of consumerism on a planet composed of finite resources cannot continue indefinitely. Yet somehow, we’re all still playing along, working more and more hours, buying more and more crap, knuckling down and surviving somehow whilst we ride the never ending boom-bust wave. Are we stupid? No. Have we been manipulated. Most certainly.
Creepy: Leaked NSA document showing spooks where to intercept previously encrypted, private personal data within google’s server cloud
So ultimately, I think they need to gather information on us to work out how we tick, to keep us towing the line, buying the products, ignoring the injustice, keep reaching for ever higher levels of affluence. Doing so is a simple matter – they create profiles on us, they model our behaviour, categorise and analyse us. As a software developer, I can see how easy it would be to automatically generate psychological profiles on every internet user on the planet. It’s not rocket science, and if you’re a CEO of a company with a turnover bigger than most countries GDP, a company that employs political lobbyists, a company that has government members as major shareholders, not forgetting that legal responsibility to your shareholders to maximise profits at all costs, I’d make sure that I had access to this information.
To surmise, I see a corrupt, self serving, yet self destructive system of economics and government, rife with cynicism and greed, hell bent on exploiting every human foible possible. I fear Mr Snowden has just exposed the tip of a very large, ugly iceberg. I hope and pray that others will follow his courageous lead so that one day we can rid ourselves of the ruling elite who have no interest in anything other than their share portfolios – society, the planet and everyone else be damned. It’s all about money and power, it always is.