Friday, June 29, 2012
A New Standard for Oxymoronic Newspeak
If there was an ongoing contest in the art of self-contradicting newspeak, a quote from a U.S. military official during the Vietnam War would be the reigning victor for most of the modern era. In describing the decision to ignore the prospect of civilian casualties and vaporize a Vietnamese village, that unnamed official famously told Peter Arnett of the Associated Press that "it became necessary to destroy the town to save it."
Epitomizing the futility, immorality and nihilism of that era-defining war, the line has achieved true aphorism status—employed to describe any political endeavor that is, well...futile, immoral and nihilistic.
But now, ever so suddenly, the Vietnam quote has been dethroned by an even more oxymoronic line—one that perfectly summarizes the zeitgeist of the post-9/11 era. As Wired's Spencer Ackerman reports, "Surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won't tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency (because) it would violate your privacy to say so."
In a letter to senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall, the agency wrote: "(A) review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons."
While the line's bureaucratic lingo doesn't roll of the tongue like its Vietnam-era predecessor, it does equal it for sheer audacity. Yes, those actively violating Americans' privacy claim they can't tell Congress about their activities because doing so might violate Americans' privacy.
Of course, what sets this particular oxymoron apart from others—what makes it the new champion of oxymoronic newspeak—is its special mix of incoherence and non-sequitur. This isn't merely a self-contradictory statement—it's one that ignores the question at hand. As Wyden told Wired: "All that Senator Udall and I are asking for is a ballpark estimate of how many Americans have been monitored under this law"—not any specific names of those being spied on.
By definition, providing a "ballpark" figure can't violate any individuals' privacy. So why would the NSA nonetheless refuse to provide one? Most likely because such an estimate would be a number so big as to become a political problem for the national security establishment.
According to the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, "The U.S. government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001." That's right, millions—and that's merely what happened with one of many programs over the last decade. Moving forward, Wired notes that the NSA is building the "Utah Data Center"—"a project of immense secrecy" designed "to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks."
In the last few years, polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans are uncomfortable with such pervasive snooping. Considering that, it's fair to assume that if the government officially acknowledged an even bigger domestic spying regime than we already know about, we might finally reach a tipping point—one in which public outrage forces a wholesale reevaluation of the NSA's entire mission.
Thus, in the name of self-preservation and self-interest, NSA officials shamelessly offer up the most epically inane oxymoron since Vietnam. They calculate that with a mindless left-versus-right political media more interested in meticulously analyzing the meaningless gaffes of presidential candidates, few news outlets are interested in letting America know about the most serious affronts to civil liberties.
Unfortunately, that calculation is probably accurate.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
© 2012 Creators.com
Epitomizing the futility, immorality and nihilism of that era-defining war, the line has achieved true aphorism status—employed to describe any political endeavor that is, well...futile, immoral and nihilistic.
But now, ever so suddenly, the Vietnam quote has been dethroned by an even more oxymoronic line—one that perfectly summarizes the zeitgeist of the post-9/11 era. As Wired's Spencer Ackerman reports, "Surveillance experts at the National Security Agency won't tell two powerful United States Senators how many Americans have had their communications picked up by the agency (because) it would violate your privacy to say so."
In a letter to senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall, the agency wrote: "(A) review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons."
While the line's bureaucratic lingo doesn't roll of the tongue like its Vietnam-era predecessor, it does equal it for sheer audacity. Yes, those actively violating Americans' privacy claim they can't tell Congress about their activities because doing so might violate Americans' privacy.
Of course, what sets this particular oxymoron apart from others—what makes it the new champion of oxymoronic newspeak—is its special mix of incoherence and non-sequitur. This isn't merely a self-contradictory statement—it's one that ignores the question at hand. As Wyden told Wired: "All that Senator Udall and I are asking for is a ballpark estimate of how many Americans have been monitored under this law"—not any specific names of those being spied on.
By definition, providing a "ballpark" figure can't violate any individuals' privacy. So why would the NSA nonetheless refuse to provide one? Most likely because such an estimate would be a number so big as to become a political problem for the national security establishment.
According to the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, "The U.S. government, with assistance from major telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in a massive program of illegal dragnet surveillance of domestic communications and communications records of millions of ordinary Americans since at least 2001." That's right, millions—and that's merely what happened with one of many programs over the last decade. Moving forward, Wired notes that the NSA is building the "Utah Data Center"—"a project of immense secrecy" designed "to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks."
In the last few years, polls have consistently shown that a majority of Americans are uncomfortable with such pervasive snooping. Considering that, it's fair to assume that if the government officially acknowledged an even bigger domestic spying regime than we already know about, we might finally reach a tipping point—one in which public outrage forces a wholesale reevaluation of the NSA's entire mission.
Thus, in the name of self-preservation and self-interest, NSA officials shamelessly offer up the most epically inane oxymoron since Vietnam. They calculate that with a mindless left-versus-right political media more interested in meticulously analyzing the meaningless gaffes of presidential candidates, few news outlets are interested in letting America know about the most serious affronts to civil liberties.
Unfortunately, that calculation is probably accurate.
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
© 2012 Creators.com
Suppose we had this sort of security monitoring of the public's supposedly private communications be sub-contracted to one or more private corporations, would that make it any better? Would these private contractors then be tempted to outdo their competing contractors, even to the point of "manufacturing" some evidence? Could you still trust the winner?
My point, some things should not be privatized. I would trust our government before I would trust a profit-driven private corporation. All we need to do is work together as a people to keep this government under the control of "We The People", not let it fall under a majority shareholder's control.
Not also the recent news of the fall of Blackberry's Canadian owner RIM. Once tagged as being a highly secure communications platform for it's corporate customers, and accused of not exposing it's codes to governments who want to snoop out terrorism. Think that our NSA hasn't already been able to crack that code?
Can't do your smoke-filled back-room deals over electronics anymore, going to have to go back to making deals in country club saunas, where the participants are naked, cant hide a wire on them, and one can see if someone is taking in a cell-phone or laptop with web-cam that can be turned on by the gov't to listen and watch.
What if your government is currently under the control of profit-driven private corporations?
Exactly. This is why government needs to be bigger than business, and thus can be immune to being controlled by business.
And what will it take to correct that or not let it get started? Open flow of information, especially the statistical non-personal type that everyone's "privacy policy" claims to be. Plus you need the right to vote in a democracy that let's those affected vote for fairness and privacy. Restricting the vote to only those who have "most skin in the game" does not necessarily mean most money invested, it can also be this information.