— by Polydamas
In 1983, the British music band “The Police” released an album titled “Synchronicity”. Highlighting that album was a song called “Every Breath You Take” which won the band the 1984 Grammy “Song of the Year” award. The lyrics of the song, sung in Sting’s inimitable crooning style, were nothing short of a creepy poem from a stalker to the female object of his affections.
Every breath you take
And every move you make
Every bond you break, every step you take
I’ll be watching you
Every single day
And every word you say
Every game you play, every night you stay
I’ll be watching you
Every move you make
And every vow you break
Every smile you fake, every claim you stake
I’ll be watching you
With the beleaguered administration of President Barack Hussein Obama already reeling from the Benghazi, Internal Revenue Service, and Associated Press scandals, the American people — and the rest of the world — learned this week that their government was a supremely nosy “Big Brother” who was watching every American like the creepy stalker from the song above. The revelation that the American government was employing certain top secret technology called PRISM to spy on all Americans and not just on the terrorists is terrifying to every freedom-loving American and civil libertarian.
The Washington Post June 6, 2013 article titled “U.S., British Intelligence Mining Data From Nine U.S. Internet Companies in Broad Secret Program” reports that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigations can “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type”, a revelation made by a career intelligence officer with first-hand knowledge of the intelligence-gathering operation. (http://wapo.st/14ClB0z). According to the intelligence officer’s leaked information, “98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google and Microsoft”. The following private Internet companies have reportedly partnered with the government: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Representatives of these companies who were asked to comment have denied any knowledge or participation in the PRISM program, cynical denials whose falsity is to be expected.
It is not outside the realm of possibility that Microsoft, Google, and Apple, which account for the Windows, Android, and Apple/iOS operating systems, respectively, have also clandestinely provided the NSA with backdoors into their operating systems as well as keyloggers. Few people in today’s society know what every process and driver on their computers’ operating systems actually does. Those who do probably work for the NSA or can be forced to zip their lips. With the recent technological trend of “cloud computing”, which puts computer users’ entire hard drives and processing power on government-accessible Internet servers with users relegated to operating dumb terminals with keyboards, (http://bit.ly/25wmvu), the NSA can also easily read the novel you wrote on your wordprocessor program, your family tree in your genealogy program, and your innermost thoughts in your electronic diary.
There was another unsurprising report in the news of the day. Apparently, Congressman Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), author of the Patriot Act which begat PRISM, proclaimed that “While I believe the Patriot Act appropriately balanced national security concerns and civil rights, I have always worried about potential abuses”. (http://bit.ly/13i0gKw). Really?! Governments abusing their powers? How absolutely unforeseeable in light of history. Rep. Sensenbrenner mouthed other vacuous statements as “Seizing phone records of millions of innocent people is excessive and un-American”, “These reports are deeply concerning and raise questions about whether our constitutional rights are secure”, “How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation as required by the Act?”
We at The Cassandra Times wish to paint an imaginary dark scenario why the administration might want to spy on the American people and what the future may bring. This imaginary scenario, which may hit close to home — or not –, is not based upon any inside knowledge of the PRISM program or any contacts within the administration. Rather, it is based upon our knowledge of human nature, history, such classic books as Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli’s “The Prince”, our fertile imagination and reading disutopian novels like George Orwell’s “1984” and the short stories of Phillip K. Dick.
Imagine we are in late October to early November of 2014 and the midterm elections to the United States Senate and House of Representatives are upon us. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee need to retain the Senate and hope to re-take the House of Representatives. Owing to their intimate knowledge of the American people, gained through PRISM sifting through e-mails and telephone call transcripts, the Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee already know exactly which likely voters subscribe to its liberal ideology. Each of these likely voters receives an e-mail and a text to his or her mobile phone commanding a vote for Democratic candidates.
The above may be a seemingly innocent scenario, except that a similar e-mail and text is also sent to the mobile phones of likely Republican voters and maybe insufficiently motivated Democrat voters commanding them to vote for Democratic candidates. The text then proceeds to name an item of blackmail, which was gleaned by PRISM, which will be divulged to cause maximum damage unless the voter performs as instructed. The blackmail item can be revealing sexual peccadilloes like extramarital affairs (read: Central Intelligence Agency Director General David Petraeus; Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA)), sexual acts with subordinates (read: President Bill Clinton), sex with prostitutes (read: pollster Dick Morris), children out of wedlock (read: Sen. John Edwards (D-NC)), homosexuality (read: Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL)), drug addictions (broadcaster Rush Limbaugh), mental illnesses (read: Democrat Vice-Presidential Candidate Thomas Eagleton), felonies (Republican Vice-President Spiro Agnew), employing illegal aliens as nannies (read: Attorney General Candidate Zoë Baird) or any other embarrassing items.
Gullible “Elmer Fudd” Republicans, Democrats, and Independents will scoff at the notion that politicians and political parties have used, currently use, and will use in the future the selective leaking of sensitive private information against their political opponents. The facts indicate otherwise. This past year, liberal activist Curtis Morrison secretly recorded and then leaked Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), which he justified to himself and to his readers as being for the greater good. (http://bit.ly/1aIplBd).
Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA), the current Chairman of the House Ethics Committee, leaked to the media a 1997 telephone conversation between Republican leaders, including Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Gingrich’s attorney, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), and others. Rep. McDermott was rebuked by the House Ethics Committee for actions that were “inconsistent with the spirit of the applicable rules and represented a failure on his part to meet his obligations” and that his “secretive disclosures to the news media … risked undermining the ethics process”. (http://bit.ly/18jShDz).
Even further back in 1996, it was discovered that White House employee Craig Livingstone and other individuals in the administration of President Bill Clinton had obtained between 400 and 900 FBI files on prominent Republicans, including former Secretary of State James A. Baker, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and former spokesman Marlin Fitzwater. (http://bit.ly/1193AWO). No one has figured out who had hired Livingstone, a former bouncer at a Washington, D.C. bar and political operative who received the highest security clearance despite having no experience. As reported in a January 15, 1998 article in the New York Times titled “Starr Questions Hillary Clinton on F.B.I. Files”, (http://nyti.ms/14eObbK), the FBI files contained “personal information, including reports of marital indiscretions, run-ins with the law and medical data”. One can only imagine what stealthy and nefarious uses were made of the sensitive information contained in the FBI files by Livingstone and his secret masters against their political opponents.
If the above scandals and improper use of private and sensitive information by government operators can happen to politicians and politically-savvy people who thrust themselves into the public eye, how much more vulnerable are average American people? Every American adult has some private aspects of his or her life which he or she would prefer to remain private and not exposed to public consumption. By combing through private e-mails and telephone conversations, every American adult can be charged with any number of felonies and misdemeanors from the many thousands of rules, regulations, and case law infesting the statutes and law books of the federal government and the states. Every American adult is a person, susceptible to specifically targeted blackmail, who can be persuaded to vote, to act or to refrain from acting just like a puppet on a string.
Using technological blackmail to control a country’s citizenry produces an elegant and relatively bloodless dictatorship. By comparison, gulags and prisons and beatings are primitive instruments, blunt barbarian clubs, when the PRISM scalpel can be employed surgically. Somewhere in hell, Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Vladimir Lenin, Ayatolla Khomeini, Benito Musolini, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, and every other tyrant and dictator from the darkest pages of human history wish they lived in the 21st century and were able to deploy PRISM to accomplish political hegemony.
In the final analysis, Rep. Sensenbrenner reminds us at The Cassandra Times of the asinine character Jar Jar Binks from “Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones”. As representative of his planet, Jar Jar Binks gave an impassioned speech to the Senate to grant sweeping emergency powers to Chancellor Palpatine. Palpatine then disbanded the Senate, anointed himself Emperor, and transformed a relatively free republic into an evil and oppressive galactic empire. Evil tyrannies may, indeed, arise from the short-sighted and misguided actions of the naive and well-meaning, like Jar Jar Binks and Jim Sensenbrenner.
