Posted on 12/26/2013 3:43:52 AM PST by SoFloFreeper
... Hi, and merry Christmas. I’m honored to have a chance to speak to you and your family this year.
Recently, we learned that our governments, working in concert, have created a system of worldwide mass surveillance watching everything we do.
Great Britain’s George Orwell warned us of the danger of this kind of information. The types of collection in the book: microphones, video cameras, TVs that watch us —are nothing compared to what we have today. We have sensors in our pockets that track us everywhere we go.
Think about what that means for the privacy of the average person. A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters.
Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.
The conversation occurring today will determine the amount of trust we can place both in the technology that surrounds us and the government that regulates it. Together, we can find a better balance, end mass surveillance and remind the government if it really wants to know how we feel asking is always cheaper than spying.
For everyone out there listening, thank you and merry Christmas.
(Excerpt) Read more at dissenter.firedoglake.com ...
As he was bravely running to Singapore, Red China, Russia...
Should Snowden have simply stayed in place to become either a State criminal or yet another unexplained death by so-called natural causes?
The US government gives multi-billion-dollar State grants to Singapore R&D institutions. China is arguably only somewhat more Red than the present USA administration. (I don’t recall Snowden seeking asylum in China. He transited through Hong Kong.) Russia has taken a public stand against the homosexual agenda. The State is today supporting religion in public life and the nuclear family.
The days of clear cut differences between communism and capitalism, tyranny and freedom, as exemplified by nation states, are waning. There is tyrannical communism here in the USA and elements of individual freedom and capitalism in all the nations to which Snowden turned for asylum.
If your argument is that Snowden ran from an oppressive USA to our former enemies, it is weak, in that he found asylum in the former Soviet Union. Alliances shift.
Snowden’s act remains separate from his place of asylum. When one’s country is a tyranny, one’s obligation to it is no longer required.
you’re using the right verbage... contract. law is nothing by a contract we all agree to live by
the trick with the contracts that make up the law is they are built on all previous laws. and there is no severance clause
when they violate the Constitution... it void all laws based on it
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