On NSA Spying Activities

9/23/2013 Interview with Guardian Editor in Chief Alan Rusbridger on the Inside Story of Snowden Leaks:
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/9/23/spilling_the_nsas_secrets_guardian_editor?autostart=true&get_clicky_key=suggested_most_popular_story

Hamid Javaherian

 

(Date Originally Published: 7/29/2013)

We heard in the news yesterday that the US congress has denied us the right to privacy by failing to limit the government’s access to our personal information and the secret data collection by NSA. The congress rejected the petition to prevent the US government from invasive move into our private life by keeping the NSA unleashed to continue spying on the US citizens. .  The general public’s  view on this issue is that we inherently have an irrevocable right to privacy.  Under the guise of ‘national security, we as citizens have lost a great deal of our civil rights in a fictitious war against terrorism, and in pretend of defense to our national security.  The erosion of this constitutional right ( the 10th amendment ) began with the presidency of G.W. Bush and became more enhanced after 911.  Our Civil Rights are in a grave danger. Infringement on our personal information has been done in violation of the Constitution, and the burden of stopping the government in their illegal practice is now laid upon us the People to enact a law to prevent them from doing so ––a paradoxical chaos!  The difference between the United States of America and countries like Iraq or Iran is precisely it’s Constitutions upon which it’s democracy stand.  There are numerous argument on this topic.  Some say, “ Well! I know the government eavesdropping on people is wrong, but I don’t have anything to hide, so who cares! The counter argument to this naivete is;  Yes it does matter and we should care because the right to privacy, as our constitutional rights is all what distinguishes us as a democracy from other totalitarian regimes around the globe.  The government isn’t specifically given the power to violate your privacy.  The right to privacy needs to be upheld as long as democracy is respected.  Allowing the government to bypass us on one of our rights would lead to the eventual erosion of our collective rights as a People?

Confusion! (Part 2)

Since 1980, status quo has been dominating the political climate of the United States, in an upward trend, with a sharp upswing at each presidential election of both parties. There are various ways for the State (establishment) to ensure the selected few stay in power. In addition to control of the media, keeping votes in the hands of the supporters of such nominees has been the policy of the government from the beginning. We know that the constitution excluded majority of people from voting, keeping the ballots excluded to male Anglo-Saxon landowners. People’s struggles against this discriminatory law for more than hundred years, from 1868 to 1972 forced legislators to pass amendments 14, 15, 19, 23, 26, and to call the Poll Tax unconstitutional. However, the establishment found other ways to keep economically disadvantaged people excluded from the voting process. It may help to consider voter turnout in US presidential elections since 1828:

Confusion! (Part 1)

Coming back from a short trip along with four other friends yesterday (writing for this blog started on 7/8/13 and was completed a week later), we were listening to the news of the airplane that crashed upon landing in San Francisco airport on CNN, Fareed Zakaria’ s news analysis program. Zakaria had three guests to discuss the events in Egypt, plane crash in San Francisco airport, and the fate of Edward Snowden, in addition to some CNN reporters. It was interesting that his three guests said the same thing about each of those subjects, as if each was repeating the previous speaker’s analysis, just in different verbiages. They ended up saying what Zakaria concluded, and what we can hear from government officials regarding all three subjects. There was not much to explain about the plane crash, what we were mostly interested to learn about. However, the other two subjects; “lack of experience in democracy in Egypt” and “Snowden aiding the enemy” were not anything short of the news we could get from Fox and other media, mostly the mouthpiece of the US government. In his memoire published in 2010, Jimmy Carter discloses his notes of his presidential period of late 1970s. One complaint that is continually repeated throughout this book is the conflict the media had with his administration, and the media’s polarization of his policies. He states that at the beginning of his term, Washington Post published a document about Jordan’s King Hussein, and his relationship with the CIA disclosing Hussein’s monthly stipend from the US secret service. It is interesting to see the 180 degrees turn of the media coverage during these thirty something years, to an opposite direction. The main reason may be monopolization of the media, and allegiance of the media moguls to status quo.