Don’t Worry, the Government Still Has Plenty of Surveillance Power If Section 215 Sunsets

[CommonDreams]

Don’t Worry, the Government Still Has Plenty of Surveillance Power If Section 215 Sunsets

Cindy Cohn, Andrew Crocker

The story being spun by the defenders of Section 215 of the Patriot Act and the Obama Administration is that if the law sunsets entirely, the government will lose critical surveillance capabilities. The fearmongering includes President Obama, who said: “heaven forbid we’ve got a problem where we could’ve prevented a terrorist attack or could’ve apprehended someone who was engaged in dangerous activity but we didn’t do so.”

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[theoldgoat]

And then there is the privatization element which places this configuration, if I may borrow Jeremy Skahill’s “giant vampire squid” image, in the sphere of predatory capitalism in a phase of inverted totalitarianism as it continues to strangle the world with it.

Free market?? Only in terms of how close to ‘free’ predatory practices can get by ‘externalizing’ costs. The recipe of ‘outsourcing’ aspects of surveillance, making breakdowns of the information available in cross-platform with internet corporations to marketing (was it Goebbels who saw his model in Bernays?). The most recent Facebook ‘internet offering’ is an infantilized dorm room frat-boy notion of access for the people the economic model has already impoverished with a marketing spin taken from superman comics. Nauseating in its pumping and spinning dissociative premises.