the Internet is bugged

Eric Snowden brought into widespread public knowledge what was available and well understood by many of us long before. Big Brother IS watching – the Internet, e-mail, phone calls, from the sky, traffic cameras and on and on.

This is and is not news. But it certainly is more openly discussed and widely understood now. It makes many intelligent people retreat. But you don’t win with retreat.

The Internet is the main source of honest news. If they scare us away, they have a virtual monopoly – their misinformation becomes society’s exclusive input.

Many, perhaps most people even slightly aware of the threats that exist to life, liberty and property retreat. That’s smart – kind of. However, if everyone closes their doors and pulls the drapes, the JBTs simply go door-to-door taking us out one-by-one.

Fourteen Million people made it to the gulags that way. Some things don’t change.

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

Smart people hide and hope others will save them. For some of us that is not good enough. That does not seem a hopeful long-term plan. So we expose ourselves, inform, cajole, shout ….