— but it was a secret —
Bradley Manning is being tried for aiding the enemy along with other charges like stealing and disseminating classified communications and the “Collateral Damage” video. IOW he stole secrets.
Julian Assange is holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London to except either the long-arm of Swedish law or the US for releasing US secret classified State Dept. cables and the “Collateral Damage” video.
Edward Snowden is stuck at the Moscow airport to avoid US authorities for his theft and release of NSA secrets. And aiding the enemy.
We have secret drone strikes. And President Obama has a secret kill list. We’re assured that no drones will be used in the US to kill an American. And the NSA isn’t listening to or reading any of the content in its dragnet of non-terrorist American communications. Or maybe they mean as long as it doesn’t pertain to “the enemy.”
And the enemy is? Ta-da! That’s Classified as reported by ProPublica.
At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.
The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”
A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that revealing such a list could cause “serious damage to national security.”
“Because elements that might be considered `associated forces’ can build credibility by being listed as such by the United States, we have classified the list,” said the spokesman, Lt. Col. Jim Gregory. “We cannot afford to inflate these organizations that rely on violent extremist ideology to strengthen their ranks.”
Will Bradley Manning be convicted of “aiding the enemy” because the enemy is a secret? Dark days ahead or are here.
Secrecy creeps over to the Senate. From The Hill, Tax writers promise 50 years of secrecy for senators’ suggestions.
Maybe they could make the tax code a secret as well. Make April 15 surprise day with the delivery of our tax bills.
Bernie Sanders respectfully declines to be a party to the Baucus and Hatch secret tax writing conspiracy.
Great minds think alike! I put these together in my snark blog.
Hunter S. Thompson sez:
“Big Darkness, soon come.”
He was on the leading edge of the curve. But Americans prefer not to pay attention until the lights quit flickering and go out for good.
We’re not going to talk about our secret enemies list because it’s classified. And we’re not going to tell you why it’s classified, because that would be talking about it.
And we welcome a public debate on NSA surveillance as long as nothing is written or spoken about it.
“1984” was nearly 30 years ago, but it remains today with a vengeance.
Published in 1949. Setting the story in 1984 would have seemed reasonable given what had transpired in the western world in the prior two decades. However, essentially correct projections rarely get the timing right. Too many variables to account for.
Come on, it’s not that hard to figure out. The first article you linked to mentions China prominently. I don’t like the idea of calling China an enemy, but they’re certainly a rival, and they have certainly gained a lot of technical information that they can use against the United States.
Are you even willing to consider a scenario in which these leaks have done real damage to national security? The Internet is always a two-way street, which means that no government can go around snooping on anybody without making itself vulnerable to a counterattack.
Leaving aside the propriety of such snooping (I know, I know), what you’ve got with PRISM is basically an interface that can be used to feed gigantic amounts of data from, say, Google, to the government’s servers. Given the existence of such a program, the challenge for any national enemy you might name is to figure out how to get in there and smuggle in malicious code or data of one kind or another. Any technical details they can get are going to make their task that much easier.
No. As economic globalization has erased that automation, competitive advantage component of what was once claimed to be part of national security, there’s not much so much left to be secret about. (I recall the time when it was forbidden to sell or supply any computers a long list of Cold War “enemy states.” But at least those states were defined, and many today are our BFF.)
What’s good for GM is good for the country but what’s good for Goldman Sachs is bad news for everybody.
Something like that — but we shouldn’t forget that GM conspired to take out public transit systems after WWII in various cities.
But compared to the vampire squid blood funnel that was just a walk in the park, though a perfect example of how the first part of my statement is false also.
My concern is that no sovereign state could stand up to these monsters if it wanted to; good luck getting our hands back on the national security apparatus now, it is already passing in to the hands of a corporate class which will wield it with increasing impunity to aggrandise their power. The tipping point is behind us, I fear, and Snowden a footnote.