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Sunday, November 10, 2013

Reflections In A Nosy Eye


Reflection Of A Homeland Security Logo 



I wrote about Twitter going public, and how it is part of a large-scale download of our souls into the data clouds of corporations, and will soon be accessible to all the Homeland Security agencies and NSA operatives, although they may have to pay Twitter for it with taxpayers money.

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2013/11/twitter-goes-public-bayesian.html

You may think my point was over the top.

Read the following from August about the closing of the website Groklaw :
...“I can’t do Groklaw without your input,” writes Jones in the blog entry. “It was really a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.”

[...]

Groklaw joins the ranks of Lavabit and Silent Circle – another encrypted e-mail service provider – as the three notable online resources whose shutdowns have garnered public attention. Lavabit owner and operator Ladar Levison did not give an exact reason for the site’s shutdown and stated in a letter announcing the site's closure that he was not allowed to by law. News that Edward Snowden was one of the e-mail provider’s clients, and Levison’s promise to appeal to the Fourth Circuit, fueled suspicion that the site closed while they fight a gag order from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court. Silent Circle followed suit to preempt any federal information requests, according to a company statement.

[...]

With Orwellian terms frequently tossed into conversation about the NSA, it seems only fitting that the “grok” in “Groklaw” comes from a Science Fiction novel “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein.
 
“Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed – to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group existence,” wrote Mr. Heinlein in the novel. However, there seems to be a difficulty finding a balance between the openness described by Heinlein’s grok and the government’s penchant for gathering up all of this information made public.
And we are left wondering what the heck is wrong with the people we have honored with all those positions of power in government and military?
What the heck?

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