The Chris Moeller Archives

The unhinged

I wish I could laugh at the assertion of Kellyanne Conway that the federal government is capable of eavesdropping on us through our microwave ovens, but this is just more unfocused nonsense-- courtesy of a dim-witted administration-- that needlessly distracts from the very real information release by WikiLeaks last week that the Intelligence State is listening in on our calls, is reading our emails, and possesses the capability to cover their tracks when doing either. The defenders of the Surveillance State that control the Democratic and Republican parties are steering you away from the horrific reality of unconscionable Fourth Amendment violation by jumping on this dumb microwave comment or inflating the comical image of President Obama purportedly eavesdropping each night during the summer of 2016 to the goings-on at Trump Tower. The current political debate regarding our inalienable right to privacy perfectly encapsulates this date and time of our collapsing republic-- an executive branch incapable of accurately identifying-- or keeping its focus trained upon-- what are actual threats to American democracy (that is, our own institutions), and an opposition party more committed to party loyalty and entrenched financial interest than to Constitutional safeguards.

As Senator Rand Paul accurately explained on Face the Nation Sunday, the NSA is tapping into our international calls, backed by the blanket approval of the FISA court, with the expressed purpose of surveilling foreigners, but with the true purpose of listening to Americans. This conspiracy has enjoyed bipartisan cover for some time as both former president Obama and GOP representative Mike Rogers, former House Intelligence Chair, have defended it. (Rogers famously said in 2013, "You can't have your privacy violated if you don't know your privacy is violated.) Both of those politicos have publicly called such practice of listening in on Americans “illegal,” which it should be considered, but domestic eavesdropping without a warrant was legalized by them and other lawmakers with the 2008 FISA law (in particular, Section 702) that then-Senator Obama voted for after he had vowed to filibuster against it.

The law states that the target of such surveillance must be the foreigner (which itself is a Constitutionally-dubious initiative, but whatever), yet the government gets “back door” access in this way to Americans as well; and, note, our government doesn’t need to “target” anyone at all in order to collect huge volumes of communications. 250 million internet transactions are captured each year by the NSA, along with an unknown but likely vast number of phone calls-- and this is done without a warrant being issued or the burden of probable cause. It’s extremely likely that Americans’ conversations account for much of this collected data.

The Democratic Party-- the new preferred political party of the Central Intelligence Agency, has adopted the tack of vilifying WikiLeaks for disclosures such as this CIA hack, ones they feel commit the unpardonable sin of politically aiding the current president. Speaking out against this secret overreach is liable to get one branded a traitor in chat-rooms, that, and/or an agent of Vladimir Putin, the evil genius of Eurasia that masterminded Hillary Clinton's electoral defeat, along with the Democratic Party’s net loss of more than a thousand legislative seats at the federal and state level during the eight years of the Obama presidency.

Thanks to WikiLeaks’ hack, we know that the CIA develops software for targeting Android smartphones and Apple iPhones to gain information about our locations, communications, and contacts. We know now that the CIA can bypass encryption by hacking directly into someone’s phone. Edward Snowden says the big reveal in this release is that the United States is paying the Google, Microsoft, and Apple corporations to retain the encryption vulnerabilities. We have also learned that the CIA is able to spoof Russian IP addresses, which would allow the agency to, theoretically, pin any hacking actions by their agents to Russian provocateurs. The unfocused political strategy from Washington that defends these actions and attacks the WikiLeaks reveal runs the spectrum from “this disclosure puts us in a precarious position with, and provides comfort to, our enemies” to “well, duh, tell us something we didn’t already know.” Which is it, I wonder? A dangerous new geopolitical development or a meaningless one?

The paranoia of liberals and their allied news organizations in respect to Trump’s Russia drama has been incredibly self-defeating. It is discrediting the news sources, destroying reputations, and lowering the discourse to the level of the president's strength. It’s not hard to understand their impulse, however. The Clinton wing of the Democratic party is, according to close study, incapable of self-reflection, unsuited to direct its focus to serious and documentable problems, and powerless to reform itself. It stood to reason that we would arrive here. The corporatists on the Democratic side that have been unexpectedly cast as outsiders to real power have no resonant message for the American people, as proven during a thorough election cycle that stretched more than 18 months, and they obviously believe that this “ends justify the means” political hatcheting strategy won't eventually bring down our democratic institutions, so we are saddled with an opposition campaign to a xenophobic conspiracy theorist president, that is, itself, a xenophobic conspiracy theory. I mean, do they really think Trump is an agent of Putin and the Russian state? Meanwhile, six Democratic Senators voted to confirm Ben Carson as HUD secretary, and ten supported Rick Perry’s bid for energy chief, the destruction of both departments part of the current Washington agenda.

The Democratic Party has spent the better part of the last three decades mainstreaming the Republicans’ greed- and fear-based policies, and this latest trend to buck logic continues the trend in a new way. Several years ago, Hillary Clinton, eternally attracted to slime as she is, latched herself onto David Brock, the political strategist first famous for smearing Anita Hill on behalf of the Republicans in the late 1980s and a walking, breathing indictment of the accusation that there’s a hair’s difference between the two major American political parties. Now we’re seeing Brock's methodology at work in support of the Democrats, the spewing of Russian-based murder conspiracies, for example, that hearken back to the greatest hits of Rush Limbaugh. This hysteria has been bubbling over ever since the Great Lakes states turned red on our televisions on November 8th. Trump’s surprise victory was an existential defeat for the Clinton Democrats that was a parallel to the metaphysical blow the United States endured when the 9-11 hijackers attacked us and then committed suicide, depriving us of our identify-defining chance at revenge. It reveals a deep, damaging insecurity in these people that nearly mirrors that of the current resident of the Oval Office, and it’s ultimately a political loser because it's an attack on reason.

posted by CM @ 6:28 PM