BWare

NSA illegally spied on MLK, and US senators.

If you think that's not going on now, you're an idiot. That's how they stay in power, and out of jail.

Disband it. Scatter its ashes to the wind.

Even if you try to use modern methods, you’re fucked.

And a contract sysadmin exposed it to the world. Why do you not think that the Russian Mafia/CS13/PLA has it?

It’s just good free-market economics. If one guy exposed it because he had morals, some other guy exposed it to the mob because he got paid big bux.

How is it not possible to believe that if a lowly contractor sysadmin can access anyone’s email, that the head of an organization with a $52 billion dollar budget does not get a daily summary of subject matter of the private emails of the most powerful people in the nation?

Would it not be the height of irresponsible behavior as the guardian of Our Homeland’s security to protect against the, ahem, possibility that one of our leaders had been co-opted? Compromised?

And if you had that information, or could get it with wiggle of your finger (presumably he’d be too intelligent, unlike certain former DCIAs, to write the order down, or email it, or say it on the phone – and if not intelligent enough to surmise, to learn by example), do you think your budget would ever be disclosed, much less cut, or that you’d be prosecuted like a lowly baseball player for lying under oath to the highest body in the land?

Does not the example of the former head of a competing agency give sufficient warning to those in legislative and executive councils, those who have to stand to election, to keep their dogs on a short leash?

I assume that no man is without sin. But if JC himself came back, do you think that emails could not be made to appear, documents found? The opposite of the GWB docs. Even JC in his own day didn’t survive a government that didn’t want him around. Think the Romans had anything on this empire?

The French have a phrase: pour encourager les autres. Detainments at Heathrow, harassment at every border for the rest of your life, years of solitary confinement, black prisons, orange jumpsuits, exile to a small room in a foreign embassy or on the run in a cold hostile land waiting for the umbrella or black car or compromised water glass, or having all vestiges of power stripped (one wonders who the DCIA pissed off, or how did he not keep enough files on hand to protect himself).

If the penalty for refusal to cooperate is prison, consider the encouragement those in high places must receive, logged only in files that are not accessible to the public. You have no right to know who your leaders speak to, or more precisely, who speaks to them.

You of course have no such protections.

It’s so specific, it could happen yesterday. Or next week. Since the closure of 22 embassies has been extended through mid-August. Aside from the specific 22 embassies closed in the specific countries of Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Mauritania, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, Yemen, Israel, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the threat is so specific, well, let them tell it:

“This threat was so specific as to how enormous it was going to be and also certain dates were given,” Representative Peter King, a New York Republican who serves on both the House Intelligence and Homeland Security committees, said on “This Week.” While an attempted attack is most likely to happen in the Middle East, “It could be in Europe, it could be in the United States.”

You’re supposed to report your international travel to the State Department. Good luck with that, millions of Americans currently overseas. You should definitely report your travel plans to the nearest consulate. I’m sure they’re equipped to handle that. Especially the ones that are closed. Operators are standing by.

The threat is specific enough that you should be careful of taking planes, trains, or boats. One presumes taxis and tuk-tuks are still as safe as they ever were.

And this from the guy who was claiming that Snowden harmed US security by revealing methods and alerting AQ that they were being monitored (because, well, all of us are. Being monitored.):

The latest alert and embassy closures may be an effort to disrupt al-Qaeda operations, according to Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director under the George W. Bush administration.

The announcements may be designed to put al-Qaeda “on the back foot, to let them know that we’re alert and we’re on to at least a portion of this plot line,” Hayden said yesterday on “Fox News Sunday.”

And this doesn’t? Something something sauce something gander.

A nickel says this isn’t about a specific threat. It’s about making the NSA look good. It’s about setting an orange alert level now that we don’t have alerts levels anymore. It’s about making sure you’re aware that your government which is spying on you illegally is looking out for your best interests. Much as my sister was when she turned my stack of Playboys over to my parents. “It’s for your own good,” she said as seriously as a fourteen year old girl can.

Well, not so much as it turned out.

And of course this has absolutely nothing to do with Snowden getting asylum in Russia, and Manning being sentenced to life, and getting those stories off the Sunday news hours, and white-knighting the NSA instead.

One assumes he’s taking ideas from people at my TLA organization. I used to send in ideas that he’d use. But it probably just means that it sucks just as much to work here as anyplace else.

Add the guy without an inside voice whose job it is to talk on the phone all day, and who doesn’t know about email, and when he’s not talking about work, or has (literally) seven people in his office having an impromptu three hour meeting, is talking on the phone about his train setup.

Or the guy who thinks it’s ok to conference call on speakerphone (pro-tip: get a headset).

Or, or should I say, and, the lady who thinks it’s ok to 1) cook smelly food in her office all day long, 2) listen to Beyonce on loudspeakers (“no one has ever complained before!”, 3) wear too much perfume, and 4) I’m pretty sure the loud continual phone conversations in Armenian have absolutely nothing to do with work as evidenced by the restaraunt names in English. There is the lovely sound of her two-inch fingernails on the keyboard to make up for it though…

Supposedly, scientists are supposed to work here. I guess you could add crying babies, dripping water, loud punk rock, and the air compressor kicking off downstairs. Wait. One of those is a real thing. I can see the vibrations in my coffee cup, ala Jurassic Park. And I listen to loud punk rock on AKG K271s in order to drown out the other voices not in my head. So I guess that’s a real thing too.

I do have a window. Out of which I can see mountains. And red-tailed hawks.