There’s too much focus on “whistle blowing” these days turning the whole thing into a dizzying drama of silliness. Which makes it all (conveniently) very distracting. Since it’s common knowledge that spying has been part of our everyday lives since 2001, that is, since American’ts stood stupefied in ignorant-bliss to the ramifications of the Patriot Act, we’ll have to wait for the dust of history to clear before we know if what all these cowardly whistle blowers actually reveal will make a difference. To worst-writer, it won’t make a difference because, as was the case with Daniel Ellsberg, history still repeated itself. Heck, even back then rational thinking Amerians knew that Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, was all a big fat monkey lie. And so… Drunk on consuming to survive American’t went with the flow. And. Subsequently. The war in Afghanistan exceeded both time and money the war in Vietnam. So I suppose the new American’t motto shouldn’t be life & liberty but instead stay stupid and vote your emotions. And nothing changes ever.
The shutting down of Lavabit stirred worst-writer’s thought this weekend. Here we have, dear worst-reader, a great example of the residual effect of grand-standing, disingenuous whistle blowing. The encrypted email service Lavabit, born out of the paranoia that the wizard of Google was spying on gmail users, was used by Edward Snowden to send email. Under pressure from the US government, Ladar Levinson simply shut down the service instead of turning over his servers for illegal inspection. That means, for the sake of the US Constitution, for the sake of all things private and personal, for the sake of men ruled by law as opposed to being ruled by other men, Levinson is taking a stand that even my cynical mind can empathise with. Indeed. This is an example of doing the right thing and standing up for what you do like a real man should and not running away to Russia like a wuss. My only concern now is that all these great digital minds are gonna go to waste on account they all have to run from big brother.
And remember: the truth might eventually possibly perhaps set us all free but it don’t have to.
Newz links:
- Mega to fill secure email gap left by Lavabit | ZDNet
- Lavabit founder closed his secure email service to ‘protect the privacy’ of its users | The Verge
- Lavabit privacy row: second email service closes ‘to prevent spying’ | Technology | theguardian.com
- Lavabit – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- NSA’s Spy History Presents a Daunting Challenge for President Obama | Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Vid to watch:
Rant on.
-tgs-
worstwriter 