Chris Hayes reminded us Monday in "All In" of the Total Information Awareness program we yelled about a decade ago and which supposedly got defunded and stopped in 2004. Except it really didn't get stopped, as we've been finding out for the past few weeks. Here's an excerpt from Hayes's commentary:
The whole commentary can be seen and read here. And here's a transcript for the excerpt appearing above:
Now, in the uproar over PRISM, there has been a tendency to focus on privacy concerns: Is the government reading my Facebook messages? But I think that’s a mistake. Because, quite frankly, well, in that sense no one really has privacy anymore to begin with. Most of us have willingly handed all of our information to Google [...]
No, the real problem, the real problem for all of us isn't the privacy concern, it's the secrecy. The problem is that we didn’t know about this. We didn’t sign off on this. Because secrecy acts in this very insidious way to insulate the government from the most basic kind of democratic accountability. [...]
I’m not concerned by what the NSA is doing because I think they might read my Facebook messages. I’m concerned because the NSA is spending billions of dollars, doing all sorts of stuff, that I, as a United States citizen, never really got to sign off on.
Democracies can and must be able to have secrets, and in fact all democracies do. But what decent, functioning democracies worthy of the name cannot have are huge, multi-billion dollar programs, and bureaucracies, and laws, and legal frameworks, and authorizations that are all invisible to their citizens.
Justice may be blind; citizens cannot be.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008— Oh noes! Hispanics might not support Obama! Except they are:
Consider all the primary-era bullshit spin we heard the first half of this year, and none was more offensive to me than the notion that Latinos wouldn't support Obama because (a) he was black, or (b) they supported Clinton too heavily, or (c) because McCain had a good relationship with that group based on his pre-flip flop support for comprehensive immigration reform, or (d) because that's what the b.s. convention wisdom told them and they were too frackin' stupid to think for themselves.
We've already seen evidence that the CW was terribly awry on this issue.
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Tweet of the Day:
Seems to me having your own paper howling for the government to shut down your sources presents certain difficulties for real journalists.
— @billmon1
Today's "encore performance" of
Kagro in the Morning was our July 5, 2012 show.
Greg Dworkin rounded up early summer polling, and talked about why Rassmussen's so weird. Then, it's all about Romney. His vacation (and review of local lemonade—remember "lemon, wet, good"?); his response to the ACA ruling; his offshore tax havens; and why he's a gaffe machine. Also: the prosperity gospel; and the myth of the wealthy "job creator."
Armando called in to talk over some long-range plans for Daily Kos Radio (not all of which have come to pass). We wrapped up with stories about Republican super-jerk Reps. Joe Walsh, Thad McCotter and Bill Young.
High Impact Posts. Top Comments.