From last year:
President Barack Obama on Monday will announce a plan to impose sanctions against foreign entities and individuals who help authoritarian regimes use technology to crack down on dissidents, an administration official said.
There was a diary earlier about this, but it has since been deleted, so, when I went to send an email to the White House, I couldn't reference it. However, this
Guardian article from last year makes one wonder if the White House really thinks we can't remember what happened during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, and with whose help.
Continued below the turd of gold...
There is no denying we live in interesting times. Sometimes it feels like the Medieval torture where a victims's entrails were slowly winched out. The drip, drip, drip revelations that keep emerging from the L'Affaire Snowden--like TODAY, with Der Spiegel's disclosure that the NSA had spied on UNHQ and on EU nation embassies--keep us wondering what will be the NSA-related headline tomorrow morning. Yes, British (and American) authorities would like to think that we've had enough fun by now, but I suspect the "fun" has barely begun. We may actually be witnessing the very beginning of the process of winching our innards back into our bodies and out of the hands of the surveillance community
This morning at church I heard someone, who works in the field of helping people with psychiatric matters on behalf of the Province of Ontario, report that recently he has had numerous cases of people calling because they have suddenly been prevented from entering the United States by border guards, even though they have been crossing the border freely for twenty years or more. Why is this? Well, these are folks who may have had a mental health event decades ago that involved the police taking them to a psychiatric hospital for observation or treatment, and somehow that information has now been shared with Homeland Fucking Security, and Canadians who have had no mental health issues for ages are suddenly being prevented from visiting friends or family south of the border for no legitimate reason at all. We all saw the map that shows Homeland Security considers all of North America its "domain." They don't care about no stinkin' sovereignty. Welcome to hell.
I don't know how the White House expects us to keep a straight face while it condemns other countries for doing some of the very despicable Constitution-defying things that it has helped to do right at home, either during G-20 summits or, most obviously, during the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations: tracking peaceful demonstrators' cell phones, beating, pepper-spraying, arresting people for exercising their First Amendment rights.
I will continue to say it like a mantra: the 99% have more money and people than the 1%. The only thing that prevents us from success is our lack of ability to laser-focus our energies in a productive way. But that day may yet come.