facebook | I am updating my post from Friday (http://naomiwolf.org/?p=1835)
that raised questions — just questions, which citizens in a
functioning democracy should always be expecting to raise at all times
about everything — in this case, about some aspects of Snowden’s
presentation that I find worth further inquiry. Please remember that
these are questions not assertions. Sources in the whistleblower
community have confirmed that the more serious of my questions — which
relate to the odd absence of US counsel at Snowden’s side, given that
the laws he will be accused of violating, if he is charged, are US laws
— does bear further investigation.
On the bigger
picture, I do find a great deal of media/blog discussion about serious
questions such as those I raised, question that relate to querying some
sources of news stories, and their potential relationship to
intelligence agencies or to other agendas that may not coincide with
the overt narrative, to be extraordinarily ill-informed and naive.
There
is no bright line that separates ‘real events’ from the world of
intelligence, surveillance, and potential intervention in outcomes.
There is not ‘reality’ and ‘spy novels’ any more, with no
interpenetration. On the contrary — the surveillance/security world and
‘the real world’ are bring more closely knit all the time, and both
reporters and commentators need to lose their naivete about this
interpenetration.
There is no longer a bright line between
‘us’, transparent reality in which everything is as it appears, and
‘them’ — the spooks, the shadow side, what used to be the material of
John le Carre novels.
The security state and its apparatus
is a now a massive part of our economy; billions and billions of
dollars — the number is not transparent — are transmitted via DHS, the
NSA and other entities into the hiring of vast numbers of people whose
job is to do what they do while not appearing to do what they do, in
terms of surveillance and other forms of domestic scrutiny of dissent;
other billions are funnelled into the technology that indeed watches
everything we do and say. Some of the jobs go to people inside the NSA —
but more and more of these tasks are being done by people contracted
to engage in security or surveiilance-related tasks, in mainstream
corporate America.
