A gloomy stalwart of the communist Eastern Block, notorious East Germany’s STASI (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, Ministry for State Security, in fact a communist’s secret police) enslaved its own citizens in an endless net of surveillance and constant paranoia and had them spying on each other. At the peak of its power, STASI had staggering 30% of East Germans spying on the rest.
I am not trying to say that the Bush Administration (BU) has remotely similar intentions of having our good citizens spying on each other. God forbid casting a shadow of doubt onto current administration’s Freedom Fighters! They have accomplished all their missions and they will gladly accept the task of spying on us all by themselves. All they need is some of our pocket money, give or take a billion, to provide means for such spying. We shall readily pick up the tab for George W. Bush and his administration. After all, they are here to protect us from everything and everyone and, if that shall include all of us in a dire need for protection from ourselves as well, so be it. BU has started its operations as a kind of an educating enterprise – first you had and will have to do it forever, to observe and to listen ubiquitous subway warnings – “If you see a suspicious package or activity on the platform or train, don’t keep it to yourself... call the Terrorism Hotline!” So, if you by a chance see a commuter leaning way over to see if the train is finally coming, beware, you might be seeing something deeply disturbing and really suspicious in her behavior! Stop what you’re doing immediately and call, no one less but the Terrorism Hotline. Good old police should deal only with hot-dog vendors and hygiene violations but everything even remotely suspicious goes directly under the Terror Umbrella.
In a less democratic societies, like East Germany used to be, such design would inspire fear and myopic thinking; it would get innocents ready to spy on fellow humans, but this is not happening here. We spy only on bad guys in the same manner our rockets kill with surgical precision and only bad people, if they kill at all. We have never ever harmed an innocent bystander, God forbid a child. We will never ever spy on a good, TV watching, Dunkin’s Donats munching, celebrity worshiping, “Coca-Cola” gulping, Britney Spears obsessing, Disney pilgrimaging, God fearing and above all tax paying citizens.
Someone more cynical would say that this new law is just another proof that the BU invokes evil spirits of the STASI. Smartypants pundits might even invoke Orwell’s legendary dystopian propaganda and its unlikely Big Brother as some kind of perverted parallel with our democratic domestic spying agendas. Some like the ACLU might also say that Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) does not include spying targeted “at a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States.” (like in the Act’s previous version) thus implying that it now includes U.S. citizens. Some liberal paranoid from the ACLU might even evoke The Fourth Amendment and your right to be secure against unreasonable searches or even go so far to say that this bill unconstitutionally allows the government to wiretap Americans’ emails and phone calls without prior, individualized court review, and without any suspicion of wrongdoing but such a liberal nitpicking should not have its place under the government’s caring surveillance.
But they all would be wrong! Our intelligence community does not operate under the umbrella of some communist’s totalitarian regime, on the contrary! This is transparent policy of the most democratic government in the world, the government that equalizes you, the citizen of the world, with everyone else living on our pale blue dot, susceptible for spying! Even more so, thanks to our government we are far better off than some poor soul spied upon in Seoul or wherever our government read people's emails. It is us who provide pencils and computers and gadgets and the daily bread for the people spying on us. It is our government, by the people, for the people, therefore it is our duty to provide them with the cash.
Our is a nice, Disneyland based society that values entertainment above all. Mickey Mouse has all the mighty buck a rodent might wish for and he cheerfully buys politicians from both sides of the political spectrum to further his corporate purpose and produces the Pirates of the Caribbean. Similarities and connections do not end here. Captain of our ship, George W. Bush and Captain Jack Sparrow share the same view on laws. Like the pirate’s Parley Code all those annoying laws "are more or less what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules."
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