Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

I've blacked out mabula.net and my partially complete Django replacement for it as part of:

The Day We Fight Back.

It's a token gesture, and I'd prefer something that actually causes a real change in the state of affairs. But hopefully the few people that visit my site will ask why its blacked out, and I'll tell them. Or they'll find out why for themselves. Or they'll know already.

Ultimately, the thing that worries me in all of this is that all the data collection, all the wire tapping and interception, all the bad cryptography and bastardised standards, all the spying and all the secrecy doesn't really improve our actual security. It hasn't found anything that normal detective work and normal policing and existing laws couldn't already deal with. It hasn't prevented any crimes, either against real people or against 'the state' or anything.

The 'baddies' are already adapting their methods and covering their tracks. There are far too many false positives, and much too much confirmation bias, to make the resulting 'intelligence' anything but a joke. The FBI already spends more money on covering up its mistakes - like its total waste of resources watching Brandon Mayfield - than it would if it had just asked him for an interview. Mean time they're missing the Boston Marathon bombers despite lots of evidence pointing to them. Then follows a lot of chest puffing and excuses and "we can't tell you the details, they're classified".

(Meanwhile, we have banks that are laundering money to supply to exactly the same terrorist organisations that get a slap-on-the-wrist fine and no jail time for anyone because they're "too big to fail". So not only did the NSA and all the security TLAs not find a massive source of funding for these organisations - something that's causing far more damage to USAdian society than 'terrorism' - but the entire rest of the government quietly brushed it under the carpet and pretended it didn't happen. Yeah, good one.)

Ultimately, all it's really about is perpetuating the existince of the security complex - mainly in the USA, but everywhere really. Its first imperative is to preserve itself, and it has all the means to do so. It has the secret courts and the secret laws to prevent legal challenge, and the arms and the blackmail material to prevent other attacks. And its paranoid level of secrecy and security makes it automatically treat any rein, any check on it, as a threat to its own existence - because, well, it would be.

So what REALLY scares me is that nothing we do will actually stop them at all. At this stage, it's basically impossible to even rein in the NSA's powers - and that'd be like taking a rabid tiger and smacking it on the nose to tell it to go away. To put in the high-level open oversight that lets the public see whether these agencies are actually doing anything useful with the vast quantities of money they control is a task that's beyond the realistic abilities of any government (to say nothing of the blackmail and subversive influence that any security agency can bring against anyone that wants to downsize them). Tackling the companies who run the prisons and supply the equipment and make a profit from all the unrest - that's just bordering on insane.

We've made the tiger, and we've fed the tiger because it said it would protect us, and we're on its backs because it's better than being in its jaws, and we've fed it more because we're afraid it might eat us, and it's only grown larger and hungrier. To be honest, I think the security complex will kill the world before climate change does.