BE: Journalistic (and national) ADHD

[Monte Davis]

I came to the same place from a different angle: my parents were moderate
1D/1R, both starting in journalism when WWII pulled them in as USMC
correspondents in the Pacific. Lots of "you know X but can't report it,"
lots of exposure to behind-the-scenes Marine vs Army PR rivalry over who
was really beating the Japanese. They scorned McCarthy and Red-scare media,
less from liberal principle than because they didn't think a cold war
justified the crap they'd put up with during a hot war, and saw how
usefully twisted "national security" was becoming in domestic politics. My
primal scenes were of them after a day at the newspaper/PR agency, drinking
rum & Coke and eating peanuts as they watched the evening news, working out
the real stories behind the stories. I wasn't a red-diaper baby, but
leaning skeptical even before Viet Nam or Nixon pushed front and center.

So beneath the episodes of partisan/ideological commitment or anger I've
felt personally, I assume that government (or any other organization) that
gathers information will always creep inexorably from gathering what it
must have to what might be useful someday, and that sooner rather than
later someone will abuse it. I didn't believe that J. Edgar Hoover schemes
under Eisenhower really went away under JFK or LBJ. I didn't believe that
Carter or Clinton or Obama nobly renounced new capabilities that came
online under Nixon or Reagan or Bush.

And if on National Transparency Day President Sanders or President Warren
were to raze the NSA and FBI and CIA and all their databases to the ground,
I'd be wondering if they'd waited until the distributed, cloud-based,
crowd-sourced FreedomPeep system was up and running -- just to monitor
threats from the right-wing backlash, of course.

On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 11:01 AM, kelber at mindspring.com <
kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> Hi Monte!
>
> My parents were harassed by the FBI for years because of their political
> affiliations. They always warned us that our phone was probably tapped. So
> most of these revelations had a ho-hum quality for me, including
> speculations about that building.
>
> LK
>
> *Sent from my Verizon Wireless 4G LTE DROID*
>
>
> Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Some may recall that I posted a passage from Rick Perlstein (and before
> him  NSA historian James Bamford and others) about the Church Committee's
> discovery in 1975 that the NSA had "been monitoring both the phone calls
> and the telegrams of American citizens for decades."
>
> https://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=1408&msg=181355
>
> So then FISA and other stern safeguards were put into place until --
> surprise! -- Snowden clued us in that the Bad Behavior had not only
> continued for decades, but expanded in step with the internet.
>
> Today we get this breathless revelation about a building in the heart of *Bleeding
> Edge* territory.
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/nyregion/national-security-agency-said-to-use-manhattan-tower-as-listening-post.html>
>
> Trust me: when that building was one year old, using analog/radio rather
> than digital/fiber optic dragnets, there was enough leakage from committee
> staff that I and many thousands of other people in NYC (hi, Laura!) knew
> about its... enhanced functions. I'm not talking tinfoil-hat speculation,
> I'm talking matter-of-fact daylight certainty, something half the high-end
> electronic installation mavens in the city were winking and nudging about.
>
> It makes P's snarking at the *Times *in* BE *even more entertaining*,*
> but it is not the kind of "been there done that" I enjoy.
>
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