Mark Mazetti, a Pulitzer Prize winner for the New York Times, spoke Tuesday to a half full hall at UCO. This isn't really a political blog, so I'll try to keep editorializing to a minimum because better spoken people than me have already outlined how foolish the whole 'War on Terror' is.
Alright, I lied. I'll opinionate a bit. One quote that really caught my attention was that Mazetti is of the opinion that it's only a matter of time before armed drones come back home to visit and maybe blow up some weddings. The Dorner manhunt was conducted with facial recognition software and surveillance drones, so this is totally unsurprising. It's nice that someone who is an expert on the subject is also of that opinion. If you're waiting for the dystopian future, it's already breaking down your door and telling you to stop resisting.
It's also interesting how the Manning and Snowden leaks have made the intelligence community more timid than ever of the press. Intelligence members must literally go through a polygraph to prove every five years that they haven't been talking to the press. I wonder, if you stand outside the Pentagon, can you feel the paranoia wafting off?
Excessive secrecy got them into this mess and they're absolutely convinced it'll get them out. I mean, there'll always be wacky hijinks to bury in the intel community. I understand that many of them do just want to protect the country. I'm just worried about how they define protect.
I mean, the community clearly has no compunction against spying for political reasons. COINTELPRO clearly shows that. So I don't really buy this whole schtick about how they're our neighbors and friends.
We're a democracy. Democracy requires informed voters and you can't have that without information. National security is not a catch-all defense against transparency when you're protecting us from terrorism, which is literally less likely to kill an American than lightning.
