At an Amnesty International conference this past week(This year’s theme: Protecting our polluted metadata lakes and privacy landfills from Wizards because child poverty, corporate power, concentrated wealth, voter suppression and women’s reproductive rights were just too specific), Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden appeared as giant heads brought to us by the latest in propaganda technology and proceeded to remind everyone in Internet Oz that your one wish to see them in a suspended state of dueling irony has been hereby granted.
Edward Snowden is introduced to adoring fans at an Amnesty International conference in Chicago on Saturday. Photo: Frank Polich/Reuters
This, coming during the week when the ACLU introduced the long-awaited NSA Documents Database, ‘indexed, text-searchable’ and selectively gifted to the world for your know-it-all/hole-in-the-wall, national security peep show-viewing pleasure.
And it’s nothing but the choicest national security beaver shot porn from uncle Glenn’s & Eddie’s own private waterlogged mattress stash, with a few non-leaked, publicly-available documents mixed in to make your spy-brary appear impressive and well-stocked with open & shut evidence to the naked eye.
But the claims from the Corporate/Rebel Alliance are invariably the same as they started: “We’ve still got your Wizard, man!”
And, yeah, I get it. China, Russia and Germany should be pissed and looking for answers. They deserve to know the truth about our national security secrets! So it’s only right that Greenwald and Snowden assuage their obviously well-founded fears by stealing the blueprint to our national security operations and presenting it to the benign world.
Makes perfect sense in a democracy to have a select few making national security decisions for everyone else.
But here’s an optics tip: If you’re gonna go all Steve Balmer meets “1984″ to continue to promote and sell your mediocre line of privacy lingerie, body condoms and assorted freedom lubes, “Orwellian” is now off limits as a counter-safeword. Got it?