The NSA watches you poop.

Gore Vidal: I think you have to do it through negatives, the great master of which was the only Roman emperor I wholeheartedly admire, Tiberius. He was a brilliant politician, a brilliant administrator, a man of state. He was somebody who was meant to govern the Roman Empire. When Augustus died, or was murdered, he became emperor, as the succession was working then. And immediately the senate and the people of Rome sent him an overall mandate that to anything he proposed, as the Augustus living in the Palatine on the hill above the curia where they held their meetings, they would automatically concur and accept. He was already a semi-divinity in their eyes. That had started with the death of Augustus who had been deified.

I've been in his office in the Palatine. His entire office from which he governed the Roman Empire was smaller than this room. It had one biggish room for himself with a pretty big mirror, not a big window, and there were two or three little cubby holes for his secretaries and scribes. I used to haunt it to try and see what had occurred there. Sometimes a room will suggest what went on in somebody's mind.

And I got to admire him more and more and then I found out what his response had been to the senate. He sent back a message because they were very upset that he didn't respond immediately with a million thanks and he said, "I cannot accept this blanket acceptance of anything that might come from the Palatine Hill here. Suppose the emperor's mad, suppose there has been a coup in the palace and somebody else is in charge and you don't know about it. You still want the word of the principle to be automatic law?" And they sent back word, "Yes, Augustus. You are the law, all power is with you. Everything that you send us will be accepted and then made law." Well, he sent it back with the same objections.

They went on and on for about three or four times and he was getting nowhere with the senate and they were getting above their station which he was quick to remind them. It would be his decision and his decision was no. After all, they lived through Caligula just before he came to the throne. Did they want that again? And they said, "we beg you, great Augustus," and so on. He realized he was getting nowhere with them and he said, "I accept your folly but I can only make one obiter dicta. And that is how eager you are to be slaves."

That to me is the United States today: eager for slavery.

Click to expand...

These exposures lead us to inquire into state policy more generally and the factors that drive it. The received standard version is that the primary goal of policy is security and defense against enemies.

The doctrine at once suggests a few questions: security for whom, and defense against which enemies? The answers are highlighted dramatically by the Snowden revelations.

Policy must assure the security of state authority and concentrations of domestic power, defending them from a frightening enemy: the domestic population, which can become a great danger if not controlled.

It has long been understood that information about the enemy makes a critical contribution to controlling it. In that regard, Obama has a series of distinguished predecessors, though his contributions have reached unprecedented levels, as we have learned from the work of Snowden, Greenwald and a few others.

To defend state power and private economic power from the domestic enemy, those two entities must be concealed - while in sharp contrast, the enemy must be fully exposed to state authority.

The principle was lucidly explained by the policy intellectual Samuel P. Huntington, who instructed us that "Power remains strong when it remains in the dark; exposed to the sunlight it begins to evaporate."

Huntington added a crucial illustration. In his words, "you may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has been doing ever since the Truman Doctrine" at the outset of the Cold War.

Huntington's insight into state power and policy was both accurate and prescient. As he wrote these words in 1981, the Reagan administration was launching its war on terror - which quickly became a murderous and brutal terrorist war, primarily in Central America, but extending well beyond to southern Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

From that day forward, in order to carry out violence and subversion abroad, or repression and violation of fundamental rights at home, state power has regularly sought to create the misimpression that it is terrorists that we are fighting, though there are other options: drug lords, mad mullahs seeking nuclear weapons, and other ogres said to be seeking to attack and destroy us.

Throughout, the basic principle remains: Power must not be exposed to the sunlight. Edward Snowden has become the most wanted criminal in the world for failing to comprehend this essential maxim.

In brief, there must be complete transparency for the population, but none for the powers that must defend themselves from this fearsome internal enemy

Click to expand...

The Obama administration has been quietly advising local police not to disclose details about surveillance technology they are using to sweep up basic cellphone data from entire neighborhoods, The Associated Press has learned.

Citing security reasons, the U.S. has intervened in routine state public records cases and criminal trials regarding use of the technology. This has resulted in police departments withholding materials or heavily censoring documents in rare instances when they disclose any about the purchase and use of such powerful surveillance equipment.

Click to expand...

This is highly questionable. Just to repeat: this is the federal government loaning out equipment to spoof mobile phone towers to spy on people and then instructing (practically demanding) that the police hide or suppress this information by claiming that it came from a "confidential source" and by sealing any affidavits that accidentally mention the use of the equipment. As the ACLU notes this practice "deprives defendants of their right to challenge unconstitutional surveillance ." It also seems like a fairly straightforward due process violation. This even goes beyond "parallel construction" in which illegal surveillance is concealed by "recreating" it in other ways. In this case, you have illegally obtained evidence... and then police are just told to lie to the court about it.

This is stunningly bad.

Click to expand...