Nothing Is Private Anymore, And Americans Are Okay With That

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – I tell you what, this terrorism racket is the national security gift that just keeps on giving the whole decade long, maybe the whole millennia long.  If we could just find this Mohammed character, if we could silence that guy, then we could end all this, couldn’t we?  Oh, wait, he’s a prophet and a spirit, a god.  Yeah, he died back in the 8^th century.  We’re not going to be able to find him.  That means as long as there are these, what do they call these people, Muslims, as long as these Muslims are out there, then we’re going to have to have this vainglorious, largest surveillance national security state in the history of surveillance national security states, aren’t we?  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  The Los Angeles Slimes this morning, Meghan Daum writing — I do not know who Ms. Daum is, by the bye — “Who’s afraid of the NSA?”  “We don’t scare that easily – or care that much” is the subtitle.  I don’t even need to read the editorial for you.  I think it speaks for itself.

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The facts are still coming in on Edward Snowden, the guy who spilled the beans on the National Security Agency’s surveillance of you, me and most likely everyone in America . . .

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Mike Church Show Transcript – Big Government Will Always Act Like Big Government And You Can’t Control It

Mike:  Check that, Ms. Daum, everyone on the planet.  I watched the interview last night.  I watched it again.  Snowden said they had the ability to spy on the planet.  This is not limited to the United States.  We have the ability to eavesdrop on everyone on Earth.  We have the ability to shut down computer systems, entire electrical grids almost anywhere on the planet.  Oh, great.  That’s what part of being the greatest nation in the history of the Earth is, the ability to shut power off to anyone that hiccups in the middle of the night that Peter King is afraid of.

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Right now, however, I’m betting he’ll eventually be revealed as an angry white geek. He brags about his privileged access to data and waxes sanctimonious about his superior conscience, but he also carries more than a faint trace of doomsday prepper. [Mike: Are you already getting the message? Nothing to see here, citizen, move along. Citizen, obey your federal overlords. They got this, move along.]

The programs he ratted out constitute, he said on videotape Monday, an “architecture of oppression” that could “get worse” with every generation that extends its capabilities. Put in layman’s terms, he fears Big Brother. And he’s willing to go to prison (or apparently Iceland, if he has his druthers) to help free the world from its clutches and put human history back on track.

It turns out the rest of us don’t scare that easily — or care that much. [Mike: Ms. Daum, it’s not that we don’t scare that easily, it’s that we don’t care that easily.] The results of a Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll released Monday show that 56% of Americans find the NSA’s telephone monitoring techniques acceptable…

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Mike:  Give it time, ladies and gentlemen.  I predict there will be a day when 86 percent of the sheeple go: Baa, surveil me.  They already walk through airports and go: Baa, strip me.  You want to see what I look like naked?  I’ll walk through that thing.  Oh, you want me to hold my hands up in the air over my head, not that high, higher, left, right?  Am I doing it right?  That wasn’t so bad.

Mike Church Show Transcript – Kevin Gutzman Interview – NSA, IRS, And American Apathy

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In the interests of preventing a terrorist attack, they say, the government should be able to do what it must, even if that means keeping tabs on every single American.

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Mike:  I tell you what, this terrorism racket is the national security gift that just keeps on giving the whole decade long, maybe the whole millennia long.  If we could just find this Mohammed character, if we could silence that guy, then we could end all this, couldn’t we?  Oh, wait, he’s a prophet and a spirit, a god.  Yeah, he died back in the 8^th century.  We’re not going to be able to find him.  That means as long as there are these, what do they call these people, Muslims, as long as these Muslims are out there, then we’re going to have to have this vainglorious, largest surveillance national security state in the history of surveillance national security states, aren’t we?  Are you beginning to get the picture here of how danger begets need for security, and how increased danger begets increased need for security, and how then double secret probation danger begets double secret need for surveillance and security?  Well, there are 310 million of us.  You don’t know which one of these people we call citizens may be planning acts of a horrendous nature.

You know the statistics of how many people are murdered in the United States every year?   Last time I saw it, it was about 57,000 I want to say, back in 2010.  That means there are 57,000 people who are not terrorists, or 57,000 acts were committed that were not committed as acts of terrorism yet people lost their lives.  Why don’t we spend $1.2 trillion trying to prevent murders?  I don’t mean just by hiring more cops.  I mean we need the precogs from the movie Minority Report from the Philip K. Dick novel lying around in an inflated plastic pool of gelatin, strapped around electrodes to their head.  They’ll tell us who it is that’s about to kill someone.

Plus we have the NSA wiretapping everyone on Earth, and certainly everyone in the country.  There have to be markers that we can look for for people that are about to snap and murder people.  We’re talking about saving.  This is security we’re talking about here.  We’re talking about saving the lives of 50,000-plus people per year.  The United States has not lost, in total, 50,000 people, unless you want to count war wounded and dead to the clutches of terrorism, in a decade.  So if this is all about preservation of life and the elimination of the threat that your life may end at the hands of someone else, shouldn’t we then do all that is necessary to do to stop murder and mayhem?  Makes sense to me, but then again I am not in the pay of the national defense architecture and industry, and it is an industry.  Therein lies the sickness.

Mike Church Show Transcript – NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden On The Run, Seeking Political Asylum

As you watch your fellow citizens happily skip along the lane and go: I don’t care what they’re doing to me, as long as Star Trek reruns come on tonight.  Know that the oligarchs and the elites that concocted this entire scenario probably never thought it would be this easy.  Can you imagine the panic button that was pushed in the White House and the panic button that was pushed at the CIA, the panic buttons that went off for some members of Congress and the United States Senate when Greenwald published that post on Thursday last, and the Washington Post published theirs on a different eavesdropping and surveillance story on the same day.  Can you imagine they thought maybe the gig is up, maybe the end is near?  Fast forward a week later.  People are already sighing and shrugging about it and it’s already the fodder of late-night comedians.  Back to Meghan Daum:

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Of course, keeping tabs has only gotten easier — and more familiar — for us all. By the end of 2006, Facebook had 12 million users. Today it has more than a billion. Google — and the breadcrumbs it drops — is even more ubiquitous. The search engine, which like Facebook is among the sites tracked by the NSA, had 91 million searches a day in 2006. In 2012, that number was 1.2 trillion.

We long ago proved we’re willing to trade a lot fewer trips to the bank — and a lot of our privacy — for convenience. Yes, we’d like to have some control over it all, to curate what gets out there, but that just proves the point. We don’t want privacy so much as privacy settings.

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Mike:  I think that is a profound statement there.  We really don’t want privacy.  We have no problem yapping in front of other people on cell phones in public places, do we?  Andrew, are you one of those people that gets agitated like I do when someone wants to conduct personal business in front of me while I’m in line trying to buy a PowerAde Zero at the convenience store?

AG:  Yeah.  It’s more though, do you really want everyone else hearing your conversations?  I don’t think I particularly care, but I would never do that.  I would think whatever conversation — I rarely talk on the phone as it is now since it’s basically all text messages.  It is kind of off-putting to see someone talking on the phone, especially if they’re in public in a line or something like that.  It’s weird to say the least.

Mike Church Show Transcript – Majority Of Americans Welcome Big Brother In The Name Of “Security”

Mike:  Isn’t it weird that we don’t talk on phones anymore?  If it weren’t for radio talk shows, who does talk?  Maybe we should not give the number out.  Maybe we should have a text, an online chat setup.

AG:  That’s what Twitter has become basically.  The easiest way to mass text things and your thoughts.

Mike:  I don’t know if you were a comic book fan when you were young, but you can think of Twitter as thought balloons coming from the top of the heads of characters in a comic book.  You have two kinds of balloons in a comic book.  You have ones that have arrows that point down to the character.  That means he actually spoke it.  Then you have the ones that look like clouds, kind of billowy, and there are dots coming from the top of your head.  That means you just thought it.  So Twitter is a ginormous thought balloon, if you will.  Back to Meghan Daum:

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Maybe it’s to our credit that we realize that it’s a bit hypocritical to fret over the minuscule chance that someone in the government could read our emails or is checking out what we sell on eBay when in fact we willingly give out this information to private companies on a constant basis. [Mike: She’s got a point.] We generally click the “terms and privacy” statement without reading it.

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Mike:  I’ve talked about this ad nauseam.  As a matter of fact, I was confronted with a term and condition box yesterday and I caught myself in the middle going: Whatever, and ticking the box.  I thought to myself: Wait a minute, read it.  It was from Google.  It was a program that Google runs called Google AdWords.  You basically purchase the usage of certain words that people search for.  If you bid high enough, when someone searches for — say you search for the term “Mike Church.”  Say I wanted to pay, which I don’t have to because I’m number one in the search engine when you search for me anyway, my website is.  Say I wasn’t and I wanted people to go to MikeChurch.com when they search for my name, even if they were looking for the Mike Church from the Kenneth Branagh movie Dead Again from back in the 1990s.  I would pay Google for the use of my own word or term “Mike Church,” and I would bid 60 cents a click or whatever the high bid is.  They would put me number one in the little yellow box at the top of a Google search.

It might note that there were three entries at the top that are usually the top three.  Those are all sponsored returns.  On the right-hand side of the Google search return are also sponsored returns.  Those cats just didn’t bid as high as the cats that got the feature placement with the yellow background.  Everyone else that is returned in the search are just regular people who design their own websites or webpages and have properly search engine optimized them so that Google looks favorably upon the page and goes: Oh, it does have that content on it.  I might want to share this with people that are looking for it.

Founders TV – NSA: Dark Side of the Gov

So there was a term and condition box.  It had 18 clauses in it.  As I printed it out and I was going through it, I’m thinking to myself: What is all this?  It was Google saying to me: If you agree to this, anything you transmit over our servers is ours and we can use it.  We won’t sell it to anyone, we’ll just rent it to them.  And you have the right to drop out at any time, here are our terms and conditions.  You can’t violate this, that, and the other.  Also, you can’t sue us.  If you get pissed off because — that’s not very gentleman-like.  If you become agitated because you’re browsing around on the internet and something shows up in your email box, you can always opt-out of the program.  This happens to me now on an eerily recurring basis.

So Ms. Daum is correct when she writes about voluntary surrendering of data.  The fact of the matter is, if you’re going to live in the interconnected world, it is not a private world any longer.  That does not necessarily mean then that official government functions must then mirror what the private sector and what individuals are doing.  What goes along with the NSA and CIA surveillance and the surveillance state apparatus is also the cost of maintaining it.  When Google does it, they are doing it for profit.  We may not like it, but they are doing it for profit.  When Bing does it or when Yahoo does it, they are doing it for profit.  They are employing people and elevating the value of capital.  That’s how a free market works.  When the government does it, they are confiscating capital that could otherwise be applied into productive means.  Not only is it an insult, not only is it unconstitutional, as far as the federal government goes, but it is also non-productive.  If there are those that view it as productive, then we should have Google and Microsoft lay down their profits and they should all then surrender for public service.  We’ll just become NGOs.  We won’t be for profit any longer.  We’ll work for the NSA.  We’ll be the NSA.  Google would probably be better at it anyway.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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