A hat-wearing comrade shared this image with us. And then we had to prove that a picture really is worth a thousand words!
Nice group, comrade!
The KGB spent billions during the Cold War to make the US look impotent. They failed. Maybe a subject for a future Ushanka post: Was their failure a result of their tactics, or our leaders?
But what goes around comes around. Agent Putin's patience has been rewarded with the Snowden NSA whistle blower asylum deal.
We are disheartened that Snowden wasn't invited back to face his criminal charges and a promised reduced sentence. He is not a hero, nor a traitor (like Manning). He is a whistle blower.
The crime wasn't Snowden's. The real crime was the absolute lack of outrage among our elected elites. It turns out every member of congress was both aware of the NSA total-surveillance program and supportive of it. How's that for representation?
Just Wednesday a family in New York was visited by the Obama version of the NKVD after their family had made Google searches of "pressure cooker" and "backpack." (The media did not mention if their searches also included words like fertilizer, crop-duster, RPG, bomb, Larry Sinclair, or jihad.) This story reminds us of another picture:
So if they can respond to a combination of Internet searches, why aren't we seeing the mass arrest of criminals? Cell technology tells us who was in an area at the time of a crime. Face recognition can take a partial image from a surveillance tape and return an identity. The same technology that 'nabbed' that family in New York can be used to find people planning a crime over email or social media. And with email and Facebook archives at the NSA, we can find criminals who have bragged of their crimes.
Yet we haven't.
Which begs the question: "Does this total surveillance exist to reduce crime and protect the citizens?"
If not, why does it exist?
Our theory: government employees are tired of looking impotent, incompetent and pathetic after the foreign-directed terrorist actions: the shoe-bomber, underware-bomber, and Boston Marathon, etc. Attention is now focused on their massive vacation-day and sick-day benefits, their higher-than private sector pay, their protection from dismissal over incompetence, misbehavior or Obama economy, the layers of bureaucracy that protect their layers of fat, or the glaring indictment of the failures of Affirmative Action that their existence amplifies each day.
Criminals don't cooperate. They are dirty, troublesome, crafty, and elusive. Why not define, then pursue, a new class of criminal?
Why not kick in the doors of people who don't plan on defending themselves against force? People who would never think of arguing with a person with a badge. People who would not let the lack of a warrant stop strangers from entering their home. People who would celebrate the arrival of these government employees in their armored personnel carriers and with their automatic weapons because a wounded unarmed college dropout might be in the neighborhood.
All of a sudden the government employee transitions from the slug who can't do 10 minutes of work a week to the slug who can't do 10 minutes of work a week but is surpassing their arrest and investigation quotas. The lucky ones might even get to shoot a dog or two in self defense.
