The US Office of Personal Management reported in 2017, the latest date I could find, that there were, summed across all territories, types, and geographic areas, 1,869,986 Federal civilian employees.
None of these people were elected.
These unelected employees had, and have, access to your data. Employees at the IRS, for instance, know how much money you made, from whom, when, and how much in taxes you paid—or didn’t pay.
The good people at the FBI, CIA, and especially NSA, were also not elected. These agencies spy on citizens routinely, and more vigorously after the poorly named Patriot Act. The wealth of data they have collected is inspiring.
Who’s Calling?
It’s not just the government. As I mentioned before, if you carry a cellphone, your carrier knows everywhere you’ve been, when you were there, for how long. They know who you called or messaged, where the person was that you called, and for how long. They have the contents of your messages. They know what apps you are using, and can access which sites you have visited, when, and so forth. To say that your carrier can paint a vivid portrait of you is a charming understatement.
No employee or official at your cellphone company was elected. Neither were any of the people at the various medical, insurance, or any other private establishments with which you have had data dealings.
Choosing Teams
Elon Musk heads DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, as we now hear almost daily, was not elected, nor were the vigorously effective people under him.
…
Crying Wolf
Naomi Wolf failed to understand this in a recent popular article in which she called Musk running DOGE a “digital coup”. She thinks Musk following Trump’s orders will make him “more powerful than any nation-state, more powerful than the WEF and the WHO, more powerful than any prime minister, and more powerful than any other CEO or leader of any other set of corporations.”
Dude. That’s a lot of power. …
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What about a locomotive?
Is he more powerful than a locomotive?
Wolf’s husband is military intelligence if you didn’t know. He might have left the agency a few years ago but that doesn’t mean there is zero professional contact.
If Musk tells me that the first case he will investigate is Trump’s (not Zuckerberg’s, his enemy) record, I will grant him the right to access my record. 🙂
Briggs, what has happened to the opinion that
???
wrt the activities of DOGE – motives and intention, and the amounts of money cut and saved…
Why have so many people, skeptical of government, politicians and the media until a few weeks ago; suddenly decided that they can believe what they are being told by exactly these people and sources?
I don’t know what IS true, but I do know that mainstream news is never true, and always motivated by evil.
Yesterday evening it spontaneously occured to me I should watch Evil Dead since I haven’t so far. And then Uncle Sargeant Briggs posts an image from Evil Dead. 😐
JH,
I just submitted your name to DOGE. Get ready for a visit.
Mr. Briggs, that is not a very smart move. Don’t you know that the complainant or accuser is usually the first one to be interviewed, well, investigated?
Wolf always was a bit of a dummy. When she ran afoul of the woke-arati a few years ago, she changed her spots.
“Unless you are a strict Luddite and have no online presence, credit card, cellphone, car, or Social Security number, your privacy is a thing of the past. The best we can now hope for is prudence from those in charge of our data.”
Mass surveillance is widespread and influential now. In the short-term, it looks like it will continue to be influential. But despite what some may think, things won’t be like this for centuries. This isn’t the new agriculture or the fourth industrial revolution or whatever they want to call it. You can’t keep disrupting things and have stability. Even the people who push all this, they don’t actually know what’s going to happen in the future. They can see in the short term that things will benefit them, but they don’t truly know what’s going to happen long-term.
We can see this with the Internet hype around the turn of the millennium. It was supposed to lead to more freedom, less surveillance, less centralization. And all this was supposed to happen inevitably, based on theories about how technology and human beings must operate. Well, the fact that the opposite happened isn’t just a fluke, it means the theories about how technology and people must work were wrong.
Widespread and influential doesn’t mean good and it doesn’t mean it will last forever. A constantly disruptive dystopia will eventually disrupt itself. If there is a future, then there will be something on the other side of this craziness (and something truly different, not more of the same thing but under a different name).
You should worry, JH, the power the left built and sought has now swapped hands and we’re going to give it to you hard and good! And we’re only auditing what you already signed off on! So we’re just getting started!
Mass surveillance is a subscription fee capitalist-driven racket to sell more unnecessary tech to increases the costs of the maintenance, energy, and manpower needed by the paranoid yahoos in government in order to catch people publicly tweeting their disapprovals of statist paradise, and to learn that their locations can be suspiciously pinpointed at a fixed location, always at the same suspicious hour on the same suspicious day every Sunday; data they’d happily volunteer upon request. Yet they can’t spot caravans of migrants.
At some point there is simply too much junk to sort through, hence AI, but it becomes an excess of useless data of no consequence which only exists to inconvenience us by blocking our passage through a turnstyle without a vexxine certificate, which is the real threat; not that they know anything about us. Yet they couldn’t stop caravans of migrants.
The takeaway is that if the numbers are on your side and there is routine mass disobedience with no history to fear or much to lose, it doesn’t matter how many fancy schmancy cameras they have.