What was a conspiracy theory espoused by a possibly disgruntled NSA agent last year, is this month a confirmed fact: the US government is and has been indiscriminately amassing the information of not only foreign nationals, but also US citizens in the process. But now the facts have been made public and the mainstream media can no longer deny that the NSA probably knows which hooker my friend Juan possibly got the clap from given call times, location spots, and approximate times of seeking treatment. Though metadata can be made to sound rather innocuous, the fact is that it reveals enough about a person to make them liable to blackmail, or to enable insider trading by members of Congress.
Information is power, and PRISM is according to my friend in DHS the only thing propping up the US economy. The entire house of cards is currently maintained by the system of insider trading that PRISM and metadata enables. But now the system has been exposed, and it will not be as easy to continue indiscriminately acquiring the information of foreign businessmen, whether the NSA is curtailed or not.
Come July 20, Obama will be faced with renewing the programs that Snowden has exposed. Should Obama renew all the programs to no opposition, the date will mark the official death of the American experiment with democracy. Should Obama fail to renew the surveillance order, the economic house of cards will implode. Either way, we now have an official date for the beginning of the second American revolution, or for the affirmation that the US is no longer a free republic.
These are the last 40 nights of the republic, and if after July 20 there is no mass protest in the US, no mass uprising, then you can expect that nothing will make the citizens rise up in the future. In a strange way I feel a sense of calm. The past few years have been stressful to be honest. When I left the US in 2009, I was lost and depressed because I felt like I was living in a twilight zone. When I read about places like North Korea, I was reminded of Yale. In the same way that the citizens of Pyongyang walk the streets without making any eye contact, ever daring to discuss politics, ever daring to say something politically incorrect, without ever daring to think beyond the proscribed paradigm, so too did I feel that Yalies wandered campus completely blind to the torture, rape, assassinations, false flags, spying, illegal wiretapping, and totalitarian fashion of the US government.
And a lot of the things I wrote about in the past were far-fetched, but the police state has arrived exactly as I predicted. What was once improper table conversation is now breakfast fare. However, after July 20, when I tell someone that I have no plans of ever returning to the US, I think they will understand better why, and perhaps won't need to ask me what my reason is: the United States is a police state.
