Politics

Another lie Obama spewed was that he would protect whistleblowers. You can't make this stuff up.

Great explanation of why it's probably impossible for Congress to stop the NSA.

"Congress knows that the voters do not care enough to mobilize against the Patriot Act, which is the heart of the surveillance state. They also know that most House members are immune from the voters. Gerrymandering works. They also know that they, personally, are not immune from the NSA’s monitoring of their telephone calls, emails, and other communications. They can count the votes. They know who is on top. The surveillance state is on top."

We have to protect ourselves as best we can until it self-destructs. And it will self-destruct.

"The ability of any bureaucracy to make decisions is limited by its ability to use the data at its disposal to make rational decisions. Ludwig von Mises in 1920 showed why all central planning by the state is blind. It has no free market to guide it. There are no prices to guide it. The state is inherently myopic. His 1944 book, Bureaucracy, extended this theme. The more that a bureaucracy seeks omniscience in its quest for omnipotence, the more short-sighted it becomes. I put it this way: it bites off more than it can chew. In the case of the NSA, it bytes off more than it can chew.
Bureaucrats are time-servers. They are not original. They are turf-defenders. They are career-builders. They are not entrepreneurial. That was Mises' point in 1944. The key goal of a bureaucrat is this: "Don't make a mistake." In short, "do it by the book." It does not matter which bureaucracy we have in mind: CIA, FBI, NSA. The attitude is the same, because the financing is the same: from the government.
When the government goes bust, the surveillance state will go bust."

Not only that, but these bureaucrats will turn on each other. Secret police in every totalitarian society end up spending tremendous resources infighting. Think about how CIA chief Petraeus was ousted. This will get worse before the government collapses.

"The fact that the NSA's two "computer farms" -- in Utah and in Maryland -- are seven times larger than the Pentagon will not change this fact. They have bitten off more than they can chew. Central planners are bureaucrats, and bureaucracy is blind. It cannot assess accurately the importance of the mountains of data that are hidden in government-collected and program-assessed digits. The knowledge possessed in the free market is always more relevant. Society is the result of human action, not of human design."

But government will do great harm before it disappears.

Funny how German Chancellor Merkel's coalition takes the lead in polls for the first time in four years right before the election. I'm sure there's nothing fishy going on here.