Observations and statements for this time of transition
By Sheila Dean
Let me begin with a sober exhortation: stop taking things so personally. Thin-skinned people are volatile and dangerous no matter their race or economic status. If you have borderline personality disorder, PTSD symptoms due to war involvements, abuse or shootings please get some help as soon as you can. Everyone else needs to realize that anger is common. It is not really a precious commodity by itself.
It is a time for adults.
The truth makes a wonderful gift. You can use it to welcome someone in or see a President off. So speak your truth.
Identity ecologies for most Americans are more galvanized and less civil since Obama took office. Identity groups needed to reconnect, understand and accept issues impacting their lives together. However, wise, ethical and diplomatic leadership should be staffed in immediately. Any group or political action committee stands to attract narcissistic opportunists who want power for power’s sake. Civility is what makes reform broad-based, lawful and acceptable.
I think militarizing the police was a poor decision on Obama’s part; which played into low bearing reactions of both police and Americans. To increase military means due to fears of racial violence was an overreaction; which became a self-fulfilling prophecy, in the instance of Ferguson, MO and following events. We should address authority identity abuses and correct the mission to one of complete focus on the law.
Contrary to the insistence of the corrupt, authority is not the law. The law is the law.
The upshot of escalating visual acknowledgment of police violence against minority publics is the air space it gave for all victims of American police violence from all strata. They are now believed and validated. While no one should ever have to endure the losses sustained from wrongful death, so many people now have the chance to find a healing community of survivors. We gain wisdom from our trials and support to become better people. Justice still needs to be served. If you call a homicide, a homicide and prosecute accordingly that serves the interest of public safety best.
So what has become of all of America’s identified people since Obama’s administration?
Obama enabled an unlawful surveillance microscope into the lives of a free people. Not to protect them, but to terrorize them, to disempower them and to allow government actors to profit from it. The result of this misappropriation of power is the compromise of U.S. civilian government offices by foreign governments. The ODNI and DoD had one job and they failed. They took ill-advised orders; which defied legal and constitutional propriety from Obama while China and Russia targeted to success America’s information centers.
It is not the role of the U.S. President to allow hackers-with-a-badge to invade to micromanage the affairs of every single American. That is the very definition of an abuse of power.
Hubris has a very high price tag. Due to overbudgeting and overprioritizing ‘national security’ interests it nearly guaranteed all federal hires are now identity theft victims. That includes the identity of the US President, who didn’t protect himself in his quest to enable for-profit datalust. The Department of State now has to handle the identity theft claims of federal workers as victims at the hands of Chinese hackers. Remember China? The nation state who loaned us a lot of money fueling the federal defecit? China, whose only government collateral now is the IP they can steal from the United States’ economically productive sectors and any intelligence they can gather. There has been little remuneration or economic or legal enforcement for these thefts to US businesses for this.
It’s been played down. Just like what I’m about to tell you.
The prioritization of mass surveillance of all identified Americans is now our biggest cyber vulnerability. Obama did not protect America’s identified people. He was not alone in this. He had many Yes-men, lobbyists and contractor enablers, but he is at fault.
We learned that 3-Letter agencies, like the CIA, become profitable from business surveillance and foreign and domestic investments in businesses like Palantir and Facebook. Not only are they collecting intelligence on all of their voluntary users, they are illegally selling public consumer information for profit against the knowledge and consent of the public. It is a violation of the Privacy Act of 1974 and a host of other laws.
Now municipal governments are emulating their corruption. ALPR and other data surveillance contractors are in this game. Many companies are also profiting from trade of consumer information to and from the US government. It is a massive conflict-of-interest. It is a corrupt confiscation of American property, identity and domestic interests. It is asset-forfeiture at its worst. The robbery committed by these national security agencies is worse than some of the banks!
If I had my wish tomorrow, any US agency who is profitable above their staffing and overhead needs would turn over their surplus immediately to pay down America’s budget deficit, subsidize the easing of colossal US student loan debt and pad America’s Medicare-Medicaid budgets. They would stop all warrantless surveillance of US people and innocent foreign persons. They would dispose of all the information they have collected, because they sell it illegally now for agency profit and because they can’t protect they information they have from foreign enemies. The profiteers would not evade prosecution for their crimes.
If the President wants more personal privacy, he or she will have the power to legislate it in. We now have the burden of explaining to the next President, why it’s worse for personal and national security to have digital eyes on everyone at all times for any reason whatsoever. The intelligence will be abused, not just by the President or his men, but by terrorists and the very people we intended to defeat in our foreign policy agenda. It now enables corrupt self-defeating infrastructure.