[luscious]

This, this, this.

You can't let yourselves lose a power war by wasting all your time losing tactical battles. It's a tragedy if we all spend any time trying to protect our LOLs and OMGs to-from each other. If you are working on means for tracking behavior and extracting value (monetary, political, etc.) you are doing something less good than you could be.

Don't get caught by rope-a-dope when you could just cut funding for all this. We don't need protection from 20 terrorists who can kill 3,000 people. We can deal with them together. Somehow (fear, greed, stupidity?) we've lost our collective front. We need a 'We' now.

When Bush and some war-nat-resource-industry profiteers stack the deck, it's awful, but expected. At least the actions are rational. At this point, it's pretty obvious (not that it hasn't been for 50+ years) that we have a problem. The organizations at the heart of this are willing to act outside the spirit, if not the letter, of US law. The political factions riding power act outside the spirit, if not the letter, of our law and founding documents.

Our government is not behaving towards the world or our own citizens in the way that inspired generations to come here to build a better life for themselves.

The baby boomers frittered everything away. Lazy asses. Now, it's time to make amends. It's time to FORK THE USs REPO!!!

[ganeumann]

We need a plan B. It may be that the citizens have already lost this power war. Certainly the reaction of the UK police to the uproar (if it's that) of the Miranda detention and the snarkiness of the White House Dep. Press Secretary about being informed says to me that they don't really care what we think. And if they don't care it's either because they know they don't have to care (because we're not powerful enough), or they can't care because they are getting even more pressure from the other side, the intelligence community (who are thus more powerful than we are.)

Yes, political pressure. But what if that doesn't work?

[luscious]

Sorry. The analogy breaks down. Once you fork a government, there really isn't a mechanism to submit a pull request.

Anyways... No, you don't work within the system. You can't move fast enough to grassroots the elimination of funding for CIA and NSA and ancillary groups within military and war contractors. Any amount of traction will fail since there would be an asymmetrical and tactical-heavy process. You will lose against the financial and political interests of the ruling class. If the financial and political ruling class sees such a crowning jewel get it, they will FTFO and see it as a portent for things closer to their own power. The intelligence groups are the necessary brain to the necessary brawn that keeps the geopolitics in line with their bottom line.

The chasm between rich and poor is getting so far in the US that this is the beginning... you can't trust the poor. There's too many of them!