We’re Building Stasi 2.0
By Keith Weiner
GoldSeek.com
Tuesday, 17 December 2013
I wrote this in early November. A US District Court decision yesterday (Dec 16, 2013) found that parts of the NSA’s mass data gathering are unconstitutional. It’s a small victory but a step in the right direction. In light of this decision, this article takes on renewed importance.
Before the Edward Snowden story broke, I watched a movie about East Germany. It was set in the time when East Germany was a communist dictatorship walled off from the world, like a huge maximum-security prison. The Lives of Others is a gripping drama that shows what that life was like. To say it was dehumanizing, that there was no justice, that people lived in constant terror of the secret police—the Stasi—does not even begin to describe it. For example, the Stasi had forensic information on every typewriter in the country. They could find the author of anything they didn’t like, and disappear him.
See the movie. By the way, the lead actor was hated in East Germany after the movie came out. Even years after communism collapsed, many of its victims are so scarred that they would prefer to blank it out. This is testimony to how horrific it was.
I normally write about gold and economics, but Edward Snowden has brought to the attention of America—and the whole world—a different issue. We advocates of the gold standard are, at root, fighting for freedom. So we should pay attention to this front in the same battle. There are many similarities with the fight for a free market in money, the unadulterated gold standard.
One of them is that the old notions of “liberal” and “conservative” seem almost inapplicable. It used to be that “conservatives” in the U.S. were in favor of more freedom and less government, at least nominally. But today, that’s not necessarily so. Wall Street is generally “conservative” and they are for a central bank, and its endless acts of Quantitative Easing.
Similarly, Republicans and “conservatives” are now coming out in favor of the National Security Agency, and defending its spying on American citizens. They do this in the wake of pervasive abuses that Snowden has disclosed. The Stasi could never have dreamed of some of the capabilities used against every American every day by the NSA, such as mass scanning of emails and phone calls, much less automatically building a list of contacts for each citizen or tracking everyone’s whereabouts in realtime.
The Rest…HERE
