Quote of the Day: "Personal Computers Have Users, Social Media Has Livestock."

From a pretty good article on what it means to be a dissident in the Internet age. There are cutting insults about the Senate ("An American Senator knows as much about PRISM and XKeyScore as a troll-doll on the dashboard knows about internal combustion") and the FISA Court ("a silly Potemkin mechanism").

For all of the snark in the article, there is a core truth: Computers in the 20the Century were funded and built to do two things: Break codes and compute artillery/rocket trajectories. But that's just the way it is for a lot of things. The first rapid form of communication technology spread rapidly across this country because of the Civil War. The carbine so loved by American deer hunters for over a century has its roots in the need to develop a better way to rapidly shoot at Confederate soldiers.* Governments got behind the building of railroads and highways as means to more rapidly mobilize and support armies. Digital cameras were funded by the NRO as a replacement for parachuting film back from space.

None of this means that we shouldn't try to rein in the surveillance state, just as we should try to rein in the militarization of the police. But don't get your hopes up.
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* The .30-30 lever-action carbine was the most popular civilian rifle in the U.S. in the 20th Century. Winchester and Marlin together sold about 14 million of them. The replacement for the lever-action carbine is a rifle that was designed to kill VC.