snowden, as he says, has accomplished what he wanted to accomplish. now what is that? very precisely, he has shown that the government of united states has been usurped, in a coup by the security forces. he has shown general keith b. alexander and his ilk to be traitors: i mean that seriously and literally: traitors to the constitutional form of government, traitors to the american way of life. they are aiding and abetting america's enemies insofar as they are aiding and abetting one another. i'm not a lawyer, so i don't know what the penalties for treason might be, but the maximum sanction (perhaps it is house arrest or community service?) should be applied summarily and with extreme prejudice to anyone who participated in the takeover.
the world, as keith and all the other groveling cowards - oh, mike rogers and dianne feinstein, for example - remind us every few seconds, is a dangerous place. that's certainly true, and now we know where the real threat comes from. i mean, what would you rather deal with day by day: a ragtag group of fanatics on the other side of the world, or a blank, dishuman, implacable bureaucracy of oppression right here in the homeland? which is more inside your life? which is actually more likely to fuck you up? to which are you more vulnerable? well, snowden proved that you are vulnerable right now, that you're being violated right now in your basic citizenship rights, that you are under profound threat from an apparently irresistible force. soldiers of the usurping power are quartered right there in your living room, on your hands, on your screen, in your head. soldiers of the occupying army are quartered in your relationships, in your purchases, in your music, at your doctor's office, at your job. dude. there are soldiers quartered in your very ass. usurpations. abuses. despotism. and not a george washington in sight, just when one would be useful.
rogers or mcain or obama might keep trying to frame it as freedom vs. security, but obviously no one is secure in the face of a govenment that possesses overwhelming force, unlimited resources, and an omnivoracious hunger for power. freedom and security stand or fall together, and they have fallen together to the military junta that now rules our country.
it could not be more obvious that the government of the united states as it currently stands is an arbitrary tyranny. if the legitimacy of the government is based, as on its own now evidently absurd account it claims to be, on the consent of the people, then a state of secret universal surveillance and overwhelming force is a government which according to its own deepest commitments has no legitimacy whatever. samuel adams or tom paine looked at a much milder set of abuses and concluded that the thing that faced them wasn't a government at all, but a band of criminals. that's what mencius taught. thoreau. john locke. john stuart mill. so, now that we're clear that we're dealing with criminals, we have to figure out some sort of legal system to feed them into.
