Tuesday, May 27, 2008
They Have A Little List...
[The] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. [T]he technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny. . . . Such is the capability of this technology. . . . I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
Senator Frank Church,
August 17, 1975
Meet the Press
National Broadcasting Corporation
as cited in "ECHELON and the Legal Restraints on Signals Intelligence: A Need for Reevaluation", 50 Duke L.J. 1467
From Pro Libertate:
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The business end of government - it always comes down to the barrel of a gun or the edge of an Executioner's blade.
"As some day it may happen that a victim must be found, I've got a little list -- I've got a little list, of society offenders who might well be underground, and who never would be missed -- who never would be missed!...
There's the pestilential nuisances who write for autographs [or, as we call them now, blogs]; all people who have flabby hands and irritating laughs....
Then the idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, All centuries but this, and every country but his own...the Judicial humorist--I've got him on the list!
All funny fellows, comic men, and clowns of private life-- they'd none of 'em be missed--they'd none of 'em be missed..... The task of filling up the blanks I'd rather leave to you. But it really doesn't matter whom you put upon the list, for they'd none of 'em be missed--they'd none of 'em be missed!"
- "I've Got A Little List", sung by the Lord High Executioner, from Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado
For a long time, filed in the category of "Things We Always Knew But Couldn't Prove" we could find the assumption that the Regime has a Little List -- a database of people who would be subject to questioning, detention, or worse, in the event of a "national emergency."
We now can file that assumption in the category of "Awful Things We Know For Sure."
According to "The Last Roundup", a diligently researched and carefully written investigative piece in Radar magazine, The List is not an artifact of overheated imagination, but rather a tangible and portentious reality...
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Read all three articles.
And then act accordingly.
Tempus fugit.
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