You Are The Transparent Man

By Dan Hagen

The irony here is palpable. The government intends to hoard complete privacy for its own activities, while claiming that the citizens it "serves" require none.

“Both (government and corporations) want access to everything that can be known about you, because who knows until later what may prove the crucial piece of information touncover a terrorist network or lure in a new network of customers,” TomEngelhardt writes.

“They want everything, at least, that can be run through a system of massive computers and sorted into patterns of various potentially useful kinds.  
“You are to be, in this sense, the transparent man or transparent woman.  Your acts, your life patterns, your rights, your codes are to be an open book to them — and increasingly a closed book to you.  You are to be their secret and that ‘you’ is an ever more global one.

“With this goes another reality.  They are to become ever less accessible, ever more impenetrable, ever less knowable to you (except in the forms in which they would prefer you to know them).  None of their codes or secrets are to be accessed by you on pain of imprisonment.”

Anyone who is comfortable with the idea of a corporate-controlled universal surveillance American secret police state with powers of summary assassination because they "trust" whatever goddamned politician they voted for is really breathtakingly self-deluded and remarkably unaware of human history.

Yes, even in our deliberately dumbed-down culture, knowledge is still power. That’s why they want it all, and want you to have none of it.