Privacy is a kind of power as well as a right, one that public librarians fought to protect against the Bush administration and the PATRIOT Act and that online companies violate in every way that’s profitable and expedient. Our lack of privacy, their monstrous privacy—even their invasion of our privacy must, by law, remain classified—is what you made visible. The agony of a monster with nowhere to stand—you are accused of spying on the spies, of invading the privacy of their invasion of privacy—is a truly curious thing.
Read more: A Letter to Edward Snowden | The Nation http://www.thenation.com/article/175339/letter-edward-snowden#ixzz2ZkRdnUFe
And then Fahd Iraqi, writing about Egypt, at http://www.telquel-online.com/content/retour-vers-le-futur :
A notre petite échelle, nous vivons aussi ce choc des temps. Il y a un décalage entre le temps des citoyens, le temps de l’entreprise, le temps des politiques et le temps de la monarchie. Ils ne sont pas synchro et le risque de collision est omniprésent.
[On our local scale we too live in this shock of time-scales. There's a lag between the time-scales of citizenz, of business, of politics, and of monarchy. They aren't in sync, and the risk of collision is everywhere. ]
Al Gore, in his book The Future, points out that in the 1970s only 3% of retiring congressmen became lobbyists. Now, over 50% of retiring senators, and 40% of retiring congressmen, become lobbyists. Our representative democracy is evolving into an oligarchy of old and defensive insiders, themselves pawns of a Monarchy (money, status, entitlement) which has escaped its own royal house (CEOs, revolving corporate directors) and become enshrined in inertia. It will continue thus until like all objects spinning out of control it flies apart. That will be an interesting day.
