We have the example of our beloved Steve Gilliard here.

I’m glad you are eating healthy. Not to get on to high a soapbox, but you really want to go to great lengths to avois bypass surgury. Getting rid of the trans fatty acids and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and doing 30 minutes of cardio-vascular exercise a day will go a long way to avoiding post-op extreme pain from aving your chest opened up. Been there, done that.

Then O snuggled up to me on the couch, and we had more deep conversation about death, and life, and coping with loss. We went through all the loved ones who were going to die, sooner or later, and pretty much covered everyone we knew, including me and the cats. And i pointed out to him that he too, someday, would die, which makes living all that much more important, moment to moment, while you still can. We didn’t wander into realms of speculation about afterlife or reincarnation, just the fact that all living things dies. I watched him regain acceptance of that, and stroked his hair. He fell asleep in my arms, there.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYY, LIFE IS GOOD!

Some West Wing DVDs from Netflix, got here, my custom amp plates (with my name on ‘em) are on the way from the engraver, my re-coned Fender Blue Alnico speakers are on the way from Orange County Speaker.

Ah the eternal quest for the holy grail of tone
I know it well.
So elusive, ephemeral, capricious.

But their focus on the shiny techy object…

Ignores the simple fact that the telecomm megacorps take the feed containing our phone/net traffic, duplicate the signals, and route the “duplicate” off to the NSA/spook world.

The telecomm megacorps copy all the traffic on their high speed cables and give it to the NSA.

By pre-Patriot Act law, the NSA is already authorized to capture, record, and analyze all electronic traffic going crossing the US’ national borders.

So all the Blackberry users (with the ‘berries Canadian HQ) share every message with the NSA.

Under the Echelon project:

(A)…” report [35] published by STOA in January 1998 refers to the role played by the ECHELON network in electronic surveillance (see [8] for a list of links to this subject). It is a global network which can intercept all telephone, fax or e-mail communications.”

IANAspook, but even MSM know the WH must use secure Federal phone lines to prevent interception.

All the non-WH traffic went through the NSA/spook/Ecehlon data vacuums.

The blogosphere (on FDL!) picked this weeks ago, and we’ve been writing about it on the Lake ever since.

Commenters from the Lake have shared the info at TPM, so the concepts are diffusing…

But they bear repeating:

Congress’s official subpoena powers allow the Senate and House to demand these records pursuant to their oversight role and their investigation of Contempt of Congress and other high crimes and misdemeanors.

Data, meet subpoena power.

[above from the massive official STOA report prepared for the European Parliament: “Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information (an appraisal of technologies of political control).

STOA also has a nifty section on chemical weapons (aka “tear gas” and other fatal “non-lethal” crowd control technologies.

The communications intercept data above is from only one portion of the STOA report, which is an amazinig and neglected resource.

Written in the late 90’s, the full draft report has been most prescient in descriibing the physical means developed to suppress popular opinion and public will over the last decade.

The table of contents may be tempting:

Abstract
Executive Summary
Acknowledgements
Table of Charts and Figures

1 Introduction 1

2 Role and Function of Political Control Technologies 3

3 Recent Trends and Innovations 6

4 Developments in Surveillance Technology 15

5 Innovations in Crowd Control Weapons 22

6 New Prison Control Systems 40

7 Interrogation, Torture Techniques and Technologies 44

8 Regulation of Horizontal Proliferation 53

9 Conclusions 59

10 Notes and References 60

11 Bibliography [Separate file (85K); Zip-compressed version 32K] 73

Appendix 1. Military, Security & Police Fairs. [Not provided with report]

[Mod Note; in the future, fewer links in a single comment will avoid the spam filters.]