by Craig Boehman

Dark Side of Internet
My enemy’s watch list bears my name. It includes yours, and your family’s too if they use the Internet or talk on a phone. Much of our everyday communications and intimate thoughts are secured in a glutted vat of zeroes and ones. My enemy is your enemy.

This is a cause for the Left and Right feet of all Americans. Together we march, divided we lose our legs to atrophy.

Edward Snowden is the messenger. The message: “The NSA has built an infrastructure that allows it to intercept almost everything. With this capability, the vast majority of human communications are automatically ingested without targeting. If I wanted to see your emails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your emails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”

This is an act of war.

In terms of story narrative, in what the late Joseph Campbell would describe as The Call To Adventure, we have been presented with a choice. Do we set out on a quest to right the wrongs, or do we remain stagnant?

If we chose to fight, what would a revolutionary act look like in modern day America? Arundhati Roy offers us encouraging words:

The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.

The NSA’s spying capabilities are dependent on corporate technologies installed in our daily lives. The strategy calls for companies to blame the government for forcing them to comply with court orders to turn over our private data. The government will shrug its shoulders and simply deny it. The object of the game is to deflect blame and to remain obscenely profitable at it — or to remain in office on behalf of corporate benefactors. Corporations and government are the winners. The losers don’t even know they’re playing. The American people. Citizens everywhere.

More leaked documents and stories are on their way from Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Watch closely in the coming weeks to discover what your neighbors are doing about it. My enemy’s watch list bears our names. Many of us are accepting Snowden’s Call because privacy is the last frontier of tyranny’s reach.