Surveillance is important but not the kind that we have been served up lately, it has gone on for decades but not on Regular Joe Citizen of the U.S. Now we can ALL be treated as suspects if we said the wrong thing from 20-30 years ago. Thanks to Edward Snowden for having a conscience about all the power he had as a techie. Now he is back in hiding after his 12 minute video-taped interview from Hong Kong. I watched it and thought he was quite articulate. The liberal press would paint him as some kind of high school dropout who became a grunt in the Army. Pretty miraculous to be a low-info kind of guy and to have that much knowledge about computers and access into that many people’s lives. People will long question whether what he did was right or wrong to be a whistleblower.
Granted, Snowden is toast, now that he has been identified. However, his biggest fear is that nobody will do anything about the intrusive surveillance to keep our government accountable for all the access and privilege they have for what we do from phone calls to texting to what we put up on the Internet. I DO care about what information is held on me because I know what they did to people in the former Soviet Union. I know what the leader of “the” Russia would like to do to some people who don’t agree with him. I know what they did to millions of people who lived in Ukraine 70-80 years ago who didn’t tow the communist party line.
We watched the movie “The Internship” this past weekend and it was funny in a few places. It showed how people my age or younger are feeling like dinosaurs if they didn’t get in on the computer technology wave. Also, it shows that students at age 21 are cynical about their future and do not live the American Dream. They have high tuition debts to pay back but no jobs to speak of. They may be tech savvy but not much on people skills and not many experiences outside of their virtual world. It was a sad commentary on both generations. The funniest line in the movie was when Vince Vaughn was trying to explain the concept of Instagram to these geeky teammates of his at Google. He kept saying, “On the line” when he really mean “online.” The kids patiently listened to him telling him that it had already been thought of before. He enthusiastically blathered on with “on the line.” The part with the strip tease bar scene was bad which made PG-13 rating embarrassing. I think they can’t be believed anymore.
Well, I promised a joke so I’ll end my blog on this funny note. More a joke on North Dakota but just the same, one that needs to be preserved.
“After having dug to a depth of 10 meters last year, Scottish scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network more than 100 years ago. Not to be outdone by the Scots, in the weeks that followed, British scientists dug to a depth of 20 meters, and shortly after, headline in the UK newspapers read: “British concluded that their ancestor already had an advanced high-tech communications network a hundred years earlier than the Scots.” One week later, “The Nordic Klub,” a Minot, North Dakota newsletter reported the following: “After digging as deep as 30 meters in corn fields near Velva, ND, Ole Johnson, a self taught archeologist, reported that he found absolutely nothing. Ole has therefore concluded that 300 years ago North Dakota had already gone wireless.”
Kazakhnomad's Blog: A Westerner's View of Kazakhstan 