Posted on 06/10/2013 1:20:40 AM PDT by grundle
Paul Krugman, an outspoken liberal economist known for his support of the Obama administration, today said the United States has become an “authoritarian surveillance state.”
Part of a panel on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Krugman offered his take on the bombshell NSA spying revelations:
“…there are different kinds of surveillance states. You can have a democratic surveillance state which collects as little data as possible and tells you as much as possible about what it’s doing. Or you could have an authoritarian surveillance state which collects as much as possible and tells the public as little as possible. And we are kind of on the authoritarian side.”
Krugman’s statement followed fellow panelist George Will’s observation that “we’re using technologies of information gathering that didn’t exist 20 years ago, that are terribly important but terribly invasive, and they require reposing extraordinary trust in the executive branch of government which some of us think it has recently forfeited.”
Here's the clip:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_I9MwMLdqg0
(Excerpt) Read more at theblaze.com ...
Here are 185 examples of Barack Obama’s lying, lawbreaking, corruption, cronyism, etc.
Authoritarian states are part and parcel of big government. However, just try and explain that to big liberal supporters and it’s just like trying to drill straw into stones of granite.
I posted this on another thread; it fits here too:
Anyone who doesn’t think that at some point Obama and his regime thugs won’t use the data gathered by the NSA for their own nefarious reasons against individuals or groups of individuals of the opposite political party or religious groups, or pro-Israel groups, has rocks in their heads where a brain should be. The Obama thugs could pluck out info on you or me, on our entire internet lives. They would know everything, our e-mails, our bank accounts and/or credit cards, our health records, everything. Any jpolitically oriented operative within the NSA could do this and bypass any required search warrant needed to do so by simply doing the search on an individual and surreptiously pass it on to whomever wants it, usually a political ideologue of liberal/socialist bent.
The dangers here are tremendous. The government is asking us to trust them on this data mining, that it will not be abused. We already know that the Obama regime is very willing to abuse and use gov’t agencies for their own political purposes. Look to the IRS spying and abuse of citizens of the opposite political party, or wrong religion in their eyes, or those with a pro-Israel bent.
Audits and grant stalling past elections to harm opposition parties from being able to organize and get their word out to educate the public on the constitution, etc., was the norm of this Obama Admin. Look at EPA bullying as a weapon by this Admin, or all the regulations being shoved down our throats, in particular affecting the business community; banks and corporation forced to become crony capitalists used by this crooked regime. Look to Obamacare and its thousands of rules and regulations that were hidden from the public and we are just now finding out what all is entailed in Obamacare.
What in heaven’s name would stop them from having ideologue plants spy on citizens’ e-mails and their backgrounds contained on the internet, basically their whole lives encapsulated therein, to use for their own politically evil intentions? I suspect they have already done this.
SCOTUS John Roberts might have been one of those whose background was looked into by the Obama regime and then used against him to blackmail him into voting for Obamacare. We’ll never know. But I wouldn’t sit here too comfortably and agree that this massive data mining is necessary for our safety rather than using more narrow targeting of data gathering with greater restrictions on its use and how it is mined. I have zero faith in the integrity of the current gov’t and what they would not stoop to in order to further their political cause. We have no true safeguards. Zero.
It does make sense that Roberts may have been black mailed, instead of having been simply clever. I wish he would come forward to confirm or deny it.
It must have been a big surprise in the hen-house that the newcomer with the red fur and sharp teeth wasn’t just another affirmative-action chicken.
Don’t worry, he no doubt blames the Republicans for it all.
A frog just commented on how warm the water seems to be getting.
"Another art of the tyrant is to sow quarrels among the citizens; friends should be embroiled with friends, the people with the notables, and the rich with one another. Also he should impoverish his subjects."
"Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the others enter into no rivalry with him."
Te Nobel Prize winner most responsible for the creation of our Big Government state complains that it has become an ‘Authoritarian Surveillance State’, which is inevitable for such a large government? I hope he appreciates the irony.
Didn’t read this I will admit. But they can blame Bush all they want, he didn’t extend the Patriot Act.
Will’s statement implies that we should have trusted the Feds to develop all of this under Bush-Cheney, before Obama came to office and had the IRS scandal exposed.
I think he’s completely wrong with that.
Your point is very important. There is no balance of power, and there are no effective checks and balances when one branch of government controls all the information gathering and has the technical capacity to track the whereabouts and intercept all of the communications of all members of the other branches of government.
Well said!
How many programs begun by government are actually ever discontinued?
None.
Do you think Bush was unaware of this fact?
Waiting to hear ...
1. What did they have on Roberts?
2. Who gave Reid Romney’s tax info?
Let me point out this scenario. A decade from now, you wake up and find a dozen US Marshals at the door. They’ve got a search warrant. You are eventually dragged into a grand jury.
They’ve got these odd numbers that they claim equals a drug dealer in Houston, from six years ago. They’ve got transactions of money moving, from five and six years ago. And they’ve got some strange emails from three to six years ago.
You go to the telephone, internet and banking organizations for a copy. You discover that NONE keep anything more than twelve months. The only data....is NSA data.
You’ve been set up by someone, but you don’t know how. Someone added lines, text, and calls....onto your NSA record.
There’s a problem here, and we will eventually pay for this.
Your post should be the first of a new generation of “Federalist Papers.” People should be able to understand your scenario.
Unfortunately, playing the “thought experiment” of putting it on Facebook, one realizes that most people would just consider it a downer and ignore it.
“Liberal Pundit [hypocrite Paul Krugman]: U.S. Has Become an ‘Authoritarian Surveillance State’”
He has certainly done his share to get us to where we are today.
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