Discussion of Sex Sells -- Petraeus

We got this reply on the article “Sex Sells: Petraeus”:

On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 10:50 AM, from Matt Janovic

The good side of this is how it played out: the FBI agent/douchenozzle was in a counter-terror unit. That's an obvious and tangible abuse of power in the war on terror, no warrants, Nada, to find out who was sending the emails. That's not going to play well. Glenn Greenwald was right: the surveillance state took down one of its own--the head of the CIA. That's big. Now you're going to see all these asshole politicians, eventually, begin to worry that they're next. Lots of similarities to the DC Madam case here, incidentally, we were all under surveillance, and remember, this is before 2008. [Mr. Janovic is the author of a book soon to be released on the DC Madam case and more details will be forthcoming here.]

Mr. Janovic.

Thank you for your response. I agree that this sort of spying on U.S. Citizens has been going on for decades. The novelty is that some politicians are upset about it. The fact that it is illegal is irrelevant as people such as Bradley Manning will tell us is only of interest in passing.

The Movie “Enemy of the State” has a speech in it delivered by Gene Hackman that is absolutely true and the facts mentioned and depicted in the film are also true. This is one reason that our Government is so anxious to point out that such things are “science fiction”. Everything everybody writes, says, to otherwise transmits over any sort of communication device is captured and stored. This is one reason that a huge facility, just for storage, is being built in Utah. They lack the storage capacity. Now consider that the entirety of American Literature could be stored on a common hard drive, you can barely imagine how much stuff is recorded by them. The only safety citizens have is that there is just so much of the stuff that there is no way to monitor or analyze all of it, even those things selected by keywords by high-speed computers. We should all remember this and may take comfort that our surveillance types are so anal-retentive and incompetent that we retain a degree of privacy in an overwhelmed bureaucracy.