The Daily Bastarette is happy to be part of Fight Back Against Surveillance Day–February 11, 2014, a day designed to fight back against government attacks on free speech, privacy, and political dissent that have rendered the Constitution arcane. ..Please join us. You can read more about The Day We Take Back and what you can do here..
The Problem
Why We Fight Back Today!
#stopthensa hashtag on Twitter
Fight Back marks the second anniversary of the defeat of SOPA and PIPA, two legislative attempts by parts of the US government and its corporate sponsors. to shred free speech in the name of state security.
These victories were only temporary. The government, in the form of the National Security Agency (NSA) and other snoop agencies continues to force its prying eyes and ears and sometimes its boots into our homes, our streets, our bank accounts, our shopping and reading habits, and our digital communications. NSA especially loves Facebook.
This is not conspiracy theory.
It is fact, documented by tens of thousands of documents released by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and other lesser known “whistle blowers,” who at great threat to themselves had the courage to drop the dime and warn the public.of how NSA and other snoop crews data mine, monitor, and analyze our personal information, in an attempt to control the private actions of the everyday US public, and people around the world.
The surveillance state is nothing new We can go back to the Civil War (and probably earlier) and document US government surveillance of its own people for its own good. In the past, these spy and snitch systems were mainly about political dissent cloaked in security.
Today’s surveillance state is even more dangerous. It is about political dissent AND social engineering cloaked in security. George Orwell would understand.
Anthony Gregory, the Gilbert I. Collins Fellow at The Independent Institute, one of the many political diverse organizations participating in Take Back writes a cogent description of the emergent Orwellian total information state:
The surveillance state has become totally integrated, as government at all levels—from federal regulatory agencies down to local law enforcement, and working with politically favored corporations—are coordinated in a wholesale attack on what is left of American privacy. Spy cameras on city streets, face-recognition software, Post Office tracking, government-mandated chips in our electronics, the government takeover of our cellphone microphones and laptop webcams—all of it points to an Orwellian future.
Local police departments and public schools have contributed to the erosion of our privacy. The NSA has spied shamelessly on foreign heads of state. The trajectory is most frightening—U.S. government spying and data collection directed at the entire world. We are on the cusp of arriving at the totalitarian dream of “total information awareness.”
Stop the Snoops Now!
Currently Congress is considering two bills, one to limit snooping, the other to expand it.
- The USA Freedom Act curtails NSA surveillance abuses.
- The FISA Improvements Act attempts to legalize bulk data collection of phone records.
We need to tell Congress to pass the USA Freedom Act and amend it to make it even stronger.
Those involved in Take Back today are contacting legislators and other government officials, blogging Twitterstorming, and attending local events to tell Congress and it’s cronies to stop now..
Adoptee Rights and the Surveillence State
Consider the following a draft of thoughts I’ve been mulling over for a long time. They’ve been written rather quickly and incomplete, but fit into Take Back. They are hardly my definitive word on the subject. Just the beginning.
This over-arching state snooping is not lost on bastard activists. The very forces that confiscate and seal our own birth records, and replace them with forged “amended” replacements–then go to extremes to keep adoption secret, insisting that birthparents must remain anonymous and unknown from their own family members–monitor our cellphones, emails, and other digital communications rooting out dangerous words and ideas that could be critical of the state.
I have long argued that adoptees are, in fact, socially engineered with their state-manipulated identities and documents, We are, the lab rats of the total information state. The state has our total information. We have none. For our own good.
Regarding our over-under-sideways-down situation. Bastard Nation testifies about the dangerous-for-us hypocrisy of the data-mined state culture that keeps us from knowing our own names, families, and histories:
Critically, in this age of heightened security, the government requires all of us to prove our identities and citizenship– a legal paper trail of identity. As a result, adopted persons without an OBC are in danger of losing even more rights than just their OBC access. US-born adoptees report increased problems in obtaining driver’s licenses, passports, professional certifications, Social Security benefits, pensions and security clearances due to what government bureaucrats refer to as “irregularities” in their amended birth certificates. In the wake of the Obama “birther” movement, about a dozen state legislatures have seen bills that would require anyone running for president (and in some cases other offices) to present an original birth certificate to prove his/her place of birth and identity. The amended birth certificate of an adoptee would not suffice.
A major irregularity is a “late birth certificate “ filed a year or more after the birth. According to the US Department of State a “late birth certificate” may only be accepted for passport application if it lists the documentation used to create it and is signed by the attending physician or midwife, or, lists an affidavit signed by the parents, or shows early public records. Recent proposed passport changes are even more stringent and absurd, and actually include a requirement for those with problematic birth documents to list every residence in which they have ever lived, and a list of their mother’s pre-natal doctor’s appointments!
Reportedly, some states are now backdating the filing date of amended birth certificates to “keep up” with federal requirements; thus creating an even larger legal fiction regarding adoptees’ births than now exists.
The current US adoption industry, along with thousands of other industries, prop up the corporate state. The current middle class US adoptee rights movement conversely tends to isolate itself from the natural intersections race, class, gender, and economics..It’s not that the movement isn’t aware of other systemic rots; (the Brown case showed that too some extent, at least superficially), but that it simply doesn’t systematically connect various oppressions with the state security set-up.
The control of our information has been a forerunner of systematic control of information for everyone else. As the advance guard of disenfranchisement-by-government, we need a strong leadership role in fighting back.
Join me on Twitter @DBastardette
I’m posoing some NSA/adoptee rights tweets
This reminds me of how adoptive parents can go ahead to describe the birth parents in the most vile terms while holding themselves up a saviors without the slightest worry. It’s the “I was your Savior” mentality that keeps these records locked up and not the potential embarrassment to the birth parents which is the overworked excuse. My wife’s parents used to literally make her get down on her knees and thank them for saving her from an orphanage and her harlot mother, not to imply they were religious, they were not. When the records remain locked you can fabricate any number of stories to hold over the head of your (preferably blonde) bundle of joy.