Washington Post: Showdown escalates between Trump, Nunes, and the FBI 

Fox News: House intel committee releases transcript of contentious meeting over surveillance memo

Zero Hedge: FBI opposes memo release due to “inaccurate information”

Also Zero Hedge: FBI texts discussed “destroying evidence”, scramble to find hard drive

CNBC: Google and Facebook are watching our every move online. It’s time to make them stop.

The Hill: Digital privacy shouldn’t be optional on the US border

NY Daily News: NYPD cops ordered to limit cooperation with ICE agents

The Guardian: The kill chain: Inside the unit that tracks targets for US drone wars

Slate: ICE is out of control

SFGate: San Francisco will wipe thousands of marijuana convictions off the books

Vox: Drug companies shipped 21 million opioids to a town of 2,900 people

Activist Post: Libertarian response to State of the Union

ScienceMag: Listen to killer whale say “hello” and “bye-bye”

Antiwar.com: Trump signs order keeping Guantanamo open

Politico: Trump expected to tap Army cyber warfare chief to lead NSA

Techdirt: Minnesota Supreme Court says unlocking a phone with a fingerprint isn’t a Fifth Amendment issue. Ed: Nothing beats the security of a good, old-fashioned password.

Forbes: New AI tech blinds computer facial recognition systems

FCW: TSA tests facial recognition tech at LAX

Newsweek: Texas’ first marijuana dispensary spurs hopes of Republicans jumping aboard legal weed

Mises: Net Neutrality advocates are asking the wrong questions

Zero Hedge: Declassified docs expose UK’s secret Cold War plan to nuke Middle East oil fields

National Review: 29 and euthanized: Dark news from the Netherlands

Chemistry World: Robot with AI brain learns to evolve synthetic protocells

We need to know. Economist: Why we still don’t have a space elevator

Atlas Obscura: Russia’s psychedelic salt mines

Express: Is nuclear fusion key to rocket fast enough to land humans on Mars?

I’ve always found it fascinating at how governments always and without exception move towards totalitarianism, immediately hacking away at the liberty of its citizens.  It’s almost like some automatic process of nature, with government employees not even truly aware of what they’re doing.  It would be interesting, if possible, to travel through history and observe every single action on the part of a governing class that slowly built the structure that would eventually be used against their own people.  It sounds far more interesting that bird-watching at least, which reminds of this quote from Baltasar Gracian:

“Many people spend time studying the properties of animals or herbs; how much more important it would be to study those of people, with whom we must live or die.”

Today, of course, we have somewhat of a more complete record of the genesis of the post-9/11 National Security State.  The wheels that were set in motion, the money spent, etc.  But the strange this is, the wheel was already there, awaiting a crisis.  Power grabs always happen amid turmoil and national fear, and after 9/11, to say that the power was grabbed would be something of an understatement.  Seventeen years later we have what you see: a Middle East burning like a toxic waste dump, a trillion-dollar Surveillance State getting itself organized and aimed at every US citizen like some digital Eye of Sauron, a supplicated Silicon Valley eagerly constructing the technology for total omnipresent, all-encompassing surveillance, and a civilian class not caring a whit.  Like I said, I’d love to observe the history of the past two decades as some kind of invisible time-traveler, not only watching the chain of decisions that has led to our present predicament, but also the facial expressions, any sign of moral injury or wavering.  Maybe I just want to believe that the people who created this mess were actually human, or people who were capable of feeling a fragment of distress about their decisions.

I would probably be disappointed.  Every government in history has been comprised of people, just like you and I, and yet they still found within them the will to unleash mass murder and enslavement upon a many other people.

So the flaw within government is the flaw within us.  Power over others leads to all manner of cruelty and evil.  Political power, that is.  The power to command the police or the military to commit an atrocity is what I mean.  The power to murder and enslave.  And it seems that, throughout history, wherever that power has existed, it was put to use.

And it also seems that, wherever some small amount of that power has been granted, it continually seeks to expand that power.  The liberty of the citizens is a roadblock to greater power, and so it appears as an enemy to government.  And that is something that should probably always be kept at the back, if not forefront, of every individual’s mind: liberty and government are mortal enemies.  Their coexistence is unnatural, and has always been a fleeting phenomenon throughout history.  Tyranny is the rule, not liberty.

Government is just a collection of people.  BUT, but.  They are a collection of people actively working to diminish liberty in the service of power expansion.  And also remember, every diminishment of liberty, no matter how small, is a step toward slavery.  And, to put it plainly, that is the only state of affairs that would feel “natural” to government.  Everyone tagged, sorted, surveilled, ordered around.  Every step a government takes, wittingly or not, is a movement in the direction of that more “natural” state.

This is what we resist.  Government is the institution of force, and force is antithetical to liberty.  Liberty is cooperation, voluntarism.  Civilization depends on the existence of such voluntary behavior.  Which in turn means that government, for the most part, is decivilizing.  Societies that suddenly embrace an ideology of government force as the path to civilization rapidly descend into slavery, mass murder, mass starvation and totalitarianism.  Just look at the rubble of the 20th century total states of Russia and China.  Their embrace of Marxism, which does nothing more than baptize government force, led directly to the deaths of millions upon millions of civilians.

Government is unnatural to liberty. But do we need it, in some form?  How to we enforce a voluntary society? How do we protect voluntary behavior from the emergence of force in some organized form?

And that’s a can of worms that centuries of treatises have been aimed at.  I’m not interested in writing a treatise here.  But these are questions that must be rolled around with an honest mind.  How is liberty to be defended once it’s restored?  Do we need to create a government to protect against the rise of government?  Does that even make sense?  These are the fundamental questions at the heart of a theory of liberty.  And of course answers have been offered up, but none that really offers up anything new on the subject.

The most fundamental question probably is this: which is more sustainable, tyranny or liberty?  And for liberty to exist in any form, must we create the very institution that at its core is motivated to destroy liberty, and civilization along with it?

Send complaints to digitalsunset86@gmail.com

Just Security: Five questions the Nunes memo better answer

EFF: California Senate rejects license plate privacy shield bill

Techdirt: First Amendment lawsuit results in Louisiana police department training officers to respect citizens with cameras

The Atlantic: How the swamp drained Trump. Ed: Wish I’d thought of this headline.

The Week: The myth of America’s immigration problem.

Fortune: Why bitcoin may not be digital gold after all.  Ed: Stories like this means it’s probably time to buy the cryptocurrency

Zero Hedge: Second person of interest identified in Las Vegas massacre

Counterpunch: The My Lai Massacre, 50 years later

ArsTechnica: Pocket-sized DNA reader used to scan entire human genome sequence

ExpressUK: 8.5-mile ‘pyramid’ found on bottom of ocean

IB Times: UK surveillance law used to spy on calls, texts, and the internet ruled ‘unlawful’

Fox News: Paul Ryan calls to ‘cleanse’ the FBI, back FISA memo release

The Hill: House Intel committee votes to make Nunes’ memo public

The Hill: Robert Mueller’s forgotten surveillance crime spree

Aljazeera: Pentagon blocking release of ‘key facts’ on Afghan war

DW: Journalists go to court over Germany’s ‘unrestrictive’ surveillance laws

My alma mater. Reason: Oklahoma State activists want a bias response team with the power to punish racially insensitive speech

Rare: The war on drugs destroys communities of color

The Maven: Future tanks: 30-tons, artificial intel, commanding attack robots

FEE: Guess why hundreds of busboys just lost their jobs

Scientific American: Missing neutrons may lead a secret life as dark matter

Big Think: How a Feynman experiment may lead to a Theory of Everything

KFOR is reporting that military weapons manufacturer,ahem “aerospace company”,  Kratos, is coming to Oklahoma City very soon.

Oklahoma rep. Steve Russell announced the deal last Friday, meaning he probably brokered the crony boondoggle.  Of course the usual benefits were rolled out: hundreds of jobs would be created, good for the economy, committed to serving our country, soldiers, America woooooo, etc.

Kratos specializes in unmanned “target drones”, which are used by the military to simulate enemy aircraft.

The chosen name for the weapons developer is a bit on the nose, as ‘Kratos’ is the Greek God of strength and power.  But then again, these warlords love ridiculous names.

Gizmodo: Facebook conveniently declares “privacy principles” ahead of stringent new regulations

Washington Examiner: Senator who released Pentagon Papers: Republicans are cowards if they don’t release FISA memo

The Intercept: Fitness tracker data highlights sprawling US military footprint in Africa

Techdirt: Senators demand investigation of intelligence community’s refusal to implement whistleblower protections

EFF: ICE accesses a massive amount of license plate data.  Will California take action?

Esquire: The Un-American ICE

New York Times: Immigration’s border enforcement myth

EFF: It’s time to make student privacy a priority

Consortium News: The war that never ends

Libertarian Institute: Military-Industrial Complex famous quotes

Zero Hedge: Fitness tracking app accidentally reveals secret US military bases, CIA ‘black sites’

WSWS: New York Times cashes in on Facebook’s news censorship

And yes, I’m still posting a story from the New York Times: The ‘killer robots’ are us

Antiwar.com: JUSTIN RAIMONDO: Kick Turkey out of NATO

SFGate: Border Patrol accused of retaliating against aid group in Arizona

MintPressNews: To assassinate Arafat, Israel’s Mossad planned to blow up passenger plane

And more from MintPressNews: 70 years of disinformation: CIA funded opinion magazines in Europe

SingularityHub: Machines teaching each other could be the biggest exponential trend in AI

Motherboard: Autonomous semis could help solve trucking’s major labor shortage

Nautilus: The sound so loud it circled the Earth four times

Wired: What’s so ‘anti’ about antimatter?

World Net Daily: ‘Police State’ national ID card tucked away in immigration bill

Daily Mail: ICE now has access to a nationwide license plate database

North Jersey: NJ police brutality: millions paid in secret settlements that keep bad cops on the street and the public in danger

CATO: When our faces are our “papers”

Activist Post: 7 times the US has lost nukes that still haven’t been found

Fifth Domain: The next cyber arms race is in artificial intelligence

Daily Star: AI Army: China hiring team of robotics experts in “terrifying” military development

The Hill: Destroying, suppressing evidence is FBI standard procedure

National Review: Why trust the FBI?

FEE: Minimum wage fallout is caused by government, not business

Alternet: Magic mushrooms fight authoritarianism Ed: Abandon Big Pharma’s poison pill racket and give everyone psychedelics and weed.

Economist: Fentanyl is lethal and almost impossible to keep out of the country. Ed: Legalize clean heroin in some form and give addicts a safe place to use it, it’s the only way to stop the fentanyl epidemic.

Truthdig: FISA is a direct threat to American’s privacy

The Week: ICE can now track license plates all over America

Huffington Post: Facebook and Google’s surveillance capitalism model is in trouble

Kuwait Times: New tactical nukes in US arsenal raises risks, experts and critics warn

Reason: No, Russian bots aren’t responsible for #ReleaseTheMemo

Cato: Why does AT&T want Net Neutrality regulation?

Mises: Law enforcement is not the same as security

High Times: Could the end of Prohibition mean the end of Cartel violence?

Digital Trends: Deep learning vs. machine learning: Here’s the difference

Imperfect Creator: Nature: Artificial neurons compute faster than the human brain

NBC News: Simple math may show how many space aliens may be out there