“Perhaps the topic of surveillance may just be the thing to unite people and, if we are lucky, even resolve our American race issues.”

Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial. Kafka’s story centers around a man who is arrested and not informed why. He desperately tries to find out what triggered his arrest and what’s planned for him. He discovers  a mysterious court system has a dossier on him and is investigating him; he’s unable to learn much more. The Trial depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes. It uses people’s information to make important decisions about them,while denying the people the ability to participate in how their information is used.

This is the world we may be living in sometime in the very near future.

A world of information processing—the aggregation, the storage, the use, the analysis of data and of information collection. A world where often no care is taken to be accurate in any of the stages of the process including the collection.

This secret information analysis affects and contaminates the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. It creates a sense of helplessness, powerlessness. It alters the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.

Typically: THE HIGHEST COURT IN THE LAND HAS THE LOWEST ETHICAL STANDARDS! The courts, not being people, are amoral.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed on Thursday that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of any (or very) phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”

Who is this analyst who “decides”?

If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

This saga of citizen spying, of decisions being made behind closed doors, actions for which the public has no input, is ongoing.

We have recently been informed the government has made secret interpretations of the laws in existence.

These laws actually began under the administration of President Bush, President Obama’s predecessor and the policies continue being implemented even more tyrannically through the administration of President Barack Obama. More