WannaKill the NSA

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nsa spying concept

Imagine that your child needs an operation to save his life.
You rise at 5 a.m. on the morning of his surgery. You race to the hospital — only to find chaos. Malware attacked the institution’s computers overnight, effectively shutting them down. Patients’ records are inaccessible as are many surgical tools and even the telephones and elevators, as you discover when you can’t call your boy from the lobby. A harried nurse shouts that visitors may as well go home: There will be no surgeries today.
Yet your son will die without medical intervention.
You try to reach his room on the top floor, but the stairwells are jammed with angry, frustrated families shouting and fighting. After two agonizing hours, you admit defeat and head home, sobbing. Your car’s radio tells you that this cyber-war hasn’t only felled the hospital: It’s paralyzed corporations and establishments worldwide.
And then you learn that the government of your country’s closest ally is behind the attack. Your son may die, thanks to this so-called “friendly” nation.
If you reside in England, this nightmare might have tortured you last weekend, courtesy of America’s National Security Agency and its ransomware, WannaCry. And if you live in the USSA, know that the sociopaths ruling us may once again have slaughtered innocents in their quest to dominate the globe. At what point do we revolt against this homicidal government?
Let’s be very clear about what happened. The National Security Agency is an anti-Constitutional bureaucracy that monitors virtually every electronic communication of virtually every person on the planet. Such surveillance directly violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution — regardless of how many clowns in black gowns pretend otherwise. Furthermore, we’ve known the ugly truth about the NSA — its deliberate circumventing of the Fourth Amendment, the staggering extent of that circumventing, the agency’s suborning of the IT industry and its insouciant eavesdropping on allies, enemies, American citizens and foreigners — for decades as whistle-blower after whistle-blower revealed these crimes. Now comes WannaCry, a “disconcerting link between the two most serious forms of cyber-security threats in the world today — nation-state action and organized criminal action,” as Microsoft’s president Brad Smith puts it.
And yet the American public, a victim paying for its own victimization and that of everyone else, shrugs and yawns.
Some argue that criminals unleashed WannaCry on the world’s computers, encrypting files until the owners pay to release them. But the bug these cyber-kidnappers employed originated with the NSA. The agency discovered a flaw years ago in Microsoft’s programs. It then manipulated that knowledge rather than immediately alerting the corporation lest Microsoft fix the error. “In late 2015, the NSA officially admitted it only discloses 91 percent of the vulnerabilities it finds, keeping the rest for the creation of cyber-weapons. … government officials admitted the hoarded zero-days are used for the creation of offensive weapons, just like ETERNALBLUE, the NSA exploit at the core of the WannaCry ransomware outbreak.” The NSA always prefers to enhance its espionage against us instead of protecting us.
Yet the agency has no legitimate reason for such surveillance. It has repeatedly claimed it spies only to “protect national security.” And that allegation has just as repeatedly proven false. The NSA spies so that American politicians and bureaucrats may dominate the world, forcing other governments into lockstep with their agendas, from promoting sodomy to rewarding crony capitalists. The NSA does not spy because other nations threaten our well-being. Rather, those countries threaten the federal government’s mastery overseas — as they should. Americans who don’t want Russian or Chinese politicians dictating to us should sympathize when foreigners object to John McCain or Nancy Pelosi’s tyrannizing them.
But it gets worse: not only did the NSA know about and exploit this flaw, one of its hackers carelessly released it. Unofficial criminals seized and used it; Microsoft’s president conjured “[a]n equivalent scenario with conventional weapons… the U.S. military having some of its Tomahawk missiles stolen.” Picture the thieves pointing those bombs at London or Paris, menacing innocent civilians who die in cyber-warfare as tragically as in conventional warfare. Had your child’s life been at stake, how would you react? Would you excuse foreigners too bored, complacent or fearful of their government to police it before it kills your family?
How long will the world tolerate such aggression? Let’s hope it shows more patience than America did 72 years ago when its rulers debated the fate of an equally bellicose nation.
By 1944, Nazi Germany was obviously losing the war it had started by invading its European neighbors. That prompted Franklin Roosevelt’s administration to discuss the fate they would deal the conquered.
The president refused to “accept the view … that ‘The German people as a whole are not responsible for what has taken place, that only a few Nazi leaders are.’ … The Allies must make the Germans understand that their ‘whole nation’ had been waging a lawless conspiracy against the decencies of modern civilization.” 1 How much more a country that enables attacks on hospitals?
Henry Morgenthau, then Secretary of the Treasury, argued for destroying whatever parts of Germany had survived Allied bombing, punishing an already starving country with complete destitution. Speaking of Germany’s most important industrial region, he advised, “Just strip it. I don’t care what happens to the population. I would take every mine, every mill and factory and wreck it. … Steel, coal, everything. Just close it down…” 2 Another American politician recommended Sherman’s march to the sea as a model for dealing with a vanquished enemy. 3 And Roosevelt himself decreed that “Germans could ‘live happily and peacefully on soup from soup kitchens,’” 4 that they “should be fed three times a day from [U.S.] Army soup kitchens… They will remember that experience all their lives.” 5  Yet the Constitution never empowers the Feds to teach other countries a lesson, any more than it empowers them to spy.
If we continue to tolerate DC’s horrific depredations, we should expect no more leniency than the Nazis’ taxpayers received.
— Becky Akers

Becky Akers is a free-lance writer and historian who publishes so voluminously that whole forests of gigabytes have died. You’ve heard of some of the publications that carry her work (Personal Liberty Digest, Christian Science Monitor, Washington Post, Barron’s, New York Post); others can only wish you’d heard of them. She’s also written two novels of the American Revolution, Halestorm and Abducting Arnold. They advocate sedition and liberty, among other joys, so the wise reader will buy them now, before they’re banned.
Sources:
[1] Michael Beschloss, “The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941-1945” (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), p. 96.
[2] Ibid, p. 103.
[3] Ibid, p. 103.
[4] Ibid, p. 95.
[5] Ibid, p. 96.