It’s More Fun to Cheat if No One Knows

Unless you have been living in a cave the last few days, you have heard the various and sundry government, law enforcement and commercial agencies have been accessing and taking our information and phone calls and either listening or storing or both and stashing them away for a rainy day.
Now first I think it should be clear. This is not really news. Most reasonably well informed people in the United States already knew it or at the very least suspected it. How anyone could not, after 9/11 and the creation of a gigantic group of war on terrorism agencies escapes me.
Please note I did not say network because that would indicate they actually all work together. Our nations internal and external secret intelligence works as well together as a dysfunctional family with substance abuse issues.
It has been reported in the past that one agency is actually spying on another agency, both thinking the other is a foreign or domestic individual that is hell bent on blowing up a vacant building, probably housing a third and yet to be named different spy agency.
Yes, it is true. In the United States it is Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy and so on. They have to spy on someone and lets face it, there is just not enough foreign terrorism for all these agencies to watch, so, like the male lion eating its young, our agencies turned their spyglasses and magic decoder rings inward. What they discovered was a smorgasbord of people to spy on to such a level that they become drunk with the information. The keys to their parents liquor cabinet had been found and the kids went wild.
Now of course in any dysfunctional family there is always the malcontent, the one who calls the police when there is an argument or someone smokes a joint behind the barn and here we find Snowden. Selling his soul for the good of us all. A modern day savior with the message the “Gods are watching” while simultaneously nailing himself to a cross while preaching the dangers of the communications networks we all use.
Is he a hero or a patriot? I personally would not go that far but he does have guts, but to what end?
The most outrageous and possibly cynical part of this whole thing is not that we are spied on or that this young man has basically destroyed his life to let us know the depth of the spying that has occurred.
What stuns this writer into a stupor similar to standing next to a flash grenade is that there are people actually surprised and amazed. We are angry and insulted and we feel violated.
We don’t feel this way for any other reason than, somewhere in the deep inner workings of our psyche, we feel a need to be angry.
We have known for years we are being watched. We have known our phone calls could be monitored and our internet was as secure as the unlocked door to a public bathroom.
Perhaps now we can just all stop looking over our shoulders now, comfortable in the knowledge that yes Virginia, there is domestic spying going on and it is us they are spying on. We can put our self-righteous cry of foul away and accept what has been going on in one form or another since 1978.
Ideally we accept this and finally admit that just like a couple that has an open marriage, we may not talk about it but we know we are cheating and so is our spouse. Maybe it is just a let down to finally know what we already knew.
In the meantime, accept that we have been, are now and will continue to be spied on and just like a Die Hard movie, regardless of how much time goes by, there will be another revelation as to what level they are watching us. Is any of this sordid spying morally or ethically right? No. Is it the way things are and the way they will continue to be? Yes
So we might as well accept it and move on because we can’t escape it any more than a fly in a spiders web, and the more we struggle, the faster the death will come.