No More Secrets

By Alan Caruba

There was a time when, if my Mother wanted to call my aunt in the same state, it was a “long distance” call. Now we live in a time when everyone is “connected” by cell phones and the Internet. The government deems cell phones so essential it gives them away free to “the poor.”

The explosion of “social networks” has us more “connected” and, to a large degree, it encourages the young and not-so-young to believe that every single thing they do each day is so important that it must be instantly communicated via the Internet.

I am not a Luddite who thinks that cell phones, the Internet, and other modern wonders are a bad thing. Much of my professional life is conducted via the Internet and often with people I have never met face to face. I have friends I have made via the Internet and others from a long ago past with whom I keep in contact via the Internet. Interpersonal communication is a good thing.

While Barack Hussein Obama has been busy transforming our nation into a Soviet-style Socialistic republic, the invention of the Internet and the likes of the late Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and the folks at Google have literally transformed our lives in ways we have only begun to comprehend.

In Egypt, Facebook brought out thousands of very unhappy Egyptians to Tahir square in Cairo where they proceeded to bring down one of the Middle East’s many dictators. The Internet exposed the global warming hoax when thousands of emails between its conspirators were leaked.

It gave the U.S. State and Defense Department folks a nightmare when a very low level Army kid passed countless secret dispatches on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to Wikileaks. Private Bradley Manning is looking at life in prison for that escapade. When I served in the Army, I had a clearance for “secret” materials and thought I was hot stuff until I realized that they gave that clearance to anyone who had a pulse. Apparently they are still doing that.

The fact that so much of what governments do is based on secrecy explains why billions are spent annually on intelligence gathering—spying—on each other. You need only read the teachings of Sun Tzu, written some 2,500 years ago, to learn how essential spying is to any government.

On a personal level, we have entered an era when there are virtually no secrets—as often as not because people share their secrets with friends who share them with friends who share them with friends. Former Congressman Anthony Weiner could write a book on the subject.

So far as governments are concerned, we are in a new era of disinformation—lies—to counter leaks. All this information pouring forth on the Internet has increasingly marginalized the role of the press.

For those who recall Watergate, a 1970s scandal that forced a president to resign, we looked to newspapers to expose wrong-doing, but today the facts are only a computer click away and, as often as not, the press, with exceptions, is actively suppressing information it does not want us to know.

Recently, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio held a press conference to confirm that the birth certificate provided by the President of the United States is, in all likelihood, a forgery. There are serious questions about the legitimacy of his Social Security number, as well as data related to his passport.

The media, for the most part, ignored this story and that makes them part of what is surely the greatest conspiracy of the new century.

The larger question is why Sheriff Apaio’s information has not become the subject of a Congressional investigation. Why are so many Americans, elected representatives, law enforcement authorities, judges, willing to be complicit in a presidency that may have been acquired by deceit and, if so, whose exercise of power in implicitly criminal?

There may be no more secrets about Obama’s claim to hold the highest office in the land, but what good is it if nothing is done to end it?

What good is it if the Democratic Party is permitted to put his name on its ballot once again?

Why do we have a Constitution? Why do we still call ourselves a nation of laws?

This is how liberty dies. Through apathy and indifference.

© Alan Caruba, 2012