Big Brother

    E.B. Misfit put up a post today about a Supreme Court ruling about electronic surveillance. There was a movie not too long ago about the East German Secret Police listening to everyone (back when there was an East Germany). Then there was the bit about the Soviets listening to everything everyone said and you had to mind your P's and Q's if you didn't want to be sent off to the Gulag. Now we have the NSA listening to everything.

Points:

1. The Soviet Union collapsed because they could not continue to fund their national security apparatus, which meant mostly the armed forces, but you can include the KGB and all their apparatchiks as well.
2. The NSA may be recording everything and stowing it away in some vast great server farm, but how much of this stuff is anyone actually going to look at or listen to? Not much. What they'll do is wait for the computer to highlight something and then they'll go look at it, and it won't be of any interest, so they'll go on to the next highlighted item.
3. Occasionally, someone will realize that all clandestine communications will be done using code words, so all conversations will become code. "Picking up the kids from soccer" will mean picking up the terrorists from the safe house. "Going to the store for groceries" will mean stocking up on fertilizer and fuel oil. Now every conversation will be suspect and will have to be investigated, which means absolutely nothing will get done.
4. The Soviets only listened to people who mattered. If you didn't do anything to get noticed, no  one paid you any mind.

    Remember the old Pogo quote? "We have met the enemy and he is us." It costs the USA about a million dollars a year to put a soldier in the field, mostly for the same reason that it costs a $100 million dollars to make a movie. It's an expedition. You need to bring everything with you, and you need to bring a bunch of people to bring the stuff, and then you need to feed them, which means more people and more stuff. It's like a pyramid scheme.
    I keep thinking the Taliban is couple of guys walking around with a shovel and a gun, but it's not. It's actually a sizable organization, and like any big outfit it takes money to run it. I imagine it probably takes about $10 thousand a year for the Taliban to put a soldier in the field, or about ONE PERCENT of what we are spending.
    We hire contractors to build things in Afghanistan. The contractors have to deal with the local people in order to get things done. Pay off the local warlords so their workers don't get shot on the job. I would not be surprised if ONE PERCENT of what we spend to put our own troops in the field ends up in the hands of the Taliban, who use that money to put one of their own soldiers in the field. In effect we are paying the enemy to fight us.
    We are all going to hell.