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March 7th 2017
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio. Hope you’re doing well. Hope you’re enjoying your newfound visibility to the powers that be.
Today Wikileaks dropped their Vault 7 release, perhaps their most important release to date. It’s a confirmation of what most people knew about the government’s capacity for surveillance: that they can enlist an electronic army of nearby devices to listen and record video, and do whatever they want to capture whatever they want. Apparently the only thing they can’t do is hack your hamster to read your mind, but I’m sure that’s coming soon! Basically reminding us that the Fourth Amendment has been turned into toilet paper for fascists.
This is an example, to me, of – I did a video almost ten years ago – how the internet was the greatest revolution in human communications since the invention of the printing press. The free market produces all of these wonderful things to allow us to share ideas and arguments and evidence and perspectives, and unite the world in the potential arena of reason and evidence. Massive forward thrusting of our capacity to be civilized. Ah – we have all of this provided to us by the free market, and then the goodies which are produced by the free market are enlisted by the state to be turned against us. The technology that is invented to serve us turns into a Big Brother who controls and chills us, and potentially compromises us, fundamentally.
And this question of compromise is really, really important. When you see people out there in the public sphere, who can you trust? Who has been compromised? Who has stuff on who? Right? How do you know that the information being presented to you comes from an honest place, or comes from a place where people have been compromised by government information about their private activities? Hell, Obama himself could have been hacked!
Obama. Obama knew about all of this, I have no doubt. Come on, liberals! Really? Are you going to keep defending him? If he knew about all of this stuff, and kept it quiet? Because this is the cycle that we live in, and it needs to be broken.
The cycle that we live in is this: the government taxes you in order to go and destabilize foreign governments, and start wars, and create massive amounts of conflict, resentment, hatred, and murderous intent around the world. Then, you see, the government takes money from you in order to resettle people from countries that they’ve attacked in your neighborhood. Then the government says, ‘Well, y’know, it’s kind of weird, but there’s a lot of people around who seem to want to do America harm, both domestically and overseas, so now we’re going to need to take a lot of money from you to develop massive amounts of hacking tools in order to spy upon everything you do. Because you see, we’re all about just keeping you safe.’ That is the cycle.
Does anyone out there really think that this a good idea? Does anyone out there think that this net catches a lot of bad guys, or gives the government control and chills conversation among good guys? Is there anyone out there who really supports this, who really thinks this is a great idea? I mean, outside the alphabet soup of agencies playing with literally the power of the gods, playing with surveillance techniques and mechanisms that the NKVD and the Stasi could only have dreamed about.
In 1984, there’s a screen that listens and watches what you do. It may have come a little later than anticipated, but its powers are almost infinitely greater than imagined.
And this is an important thing to remember. Is there anyone you would trust with this power? Whenever you think that the government can do something good with the powers it has, imagine that your worst enemy has those powers to be used against you. Because sooner or later, unless we push back, that will be the situation we find ourselves in.
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