Since 2008, when Muntadhar al-Zaidi threw two shoes at then-president George W. Bush, there have been a number of similar incidents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_shoe_throwing_incidents One cannot blame al-Zaidi for choosing to throw a shoe and shout, "This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog!" and "This is for the widows and orphans and all those killed in Iraq." In his culture, throwing a shoe at someone is a very significant choice.
One wonders, though, whether it would (hypothetically) be more appropriate for people worldwide to throw cell phones at individuals like George W. Bush who have been instrumental in the warrantless wiretapping scandal. One might choose to include sundry current and former members of Congress who voted for the FISA amendment law which pretends to make it lawful for the government to spy on anyone in the world, without probable cause, without due process, and without end. One might include current government officials, including the current president, given his vote as former Senator from Illinois and his ongoing enthusiasm for everything espionage and unconstitutional. One might even include former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, who was recently the target of yet another thrown shoe, and who has been frequently an enthusiast of big government programs, including ones that evidently involve mass espionage. Or one might not, since throwing shoes apparently is a crime, and throwing cell phones might be regarded the same. No matter how many people in government were stoned to death, it seems unlikely to change what government is and what it does, so why bother? How you choose to behave is your responsibility, of course.
Federal Judge Claire Eagan seems to be an especially interesting candidate for future protests of all kinds. We'll assume for the time being that such future protests would be non-violent in character. Eagan was outed in a recent issue of The New York Times (Thursday 15 May 2014) as having evidently lied in an August 2013 opinion about the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping. Eagan issued her false statements as part of her official opinion for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which pretends to provide some sort of legal process in an attempt to give the fig leaf of constitutional cover to what remains a violation of individual liberty and an outrage to every human being on Earth.
Eagan said, in a particularly smarmy way, that "To date, no holder of records who has received an order to produce bulk telephony metadata has challenged the legality of such an order. Indeed, no recipient of any Section 215 order has challenged the legality of such an order, despite explicit statutory mechanisms for doing so." That was a lie, Judge Eagan.
In fact, as far back as March 2001, the telecommunications company QWest refused to participate in the NSA's warrantless wiretapping programme. Wikipedia reports, "In an unusual related legal development, on October 13, 2007, The Washington Post reported that Joseph P. Nacchio, the former CEO of Qwest Communications, is appealing an April 2007 conviction on 19 counts of insider trading by alleging that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal. According to court documents unsealed in Denver in early October as part of Nacchio's appeal, the NSA approached Qwest about participating in a warrantless surveillance program more than six months before the Sep 11, 2001, attacks which have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its efforts. Nacchio is using the allegation to try to show why his stock sale should not have been considered improper. According to a lawsuit filed against other telecommunications companies for violating customer privacy, AT&T began preparing facilities for the NSA to monitor "phone call information and Internet traffic" seven months before 9/11." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_%282001%E2%80%9307%29#Developments
In a more recent incident reported in the New York Times on 14 May 2014, a phone company, probably Sprint, raised legal questions about the metadata collection programme in July 2009. The company "was apparently on the verge of filing a formal legal challenge in January 2010, provoking a significant response by the Justice Department and the court to head off such a step." The department asked the court to unseal certain records about the programme, "and a related NSA program that collects bulk records about Americans' emails" so that the company could be more fully briefed about its intended complaint. On 8 January 2010, the company and the Justice Department petitioned the court "to extend the time period for the company to challenge the order requiring it to turn over its customers' records. It noted that the carrier had been raising questions about the legality of the program since July 2009."
In January 2014, Verizon seems to have challenged the FISA court on the legality of the programme, and Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, in what appears to be an even bigger lie, portrayed the challenge as the first by a carrier, and cited Judge Eagan's evidently false statements in the earlier opinion. So, one judge makes false statements in rejecting a request based on the false statements of another judge.
It bears mentioning that QWest was well-known for several years as a company that was resisting the NSA's warrantless wiretapping. How did the government respond? By treating its former CEO to what appear to be false charges and trumped-up evidence for improper convictions, which may have involved prosecutor misconduct. In other words, the government destroyed the lives of the people it could identify as being behind any resistance by phone companies to the government running roughshod over the freedoms of Americans. Little wonder that Sprint executives thought long and hard about whether to make their legal challenge in January 2010. I wonder how many Sprint executives were called by people in the Obama administration and told what to expect, how many charges would be filed against them, how many of their children would be attacked in various ways, how many of them would be imprisoned, tortured, or financially ruined?
The government plays hard ball. That isn't news. But idiots in the crypto currency industry seem to think that government regulation of Bitcoin would be a good idea. Why is that? It isn't as though there are any protections within the government's system. You either obey, or you are destroyed. And if some government regulator wants money, or a job after leaving their government office, or anything, how are you going to stop them?
The simple fact is that the government has been lying for decades about its domestic espionage programmes, about its foreign wars, about its military, and about everything that it wants to lie about. Every time I start writing more of the definitive review of the NSA warrantless wiretap scandal, someone sends me a news clipping or a link to yet another story making it clear that there is no end to the violence, malicious falsehood, and betrayals involved in the government's behaviour in this area.
You would do well not to trust the government. Encrypt your e-mail. Keep your computer systems secure. Stay as private as possible. The life you save may be your own.