Recently, Edward Snowden was awarded the Ridenhour Prize by the Nation foundation at the National Press Club in Washington, DC. During the ceremony, James Bamford said, "In a memorandum, General Keith Alexander suggested going after not terrorists or criminals but 'radicalizers,' including innocent Americans by searching the Internet for their vulnerabilities, such as visits to porn sites. Then by secretly leaking this information, the NSA could discredit them in the eyes of their followers."
Today, we all know who global hero Edward Snowden is and what he revealed about the evil and malicious vipers at the Nationalist Socialist Security Agency (NSA). But who was Ridenhour to be identified with a prize? And who is this Alexander character who purports to be a general? In our ongoing inquiry into government regulation, whether it is really a terrible idea or just a very bad one, and whether the failed experiment in "limited government" might ever be admitted a failure by those dedicated to more government, we thought we should find out.
Ronald Ridenhour was drafted to do some very bad things in Vietnam many decades ago for a bad organization filled with bad people. He learned that some of those people had committed a particularly heinous massacre at a place called My Lai. He gathered information from eyewitnesses, returned home after his time in the service was up, and sent letters to about 30 different congress critters and Pentagon apparatchikisti. So he broke the story. An investigation ensued, and a few went to prison.
Ridenhour said, "...Some people — most, it seems — will, under some circumstances, do anything someone in authority tells them to.... Government institutions, like most humans, have a reflexive reaction to the exposure of internal corruption and wrongdoing: No matter how transparent the effort, their first response is to lie, conceal and cover up. Also like human beings, once an institution has embraced a particular lie in support of a particular coverup, it will forever proclaim its innocence." (Ron Ridenhour, Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1993)
Evidently, Snowden gets it. Snowden understands what he had to do for people all over the world, what was the right thing to do, and he did it. Ridenhour got it. He knew that what had been done at My Lai was wrong and that it was the right thing for him to tell the world about it. You get a sense of Ridenhour's purpose and sensitivity from his 1969 letter to Congress http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/ridenhour_ltr.html and from his other writing on the topic. http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Narrative/Ridenhour_Jesus_01.html
So, who the hell is Keith Alexander, what bone head made him a "general," and how does he purport to uphold his personally sworn oath to defend the constitution (which includes extensive guarantees in a bill of rights) against all enemies foreign and domestic when he's convinced that he has to rape the individual liberty of millions of people he's never met? Or am I asking the wrong question....?
You can read the public pabulum about this guy at his wikipedia page. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_B._Alexander He was made a general some decades ago and allowed to "retire" in March 2014 at the age of 62. Although he allegedly offered to resign in October 2013, the Obama administration was apparently so enthusiastic about his work, the main body of which seems to have involved invading the privacy and violating the civil liberties of not only every single American alive, but also billions of people worldwide. More importantly, as can be seen from a series of statements he made to the public and to Congress, Keith Alexander was evidently lying, over and over again, in what seems to have been a pathological attempt to get away with mass surveillance, oath breaking, and the deliberate, malicious, deceitful destruction of reputations of anyone who disagreed with his apparent militarism and enthusiasm for the butchery of human beings in the name of preserving a system of command, control, regulation, and domination.
In other words, he doesn't get it. Nor does the Obama administration. Nor does Congress. Those in power seek more power. For those in power to even look at what is being done to individual liberty in the name of control seems vanishingly unlikely. Although, for his crimes against humanity as a general officer in the military, for his crimes against the American people and the constitution as director of the NSA, and for his sundry other high crimes and misdemeanours, Alexander should, in my opinion, be impeached, convicted of treason, stripped of his titles, honours, medals, awards, assets, and pensions, and spend the rest of his life at labour to compensate his victims with whatever he has kept of his past (ill-gotten) earnings and whatever he gets in future earnings under extremely close supervision, we all know that no such consequences will be transpire. Criminals in government offices get away with murder, often.
These facts ought to give those who want government regulation of bitcoin in particular and the crypto-currency industry pause. But my experience of such people is that they always want to believe that they are in the right, that they are clever, that they have friends in high places, and that they, too, will be able to get away with creating cartels in restraint of trade, engaging in economic piracy under colour of law, and won't ever learn. They won't learn that government regulation is a bad idea because they think that they can ride the tiger.
The tiger is, of course, big government. In terms of annual budget, there is no bigger government than the United States government. And the kind of people who want regulation of the finance industry for their own benefit think that they can ride that tiger, and tigers just like it, without ever getting thrown off, mauled, and eaten. People like Bernie Madoff thought that, too, and were willing to engage in fraud, deceit, and flim-flam to gather in billions of dollars, mismanage those funds, and, for a time, get away with doing so. When a few prominent scapegoats were needed, a very few were found, including Madoff.
Lt. Calley presumably thought he could ride the tiger, just as Alexander seems to be thinking. Ron Ridenhour proved that thinking wrong. Ed Snowden may do the same for Alexander and a host of other vermin infesting the nationalist socialist (Nazi, fascist, police state, militaristic) government of the United States.
Ridenhour and Snowden have honour, decency, and humanity. They should be regarded as heroes by everyone on Earth who has a conscience. Alexander is a monster. And if you favour government regulation of any industry, you are no better.