Monthly Archives: December 2014

RECENT MUSINGS

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By Zachary Klein

Last week I began thinking about today’s column and knew I didn’t want to spew another tirade about the state of the country, world, or my own politics. Not that there wasn’t plenty to rage about given the past few weeks, but hell, it’s the holiday season and I didn’t want to play Grinch.

It’s that strange time of year where the holidays have put an end to the normal part of 2014 and the new year has yet to begin. So here are flashes of the flotsam and jetsam that are floating through my head.

Sony and The Interview. After all the stories and interviews with Sony executives, I began to wonder whether they hacked themselves. No way would they ever get the audience and ticket sales for that crappy movie had they gone the traditional route. Now? A lotta people are going to make a fortune. If I were North Korea and gonna hack, I would have gone after their financial passwords and bank accounts. You know they need the money.

Level playing field. If, after all the newspaper articles, television talking heads, incarceration statistics, grand juries, and the number of gunned down Black men and boys, I hear the term LPF again, I really might choke myself. Or, at the least, smash my head against a wall. There’s only so much bullshit I can tolerate and that one is used up.

Tim Burton. How can a guy who is as talented and creative as Burton turn out a snoozer like Big Eyes? Let’s hope he learns from this loser. Mr. Burton should stick to weird and crazy which he does very, very, well and stay the hell away from straight.

And speaking of movies:

Foxcatcher. I knew Steve Carell was in it before I went and, while I’ve seen The Office countless times, I didn’t recognize him playing John du Pont until a quarter of the way through. Either Carell was absolutely terrific or I’m starting to lose it. I’m going with the former—a way to feel good about both of us.

The Hobbit. How the hell many of them are there?

Tavis Smiley and David Ritz. Not a film but finished their book, Death of a King: The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year and, while learning a large amount of information I hadn’t known, the most important “take away” was the regeneration of my belief and commitment to non-violence as the only meaningful agent of change. I won’t publicly “marry” non-violence in front of a congregation the way King actually did (“I take thee…”), but I’m not about to change my mind. Begin with blood, end with blood.

Holiday habits. For the first time in at least thirty years the tradition of Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners with the usual assortment of suspects went south for a variety of good reasons. And will probably never be the way it was. (Yeah, I hear Streisand in my head, too). As completely legitimate as it is, and while we were a significant part of its demise because of new family constellations, I still hate it. Call me a stick in the mud.

Binge TV. If you know me you know I love television. It’s kept me company virtually my entire life. To survive my addiction, I don’t hold its programming near to the standards I do with other art forms. But now there’s a new twist thanks to “on demand” cable and Netflix. It’s possible to watch an entire series one after another until its conclusion. Or, in the case of this past week’s Marco Polo (Netflix) until the season’s end. The show? A poor man’s Rome which wasn’t at all rich. So what? I can’t fuck like a bunny anymore and I’m too fat to binge eat, drink, or smoke. So, unless we’re going out, I’m a telly camper.

Facebook. Yep. There’s an enormous amount of criticism, most incredibly well deserved. Nonetheless, I’ve met people who I honestly consider good friends through this medium and am grateful. Believe me, if I had the opportunity, I’d go drinking with all. I love the idea of “one world” and while we’re light years away from even visualizing that, FB is a small step. How else could I have connected with people from different cities, countries and race who I’ll never meet but care for any way. Yeah, it’s a strange new reality and I don’t have a clue whether it’s a good strange, but it makes me happy.

So speaking of happiness:

Matt Jacob reboot. Matt’s move to Polis Books has publically begun. Polis is reissuing the first three books of my Matt Jacob novels individually and in a set during February and publishing the new book of the series in March. Made for a hectic week of working with BoismierJohnDesign (the great people who created and maintain my website) swapping out the old covers for new and placing the first chapter of Ties That Blind on its own page. Got it done and felt pretty damn good working with both companies.

Family. Two new granddaughters at the same time! Two new additions to those I already adore and love. I plan to enjoy every moment of their lives as long as I’m around. And frankly, I’m hoping for at least twenty.

So there it is, folks. A small piece of my head and without a rant. (Well, maybe there was a mini one tucked in there.)

Happy New Year and may it bring peace to all.

“The difference between what we do, and what we are capable of doing, would suffice to solve most of the world’s problems.” ~ Mohandas Gandhi

Jackboots In The Post Office

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by Kent Ballard

The Christmas season was never a time to go to the Post Office. It’s an annoyance at best and a dreadful, thankless chore at worst. But this season my visit became something much darker.

Friday was one of those days that hit us all once in a while. I was busy and pinched for time. I had to hit the hardware store, Post Office, and then rush back home to meet a friend who was coming to visit. They were widening a public sidewalk corner in the tiny little town near my home. With the forethought and planning of any small town the minor construction they were undergoing managed to not only tie up a major state highway but also a federal highway that often takes the spillover traffic from the nearby Interstate. I don’t think I could have done a better job of disrupting traffic if I’d been hired to do it by the governor. At least I’m sure they’ll build a sidewalk that will last for the ages, a sidewalk that will someday be measured as one of man’s enduring efforts like the Great Pyramids or Mount Rushmore. It’s certainly been taking them that long.

After plodding through the traffic backup I made the hardware store and was in and out in a flash. Then I had to negotiate the barricades and yellow flashing lights again, along with their amazing town construction workers, all expertly trained to sleep while leaning on shovels without falling over. I pulled into the parking lot of the Post Office and went in. I didn’t have a stamp for my letter. My wife had taken off with our stamps safely in her purse and all I had to do was tell the nice Post Office person I wanted to mail this envelope (a common letter), pay them, tip my hat, and come home.

The USPS has been going broke for as long as I can remember. I don’t know why they just don’t charge more and become solvent. I’ve read where postage in other countries is considerably higher, and often when visitors come to the States they remark about our low postage costs. An even better idea would be for the USPS to triple or quadruple the cost of third class mail. We’d then either get a lot less junk mail or they’d be rolling in money, probably both. Anyway, after waiting my turn in line I got to the sole woman behind the USPS counter who was waiting on the public. The counter was set up for two workers, but I’m sure you’ve encountered similar “conveniences” yourself, either at your Post Office or your bank, where they spend fifty million dollars to tell you how much they value your business while cutting workers and lengthening your time in line. Few people will change banks and where ya gonna go for another Post Office?

When it was my turn I stepped forward and put the letter on the counter in front of the woman. While digging in my pocket for change I said, “Hi. I just need to mail this. My wife has the stamps and I want to get this out today.”

The woman did not share my sense of urgency. Fair enough. She didn’t need to. All I wanted her to do was her job.

“You don’t have a return address on this. You need a return address.”

Did you ever feel like a bumblebee that just flew into a brick wall? The woman gestured to the counter along the wall, indicating I could go over there and temporarily be out of her hair for a moment while I wrote my return address on the envelope. She was only working at one speed (glacial) and processing customers as if they were all putting her to extreme difficulty. If I’d taken my letter and done as she said it’d be another ten or fifteen minutes before I worked my way back to her. I’m not normally rushed, but those minutes were more important to me than the normal creaking flow of her day. I did not have a pen on me, nor did she offer me one.

“Is that a law? Can’t you mail this without a return address?”

“Hmm. I could mail it. But you need a return address.”

“Well, if you can mail it without one, go ahead and do that, please.”

“You don’t understand. I could mail this, but you really need to put a return address on it.”

“Is it a federal law now that every letter has to have a return address?” And then I caught her expression. For no understandable reason this civil servant was now glaring at me with something akin to suspicion. What was this woman’s problem? Something changed in the air. I was not sure what. Was she just overwhelmed by her own bureaucratic importance of having the only USPS public window in twenty-five miles? Had she finally exhausted her ability to wield such astonishing power?

I didn’t know. It finally dawned on me that I didn’t care either.

“If there’s no federal law requiring a return address, I’m going to mail this as is without one. I don’t have the time to…”

BAM! She slapped a meaty fist on the counter, snatched up my letter, spun around with surprising speed for someone of her size, and marched back into an office behind her.

Behind me, a housewife waiting in line softly said, “Well, what’s wrong with her…?”

I kind of shrugged and said, “I don’t know. It’s just a letter.” Then I looked back in line and offered, “Sorry to cause a hold-up. I don’t know what her problem is. I just need to mail one letter.”

Presently the squat woman came out of the office followed by a man. She pointed an accusing finger at me and said triumphantly, “He’s the one!”

The one WHAT? I wondered. What had I done? Nothing. Nothing at all.

This was interesting. Had I broken some obscure federal law? Could I expect an FBI SWAT team to launch grenades through the door and club me into submission? Whadda hell was going on here? The man looked at me as if I was a Nazi paratrooper just dropped in to conquer his portion of America. This made no sense at all. And whatever their dog and pony show was really about, they were hindering every postal customer there. Including me. I didn’t know what raised their hackles, but it was now evident that whether I liked it or not I was in the middle of some kind of Twilight Zone game. Did you ever surprise yourself and decide you’d had enough?

“You need a return address on this.”

Wrong thing to say, Homer. “You need to train your help. I just asked her if that was a law. She said it wasn’t.”

He laid the letter back down on the counter. Trying a different tact, he said more pleasantly, “No, it doesn’t have to have one. But if it doesn’t have a return address it could get lost in the mail and we wouldn’t know who to return it to.”

“I’ve got faith in you.” This was becoming a pissing contest.

“It’s for your own protection,” he deadpanned.

“I’ll take my chances.” I was on the verge of becoming…postal.

“It could get lost.”

“I’ll write another.”

I found myself engaged in an silly exchange over…what? Why were these two government time clock punchers behaving this way? Why were they very strongly trying to get me to comply when there was no law to comply with? Were they vaguely threatening me? It sure seemed like it. But why?

Nope. I wasn’t playing their game, whatever it was. I had a dollar bill crumpled in my hand. I tossed it onto the counter and stared back at the Postmaster.

He said, “It’s really for your protection…”

I didn’t say a word. Just stared at him.

He bent down and literally whispered something to the office penguin. Whispered, mind you, as if saying some loathsome, despicable thing. She looked back at him. He nodded. She stepped ahead and picked up my dollar and–as if nothing unusual had transpired–she rang me up and handed me my change.

I muttered thanks and turned for the door. Once past it I looked back and they were still staring at me. What in the world? It seemed as if they were doing their barnyard best to memorize my looks, height, weight, my every feature.

When I came home I was still mystified, still wondering what had taken place in such an otherwise obscure place like the local post office. My guest arrived and I told him, “Dave, the weirdest thing happened just a while ago…”

I told him about the little mystery I’d encountered while in town. He chuckled and said, “Yeah, leave it to you…”

That only turned my fires up. “Leave WHAT to me? I ASKED them if it was legal, or if a return address was required by law! Hell, by their own admission I wasn’t breaking any law! Why all the guff over something as unimportant as that?”

Dave made a mocking frown at me. “You disappoint me, Kent. I thought you kept up with all the news about our heroic war on terrorism.”

“Huh?”

He sighed. “You ever hear of the Patriot Act? Do you remember when that wacko sent powdered ricin in the mail to a few congressmen? You won’t get a cell phone because you don’t want spy agencies pinging you every five minutes,” he laughed, “but you didn’t know about some of the other ways they track you?”

Terrorists? Ricin? Congress? I stood there blinking.

The U.S. Post Office is nearing the capability to photograph every piece of mail it handles. They say they only photograph some of them now. But they have conveyor belts they can place mail on and it shoots them through a camera very rapidly. They have software that can read and store names and addresses. That way, if the FBI, the Department of Homeland Insecurity, or even a local cop gets interested in someone they can call the USPS and ask them, “Where is this person’s mail going and who mails them?” And you will never know anything about it. The NSA didn’t ask your permission to read your emails and search engine queries. They didn’t ask how you felt about them listening to your phone conversations. The USPS didn’t ask you about this, either.

They can track everything you send and everything you get in the mail. They can tap the same information from FedEx and UPS too. Law enforcement requests for USPS information are skyrocketing (see below). It costs them nothing. You pay for it. And that’s why the people in one post office wanted me to put a return address on my letter so very damned badly and why it looked suspicious when I refused. At least to them. I suppose they saved every minute I was there on videotape and flagged that, too. I should have combed my hair.

This business has gone on long enough. I’m tired of every government mouthpiece constantly screaming TERRORISM! TERRORISM! at me when I’m in far greater danger from bee stings or tripping over my own big feet. I’m tired of secret judges on secret courts handing out surveillance warrants like Life Savers on Halloween. I’m tired of my own government using the weak straw man of TERRORISM! to shred my Bill of Rights more every day.

I’m not the first to write about this. You’ll find the links below quite interesting. I’d hoped that maybe, somehow, I’d blown this out of proportion in my mind, that a bored clerk in a post office merely wanted to do something to break her monotony, or perhaps even that I was rushed and came to an incorrectly harsh judgment. I hoped that right up until I read these.

http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/28/7084135/usps-mail-cover-surveillance-wider-than-thought-49000-pieces

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/06/snail-mail-snooping-safeguards-not-followed-108056.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/us/us-secretly-monitoring-mail-of-thousands.html?rref=us&module=ArrowsNav&contentCollection=U.S.&action=click&region=FixedLeft&pgtype=article&_r=1

LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT

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I’ve hated that phrase since the 1960s when people who despised our demonstrations for civil rights or against the Vietnam war hurled the words at us if they were bricks.

Not so sure what I think about love it or leave it these days. I’m not even sure I like our country anymore, so maybe it really is time to pack up and get out. The work I do can be done from anywhere there’s an internet connection. And there are Internet connections in countries that more closely resemble my democratic socialist and non-violent beliefs.

Why now? Honestly, I’m finding it harder and harder to breathe when I open a newspaper and read a synopsis of what I’ll call the TORTURE REPORT, a non-partisan summation of five, count ’em, five years of study that concludes we did indeed torture people. And also concluded that little or no useful intelligence was actually gathered. Okay. We tortured. And while the very idea is horribly disgusting, I also understand we’re not the only country to use Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (a very benign and misleading use of language). And we won’t be the last. But to then have government officials who were, at one time, vocal in their opposition to torture (e.g. the present Director of the CIA and the fucking President himself) dance around the report’s conclusion of its usefulness by repeating over and over that “it’s unknowable” appalls me. Hell, my government was more honest in the mid-70s when it disclosed the findings and transcripts of the Pike and Church CIA congressional hearings.

Actually, this blind eye toward torture isn’t new. My government wrote a constitution that spells out the notion that Black men (they didn’t even bother with women of any color) were worth three-fifths of a White. So for generation after generation we encouraged and welcomed slavery. (Just another torture form). And please don’t think this was only a North versus South issue. Vast fortunes were made in New England through the slave trade.

We can go back farther if need be. We blood-let Native Americans for the simple reason we wanted their country. Again, I get it. We weren’t the first and certainly won’t be the last to steal other peoples’ land and homes. But a nation born from blood and continues that tradition through to the present, simply can not pretend that its hands are clean and claim, ”it’s unknowable.”

But the pull toward leaving isn’t solely based on our bloody history. It isn’t even based upon our current belligerent cop of the world posture and actions. It has as much to do with the attitudes and behaviors we’ve been acting on since ketchup became a vegetable.

Without romanticizing the 1960s when I first cut my ethical and political values, there were, at least, politicians who actually attempted to right wrongs. Not many, but many more than now. Even Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren voted to fully fund the Israeli military despite their very clear knowledge the funding was going to an apartheid state. What we got now is nothing and damn near nobody.

I sense a seismic shift of the underpinnings in even the great stuff my country has done. There was a time (though not without its own set of politics) when we had pride about being a country where people, not counting people of color, could actually have a chance to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” We no longer have bootstraps. We have part-time employees without living wages or benefits. Now, we want to pitch kids back to countries where death might be the kindest thing to occur. We once were proud of our roads, bridges and, at the time, perhaps the greatest infrastructure in the world. Now, that great infrastructure is crumbling and rather than address it, we give tax breaks to those who need it the least and carte blanch to corporate theft. Is it a surprise that almost 50% of our people don’t vote? Why bother? Both political parties are about feeding the rich. Thirty-three states have laws against people sleeping outdoors but don’t fund anywhere near enough shelters to house them. This is what we’ve become and I believe that those who don’t bother to vote have a gut level understanding of that. My government isn’t about them—or about me.

The cruel joke of it all is how many things I love about living here. Our arts, our literature, our music all speak to me in ways no other culture’s could. The caring and giving between people who might even be strangers. The often spontaneous celebrations or even protests that bond us, if only temporarily. The ability—if one chooses—to meet with people (whatever their politics) who, while different than me, still infuse my life with learning and growth. And of course there’s sports.

Would it be easier to be a stranger in a strange land than to be an outlier in my own? I guess I’d need to leave to find out. But let’s face it, I’m not going anywhere. Some very obvious reasons: family and friends. Not so obvious or even understandable to myself is the irrational never-ending hope that somehow, in some way, we still have time to change. That it’s potentially possible to become a land of sanity and community rather than warheads, drones, and prisons. That our culture might find its way out of our racist, economic, and military fog and into, at least, some light.

But the way I feel right now, I ain’t betting rent. Although:

It’s amazing how a little tomorrow can make up for a whole lot of yesterday. ~ John Guare

Where No One Has Gone Before

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by Kent Ballard

 

I surprised myself last week while watching the NASA coverage of their Orion test. The first day was a nasty reminder of all the times when the world and I waited through countless holds. But on the second day, at around T minus 20 seconds, a miracle happened.

I became young again.

Young enough that it was all still a mystery. So young that the unknown no longer held any fear. I was young enough to challenge the universe on its own terms and I was confident of victory. We could face this great thing. And we could beat it.

But the glow of those engines has died out now, and I’m back on Earth. What I see is not encouraging. We’re not only fighting the universe here. We’re fighting ignorance and superstition and mankind’s eternal curses of greed and stupidity. And no amount of engineering can help us.

When I was a small child, very few people believed it would ever be possible to land a man on the Moon. You would still get laughed at for saying you thought differently. We not only landed a dozen men over several missions, we took cars with us and drove around on the damned thing, a uniquely American way of conquering any new land.

You’ll get laughed at today while talking about starships. Never mind the fact that we’re now investigating the Alcubierrie Drive, a dead ringer for the legendary Warp Drive that powered four generations of fictional ships around the galaxy. And if you try to talk to people about the EmDrive, all but a very tiny handful will have no idea what you mean. If you explain that it means thrust from electrical power only—a reactionless, fuelless thrust—if they have any grasp of physics they’ll simply tell you it isn’t possible. But it is. We’re working on that too. And the Chinese are very interested in it as well. Both nations have small working models that produce thrust and are scaling them up. Other nations will follow soon.

Still, the uneducated moan and wring their hands about all that money spent in space. They’re fools and always have been. Not one cent has ever been spent in space. All that money was spent here in our economy and it went to develop new chemicals and materials, processes to miniaturize things, new kinds of batteries and power sources, computers that are cheaper, faster, smarter, and smaller. NASA employs many more plumbers and bulldozer operators than astronauts, more bricklayers and electricians than physicists, and they give more paychecks to janitors than to people working on new propulsion systems. And they do it all on much less annually than one battle cost in Iraq or Afghanistan and they spent a helluva lot less blood buying all that too. The United States has now spent over nine trillion dollars supposedly fighting poverty. We have more poor now than when we started. But for the same expenditure we could have had a world that looked more like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—and with more employment and better employment for everyone.

Breakthrough technologies do that. When personal computers were new, there was a worry about the economic disruption a “paperless office” would cause. People believed secretaries everywhere would lose their jobs. (Yes, I know, but they really believed that.) What actually happened was computers made countless thousands of new jobs that didn’t exist before and you cannot find a secretary today without at least one computer monitor on his or her desk. One did not eliminate the other. They made each other stronger and more efficient.

People who would boldly go anywhere first have to deal with the others who laugh at them. Cold fusion became the fodder for late night talk show jokes. Fleischmann and Pons died discredited, unable to find work anywhere in the enlightened world of academia that blackballed them. And while cold fusion has been replicated many times over, it hasn’t been officially invented yet because no one has found the secret to starting and stopping it when they want. Therefore it does not exist—but universities around the world keep on doing it and studying it because the riches of King Solomon’s mines await the first team to control it. But they study in secret for the most part. They don’t want to be laughed at, the second-worst imaginable thing in academia, and they don’t want to rock any boats, by far the worst sin. Also some of them could be killed. Controlled cold fusion would wreck the oil industry overnight and set the world economy on its ear. You’d better believe that this work is not only very real but also very dangerous. If you were totally without morals, how many people would you kill for several trillion dollars?

I was listening to some forgettable comic making fun of NASA recently. He said they should make their minds up about asteroids. On one hand, they’re claiming that one could fall on us and kill us all, and on the other they’re talking about lassoing one and bringing it closer to Earth. What gives?

He’s probably not stupid, merely uneducated. I would enlighten him by showing him a map of the Earth, carefully pointing out the gigantic craters left behind by asteroid strikes, and ask him if he’d mind being under one when it hit? And if he did, who would he go crying to in order to save his ass? The Department of Homeland Insecurity? His police department? The Post Office?

Then I’d ask him if money meant anything to him, and point out that a great deal of money is now being invested in robotic devices to mine asteroids in space. Asteroids are like candy. They come in many different flavors. The right kind of asteroid is worth a ridiculous sum of money. How much? It’s been estimated that just one small (thirty yards or so across) S-type asteroid contains over a hundred pounds of gold and platinum, and about one and a half million pounds of other metals like iron, aluminum, titanium, lead, nickel, and other expensive things. The people who no longer laugh at this, and who are investing money today, figure that 241 Germania—a common enough asteroid—contains mineral wealth equal to $95.8 trillion dollars on today’s market. That’s equal to the annual GDP for the world. Bold people are going for a piece of that.

I’d point out too that by taking this wealth from space, no little bunnies or pretty trees would need to be bulldozed away. Those metals can be taken—and will be taken—with no scarring of the Earth, no poisonous mining runoff, and no need for decades of expensive land reclamation projects that might or might not ever be completed. We may not live to see starships, but we will buy things made out of metal from space because those products will be cheaper than Earth-mined metals.

And don’t write off starships either. If the past century has taught us anything, it’s not to laugh too loudly at the impossible. Be honest with yourself. Who would have ever believed in nukes, lasers, or smart phones? Or that two of the three would be developed by private enterprise? Or that the other one would be considered one of the greatest engineering feats in history but only used twice? The point is, don’t scoff at technology and never try to predict it. You’ll always be wrong.

My youthful feeling the other day was bittersweet. Sure, I was one of those kids who idolized the early astronauts and could rattle off every nut and bolt that made up a Mercury or Gemini capsule. But I also bristled at—and fought—the idea that it was all a Cold War stunt. No, space meant more to me than that. It still does. But the old enemies still exist, and I find myself fighting the same ignorance, the same luddites, the same refusal to see what this means to our species. Human history has barely begun, but we wrote another line of it last Friday…no thanks to them.

In the end it means the survival of humanity, that we won’t all be taken out helplessly by a rogue asteroid, solar flare, some virus from hell, or our own stupidity. That’s worth fighting for, even if that day seems so terribly far away. And on a deeper and more spiritual level, it means new hills for people to hike up simply to see what’s on the other side. We need both. We need the security of knowing we can take hits, terribly brutal hits, and still be around. And without our curiosity we would no longer be human. If we should ever lose that we’ve lost everything, including any hope we ever had.

For me, the end of the space program will come at that time when people think no more about hull designs or propulsion systems or radiation shielding, when the great thing before them is that next hill or that next curve in the river ahead. Because at that time, we will never again run out of hills and rivers to explore, new places to go, new lands to seek.

We will be more free than humans have ever been before. We will be free forever.

LATE TO AN UGLY PARTY

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By Zachary Klein

Since the 1960s (and probably before) it’s been no secret that our government spies on its own citizens. We knew that S.D.S. meetings, demonstrations, activists, and people the government distrusted have always been under systematic surveillance. Books have been written about it; friends had it proven to themselves by requesting their own dossiers after the Freedom Of Information Act was passed.

Like I said, it was no secret, but I never cared. If the government wanted to play garbologist with my life, so be it. It was their hands that got dirty. And when the Internet blossomed and people had the opportunity to chat with others far and wide, let alone visit websites that discussed everything from politics to porn, I just assumed they were being monitored. And I still didn’t care. If they wanted to watch me look at naked ladies, go for it. I’d lost any belief of the “right of privacy” a long, long time ago. I had other fish to fry and barely considered the implications of my own facile attitude.

But a week ago I saw a movie called Citizenfour, a documentary by Academy Award winner Laura Poitras. Shot in real time Poitras follows Edward Snowden leaking thousands of classified documents, primarily to Glen Greenwald, at that time a reporter and columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian. Then she followed the aftermath of the published leaks.

These leaks detailed the wholesale data interception by the N.S.A. We’re not just talking about spying upon known or suspected terrorists and their connections and associates. We’re talking about damn near everybody including prime ministers of other countries. (One example was Germany’s Andrea Merkel). And when I say everybody I mean pretty much that. Telephone companies, cable companies, Internet search engines, and any institution who gathered personal information were essentially ordered to turn everything over that they had on all of their customers or clients.

When the story first broke publicly in early June, 2013 I met it with a shrug, continuing to believe we were talking about rummaging around in people’s underwear. But at one point in the movie (and I’m going to paraphrase) someone commented that while we were calling this massive collection of information the loss of privacy, it really went much, much deeper. The enormity of this invasion of peoples’ lives actually represented the loss of freedom and liberty. A situation where the quantitative morphs into qualitative.

Well, that notion spun my head. If our own government quietly watches every person, with access to all our conversations, we are living in what ought to be described as a benign police state. A police state usually conjures images of barbed wire and machine guns and, in many countries throughout the world, that’s exactly what it is. But let’s remember what has always been true: information is power. Having virtually all information about every one of us residing in the hands of the government is more power than I’m willing to cede.

I’ve listened to the other side of the argument. “We need to be safe and secure.” “Everything changed after 9/11 and that tragedy demands heightened security—even at the loss of some liberty.” “We don’t know how many attacks have been thwarted because of the N.S.A.’s eyes and ears.” Which is true. We don’t know. But that lack of knowledge is due to our government’s ongoing refusal to provide any hard, real information.

Then there’s also the demand to show how this overwhelming amount of spying has affected anyone’s rights. Where is that slippery slope that will lead to the loss of liberty? Which organizations have been affected by the government’s knowledge about everything they do or say?

I can’t answer those questions. But the government can. And won’t—though some small glimmer occasionally shines through. Does anyone really believe that every major news organization decided on their own not to show the body-bags of our dead soldiers returning home? And that due process has been denied for every single person who has been sent to Guantanamo on the basis of information the government refuses to make public? Do we really have to wait until neighbors, relatives, or friends are arrested and detained because they had a conversation with someone who knew someone who knew someone else that attended the same church as someone who might have known a person who had possible ties to a radical organization? From where I now sit that’s way too late. That’s stick a fork in it time.

I’m sure there are people who believe that all undercover espionage on our citizenry should be eliminated. Unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and the possibility does exist that dangers might be greater than some reasonable surveillance.

But the key word is reasonable and that is not what’s happening. What’s really happening is blatantly unreasonable. For our government to secretly spy on its entire population because they can and not be held accountable in any way (and please don’t throw the secret F.I.S.A. court in my face because apparently they have no accountability to anyone but themselves) is shameful for any country that calls itself an open democracy.

Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Glen Greenwald, and those who drew back the curtains on the N.S.A.’s illegal activities should be honored for their attempt to expose our government’s spitting in the face of liberty and freedom. Dictionary.com defines a police state as a nation in which the police, especially a secret police, summarily suppresses any social, economic, or political act that conflicts with governmental policy.

We aren’t there or that. Yet. But most of the Patriot Act and especially the N.S.A’s extraordinary hidden reach, brings us a giant step closer.

“The best people possess the…, courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice.” – Ernest Hemingway