EDITORIAL BLACK FRIDAY, OR THE DAY YOU PAY ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS FOR THE NSA TO SPY ON YOU By Phil Seahorn November 29, 2014 WHEN HAVE YOU EVER HEARD OF A
CONSUMER PRODUCT MADE IN THE U.S. THAT DEVALUES QUICKER THAN THEY MAKE THE DAMN THINGS? I made the really bad mistake of not wanting to eat traditional Thanksgiving food and head out to Walmart to get some groceries. I became too busy prior to Thanksgiving, and did not know what stores would be open in the Spokane and Spokane Valley areas (think St. Louis and St. Louis County). Got to the Walmart, saw the parking lot was full. Now, I DIDN’T know that Walmart decided to start Black Friday at 6 on Thanksgiving night, but there it was. There were the thousands of people inside the Walmart. And guess what all of them were trying to kill themselves over? The bargains on the big screen computer screens. I mean televisions. I posted last year at this time an editorial on exactly why the things that are being sold in the Walmart as televisions are really huge computer monitors. I posted that the NSA has been using the monitors to gather all that data on Americans for domestic spying. You know, the data that was not widely discussed: millions of gigs of video from inside
American’s homes, apartments, trailers, wherever a wide screen computer screen could be placed. Now, I have been watching television for half a century, so I know what a “television” is supposed to look like. And I know what a television does: transit signals from television stations into your homes for your entertainment. We of the ‘silver generation” have always grown up with shit like: “they can see you thru your television. Well, here we are in 2014. And yeah, they can see you thru your wide screen computer monitor. I posted a lot of online references to the technology that exists today that makes that quite possible to do. And it is being done, and will continue to be done. It’s not so much that the NSA is doing this (well, actually, it is and it’s sick as shit), but how WILLINGLY people are going into these Walmart’s and buying these things. Sure, the prices have gone down tremendously on these computer monitors ( I will not , and never will, call these things “televisions”), but why hasn’t Americans made the connection between what these computer monitors posing as televisions can do, and how these things are drastically being reduced in price. No other consumer product is going by the business model that these wide screen monitors are being sold. Think about it: it’s almost like Walmart and other retail markets across the country are GIVING these things away. But that would be too obvious.
People are still thinking that this NSA/wide screen monitor/Black Friday thing have absolutely nothing to do with each other. However, a more paranoid, I mean, REALISTIC person would see that the whole “wide screen monitor purchase on Black Friday or die” thing is just too bizarre. People are now killing themselves in Europe over these things in their version of “Black Friday: European Style”. So, I guess Europeans don’t mind ( after publicly complaining bitterly about U.S. spying across the pond) that the NSA can easily use technology to turn their Internet connected “televisions” not only into huge web cams, but that the things can PERSONALLY encode the data to their specific homes, track all their day to day habits, and supply REAL TIME SURVEILLANCE DATA STRAIGHT TO THE U.S. GOVERNMENT. So, enjoy your Black Friday purchases, especially the wide screen web cams, uh computer monitors, I mean, televisions. The NSA will be enjoying it, too.
p
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