It took the S.O. and I a long time to get Internet connectivity to the house, besides our cell phones and a stick for the computer. While I was away, it was installed-but our bandwidth is severely limited due to the lack of fiber (and cable) to our little village. So we get a whopping 3MB/s download speed.
So it was with trepidation when she went off to work today, that I tried our Apple TV box. Surprisingly it worked very well with no ( almost no) interruptions for buffering. Sitting down to play with the box and sharing via WiFi with my computer. I can access my entire I-tunes library-so that is a good thing.
In channel surfing, though-I stumbled upon the PBS channel, which in our previous abode had been one of my staples. And I started watching, The United States of Secrets. Its a Frontline documentary about the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, through which, the boys and girls in Ft. Meade got to violate every American’s rights under the Constitution. Now, it is not surprising that in the days after 9-11, the government went seeking broader authorities to violate these rights. What is jarring, and has you saying “WTF?” about every 15 minutes is the ease with which the sworn guardians of those rights just gave them away with no moral convictions. And your second “WTF?” moment comes when you see honest civil servants, who realized the government was screwing the pooch, made attempts to set things right “through the system”, only to be stymied at every turn. And, like it or not, a lot of the blame or that lies with Dick Cheney.
Watch for yourself how innocently your government can turn to be as evil as that with which it seeks to protect you from:
The whole show is 4 hours in two parts-long to be sure-but worth every second of your time. If you are an American who cares about the rights of your fellow citizens under the Constitution, you will be astounded at what it discusses. (Even if you support Bush). The real revelation is not that they usurped the rights under 1st, 4th, and 5th amendments-but the ease at which they brushed aside concerns about that incredibly important issue. The precedents it created are scary.