Leid Stories - 08/16/13

The NSA ‘Privacy’ Hypocrisy / A Reprieve, But Not Yet Justice, for Tawana Brawley

We’ve been waterboarded yet again with a new Edward Snowden inside-spy story – this one doled out to Jeff (Amazon.com magnate) Bezos’s soon-to-be-acquired Washington Post – about the U.S. government’s insatiable appetite for minding our business without us knowing. A different riff on the same tune.

The grandpappy of all ironies is, Snowden’s drip-by-drip “exposés,” given such dramatic play by compliant media outlets he selects for dissemination of the purloined material, should actually spark a conversation not only about government’s privacy abuses, but how his tech world and its oligarchic leaders are no different; in lockstep capitalistic cooperation with government, they have given us the gift that keeps on taking: “industrial-intelligence complex.”

Plus, a personal reflection on a Virginia circuit court ruling dismissing a defamation claim against Tawana Brawley by Steven Pagones, a former assistant district attorney from Dutchess County, N.Y., said to be one of four white men who kidnapped and sexually assaulted the then-15-year-old over a four-day period in November 1987.

The court’s ruling is the latest legal development in the case, which Brawley and her attorney, Alton H. Maddox Jr., have been blocked by state officials from bringing to trial for 26 years.