The Thought Police and TwitterCrime

The Thought Police (thinkpol in Newspeak) is the secret police of Oceania in George Orwell‘s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The government attempts to control not only the speech and actions, but also the thoughts of its subjects, labeling unapproved thoughts with the term thoughtcrime, or, in Newspeak, crimethink.

Welcome to 1984 2011. You thought Nixon and Reagan were bad?  Let’s see what the Obama/Holder Department of Justice has been up to while you may have been watching football.  Glenn Greenwald heard and ignored a cautionary tale. He tells it all with the knowledge of present sight.

One of the more eye-opening events for me of 2010 occurred in March, when I first wrote about WikiLeaks and the war the Pentagon was waging on it (as evidenced by its classified 2008 report branding the website an enemy and planning how to destroy it). At the time, few had heard of the group — it was before it had released the video of the Apache helicopter attack — but I nonetheless believed it could perform vitally important functions and thus encouraged readers to donate to it and otherwise support it. In response, there were numerous people — via email, comments, and other means — who expressed a serious fear of doing so: they were worried that donating money to a group so disliked by the government would cause them to be placed on various lists or, worse, incur criminal liability for materially supporting a Terrorist organization.

Will we join the ranks of those the Justice Department consider materially supporting a Terrorist group if Wikileaks is redefined by the Justice Department from whistle blower site to Terrorist group?  Should we all be getting lawyers like those peace activists who were hauled in for sending off old clothes to naked Palenstinians I described in a post called Nostalgic for Nixon?  Better yet should we all line up with confession letters before we get hauled off to Saudi Arabia for extraordinary interviews and held in solitary confinement for extraordinary thought crime?

Better question:  Is this still the USA?

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