NSA electronic portrait of you, me ... everyone

What's the NSA so afraid of domestically, any way?

Is our government really that afraid ... of us?

Yes, they're afraid: it's called "consciousness of guilt". They're afraid ~they'll end up in one of those prisons they built for US.

www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/

I know, it is old news. Still, from link:

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.

The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

But “this is more than just a data center,” says one senior intelligence official who until recently was involved with the program. The mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that until now has gone unrevealed. It is also critical, he says, for breaking codes. And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle—financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications—will be heavily encrypted. According to another top official also involved with the program, the NSA made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed by not only governments around the world but also many average computer users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power.

Cool!

I'm afraid a far darker emotion than guilt is at work.

Many people have little clue how valuable their freedom really is. It should be cherished and protected.

But the trick is to make you free in name only. To make freedom merely an illusion, a trick of mind.

"You are free to think what I choose, do what I say."

...and mystic writer Carlos Casteneda's character Don Juan advises to become as invisible as possible...to slowly and methodically erase your personal record of having been here.

The idea is to be free of others assumptions and preconceptions which continue to influence you.

Also, importantly, the lesson is to to deconstruct your own rigid beliefs about what reality is.

Perhaps it is a more dynamic way of living, to engage with life in the fullness and explore the potential any particular moment may offer, alive and raw, direct and unencumbered; self actualization.

I am a human doing not a human being.