Dear Dirty America

The wave of uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East that have overturned three governments in the past year have prompted the U.S. government to begin developing guidelines for culling intelligence from social media networks, a top Homeland Security official said Monday.

Department of Homeland Security Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the use of such technology in uprisings that started in December in Tunisia shocked some officials into attention and prompted questions of whether the U.S. needs to do a better job of monitoring domestic social networking activity.

Wagner said the department is establishing guidelines on gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes. Wagner says those protocols are being developed under strict laws meant to prevent spying on U.S. citizens and protect privacy, including rules dictating the length of time the information can be stored and differences between domestic and international surveillance.

Monitoring Twitter and Facebook to prevent public uprisings? You mean like people using social media networks to organize peaceful assemblies and make their voices heard? Like practicing that part of the Constitution called freedom of speech?

Don’t worry, the Dept of Homeland Security will play by all of the rules when spying on American citizens for law enforcement purposes. Except, in case we forget, there are very few rules left intact after the installation of the Patriot Act, and then the recent extension of it.

Americans are already seeing firsthand what happens when they try to peaceably assemble. From New York City to Oakland, California, police get orders to move in and squash the protesters. Batons sliced the air, pepper spray liberally squirted into crowds of peaceful protesters, rubber bullets shot at face level at unarmed demonstrators, and tear gas lobbed at those most desperate and financially distressed.

Occupy Wall Street is dangerous

From coast to coast, this nation has awakened and its people are so angry they’ve finally stopped caring about Kim Kardashian and who she’s squeezing, and have decided to get involved, learn about the fraudulent packaging and selling of bad debt done by Wall Street, and the hedge fund managers who bet against it and made gobs of money from your financial pain.

Wall Street has fun trading numbers, but it’s your homes, your jobs, your families, your social standings, and your humiliation that isn’t just speculation. Those who continue to thrive on risky bets, and those banks who make deals which should only be allowed inside of casinos and in the basements of secret brothels, have wasted our future, have disemboweled our American Dream, and what we have left is a deteriorated, impoverished, and embarrassing existence where the least talented among us, along with the greatest among us, cannot get a job and cannot move up the social ladder.

We’re left groveling in the gutter, begging for food stamps and a few hours of minimum-wage work where we can get it. It’s no wonder Americans are uprising. Twitter and Facebook, as hokey as it sounds, have become an information pipeline. We can spread empowering information to millions of people within seconds.

Occupy Los Angeles: storming the financial district

Of course Homeland Security is monitoring it. The cold wind is blowing, and you’d better be on the side of the people, or you’re going to be blown away. We’ve wasted too much time getting shit as our politicians are more interested in serving the interests of their own pipeline — that massive tube running between Washington and Wall Street.

We’ve got a voice in Twitter, in Facebook, and through the Internet. We’d better cherish it and protect it, because it’s our lifeline. It might be all that we have left.

The thoroughness of a good whore: buying into what’s left of the American Dream