A Modest Suggestion for Change of Emblem for the National Security Agency
At the Niagara Falls Reporter, we seek to serve the interest of the people. And, as we reviewed our story, A Good American, this week, it occurred to us that we could serve both the people, and the government which purportedly is in existence to serve them, by offering a revised emblem [or logo] for the National Security Agency, known also as the NSA.
Logos, as readers know, are important symbols which help identify an organization’s purpose and build brand recognition.
For years the NSA was assumed to be an intelligence organization of the United States government, responsible for global monitoring, collection, and processing of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes. We have lately seen that the NSA has also become responsible for monitoring US citizens with an intrepidity that Orwell only dreamed of.
According to some, the NSA has become a spying, prying, constitutionally reckless agency whose aggressive and clandestine bugging of electronic systems, eavesdropping, surveillance, burglary, wiretapping, breaking and entering are just the tools that a police state needs to maintain its power over the people.
This is said to be done to make us safe.
Today the NSA intercepts the communications of over a billion people worldwide, many of whom are American citizens, and tracks the movement of hundreds of millions of people using cellphones.
In the name of transparency, we submit this new NSA logo/emblem for our readers’ approval and hope soon to hear from an official from the NSA to see how receptive they are to our modest suggestion.
If it goes over well, which perhaps we have no good reason to be sanguine about, we plan to recommend changing the name of the National Security Agency to the National Spying Agency since this seems to be a more honest description of the agency’s purpose. No change in the acronym NSA will be needed.
Finally, the NSA’s expanding role can be said to be fulfilling the will of a people who no longer desire freedom as their primary goal of life, something they would fight to keep, and have substituted instead as a primary goal the craven desire for safety at any and all costs. The revised emblem of the NSA will aid people in recognizing their passivity to the loss of their freedom of privacy.
To create the ultimate inversion – where the people need permission for everything and the government is free to do what it wishes – as opposed to the people being free and government needing permission to restrict any freedom – we need to surrender our liberties including all rights to privacy.
As Benjamin Franklin observed, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
We now see a people well underway on the slippery path of giving up liberty. It remains to be seen whether their expanding government will provide that safe refuge for their servile desire for safety at all costs, or create a nation where the danger comes from the government itself and where there is little or no liberty.
A nation where it is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
In any event, this new NSA emblem, if adopted, could provide a reminder to the traders of liberty for safety of what lies in store or perhaps has already been visited upon us.
