{"id":5303,"date":"2013-08-05T14:00:37","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T20:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5303"},"modified":"2013-08-05T14:00:37","modified_gmt":"2013-08-05T20:00:37","slug":"the-ecuadorian-library-or-the-blast-shack-after-three-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5303","title":{"rendered":"The Ecuadorian Library: or, The Blast Shack After Three Years"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><A href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/geek-empire-1\/a1ebd2b4a0e5\">Bruce Sterling<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>When you\u2019re a professional spy hierarch, there are few things more annoying than these conscience-stricken Winston Smith characters, moodily scribbling in their notebooks, all about how there might be hope found in the proles somehow. They\u2019re a drag.<\/p>\n<p>See, dissidence is like Andrei Sakharov. Such a useful guy, modest, soft-spoken, brainy, built you a hydrogen bomb. This eerie device straight from hell even works, so it\u2019s all good. Then all of a sudden he\u2019s like: you know what? The noble science of physics shouldn\u2019t harm mankind!<\/p>\n<p>What kind of self-indulgent, fatuous gesture is that? Look here, Dr Labcoat: why was the public\u2019s money given to you, if not to \u201charm mankind\u201d? If physics was harmless, you wouldn\u2019t have a damn salary!<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s what life feels like for the NSA right now. That is the shoe Snowden laced on their foot. If you\u2019re NSA, as so many thousands are, you\u2019ve known from the get-go that the planet\u2019s wires and cables are a weapon of mass surveillance. Because that is their inherent purpose! You can\u2019t get all conflicted, and start whining that Internet users are citizens of some place or other! That is not the point at all!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bruce Sterling: When you\u2019re a professional spy hierarch, there are few things more annoying than these conscience-stricken Winston Smith characters, moodily scribbling in their notebooks, all about how there might be hope found in the proles somehow. They\u2019re a drag. See, dissidence is like Andrei Sakharov. Such a useful guy, modest, soft-spoken, brainy, built you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5303"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5303\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}