The tinfoil hat scenario

As I write these words, it appears that negotiations in Washington remain stalemated, with the last hope being the negotiations in the Senate. So what now?

If I were to put my tinfoil hat, revelations about government spying capabilities gives the Obama Administration the ability to dig up dirt on anyone they want. This might just the time they would use such a weapon on their political enemies.

Washington's Blog reports that NSA Whistleblower: NSA Illegally Spied On General Petraeus and Other Generals, Supreme Court Justice Alito and All of the Other Supreme Court Justices, the White House Spokesman, and Many Other Top Officials. As a case study, consider the case of David Petraeus, former CIA director, and how he was forced to resign. The ACLU noted that:

A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study a few years back found that reviewing people’s social networking contacts alone was sufficient to determine their sexual orientation. Consider, metadata from email communications was sufficient to identify the mistress of then-CIA Director David Petraeus and then drive him out of office.

If Petraeus wound up as the wrong person's enemy and a hatchet job like that could be done to the director of the CIA, why couldn't be done to members of Congress? Marcus Ranum, writing at Fabius Maximus, pondered this question as well [emphasis added]:

When General Petraeus’ potentially promising political career was ended, one of the things I wondered about (I still do) is how/where all the information about his emails and phone calls came from. Some of that stuff would have been fairly old. That it entered into the picture at all tells me that the FBI has some pretty impressive capabilities to be able to retrieve old/deleted stuff — a capability that the manager of the Reagan Administration’s email server or Rose Marie Woods would have been a bit threatened by. The use of such information in what amounted to a Washington insider “hit” shows its real purpose: to destroy or intimidate or uncover the operations of political opponents or potential political opponents.

My daughter opened an egg today and found an egg that looked like a mushroom cloud:

Is this a Sign of the Political and Financial Apocalypse, or just too much egg-citement?





Cam Hui is a portfolio manager at Qwest Investment Fund Management Ltd. (“Qwest”). The opinions and any recommendations expressed in the blog are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions and recommendations of Qwest. Qwest reviews Mr. Hui’s blog to ensure it is connected with Mr. Hui’s obligation to deal fairly, honestly and in good faith with the blog’s readers.”

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