It's no small irony that 1984 was published 64 years ago yesterday. Earlier this year, Glenn was called a conspiracy theorist because he warned about the data collection of the federal government, all while the ribbon was being cut on the NSA's vault in Utah. Today, however, The Washington Post revealed that Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple are all part of a program called PRISM that gives the federal government access to the information on their servers.
"It is a brave new world. It is a brave new world. It is 1984. The things that we speculated against in the 1990s when I first read Ray Kurzweil's books and I started looking into what we were actually doing with technology. When we started thinking, what is possible when you ‑‑ when we watched Minority Report, the Tom Cruise movie, and we saw that they could monitor everything. We're here, gang. If anybody wants to talk about Common Core now and the collection of data, go ahead. Let's bring it on. Now's the time to talk to your friends about Common Core and the collection of data. Now's the time to stand up in Florida and say, 'Excuse me? You put a retinal scanner on your buses because you wanted my son or daughter's iris scan? I don't think so.' Now is the time to stand up because if you do not, if you want to play the game that this all started with George W. Bush, I don't care if it started with Jesus. 'Started with Moses, you know. He was the first one to start watching over people's stone cutting of tablets.' I don't care. Now is the time to stop it. How it started is meaningless. What they're doing with it now isn't."
"You know what amazes me is congress decided to talk about this and all they could talk about in congress is, 'Are you listening to our phone calls? Are you listening to members of congress' phone calls? Does your political machine have access to that?' Are you out of your mind, Senator? Is that really what matters to you? Well, thank you for being just like a member of the press. You only cared about it when they were attacking you. You called people like me just five weeks ago a conspiracy theorist while they were cutting the ribbon on the NSA vault in Utah. While they're cutting the ribbon of that, you call me a conspiracy theorist for saying they're collecting data, every piece of data and every keystroke of every computer online. 'Glenn Beck's out of his mind. He's crazy.' Am I now? Am I?"
"So now that you have the information that you denied, now what are you going to do with it? You didn't care about it five weeks ago but then you found out, Senator, that maybe you were being listened to. The AP didn't care about it but then they found out that, oh, maybe they're being listened to. And the American people, you're being listened to; you're being monitored. Do you care, or do you say, 'I'm not doing anything wrong; so it doesn't matter.' Welcome to 1984. 2 plus 2 equals 5. It doesn't matter. I told you when I was at CPAC. And the crowd liked it, but the elites did not when I said the disease is progressivism, the controlling of people, the people that think they're the ranchers and the average citizen is a cow. We're not cattle. We are your employers. When they're listening to us, it's fine, Senator, that they listen to us but not to you?"
"Wait a minute. What I'm doing in my bakery or as a truckdriver, whatever I'm doing, it's okay to monitor me because you're not sure about me. But as Lindsey Graham says, he's sure about him; so he doesn't mind. Lindsey, what is it that you have sold your soul for? What is it that you members of congress and the Senate, you people in the FBI, the NSA, the people in the White House. I'm not talking about Democrats or Republicans. I'm talking about human beings. I'm talking about people that, no matter what side of the spectrum you're on, unless you are a fascist or a Communist, no matter what side of the spectrum you're on, how do you sleep at night, justifying that you are listening and monitoring and collecting data on every purchase, every geotractking device I might have? All of my phone calls you say that you're not ‑‑ we can't really look in. We don't actually read. Oh, I'm supposed to believe you on this, when you didn't tell me the truth in the first place?"
"And the senators yesterday as they're talking and having their confab for the American people to get to the bottom of it, they ask Eric Holder, 'Are you listening to members of congress?' And he doesn't answer. In fact, here is, Cut 457."
VOICE: Could you assure to us that no phones inside the Capitol were monitored of members of congress that would give a future executive branch if they started pulling this kind of thing up, would give them unique leverage over the legislature?HOLDER: With all due respect, Senator, I don't think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss.
"Why not? Stop. Why not? Why not? The American people are listening."
"It is time for transparency. I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways. You need to collect all the information on every single American, every single American. Make no mistake, America. They read every ‑‑ they have access to every single e‑mail that you write. Beyond that, they record and can record every single keystroke. So you write something and you're like, 'No, that's not quite right. Delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete.' They can record every keystroke."
"Now let me ask you something: How is it that the members of congress, the people in the White House can, A, tell us that there is no war on terror. We are not having a war on terror. There is no such thing as a war on terror. There is no such thing as jihad. It's a state of mind."
"How is it that that is winding down, it's almost over, it doesn't even exist, and yet they need to have this kind of security? How is it they say we can't invade people's privacy and ask them, ask them for their ID at the voting booth. How dare you stop someone on the street and ask them for their green card. How dare you ask anybody any question at all if you're near the border? How dare you violate civil rights, the civil rights of people who don't belong here? How dare you even ask me how many people are here without a visa? How dare you even expect me to know how many do have a visa and then never showed up at their schools? How dare you even ask those things, you racist, but yet you need to know everything that I do and every American in this country. How dare you. You can't have it both ways. It doesn't exist both ways. You have painted us as the enemy. You are not protecting us; you are protecting your own power. It is time for people to stand up and say 'We are the employers. You are the servant. We want access to all of the things that you do.'"
"Boy, it is very interesting. It is very interesting how these people have created the Bubba effect, how these people are on the verge of making people like Anonymous into heroes. And they say, 'Well, they had full briefing of this.' Well, I didn't. In fact, not only did I not receive full briefing on this as a taxpayer, as a shareholder, as an owner of this damn country, not only did I not receive a briefing, nor did any of the other shareholders and owners of this country, just an elite of the elite in Washington knew that and meanwhile you lied to the shareholders. You told us under oath you weren't doing any of these things. But you ask for our trust now? Read the Declaration of Independence, America. You better read it now. This is all about civil rights. What right do you have to read my information? What right do you have to follow me? What right do you have to scan my children's eyes? What right do you have to continue to grow this out‑of‑control state that at the best you say, 'Well, we're just sloppy.' Well, you're too damn sloppy."
"I have said for a while, give these people no more power. I have said for a while, 'You better get off Google. You better drop your damn Google mail.' Well, what are you going to do? Said for a while I don't carry a cellphone. I've told you what Ray Kurzweil told me, the head of Google intelligence, of what they can do. He laughed at me when I talked to him about my concerns, and he didn't laugh at me because it was a conspiracy theory but because it was an infantile understanding of what they can already do."
