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A comment on NSA Said to Use Manhattan Tower as Listening Post. Parent comment

Re:NSA Said to Use Manhattan Tower as Listening Post by pmcginn on Saturday November 19, 2016 @11:41PM (#12997307)
That is 100% not the message.
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Re:NSA Said to Use Manhattan Tower as Listening Post by eternalban on Saturday November 19, 2016 @11:48PM (#12997322)
What is the message then? How does the "hero" end up in 1984?

   Under the spreading chestnut tree
   I sold you and you sold me.
Tell me it ain't so, pmcginn.
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Re:NSA Said to Use Manhattan Tower as Listening Post by aoeu345 on Sunday November 20, 2016 @01:55AM (#12997678)
That one sentence is not the message, the message is

  An extreme totalitarian surveillance state will 
  eventually converge to punishing acts like extra 
  marital sex or keeping a diary with personalized 
  torture until victims are broken beyond any thought 
  of hostility towards their authority figures.
Which is a damn good thing for children to think about. People really are that bad, so hold your freedoms close.
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Re:NSA Said to Use Manhattan Tower as Listening Post by eternalban on Sunday November 20, 2016 @12:22PM (#12999896)
Horses for courses.

I'll read Lord of The Rings to my kids and let thoughts of Frodo give them the courage and the hope, and I suppose you can terrorize your kids by reading them about "rat face cages" and betrayals and fear culminating in a sit down in Chestnut Tree cafe drinking Victory Gin.

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Re:NSA Said to Use Manhattan Tower as Listening Post by Create on Sunday November 20, 2016 @04:11AM (#12998010)
oh dearism

http://www.dw.com/en/david-petraeus-the-washington-elite-hav...

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Re:NSA Said to Use Manhattan Tower as Listening Post by kafkaesq on Sunday November 20, 2016 @06:46PM (#13001985)
What is the message then?

It's right there in The Party's second-favorite slogan:

    Who controls the past controls the future.  Who controls the present controls the past.
The task of finding similarities to current events in the world (and the U.S. in particular, this past year) is left as an exercise for the reader.
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