> The real scary part is that they are scared of what will happen if they don't do something

In the context of these posters, the implied "what will happen" is mostly worldwide Communist revolution with the U.S. losing the Cold War. You can see that for example in the poster depicting the edited version of the Gettysburg Address, which someone commented on elsewhere in this thread. The concern is worldwide totalitarianism on the Soviet model, and that's mostly the danger that these posters are meant to allude to and frighten the NSA staff with. If you say the wrong thing at Christmas dinner, Communism may win.

That sounds like a joke nowadays, but I'm sure it didn't sound like a joke to the people who created the posters or the people who saw them every day. Both sides of the Cold War fought it super-hard.

One problem that the people making the posters left out is that the Cold War also led to vastly bigger, stronger, more secretive states—including on the NATO side. It led to creative people being given billions upon billions of dollars to dream ever-bigger dreams about military and intelligence capabilities. We still don't even know what some of those dreams were, partly because generations of classification holders brought up on these posters and other versions of them have taken them to heart so strongly. So, we've got states that continue to be extraordinarily ambitious and capable in some ways that they don't really want anybody to talk about. To me, that's a tragic legacy of the Cold War. If the people who made the Gettysburg Address poster were serious in their concern for the state's apotheosis, they might have done well to also consider how "war is the health of the state"—evidently, whether it runs hot or cold.

We kind of know about some parts of the nuclear side of that, and we kind of know about some parts of the espionage and covert action side of that, but these parts all kind of hurt to think about and the people who've dreamt and are still dreaming those billion-dollar dreams would mostly just as soon that we didn't go too far down the rabbit holes.

Any particular background on any of this you might recommend?

Fear brings money to security agencies like products bring money to corporations. I'm sure if you visited Apple you'd see a lot of iPhones.

>You know,the scary thing about the US intelligence community isn't that they all are "after out liberties" or "againsy our privacy". My experience and encounters related to the IC scare me because they genuinely believe they're the good guys who're on the right side of justice. The real scary part is that they are scared of what will happen if they don't do something (where something entails disregarding laws and the will of the people). I would rather they be "after me" than scared of me.

>I hope academics consider this before getting into bed with them. They don't just have a subersive mission,they're making decisions out of fear.

sed 's/ US intelligence community/Commies/g'

sed 's/ US intelligence community/Hippies/g'

sed 's/ US intelligence community/Liberals/g'

sed 's/ US intelligence community/Mormons/g'

sed 's/ US intelligence community/4chan/g'

sed 's/ US intelligence community/OP/g'

sed 's/ US intelligence community/The alt right/g'

sed 's/ US intelligence community/BLM/g'

sed 's/ US intelligence community/white supremacists/g'

sed 's/ US intelligence community/academia/g'

sed 's/ US intelligence community/the tech industry/g'

sed 's/ US intelligence community/whatever group I happen to disagree with today/g'

See the point? You could have said that about any group you didn't like.

In my opinion any individual or group seeking to restrict the freedoms of the individual is inherently subversive to democracy.

edit: And I'm wrong because why?

Why would you need a government, even a democratic one, if you had no intention of restricting any individual's freedom?

Individuals are generally trustworthy. Groups generally act like sociopaths.

There's a difference between restricting the freedom of all individuals and restricting the freedom of some individuals.

Eventually you have to draw some lines (e.g. not letting people murder each other).

But don't laws that apply to all individuals inevitably apply only to some subset? Most people have no desire to murder others and so are basically unaffected by a law forbidding it.