The hottest topic on Reddit right now can’t actually be found on Reddit.  It’s censorship—and you won’t find it on Reddit because the censorship is being done on Reddit by their own moderators.  This is naturally causing quite a stir, since Reddit is more than a link site; it’s a community of millions who are constantly posting links to pretty much whatever topic you want to talk about or learn about.  Telling Redditors that they aren’t allowed to post links on a certain topic naturally makes that topic so much more interesting.  When you consider that you can even find a lot of porn on Reddit, the logical question is what could be so awful that it must be squashed every time it’s posted?

The answer is this: Glenn Greenwald’s latest article showing the depths that the federal government will sink to in order to “control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse,” and destroy individuals, such as journalists, bloggers, and regular folks who get in their way—none of whom have ever been so much as charged with a crime.  I can’t post the slides themselves for obvious reasons, but I highly suggest you check them out.

You’ll notice that they appeal to your baser instincts first.  Will sex work on you?  Can they trick you into a compromising position and use that against you?  If not, no worries; they’ll just Photoshop the pictures on your Facebook to look like you did.  Or they’ll start emailing your loved ones as your secret paramour or as the victim that you assaulted.  Lovely, right?

What would they do to companies they needed to destroy?  Leak their proprietary info on blogs and other sites, post nasty reviews and other info, or even ruin their business relationships.

So what, you might say?  They’re an intelligence service and that’s what intelligence services do.  But here’s the problem: These people being targeted are just like you and me.  They aren’t criminals. They aren’t threats to national security.  They’re just people who have not been charged with a crime, there are no warrants against them, they have done nothing to deserve this except that some faceless agency with a limitless budget and total power has decided that they need to be destroyed.

these surveillance agencies have vested themselves with the power to deliberately ruin people’s reputations and disrupt their online political activity even though they’ve been charged with no crimes, and even though their actions have no conceivable connection to terrorism or even national security threats.

They have become all-powerful with no oversight—and they get to decide who they target.  If you’re thinking that they limit their activities to crazy Muslims or white supremacists, you’d be wrong.  They’re targeting you.

Cass Sunstein, a close Obama adviser and the White House’s former head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, wrote a controversial paper in 2008 proposing that the US government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-”independent” advocates to “cognitively infiltrate” online groups and websites, as well as other activist groups. Sunstein also proposed sending covert agents into “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups” which spread what he views as false and damaging “conspiracy theories” about the government.

By the way….you may recognize Sunstein’s name.  He was appointed to the NSA review board by Obama.  Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse.

We already know the NSA is dirtier than a two-dollar hooker doing Friday might mud wrestling, so at some point hearing the details almost becomes tedious.  Why would Reddit care about censoring it?  Isn’t this the kind of thing they’d be all over?  You’d think…until you realize that Reddit is one of the exact outlets that the government would use.  Want to leak some info and see it catch some air really fast?  Post it on Reddit and make sure your little minions upvote it.    A Reddit user has already tried to point out the censorship going on (the comments on that thread are pretty interesting).  WashingtonsBlog has some info on this as well.  It’s worth taking a look at and coming to your own conclusions.