Another overcast early morning here on California’s north coast, this the mid-week edition of life as society goes semi-berserk, or something.

Blowback: An intelligence term for adverse, unintended consequences of secret operations. The CIA first used it in a report on the 1953 operation that overthrew the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran.

During the last few days, since the leaking of NSA spying secrets, there’s been all sorts of problems coming now to the surface, a blowback of sorts on how we Americans keep ourselves private, except there’s no longer any, and most-likely won’t be ever again.

And sales of George Orwell’s ‘1984‘ has spiked 6,000 percent in just a few hours — is there a blown-back link here?

(Illustration found here).

And due to President Obama’s love of secrets and people who keep them, and his obvious desire to strangle anyone who opposes that view, a most-horrible public blowback: For the first time since 2005, more Americans have a favorable view of former President George W. Bush than an unfavorable view. According to a new Gallup poll released Tuesday, 49 percent have a positive opinion of the two-term Republican president, while 46 percent feel the opposite.
Although supposedly the poll was conducted before the NSA spying mess became public, Obama still is so bad, the worst president in US history is climbing upward in popularity — WTF?

And overseas, the shit stinks in many languages, especially German — Obama is scheduled to visit Germany next week, but the Germans want some real-time answers to some old questions — what kind of government does the United States really have?
From Reuters (h/t Firedoglake):

German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman has said she will raise the issue with Obama in talks next Wednesday, potentially casting a cloud over a visit that was designed to celebrate U.S.-German ties on the 50th anniversary John F. Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech.
Government surveillance is an extremely sensitive topic in Germany, where memories of the dreaded Stasi secret police and its extensive network of informants are still fresh in the minds of many citizens.
In a guest editorial for Spiegel Online on Tuesday, Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said reports that the United States could access and track virtually all forms of Internet communication were “deeply disconcerting” and potentially dangerous.
“The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is,” she said.
“The suspicion of excessive surveillance of communication is so alarming that it cannot be ignored.
For that reason, openness and clarification by the U.S. administration itself is paramount at this point.
All facts must be put on the table.”
Markus Ferber, a member of Merkel’s Bavarian sister party who sits in the European Parliament, went further, accusing Washington of using “American-style Stasi methods”.
“I thought this era had ended when the DDR fell,” he said, using the German initials for the failed German Democratic Republic.
Opposition parties have jumped on the issue, keen to put a dampener on the Merkel-Obama talks and prevent them from boosting the chancellor as she gears up for a September parliamentary election in which she is seeking a third term.
“This looks to me like it could become one of the biggest data privacy scandals ever,” Greens leader Renate Kuenast told Reuters.

And can the US lecture any foreign peoples on their conduct? Yesterday, from the European Parliament:

British MEP Claude Moraes (Socialists & Democrats) said citizens had been “shocked” by a “major breach of trust”.
“500,000,000 Europeans people were shocked to find a foreign country has access to the most intimate details of their private lives,” added Dutch MEP Sophia in ‘t Veld (ALDE).
“We cannot be surprised to find the Americans spying on us.
We have asked questions again and again but we get no answers from the EU Commission[… ] How can we tell the governments of Iraq and Egypt that they should not spy on their citizens when we are doing the same,” she told the Parliament.

And the players in the big spy operation want more say in what’s going down — via the Guardian:

Microsoft and Twitter have joined calls by Google and Facebook to be able to publish more detail about how many secret requests they receive to hand over user data under the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa).
“Permitting greater transparency on the aggregate volume and scope of national security requests, including Fisa orders, would help the community understand and debate these important issues,” Microsoft said in an emailed statement to the Reuters news agency.
At Twitter the chief lawyer, Alex Macgillivray, tweeted: “We’d like more NSL [national security letter] transparency and Twitter supports efforts to make that happen.”
…
In a letter from Google to the US attorney general, Eric Holder, also published on its corporate blog, the company once again said allegations that the US government had “unfettered access to our users’ data are simply untrue.”
But, the letter added, the fact that Google was not allowed to disclose requests made for information under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa) “fuel[s] that speculation”.
Fisa requests come with gag orders, meaning Google, Facebook and other tech companies cannot say whether they have received them.
Drummond wrote in the letter to Holder: “We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our transparency report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including Fisa disclosures – in terms of both the number we receive and their scope.
“Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made.
Google has nothing to hide.”

Google the words, ‘yeah, right.’

And people who thought Obama was a gift to American politics?
Not so nice any more — Zaid Jilani of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee (via The Atlantic):

“If you go back and look at candidate Obama’s statements about whistleblowers and civil liberties, breaches of freedom and privacy under the past administration, you’d have a hard time saying Candidate Obama would agree with President Obama on this,” Jilani said.
“Within six hours of the whistleblower being outed, they were already talking about a criminal probe.
They weren’t talking about any internal investigation of the NSA’s conduct or abuses of the Patriot Act.”

Obama is learning, however. In a surprise, he attended an off-the-record-meeting with White House reporters yesterday, but, of course, we won’t ever know what went down there — or maybe, if there’s a whistleblower amongst that crew…
Blow it back in their faces, if you will.