As most readers know, the United States was the first — and still the only — country to use atomic weapons against another country.
Now I am very unhappy to report that the United States is the first country to engage is cyber warfare against another country.
For several years we have been the first country to engage in drone warfare in other nations’ sovereign territory. Now, the Obama administration is proudly leaking the fact that the president sits down on a weekly basis to decide who will be assassinated by the drones. As the Nation magazine points out, President Obama has now become the assassin-in-chief.
Who cares, you say. After all, the president is mostly targeting bad guys. Do you care that drones are now being used to spy on you in the United States? Meanwhile, the NSA is building a massive domestic spying center in Utah. One of the clear purposes of the center is to spy on your e-mail and blog posts (ahem!) and phone calls.
This is clearly a brave new world, a world where the United States engages in all kinds of firsts. The country with the first Constitution intended to protect individual liberty has now become first in warfare and first in developing the 21st century technological apparatus to destroy liberty.