A week has passed since my last post, busy with relatively mundane activities. Dina was attending a workshop out of town for a couple of days, so we went up to Sharon to be grandparents. The older children had school and Julia went to her regular daycare while Barry worked I prepared dinners and Sabbath meals. The three days flew by, and somehow I never even got around to taking any pictures. We are heading back to Sharon this weekend. We will spend Shabbat with Simmie and family, and then on Sunday Barry and I are taking Joshua and Ella to a hockey game, the Providence Bruins (the development team for the Boston Bruins) vs. the Portland Pirates, the beginning of a bunch of tickets to sporting and theatrical events we have bought as Chanukah presents.
A few years ago I “friended” singer/songwriter Carole King
on FaceBook. Although I only look at FB occasionally, she (or, more likely, her
representatives) appears to post quite frequently. A few days ago I caught a
blurb about an upcoming episode of the PBS series; “Finding Your Roots” called “Our
People, Our Traditions” featuring Carole King, playwright Tony Kushner, and lawyer
Alan Dershowitz. Something reminded me
about it yesterday, and I found it on-line. It is long (an hour) but is interesting
and really quite moving. With the storm on its way to these parts, having
already hit our Midwestern friends with snow and frigid temperatures, it is a
good chance to fix yourself a cup of hot tea or cocoa and sit back and enjoy
this.
We also found a couple of hours to sneak out and see the new documentary, Citizenfour. The making of this movie is a pretty amazing story. In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras was several years into making a film about surveillance in the post-9/11 era when she started receiving encrypted e-mails from someone identifying himself as "CITIZENFOUR," who was ready to blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. In June 2013, she and Glenn Greenwald, a reporter for The Guardian, flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with the man who turned out to be Edward Snowden. The film that resulted from this series of tense encounters is a 100% real-life thriller unfolding minute by minute before our eyes.
There are many difficult questions raised by this story. How worried should we all be about the massive amounts of our personal information available to so many people? It goes without saying that much of the answer to this question depends on how the individuals accessing this data intend to use it. Most of us would agree that the lack of a repeat of September 11th, 2001, is a very good thing, even at the cost of sacrificing some privacy. But do we need this much surveillance to prevent a repeat of that horrific event? How will we ever know? How worried should we be or do we have to be if we know we have not done and do not intend to do anything wrong? At the end of the day, Barry and I did not find Snowden all that much of a hero. I am in no position to judge how much damage he might have done to our national security, but I am not convinced that he found out anything we all needed to know about the overwhelming majority of citizens both here and abroad. As I have discussed about airline security, we need to become smarter and more focused in this work. Still, it is an incredibly well done documentary and worth seeing.
Have a good week, and stay warm!
Love,
Rebecca
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