All right, what’s next?

At the end of The Bourne Identity (2002) there’s a very interesting scene

Ward Abbott: [Testifying before a congressional intelligence committee] The Treadstone project has actually already been terminated. It was designed primarily as a sort of advanced game program. We’d hoped it might build into a good training platform, but quite honestly, for a strictly theoretical exercise, the cost-benefit ratio was just too high. It’s all but decommissioned at this point.

Committee Member: All right, what’s next?

Ward Abbott: Okay. This is… Blackbriar. Blackbriar is a joint D.O.D. communications program that we really feel has good traction to it. It’s got legs, it’ll run and run…

— The Bourne Identity (2002) at 1:49:33

I think of this scene every time we hear of some unbelievably invasive intelligence program enacted in the wake of that faith-based initiative knows as “9/11” being “shut down.”

Of course, the most egregious of all (that we know of), PRISM, has never been shut down, and probably never will be.

Land of the free…

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