The Surveillance State marches on under Barack Obama

I voted for Obama, but I am compelled to speak up with he pushes the same insane policies as bush when it comes to spying on Americans. He continues to act against our allegedly-treasured Constitution as he continues to expand America's surveillance State. Glenn Greenwald sum up the situation: "The continuously expanding Surveillance State in the United States is easily one of the most consequential and under-discussed political developments. And few are doing more to ensure it continues than top-level Obama national security officials." Amy Goodman discussed recent developments in Congress with William Binney, who served in the National Security Agency for nearly 40 years, including a stint as technical director of its World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group. Since retiring from the NSA in 2001, Binney has warned that the NSA’s data mining program has become so vast that it could "create an Orwellian state." Here is the immediate problem:

The Senate is closer to renewing controversial measures that critics say would allow the emails and phone calls of U.S. citizens to be monitored without a warrant. The Select Committee on Intelligence has voted to extend controversial amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that were set to expire at the end of this year.
Here is William Binney's reaction:
Well, in my mind, this is a continuation in the mindless legislation that our Congress has been putting out, just to justify what they’ve been doing for a decade or more. Instead of trying to use discipline and living up to their oath of office to defend the Constitution, they’ve decided to violate the civil liberties and the rights of all U.S. citizens. And that’s what—that’s what’s going on here. That’s what PATRIOT Act Section 215 is about. That’s what they’ve been doing. And what’s happening is they’re destroying the strength of this nation, which is the freedom and liberties that the citizens have to do things . . . [O]ne of the primary reasons I left NSA. I mean, we were collecting data on virtually every U.S. citizen in the country. And so, I couldn’t—I couldn’t participate in that. I couldn’t be an accessory to subversion of the Constitution and subverting the constitutional rights of every U.S. citizen. So I had to go. And that’s the reason I left. But like I say, I left a system, that they used that system that I built to target U.S. citizens. But when I left it there, I had built in protections, but it meant that, for them, they could not use my system that way and target U.S. citizens, so they had to remove the protections to make that possible.

Continue ReadingThe Surveillance State marches on under Barack Obama

Inventing terrorists

America's alleged "protectors" are costing us an enormous amount of money. So much so, that a majority of Americans are willing to cut the "Defense" budget. Uh oh. Those good guys better go find and prosecute some of those alleged bad guys trying to destroy America. But what if those bad guys are too rare, or two hard to find? Rolling Stone's Rick Perstein makes it clear that if you can't find real bad guys, the next best thing would be to create them:

Then, the night before the May Day Occupy protests, they allegedly put the plan into motion – and just as the would-be terrorists fiddled with the detonator they hoped would blow to smithereens a scenic bridge in Ohio’s Cuyahoga Valley National Park traversed by 13,610 vehicles every day, the FBI swooped in to arrest them. Right in the nick of time, just like in the movies. The authorities couldn’t have more effectively made the Occupy movement look like a danger to the republic if they had scripted it. Maybe that's because, more or less, they did. The guy who convinced the plotters to blow up a big bridge, led them to the arms merchant, and drove the team to the bomb site was an FBI informant. The merchant was an FBI agent. The bomb, of course, was a dud. And the arrest was part of a pattern of entrapment by federal law enforcement since September 11, 2001, not of terrorist suspects, but of young men federal agents have had to talk into embracing violence in the first place. . . . In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage
. Complementing America's elite entrapment teams are America spying teams. The following passage is from Rachel Maddow's new book, Drift: the Unmooring of American Military Power:
The spy boom has been a beautiful windfall for architects, construction companies, IT specialists, and above all defense contractors, enriching thousands of private companies and dozens of local economies hugging the Capital Beltway. All those SCIFs and the rest of the government-contractor gravy train have made suburban Washington, DC, home to six of the ten wealthiest counties in America. Falls Church, Loudoun County, and Fairfax County in Virginia are one, two, and three. Goodbye, Nassau County, New York. Take that, Oyster Bay. The crown jewel of this sprawling intelligopolis is Liberty Crossing, in the Virginia suburbs of Washington—an 850,000-square-foot (and growing) complex that houses the National Counterterrorism Center. The agency was created and funded in 2004 because, despite spending $30 billion on intelligence before 9/11, the various spy agencies in our country did not talk to one another. So the $30 billion annual intelligence budget was boosted by 250 percent, and with that increase we built ourselves a clean, well-lighted edifice, concealed by GPS jammers and reflective windows, where intelligence collected by 1,271 government agencies and 1,931 private companies under government contract is supposedly coordinated.
At least there will be plenty of domestic drones to keep an eye on those protesters, as reported by Tim Watts of The Intel Hub:
Did you know that a bill, HR 658, the FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act, has just passed both the House and the Senate that authorizes the use of 30,000 spy drones over America? Like the anti-Posse Comitatus NDAA legislation that passed in November, this bill was not widely reported by the mainstream media. Do not feel bad for not knowing about this, because, similar to the anti-Constitutional NDAA legislation, they purposefully tried to hide this from the American public. The corporate controlled mainstream media was once again complicit and was an integral accessory in this crime against “We the People.” The corporate mainstream media failed us all miserably once again. Think about the enormity of this for a second… 30-THOUSAND drones flying overhead surveilling the US. If you divide that by 50 states, that is 600 drones per state!
I think that Rachel and Tim are getting a bit carried away, of course because this huge mushrooming industry is an antidote to the unemployment problem. We are quietly employing America's people by hiring them to spy on each other. Perhaps we'll soon reach a happy equilibrium where there's one American spy for every American non-spy. Or something like that. Or perhaps I'm overstating my case. I can't actually prove that American law enforcement/military personnel are spying on U.S. citizens or that they are doing this from the United States. James Bamford of Wired explains:
For example, NSA can intercept millions of domestic communications and store them in a data center like Bluffdale and still be able to say it has not “intercepted” any domestic communications. This is because of its definition of the word. “Intercept,” in NSA’s lexicon, only takes place when the communications are “processed” “into an intelligible form intended for human inspection,” not as they pass through NSA listening posts and transferred to data warehouses. Complicating matters is the senseless scenario made up for the questioning by Congress, which makes it difficult to make sense of his answers, especially since many seem very parsed, qualified, and surrounded in garbled syntax. That scenario involved NSA targeting U.S. citizens for making fun of a President Dick Cheney for shooting a fellow hunter in the face with a shotgun, and then the fun-makers being waterboarded for their impertinence. Asked whether the NSA has the capability of monitoring the communications of Americans, he never denies it – he simply says, time and again, that NSA can’t do it “in the United States.” In other words it can monitor those communications from satellites in space, undersea cables, or from one of its partner countries, such as Canada or Britain, all of which it has done in the past.

Continue ReadingInventing terrorists

Permanant war and meaningless chatter

What's on the table for this election season? Glenn Greenwald explains:

But like almost all of the most consequential and destructive policies — endless war, the Drug War, the sprawling and barbaric American prison state — the domestic Surveillance State expands with equal fervor under both Democratic and Republicans administrations, and opposing it thus affords no partisan gain and it is therefore entirely off the table of debate. In lieu of any dispute over these types of actually consequential government policies, we instead endure a series of trivial weekly scandals that numb the brain, distract attention, and produce acrimony as virulent and divisive as it is petty.
Greenwald pointed out that some mainstream writers are starting to take note of America's endless state of war and surveillance. For instance, the following excerpt is the writing of Fareed Zakaria:
Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for the intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet – the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. The largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs is now the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people. The rise of this national security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government's powers that now touch every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. Some 30,000 people, for example, are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications within the United States.

Continue ReadingPermanant war and meaningless chatter

Internet companies pressured to make private communications easy access for the governent

It's bad enough that the federal government can convince itself that it has the right to listen in on all of our telephone calls, emails, Tweets, and posts without probable cause. Now the federal government is twisting the arms of the internet providers to make it technologically easy for them to spy on us. Glenn Greenwald reports on this travesty.

Continue ReadingInternet companies pressured to make private communications easy access for the governent

Dad performs sting operation to catch teachers bullying his 10-year old autistic boy

This dad of a ten-year old autistic boy wired up the boy to see how his teachers were treating him. The results were shocking, and he now rightfully wants the school to fire all the teachers who heaped abuse on his son. I forced myself to watch and listen to the tape recordings. It makes me wonder how many other vulnerable people (autistic kids, mentally retarded kids, people in nursing homes) are abused. I couldn't blame other people who want to do these sorts of sting operations. Warning: in many states such as Illinois, these one-party consent stings would be illegal.

Continue ReadingDad performs sting operation to catch teachers bullying his 10-year old autistic boy