Mass Surveillance for Dummies -- Part 4
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for
lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!
--Benjamin Franklin
By
Nolan K. Anderson
04/01/06 "ICH"
-- -- George Bush's Democracy is two wolves (in
sheep's clothing) attacking a lamb, throwing the lamb in a hole
and keeping him prisoner indefinitely (for the safety of the
wolves) while borrowing money from all the lambs in the
neighborhood (to create a world safe for wolves) and using the
lamb's wool as collateral (for the benefit of the lending
wolves). If this makes no sense, read no further. It's not going
to get any better than this.
This convoluted type reasoning is what makes the world of mass
surveillance turn upon the axis of American government
rationalization. This is the type reasoning that government
shysters use to confuse any politician or entity brave enough,
lucky enough or stupid enough to blunder upon their hidden world
of mass surveillance programs for all the inhabitants of the
planet. This is the reasoning that allows our government to
continually expand their nefarious programs using well-hidden
and bottomless budgets and answer only occasionally to
over-zealous and misguided civil rights activists.
The power of present-day programs of mass surveillance is truly
futuristic, beyond comprehension and beyond oversight and
control. But even this does not properly portray their danger to
the "American way of life". Their true power and danger comes in
examining the programs in connection with the resumes of those
who have been empowered by the Bush Administration to guide,
control (and of course expand) these programs.
John Negroponte - United States National Intelligence Director:
"Intelligence czar John Negroponte . . . (worked in) the CIA's
Phoenix program, which assassinated some 40,000 Vietnamese
"subversives." Negroponte was the officer-in-charge for Vietnam
at the National Security Council (NSC) under Henry Kissinger,
having worked as a "political affairs officer" (read: CIA) at
the US Embassy in Saigon starting as early as 196. In 1981
Reagan appointed Negroponte as Ambassador to Honduras. That
appointment gave Reagan a base from which to assist the Contras
in Nicaragua. Negroponte became good friends with General
Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, infamous for his participation in
Battalion 3-16 death squad human rights abuses and who was
conducting a reign of terror in Honduras at that time".[1]
Michael Chertoff - Secretary United States Homeland Security:
Chertoff, as an aggressive proponent of the USA PATRIOT Act,
helped set up the newly authorized surveillance networks that
need not rely on a targeted individual being suspected of any
crime.
Chertoff's record is one of having shredded the constitution and
its protection of civil liberties, but his unquestioned fealty
to the president, seems to be his primary qualification for the
post of Homeland Security Czar. Virtually every aspect of the
War On Terror now features someone who has been promoted for his
or her misdeeds. No bad deed goes unrewarded. Chertoff's round
up of Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians after 9-11 was not only a
civil liberty atrocity it was wholly ineffective. None of the
detainees, held incommunicado and without bond until proven
innocent, was ever charged -- let alone convicted -- of any
terrorism-related crime. Few if any held any useful intelligence
value".[1]
Alberto Gonzalez - United States Attorney General:
"George W. Bush's pick for Attorney General, advised the
President and the Pentagon that Bush was above the law
concerning torture. This sicko actually said that the President
is not just above international law (the Geneva Convention), but
that Bush is even above Federal law).
Gonzalez's memo, which told Bush that the nature of the war on
terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on
questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its
provisions of the Geneva Conventions on torture did not apply to
"unlawful combatants" captured during the war on terror."
His (Gonzalez's) office also played a role in an August 2002
memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel
advising that torturing alleged Al-Qaida terrorists in captivity
abroad "may be justified" and that international laws against
torture "may be unconstitutional if applied to interrogations"
conducted in the U.S. war on terrorism. At least five and up to
28 confirmed deaths of detainees are believed by the Pentagon to
have been caused by aggressive policies Gonzales did not define
as torture".[1]
We Americans through our inertia, apathy and negligence have
allowed our elected representatives to put these criminals in
their present positions. Imagine going into a maximum security
prison, selecting the most hardened and dangerous criminals in
the facility and putting them in a position to monitor and
control your present, your future and that of your children
under laws that have been made in secret. Our neglect of our
government is an ingredient of future horror and unimaginable
suffering for our country and ourselves.
The ADVISE Program:
This is a relatively new Department of Homeland Security
data-mining program that is designed to collect a vast array of
corporate and public online information - from financial records
to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US
intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then
store it as "entities" - linking data about people, places,
things, organizations, and events. If there is anything new
about the program it is the sheer size of the program as defined
by its data storage requirements. The storage requirements are
huge - enough to retain information on about 1 quadrillion
entities. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively
form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the
Empire State Building.[2]
Remember, the information being gathered is all-inclusive. It is
the record of the way we live our lives - the way we buy
toothbrushes, the schools we attend, the amount and type of food
we purchase, where and how much gasoline we buy. In the eyes of
our freshly minted totalitarian system, this is the "beauty" of
the system. Who can object to having a record made of what kind
of toothpaste he uses? If one objects to having his dental
habits monitored, he must really have something to hide. Perhaps
"Big Brother" should dig deeper into the way you live your life.
Perhaps "Big" should monitor your e-mail (coming and going).
Perhaps there is a law-enforcement link between people who buy
lots of size 9 shoes and those who buy lots of toothpaste.
Possibly we are watching an outbreak of "hoof and mouth disease"
- or, maybe it's "chicken flu". This rationalization sounds
implausible and facetious, but it points to the fact that the
systems link worldwide law-enforcement, anti-terrorist and spy
agencies. This network coupled with the fact that computers are
drawing the conclusions about ones toothpaste usage and someone
else's shoe buying habits should be a reason for grave concern
when made available to some foreign government agency.
Questions about the innocuous things that constitute our daily
lives and their value engender some other rather closely related
questions. If the innocuous data of our lives is so important in
protecting us, one might wonder why the following "data" didn't
trigger some pre-9/11 life-saving actions. Why did the following
"trends" go unnoticed - especially when these type trends are
specifically what surveillance experts look for in trying to
recognize such impending events as 9/11?
"A jump in UAL (United Airlines) put options 90 times (not 90
percent) above normal between September 6 and September 10, and
285 times higher than average on the Thursday before the attack.
-- CBS News, September 26 A jump in American Airlines put
options 60 times (not 60 percent) above norm al on the day
before the attacks. -- CBS News, September 26 No similar trading
occurred on any other airlines -- Bloomberg Business Report, the
Institute for Counterterrorism (ICT), Herzliyya, Israel [citing
data from the CBOE] 3 Morgan Stanley saw, between September 7
and September 10, an increase of 27 times (not 27 percent) in
the purchase of put options on its shares. Merrill-Lynch saw a
jump of more than 12 times the normal level of put opinions in
the four trading days before the attacks".
The answer: These "anomalies" did not go unnoticed. They were
duly noted in the SEC's post 9/11 and investigation. The SEC,
after a period of silence, undertook the unprecedented action of
deputizing hundreds of private officials in its investigation.
The result of these deputizations was the silencing of these
officials BECAUSE THEIR DEPUTIZATION MEANT THEY COULD NOT
COMMENT ON A CASE UNDER INVESTIGATION TO ANYONE OUTSIDE THE
CASE.
(You see, the sheep and the wolves' connection make more sense
than this one). What you still may not see is why the government
needs information on what toothpaste we buy and then take steps
to silence information on such an important event as 9/11. It
should also be remembered that 4 years after
9/11, 120,000 hours of FBI intercepted telephone conversations
had still not been translated or transcribed - pointing to the
urgency with which our government views such "critical
information".[3]
Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) Program:
Because of the inherent secrecy concerning every aspect of the
government's many faceted spy system, it is not clear whether
the ADVISE program and the HSIN program are one and the same or
whether they even connected. However, the descriptions of the
two programs show a lot of commonality. They are both data
mining type programs and they both look at, in Comrade
Chertoff's words: . . . "the thousands and thousands of routine,
everyday observations and activities (of which intelligence is
made). Surveillances, interactions - each of which may be taken
in isolation as not a particularly meaningful piece of
information, but when fused together, gives us a sense of the
patterns and the flow that really is at the core of what
intelligence analysis is really about. We have many interactions
every day, every hour, at the border, on airplanes, with the
Coast Guard. And what we need to do is to vacuum all those up
and get them fused and analyzed so we can not only take
appropriate action ourselves, but so we can share it with our
state and local partners."[4]
Perhaps the difference between the programs, if there is one,
comes from the agencies with whom the information is shared.
Comrade Chertoff explains that the HSIN objective is that of
making a blanket US network linking all intelligence (sic)
agencies and law enforcement departments across the United
States to form a hybrid spy network with the ability for all to
operate as if the participants were in the same room with a
common operating picture. [4] This is an impending disaster
straight from Orwell.
Conclusions:
The good news is that the Department of Homeland Security has
proven itself to be so criminally inefficient and negligent in
overcoming the effects of a natural disaster like Katrina that
the possibility of its achieving its surveillance goals in the
near future is rather slim. However, we know that little things
like money, patriotism or the Constitution will never stand in
the way of our "Pyongyang on the Potomac" and its attempts to
overcome that "goddamn piece of paper" called our Constitution.
The bad news is that with criminals like Negroponte, Chertoff
and Gonzalez running the asylum there is a good chance that
unimagined numbers of Americans will suffer loss of freedoms,
loss of a way of life and/or a loss of life. Americans will be
able to get rid of Bush in November of 2008; however, they will
not be so lucky in getting rid of Chertoff and Negroponte.
Alberto will probably go back to "shystering" somewhere within
the Bush Empire - possibly building firewalls and ironclad
alibis for the Carlyle Group after November of 2008.
The ECHELON program has been with for us more that four decades.
In that time the program has been refined and expanded to truly
alarming proportions. The ADVISE and HSIN programs will undergo
the same metamorphoses as time passes unless they are monitored
and controlled for the safety of American civil liberties.
Losing our liberties to our own government is no less
frightening than losing them to some foreign terrorist
organization. For those who doubt this basic truth, it would be
well for them to examine the modern history of Russia, Germany,
Cambodia and Viet Nam. Iraq's present "history in the making"
should show any rational person the dangers of a government with
an agenda. A government with an agenda, unlimited resources and
no oversight by its people is a guaranteed formula for disaster.
Creeping totalitarianism doesn't really describe the disaster(s)
being created for us. However, 385 million dollar
Halliburton/KBR "detention centers" being created for us do.[5]
References:
[1]
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9290.htm
[2]
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0209/p01s02-uspo.html
[3]
http://911research.wtc7.net/sept11/stockputs.html
[4]
http://tinyurl.com/ar84z
[5] portland imc - 2006.02.04 - Halliburton gets $385 Million
for "Detention Centers" for "NEW PROGRAMS"
Nolan K. Anderson is a retired engineer and a veteran of Korea
who was once a "conservative" until he found there was nothing
left to conserve and as a veteran hates to see a tour in Korea
go to waste. (He may be reached at
nkanders@bellsouth.net).
Copyright Nolan K. Anderson
