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After Orlando, Democrats and Republicans Clamor for Expanded Police State

clinton trump

By Eric Draitser | Stop Imperialism | June 16, 2016

The horrific massacre in Orlando has once again thrust the specter of domestic terrorism into the limelight, and into the media space. Pundits and politicians alike have taken the incident as yet another opportunity to thump their chests about the need for even more counter-terrorism legislation, a further increase in surveillance state activity and, of course, more war abroad.

And while such opportunists posture as defenders of the American people, none care to face the inescapable reality that since 9-11, and the introduction of numerous pieces of draconian legislation ostensibly aimed at combatting terrorism, the agencies charged with surveillance and law enforcement have not managed to prevent attacks. Obviously, this raises the question of what exactly legislation such as the PATRIOT Act is really intended for if not to ‘keep Americans safe.’

But even more critical than retrospective criticism of the erosion of civil liberties after nearly a decade and a half of propaganda and fearmongering, is the need to oppose the further expansion of such legislation and domestic spying programs.  Indeed, while what were once considered rights are now seen as passé, the US is staring down the barrel of a presidential election where the leading candidates are calling for even more surveillance, expanded government databases, and more billions of dollars to be poured into the NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, and the rest of the alphabet soup that comprises Police State USA.

Clinton, Trump, and Death as Political Currency

In the immediate aftermath of the heinous slaughter in Orlando, the neoconservative-neoliberal chimera known as Hillary Clinton predictably called for an expansion of surveillance and the police state. Less than 48 hours after the attack, in a speech in Cleveland, Clinton proclaimed:

We already know we need more resources for this fight. The professionals who keep us safe would be the first to say we need better intelligence to discover and disrupt terrorist plots before they can be carried out. That’s why I’ve proposed an ‘intelligence surge’ to bolster our capabilities across the board, with appropriate safeguards here at home.

As with all things Hillary, one must carefully deconstruct the statement to unravel the distortions and empty rhetoric, and distill her actual proposal. The first part of her statement is instantly suspect as the US has already grossly inflated its intelligence budget. According to the Federation of American Scientists, the 2017 intelligence budget will reach nearly $70 billion, with $50 billion being spent on the National Intelligence Program (NIP).  One would have to seriously question the logic in Clinton’s statement, namely the implied consensus about the need for more resources. How much more exactly will prevent incidents like the one in Orlando? Perhaps another $50 billion would do the trick?

The second fallacy embedded in the torrent of misinformation that is a Hillary Clinton speech excerpt is the specious argument that “better intelligence” would “discover and disrupt terrorist plots before they can be carried out.” This vacuous statement must be dismissed out of hand after one considers the fact that the alleged Orlando killer, Omar Mateen, was investigated, followed, and interviewed by the FBI multiple times (he was also introduced to FBI informants whose responsibility was likely to keep tabs on him).

So, according to Clinton the US should spend tens of billions more dollars to fund the agencies and programs that already have the ability to single out a potential terrorist, do all the leg work to establish contact with him, invest human resources into his case, and yet still be unable to stop his alleged actions. To put it in terms Hillary’s Wall Street patrons would understand: sounds like a bad investment strategy.

The third unmistakably wrongheaded statement (I only selected three sentences, so she’s 3 for 3) is the absolutely odious suggestion of an “intelligence surge” to improve the capabilities of the intelligence community. In fact, what Clinton is actually suggesting is a massive increase in contracts awarded to private intelligence firms and military contractors, though veiling it as a boost to the intelligence community. This fact is made clear by the renowned investigative journalist Tim Shorrock in his 2008 book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing where he notes that:

In 2006… the cost of America’s spying and surveillance activities outsourced to contractors reached $42 billion, or about 70 percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends every year on foreign and domestic intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot know the true extent of outsourcing, for two reasons. First, in 2007, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) refused to release an internal report on contracting out of fear that its disclosure would harm U.S. national security interests. Second, most intelligence contracts are classified, allowing companies like CACI to hide their activities behind a veil of secrecy.

Think about that figure for a second: 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to outsourcing. In other words, government expenditure on surveillance and intelligence is an indirect subsidy to private corporations. This should come as no surprise considering similar indirect subsidies to energy companies, private mercenaries, and even big retail corporations.

Of course, Clinton knows all this perfectly well. So when she calls for an intelligence surge what she’s actually doing is making clear to her military-industrial-surveillance complex cronies that she will make sure to feed the goose that continues to lay the golden eggs. Just like her speeches to Goldman Sachs served to reassure Wall Street that she was their lady, so too does Clinton use the tragic events in Orlando to give a wink and a nod to Booz Allen Hamilton, CACI International, and the rest.

As with all things Clinton, her words drip with cynicism like her hands drip with the blood of Libyans, Syrians, Iraqis, Serbians, and countless others.

It should be mentioned too that aside from just funding, Clinton undoubtedly represents a further rightward shift in terms of “anti-terror” legislation – the kinds of bills that she’d promote and sign into law as president would be, to put it bluntly, no different than the Bush era bills that she supported such as the PATRIOT Act.  As Conor Friedersdorf noted in The Atlantic in 2015:

[Clinton] served in the United States Senate from 2001 to 2009. She cast votes that enabled the very NSA spying that many now regard as a betrayal. And she knew all about what the NSA wasn’t telling the public. To say now that the NSA should’ve been more transparent raises this question: Why wasn’t Clinton among the Democrats working for more transparency?

Friedersdorf is being much too kind with his concluding rhetorical question. Clinton is perhaps one of the most hawkish surveillance state proponents in the US. Her total disregard for even the basic tenets of the US Constitution, let alone domestic or international law, make her not only unfit for office, but a dangerous criminal.

And then of course there’s the trainwreck made flesh, Donald Trump, who with his typically bombastic and utterly vacuous public statements has once again managed to make the criminal Hillary into the “sensible one.” In a speech on Monday June 13, Trump reverted to his usual racist demagogy that is light on actual policy prescriptions and heavy on xenophobia, racism, and outright lies. But in the midst of the Trump madness, there are indeed kernels of policy that should be worrying.

During the speech Trump called, once again, for a ban on Muslim immigration to the US, warning of “major consequences” for the Muslim community in the country. But Trump went further saying, “We have a dysfunctional immigration system, which does not permit us to know who we let into our country, and it does not permit us to protect our citizens properly.” Again, Trump provides no specific policy prescription, but the implication from his statement is an increase in surveillance of citizens domestically, as well as presumably the codification of a deeply racist immigration system which would discriminate based on religion and/or ethnicity.

Trump continued, saying “With these people, folks, it’s coming. We’re importing radical Islamic terrorism into the West through a failed immigration system and through an intelligence community held back by our president.” Here again Trump aligns with Clinton. While supposedly the two are opposed to one another, the fact is that both accept the false assumption that our problems would be solved if only we could just stop “holding back” the intelligence community. Clinton calls for a surge while Trump calls for taking off the training wheels. Sort of like an argument about which is better Pepsi or orange juice.

The Police State Is Not the Answer

While the Demopublican-Republicrat Party continues its political posturing, the assumptions that both have internalized are what need to be excised from the body politic. It is patently absurd to call for more surveillance in a country where, thanks to Edward Snowden, we now know the following:

  • The PRISM program allows “The National Security Agency and the FBI [to tap] directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, emails, documents, and connection logs.” According to cybersecurity experts PRISM uses obviously illegal tactics to “circumvent formal legal processes… to seek personal material such as emails, photos and videos.”
  • The BLARNEY system is utilized extensively. According to former AT&T technician Mark Klein and former Senior Advisor for Internet Technology at the FCC Scott Marcus, “Using a device called a ‘splitter’ a complete copy of the internet traffic that AT&T receives… is diverted onto a separate fiber-optic cable which is connected to a room which is controlled by the NSA.” Therefore, unlike PRISM, which the government and its apologists attempt to justify as being used to target key individuals, BLARNEY has no such capacity. Rather, it is designed solely to collect data, all internet data, to be used and likely stored.
  • The NSA has constructed enormous data storage facilities such as the Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. As one top security official told Wired, “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

Naturally, there is not nearly enough space here to detail all of the myriad surveillance programs. But, taking them together with what we know of government funding to private intelligence firms, how could anyone rightly argue that surveillance should be increased? If anything, the enormous expenditure has proven utterly useless.

Indeed, the legal framework developed in the post-9/11 era including draconian legislation such as the PATRIOT Act, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and many others, laid the foundation for the systemic and systematic stripping away of civil liberties and human rights. The technical infrastructure has been steadily evolving since 9/11 as technology continues to improve, providing the intelligence agencies with ever more tools for surveillance and intelligence gathering. The continued, unrestrained neoliberal policy of privatization has created a complex network of companies, contractors, and subcontractors, usually working independently of each other, all in the service of the security state. Finally, the political landscape in the United States has so thoroughly devolved that elected officials are more concerned about stopping the whistleblowers and leakers, than about addressing America’s continued descent into a fascist police state.

Such is the state of the union in 2016. And while the aspiring Mass Murderer-in-Chief Clinton continues to attack the political snake-charmer Trump, and The Donald does what The Donald does, the bodies of 50 innocent people are being laid to rest. Must the values and freedoms that the US allegedly once stood for also be buried?

June 20, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Islamophobia, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Corporatizing National Security: What It Means

By Ralph Nader | June 20, 2013

Privacy is a sacred word to many Americans, as demonstrated by the recent uproar over the brazen invasion of it by the Patriot Act-enabled National Security Agency (NSA). The information about dragnet data-collecting of telephone and internet records leaked by Edward Snowden has opened the door to another pressing conversation—one about privatization, or corporatization of this governmental function.

In addition to potentially having access to the private electronic correspondence of American citizens, what does it mean that Mr. Snowden—a low-level contractor—had access to critical national security information not available to the general public? Author James Bamford, an expert on intelligence agencies, recently wrote: “The Snowden case demonstrates the potential risks involved when the nation turns its spying and eavesdropping over to companies with lax security and inadequate personnel policies. The risks increase exponentially when those same people must make critical decisions involving choices that may lead to war, cyber or otherwise.”

This is a stark example of the blurring of the line between corporate and governmental functions. Booz Allen Hamilton, the company that employed Mr. Snowden, earned over $5 billion in revenues in the last fiscal year, according to The Washington Post. The Carlyle Group, the majority owner of Booz Allen Hamilton, has made nearly $2 billion on its $910 million investment in “government consulting.” It is clear that “national security” is big business.

Given the value and importance of privacy to American ideals, it is disturbing how the terms “privatization” and “private sector” are deceptively used. Many Americans have been led to believe that corporations can and will do a better job handling certain vital tasks than the government can. Such is the ideology of privatization. But in practice, there is very little evidence to prove this notion. Instead, the term “privatization” has become a clever euphemism to draw attention away from a harsh truth. Public functions are being handed over to corporations in sweetheart deals while publicly owned assets such as minerals on public lands and research development breakthroughs are being given away at bargain basement prices.

These functions and assets—which belong to or are the responsibility of the taxpayers—are being used to make an increasingly small pool of top corporate executives very wealthy. And taxpayers are left footing the cleanup bill when corporate greed does not align with the public need.

With this in mind, let us not mince words. “Privatization” is a soft term. Let us call the practice what it really is—corporatization.

There’s big money to be made in moving government-owned functions and assets into corporate hands. Public highways, prisons, drinking water systems, school management, trash collection, libraries, the military and now even national security matters are all being outsourced to corporations. But what happens when such vital government functions are performed for big profit rather than the public good?

Look to the many reports of waste, fraud, and abuse that arose out of the over-use of corporate contractors in Iraq. At one point, there were more contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. soldiers. Look to the private prisons, which make their money by incarcerating as many people as they can for as long as they can. Look to privatized water systems, the majority of which deliver poorer service at higher costs than public utility alternatives. Visit privatizationwatch.org for many more examples of the perils, pitfalls and excesses of rampant, unaccountable corporatization.

In short, corporatizing public functions does not work well for the public, consumers and taxpayers who are paying through the nose.

Some right-wing critics might view government providing essential public services as “socialism,” but as it now stands, we live in a nation increasingly comprised of corporate socialism. There is great value in having public assets and functions that are already owned by the people, to be performed for the public benefit, and not at high profit margins and prices for big corporations. By allowing corporate entities to assume control of such functions, it makes profiteering the central determinant in what, how, and why vital services are rendered.

Just look at the price of medicines given to drug companies by taxpayer-funded government agencies that discovered them.

(Autographed copies of my new book Told You So: The Big Book of Weekly Columns are available from Politics and Prose, an independent book store in Washington D.C.)

June 21, 2013 Posted by | Corruption, Economics | , , , , | Leave a comment

The advantages of knowing everything

Xymphora | June 16, 2013

Here we go:  “NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants”:

“A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA “may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States.” A possible interpretation of that language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can domestically — on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to “target” a specific American citizen.”

Gathering everything is OK.  Also:

“Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell indicated during a House Intelligence hearing in 2007 that the NSA’s surveillance process involves “billions” of bulk communications being intercepted, analyzed, and incorporated into a database.
They can be accessed by an analyst who’s part of the NSA’s “workforce of thousands of people” who are “trained” annually in minimization procedures, he said. (McConnell, who had previously worked as the director of the NSA, is now vice chairman at Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden’s former employer.)”

As far as the NSA is concerned, gathering everything without warrants is legally permitted, and once they have it, NSA analysts who are ‘trained’ to NSA standards are legally allowed to listen to whatever they want.  Gathering everything is actually better than getting a FISA warrant for a particular target.

PRISM is going to take over the entire discussion, and, lo and behold, it is not that bad.  Get  a few more keys for the ‘lockbox’, and all will be deemed to be well.

The three big questions concerning Total Information Awareness are:

  1. economic – can we pay to store all this information?;
  2. technical – can we develop search engines that will allow us to handle all this information without becoming paralyzed by the sheer volume of it (remember that Simon’s big straw man was the ridiculousness of having FBI agents listen to all the conversations!!!), the traditional problem with totalitarian states?; and
  3. legal – in a country with constitutional protections for basic liberties, how is any of this allowed?

The NSA believes it has an answer to the first two of these problems, and just needs to fool Americans into believing that the presence of those scary Moooooooslims under their beds justifies a bit of bending of the constitution to finesse the legal problem.  Some tinkering will be done to PRISM, and everybody will go back to sleep.

The final step will be to continue to expand the exploitation of the information as a method of social control using blackmail or something like blackmail – even the awareness that there is information out there that could be used for blackmail will start to influence behavior, particularly repressing any kind of political protest (not that there is much of that anyway) – and to use the insider information to siphon up whatever wealth is not yet in the hands of the 1% (it is a fun fact that Booz Allen is owned by the Carlyle Group).

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June 16, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

NSA Document Leak Proves Conspiracy To Create Big Brother Style World Control System

By Lee Rogers | Blacklisted News | June 10, 2013

The Obama regime which was already in the midst of three high profile scandals now has a fourth one to deal with. Top secret documents were recently leaked to the Washington Post and the London Guardian detailing a vast government surveillance program code named PRISM. According to the leaked documents, the program allows the National Security Agency (NSA) back door access to data from the servers of several leading U.S. based Internet and software companies. The documents list companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Apple as some of the participants in the program. There have also been other reports indicating that the NSA is able to access real-time user data from as many as 50 separate American companies. Under the program, the NSA is able to collect information ranging from e-mails, chats, videos, photographs, VoIP calls and more. Most importantly is the fact that PRISM allows the NSA to obtain this data without having to make individual requests from the service providers or without having to obtain a court order. To say that this is a violation of the Fourth Amendment which forbids unreasonable searches and seizures would be a gross understatement. This is actually much more than that. This is a program designed specifically to serve as a Big Brother like control grid and to end privacy as we know it.

In some ways this is not really a new story. This is just confirmation of what many people involved in the alternative research community have known for years. Going as far back as the 1990s there were reports revealing how Microsoft provided the NSA with back door access to their Windows operating system. Google’s cozy relationship with the NSA has also been discussed off and on over the past decade. There have even been other whistleblowers that have come forward previously detailing a number of unconstitutional and unlawful abuses conducted by the agency. This includes revelations of how the NSA was spying on American service members stationed overseas. The only difference with this is that these newly leaked documents provide definitive details on just how wide reaching the NSA’s activities have become.

It is now painfully obvious that James Clapper the Director of National Intelligence when testifying before the Senate this past March blatantly lied when asked by Senator Ron Wyden if the NSA was involved in collecting data from the American people. Clapper flatly denied that the NSA was engaged in these types of domestic surveillance activities. What makes the situation such a joke is that the Obama regime is not focused on the fact that Clapper lied to the Senate which in of itself is unlawful. Instead they have been more focused on determining the source of the leak that exposed these broad abuses of power. This is probably not surprising considering that this is a regime that rewards corruption by promoting people involved in all sorts of questionable activity. The promotion of Susan Rice as Obama’s new National Security Advisor is a perfect example of this considering her involvement in spreading bogus Benghazi related talking points. On the other hand, the Obama regime has severely punished a variety of whistleblowers who have dared to expose any wrong doing.

At least the Obama regime won’t have to spend much time and energy trying to identify the whistleblower as this person who leaked these documents has already come forward publically. At his own request the Guardian revealed his identity as Edward Snowden a 29-year old Information Technology specialist who has been working at the NSA for different contractors including Booz Allen Hamilton and Dell. Snowden had previously worked at an NSA office in Hawaii but boarded a flight to Hong Kong a few weeks ago where he has stayed since turning over these documents to the media. He expects that he will never set foot on U.S. soil again and may possibly seek political asylum in a country like Iceland. The Guardian interviewed Snowden over several days and has recently posted an interview transcript that provides more detail on the abuses he became aware of and why he decided to come forward as a whistleblower. In the interview Snowden confirms that the NSA has the infrastructure that allows them to intercept almost any type of data that you can imagine from phone records, e-mails to credit cards. He also reveals how the U.S. government is engaged in hacking systems everywhere around the world and how the NSA has consistently lied to Congress about their activities. There is little doubt that Snowden is thus far one of the most important whistleblowers to come along in the 21st century and he will likely face retaliation considering the vast reach and capabilities of the U.S. intelligence community.

Many individuals within the Obama regime including Obama himself have claimed that this type of widespread data collection is needed to fight terrorism and is used for national security purposes. Even if we were to assume that the war on terror is real, this claim is ridiculous and absurd on its face. It would be one thing if they were collecting information based upon a specific criteria identified by legitimate human intelligence. Instead they are collecting indiscriminate amounts of information which makes it much more difficult to analyze and target anything that might indicate a potential threat. If the NSA’s goal is really to detect and target terrorism then all they are doing is making their job more difficult by vastly increasing the noise they have to filter through. Either the people running the NSA are incredibly stupid or the goal of this program is to establish the infrastructure necessary to centrally collect data from communications everywhere around the world.

Other evidence to support this notion is the fact that the NSA is building a huge new facility in Utah that is being designed to store an enormous amount of data. A Fox News report indicates that, when completed, the facility will be able to store billions of terabytes worth of information. It is hard to fathom how the NSA would need this much storage space unless it was being used to collect and store any and all communications.

The Obama regime has tried to justify all of this by saying that PRISM helped stop an alleged New York City subway bomb plot back in 2009. This has been proven to be factually incorrect as regular police work and help from the British were larger factors in stopping the plot. This is assuming you even believe the official story of this terror plot to begin with. The government and more specifically the FBI have manufactured so many fake terror plots that it is difficult to determine fact from fiction at this point. So with this said, there is really no proof that PRISM has even helped to stop any so-called terror plot. They are collecting information simply for the sake of collecting information with no probable cause or reasonable justification.

At this point it is an undeniable fact that the NSA has been illegally collecting information on the American people. For years what has been dismissed as conspiracy theory is now without question a conspiracy fact. It is laughable that Obama and his assorted cronies are even trying to defend this program as a useful tool to fight terrorists. It is more likely that this program is being used to help find people domestically who dislike the government and would potentially fight back against it. A striking similarity to what is depicted in George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 where political dissidents are identified as thought criminals. A tool the NSA uses called Boundless Informant which counts and categorizes the information they collect shows that more data is actually gathered from domestic sources in the U.S. than from Russia. So based on this one could argue that the NSA almost seems to view the American people as more of a threat to national security than the Russians.

The three scandals the Obama regime was dealing with prior to this new scandal are all grounds for impeachment and one could easily argue that this one is many times worse than the previous three. Obama should resign in disgrace but being that he’s a narcissist who seems unwilling to admit making any mistakes it is highly doubtful he will do this. Obama and the rest of the useful idiots in his regime who have tried to defend and justify this and other criminal programs need to be … removed from office and put on trial. The criminal activity from the Obama regime is so vastly transparent it has become a complete and total joke to anyone who is even remotely paying attention.

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June 11, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment