Is the NSA’s data mining more about domestic control than terrorism?
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16 Comments
The big threat to the power structure is the Occupy movement, not terrorism. Once you accept that, everything else makes sense.
It would take a whole team of Snowdens to figure out your handwriting.
I very much approve of hand-written blog posts. Like the pencil paparazzi, their time has come. Your handwriting makes me happy. I have to tilt my head like a confused puppy to read it.
Yes. This is about crushing dissent. It may have been developed for terror, but it’s use will be for identifying and tracking those who pose threats to the corporate power structure. Terrorists know better than to use social media to plan attacks.
It would be interesting to see who they’re tracking. One bets that Glenn Greenwald, who has zero ties to terrorism, is now getting the full treatment.
Is that the infamous “tattered blogging leotard” that you used to write about?
What ruler wouldn’t want to know the thoughts of his or her subjects… to know just when to crack the whip?
Often times things begin with the best of intentions. Unfortunately, though, once the tools exist people will find a way to use them, and not always for the purposes that were first envisioned. These questions about big data should have been asked years ago, as it was clear that this was where we were heading.
http://www.activistpost.com/
Friday, June 14, 2013
Turnkey Tyranny
Joe Giambrone
Activist Post
The genius of the American political system is that each administration is significantly worse than the one that preceded it. The effect is historical revisionism in the public mind. Nixon looks downright cuddly next to the abuses of Cheney/Rummy/Bush and company. Now Bush Jr. is starting to look like a civil libertarian when compared to the current Snoopmeister In Chief. As we plummet toward official Satanism, with a state unrecognizable and patently evil at its core, we can at least cling to the notion that things weren’t as bad as now in some past golden age. Then we can look around and fight amongst each other, assigning blame to the nearest uninformed yahoo, rather than to the high priests of human sacrifice and global misery and destruction.
Dick Cheney — the true power in the White House that *ignored* a national security briefing titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” now says that 9/11 could have been averted if only we had NSA monitoring back then …
http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/16/18987472-cheney-says-nsa-monitoring-could-have-prevented-911
A recent report in The Guardian (UK) suggests:
Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate and energy shocks — NSA Prism is motivated in part by fears that environmentally-linked disasters could spur anti-government activism
An excerpt:
“NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was a computer systems administrator for Booz Allen Hamilton, where he directly handled the NSA’s IT systems, including the Prism surveillance system. According to Booz Allen’s 2011 Annual Report, the corporation has overseen Unified Quest “for more than a decade” to help “military and civilian leaders envision the future.”
The latest war games, the report reveals, focused on “detailed, realistic scenarios with hypothetical ‘roads to crisis'”, including “homeland operations” resulting from “a high-magnitude natural disaster” among other scenarios, in the context of:
“… converging global trends [which] may change the current security landscape and future operating environment… At the end of the two-day event, senior leaders were better prepared to understand new required capabilities and force design requirements to make homeland operations more effective.”
It is therefore not surprising that the increasing privatisation of intelligence has coincided with the proliferation of domestic surveillance operations against political activists, particularly those linked to environmental and social justice protest groups.
Department of Homeland Security documents released in April prove a “systematic effort” by the agency “to surveil and disrupt peaceful demonstrations” linked to Occupy Wall Street, according to the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF).
Similarly, FBI documents confirmed “a strategic partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the private sector” designed to produce intelligence on behalf of “the corporate security community.” A PCJF spokesperson remarked that the documents show “federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”
Meant to include the link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/jun/14/climate-change-energy-shocks-nsa-prism
Snowden charged with espionage.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-charges-snowden-with-espionage/2013/06/21/507497d8-dab1-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html
Russia’s ITAR-Tass news agency, citing an unidentified Aeroflot official, said Snowden would fly from Moscow to Cuba on Monday and then take a flight to Caracas, Venezuela.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/hong-kong-snowden-has-left-for-a-third-country.php
Vice’s Motherboard has something on this same subject today.
“Sorry, NSA, Terrorists Don’t Use Verizon. Or Skype. Or Gmail.”
Read more:
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/hey-nsa-terrorists-dont-use-verizon-or-skype-or-gmail#ixzz2XFNOA1Nl
From Salon:
Read more:
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/16/hey_washington_post_print_the_nsa_interview/singleton/