Unhinged Rhetoric Does This Nation No Good - Now James Woolsey Wants to Execute Snowden?

Former CIA head James Woolsey said the 'blood of French citizens is on Edward Snowden's hands'. No,  the blood of those citizens is on ISIS' hands, you fool!

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” - Sen. Frank Church, referencing the NSA in 1975.

Let us admit in a time of hyped terror, with robed lunatics barking threats on almost every TV screen in a 24/7 medium, it takes courage for a citizen not to become petrified and hide under his or her bed. It also takes courage and character, as well as confidence in one's own positions, not to surrender to hysteria and especially political fear-mongering, to give these slime what they want, which is to change who and what we are as a nation,

So it's been disconcerting to hear the recent insane rhetoric coming out of assorted yapping mouths lately, mostly those who we knew were already detached from reality.

Such as Donald Trump now calling for a database to track all Muslims, and Ben Carson comparing the Syrian refugees (mainly women and children) trying to escape their war torn country to rabid dogs. Then there was former CIA head James Woolsey who actually said "the blood of French citizens is on Edward Snowden's hands" in a debased pop off that rivals those of even Trump and Carson.

What is this lunatic thinking? Where does he pull this from? Is he even remotely aware that the end-to-end encrypted devices and apps (like 'Whats App') used by the ISIS bugs weren't even around when Snowden made his revelations in 2013? (On November 18, 2014, Open Whisper Systems announced a partnership with WhatsApp to provide end-to-end encryption by incorporating the encryption protocol used in their TextSecure application into each WhatsApp client platform. Prior to this there were numerous security holes and issues). Of course, it's all insanity ratcheted up and made to sound rational. It isn't. It's nutso talk. (Especially as it is the Tech companies which are now most adamant about not removing encryption for their apps because they believe it will degrade the devices' usefulness.)

Snowden then was absolutely correct to expose the violations of our 4th amendment rights which even a subsequent   300-page report  by a commission (appointed by Obama himself)  found to be infringing on our civil liberties with dragnet collection of our personal information and data. What are we even worth as a country and a people if we succumb to so much fear that we're prepared to sacrifice our principles and liberties which is precisely what these fucktard terrorists want?

But given that the CIA also believed JFK was guilty of "treason" - and so had him terminated in an executive action- the words out of Woolsey's mouth perhaps aren't surprising.  In JFK's case, he earned the company's wrath by refusing to support their ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion with air power, and then fired Allen Dulles as CIA Director in the aftermath. Worse, he commenced a year's long secret rapprochement with Fidel Castro - certainly which would be viewed as a stab in the back, just like Snowden's revelations are now by Woolsey.

Thankfully more of the background details of this will be brought out in David Talbot's new work, “The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government,”  which extends out from JFK’s murder to investigate the rise of the whole shadowy network that Talbot holds ultimately responsible for the president’s assassination, and which metastasized in its wake. This is a work long since needed, and particularly how Dulles kept his little operations going on sub rosa even after JFK ditched him. (Dulles was later appointed to be on the Warren Commission by LBJ. Two real traitors working in league with each other to cover their foul tracks.)

As for the Reepo presidential candidate clowns popping off with their own whacked out rhetoric on the refugees, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson had this to say on Chris Hayes' All In last night:

"It doesn't surprise me coming from the right wing blather of the Republican Party. It's the kind of talk that surrounded the internment of the Japanese who were loyal to a fault. But we put them in concentration camps. It's the kind of talk that's extremely dangerous. It's the kind of talk that plays right into the hands of Al Baghdadi and Al Zawarahi, Al Musra and so forth.

Because that's what they want...they want us to act to bring about our own suicide".

That suicide, of course, also extends to killing our own constitutional principles in the interest of trying to get absolute security. But as Benjamin Franklin put it: "Those who would sacrifice liberty to gain a temporary security deserve neither liberty or security."

He didn't mince words. And why should he have? Liberties once lost, as Woolsey would have wanted us to do, are difficult if not impossible to win back. Once you give them up - say in the midst of combating these asshole terrorists (the latest attack was in Mali last night) you surrender to them, without even firing a shot.

Most citizens, indeed, aren't even aware our liberties (including the right to own guns) hang on a metaphorical knife edge. This concerns Reagan’s Executive Order 12656, issued in 1988, which has remained in effect since and was actually activated after 9/11. The order stated that Continuity of Government procedures were called for in the event of "any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States."

According to the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 326; cf. p. 38), "Contingency plans for the continuity of government" were implemented on September 11, 2001.  Later mutations of COG under the Bushites  equated political dissent with treason. In regard to the last, the definition of "terrorist" was expanded to "domestic terrorist" by congress in 2001, to include:

"“…activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States"

 According to the ACLU, “this definition is broad enough to encompass the activities of…prominent activists, campaigns and organizations.”  That includes past protest movements like Occupy Wall Street and anyone who currently protests the Keystone XL pipeline, chemical toxins in water or fracking. (No surprise this meme is still lurking - ready to spread- as we learned in the Denver Post (Nov. 18) that certain citizens of Thornton, CO had their names and home locations placed in red on a city council map as "opponents to fracking". )

How much did Snowden reveal or confirm that we didn't know or realize before - bordering on coming this [[ close to a totalitarian state? investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham disclosed the extent of the spying :

"The following information seemed to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.

There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources note the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”

Are Americans really ok with all that indiscriminate snooping in a terror war? If so, they merit neither liberty or security. They are prepared instead to surrender their most precious rights to the ISIS or other rats at the drop of a hat. Blaming the French deaths on Snowden also shows Woolsey has his head where the Sun doesn't shine, just like the CIA's earlier mutations (e.g. Allen Dulles) who orchestrated Kennedy's executive action then blamed it on a patsy they set up.)

Former NSA code breaker Bill Binney  delivered the sane view after the Snowden disclosures emerged and those like James Clapper and Keith Alexander were making noises about the need for mass warrant, dragnet searches.

"First of all I don’t understand this being bamboozled into thinking that you have to do this to find bad guys. That’s false. There’s very simple principles you can use to find out who is the bad guy and who isn’t and you can do this without violating anybody’s privacy”.

Americans need to keep things in perspective as this current terror epoch continues and not surrender their brains and balls to the hysterical, unhinged voices spouting off on the tube. Better yet turn the tube off - as well as other media access- and reclaim your gray matter by doing some serious reading.  As author Harold Bloom put it:

"If we fail to read conscientiously and seriously we risk becoming lost in the visual media"

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/walter-brasch/64867/the-republicans-rhetoric-of-hate-and-fear


Excerpt:

"In the history of the United States, just the members of the white-hooded Protestant-professing fire-and-brimstone Klan killed and maimed more Americans than all the murders by non-Christian terrorists—and that includes 9/11. Add in the number of serial killers, the racists who killed children in churches, the zealots who killed health care personnel because they performed legal abortions, and the people like the Oklahoma City bombers and the Unabomber, and the number of pretend-Christians killing Americans rises to hundreds of times greater than any Muslim attack."

World Wide Web Creator Blasts NSA For Undermining Online Security

You have to hand it to the spooks at NSA for being mischievous liars, dissemblers, prevaricators, obfuscators.....however you want to put it. And it's amazing how their crap works hand in glove with other spooks, from other nations. Case in point, the recent (TIME) comments of French Head Spook Bernard Squarcini, who deplored the "level of naïvete" of those condemning the NSA spying on allies when "we all do it". This, even as NSA Troglodyte James Clapper admitted in a Sunday NY Times interview ('No Morsel Too Minuscule for All -Consuming NSA', Nov. 1) that despite dismissing objections from other nations to NSA spying as "brazen hypocrisy":

There's no question that "from a capabiity standpoint (of the scale of eavesdropping of the NSA), we probably dwarf everybody on the planet with perhaps the exception of China and Russia"

Really now? Of course, he was referring - as the article noted - to the 35,000 workers and the $10.8 b a year which sets it apart for such dedicated international spookery. All money, imho, that is totally wasted. Money that could better be allocated to replacing the $40b to be cut from the food stamps program over the next 10 years - thanks to the security fetishist Reepos and assorted Demo Neoliberal punks in their camp. Just 4 years worth of NSA "allies' phones spymongering" would pay for that sliced SNAP program! It would mean the difference between kids in the "richest nation on Earth" going to bed hungry or not.

Anyway, now the creator of the World wide web has come out against the way this hyper, no holds barred spy craft is undermining the whole security of the web. According to a UK Guardian report, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist who created the world wide web, has called for a "full and frank public debate" over internet surveillance by the National Security Agency and its British counterpart, GCHQ, warning that the system of checks and balances to oversee the agencies has failed. Make no mistake that as the inventor of the global system of inter-connectivity known as the web, with its now ubiquitous www and http, Berners-Lee is uniquely qualified to comment on the internet spying revealed by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

In an interview with the Guardian, he expressed particular outrage that GCHQ and the NSA had weakened online security by cracking much of the online encryption on which hundreds of millions of users rely to guard data privacy. He said the agencies' decision to break the encryption software was appalling and foolish, as it directly contradicted efforts of the US and UK governments to fight cybercrime and cyberwarfare, which they have identified as a national security priority. Berners-Lee also said it was a betrayal of the technology industry. Let's recall, by way of fixing ideas here, how the NSA last year helped the Israelis create the 'Stuxnet' then 'Flame' virus - which escaped their control and (after being created as worms to destroy Iranian centrifuges for nuclear processing) and now lurks as a weapon that can be turned back on us all. (To get my take on it, see my post: 'The Stupidity of Stuxnet' from March 5, last year.)

Make no mistake that as a brilliant guy, Berners-Lee sees the Guardian news organization and Snowden as having acted in the public interest. This is in contrast to several senior British Puppets......errrrr....politicians – including the prime minister, David Cameron – who have called for The Guardian to be investigated over reporting of the Snowden leaks. Similar to the Neoliberal poseurs and puppets like Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein who loudly proclaimed Snowden a "traitor" and called for his prosecution, even as they turned a blind eye to the actual violations of the 4th amendment by using bogus Fisa courts to secure mass warrants as opposed to the individualized ones required by the 4th.

Berners -Lee went on to observe in his Guardian interview:

"Whistleblowers, and responsible media outlets that work with them, play an important role in society. We need powerful agencies to combat criminal activity online – but any powerful agency needs checks and balances and, based on recent revelations, it seems the current system of checks and balances has failed."

Sadly, the NSA has broken beyond all bounds of any useful or reasonable checks and balances. As the NY Times piece reported (op. cit., p. 11) the "exploits of the Tailored Access Operations, or T.A.O., is the prim name for the NSA division that breaks into computers around the world to steal the data inside, and sometimes leaves spy software behind." I mean, is it any wonder many citizens are flocking to the downloadable Tor browser (which is pre-configured to mask your IP address and therefore your location) with this shit going on and few legislators with the balls to impose some kind of control?

Today is to have been D-day when an unprecedented hearing in Westminster questions the conduct of Britain's spy agencies and the heads of the three secret services – MI5, MI6 and GCHQ – go before parliament's intelligence and security committee. The 90-minute session will give the nine-strong committee, led by Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a chance to question the agencies about the reach of the mass surveillance programmes that have provoked a global debate about privacy in the internet age.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., two parallel tracks for legislation - one bogus as a $3 bill, the other serious and real, are up for consideration. In the case of the former, the bill sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, would effectively legalize many of the NSA’s controversial spying tactics that have been exposed to the public recently. It would also expand the NSA’s powers, giving the agency new authority to tap cellphones, track cellphones, and would also impose 10-year sentences on any unauthorized person who accesses the NSA’s data. In other words, it's '4th amendment, fuck you' hubris raised to the googleplex power. Citizens need to barrage their reps to stop this perfidy. Whether Reepo or Demo, tell them no votes on their next election bid if they fuck this up.

The other bill, by Sen. Patrick Leahy and Jim Sensenbrenner (an original co-author of the Patriot Act), would actually reform the NSA. It would end the NSA’s bulk collection of data, require the government obtain court orders before it could use information collected on Americans, create transparency by allowing communications providers to disclose information about the orders they've received from the NSA, make FISA court orders since 2003 public, and create a public advocate for the FISA Court. Feinstein has vowed to kill Leahy’s legislation. We can't let that happen. Not on our watch, not when this may be the last, best chance to regulate the spooks gone wild.

Back to Berners-Lee. Speaking from his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he said that though he had anticipated many of the surveillance activities exposed by Snowden, including taps on the internet through the Prism program, he had not been prepared for the scale of the NSA/GCHQ operations, he "didn't realize it would be so big." At worst, such spying could damage the public's confidence in the intimate privacy of the internet as a free and safe place to interact, adding: "When you take away the safe space, you take away a lot of the power of human problem solving,".

Berners-Lee, who was honored in the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, reserved his harshest words for GCHQ and the NSA's undermining of the protection afforded by encryption, which he said would benefit organized criminal hacker gangs and hostile states. He said:

"In a totalitarian state where it reckoned it was the only strong state in the world, I can imagine that being a reasonable plan. But in this situation, internet security is hard. It's naïve to imagine that if you introduce a weakness into a system you will be the only one to use it."

He also criticised the cracking of encryption on ethical grounds:

"Any democratic country has to take the high road; it has to live by its principles. I'm very sympathetic to attempts to increase security against organised crime, but you have to distinguish yourself from the criminal."

Is the U.S. really a democratic nation any more, or has it reverted to a total, lawless gangster state? - As author Michael Parenti has warned, from the time of the JFK assassination. (When the security state finally grabbed the last leash of governance via complicity in Kennedy's assassination, facilitating it and its ensuing cover-up). This 50th anniversary year of the assassination is the perfect time to apply the ultimate litmus test to see whether we're a gangster state, or still a nominally democratic nation. If Feinstein's bill wins, you damned well know the answer.

And, btw, if you believe that's "over the top", consider the words of former senior NSA official Bill Binney, who in a CBS June 19 interview declared there were "simple principles that can be used to find bad guys without violating anyone's privacy". In the NY Times piece (ibid.), at the very end, Binney goes on the record again, stating bluntly, that without new leadership, new laws and top-to-bottom reform:

The agency will represent a threat of 'turnkey totalitarianism' - the capability to turn its awesome power - now directed mainly against other countries - on Americans.

To be forewarned, and all that....

See also: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/11/department-justice-privacy-internet-lavabit-encryption-keys

Rogue NSA Must Now Be Brought to Heel With the Sensenbrenner-Leahy Legislation!

Newsflash to James Clapper, Gen Keith B Alexander and other lying NSA rats: Ed Snowden is NOT a "traitor" but a 4th Amendment HERO for exposing YOUR Transgressions against the Constitution.

"I don’t understand this being bamboozled into thinking that you have to do this to find bad guys. That’s false. There’s very simple principles you can use to find out who is the bad guy and who isn’t and you can do this without violating anybody’s privacy”. -   Bill Binney, former NSA code breaker on CBS Early Show, June 19

Following the eruption of outrage against Spook Central, aka the NSA, with the spying on major allies (and their lying rot that "they do it too" and "they gave us the data" - which German friends have assured me are LIES) we now see these lying rat fuckers accusing Ed Snowden of being a "traitor" even as major American tech businesses express their own brand of outrage at learning of new NSA interventions into their Cloud sites (mainly overseas) to collect millions of data files.

Make no mistake this agency is out of control and needs to be reined in, big time. And congress needs to shut them up and reprimand them when they get in front of the lawmakers and lie their asses off. But this isn't new. Clapper already showed the lying  rot he's made of, lying to a Senate Committee several months ago, and he has the gall to call Snowden a "traitor"? He is - a traitor to the 4th amendment! 

Patriot Act co-author James Sensenbrenner agreed with Snowden's take on the damage done by this indiscriminate mass spy shtick as he was quoted in a UK Guardian piece ten days ago:

"Oversight only works when the agency that oversight is directed at tells the truth, and having Mr Clapper say he gave the least untruthful answer should, in my opinion, have resulted in a firing and a prosecution,"

Which is sad, because it means the principles of our nation have been stood on their head: the bad guys prosper while the good guys and heroes are turned into refugees or outcasts.

Now, let's move to the latest outrage as reported in The Washington Post, as well as The Denver Post yesterday (p. 1A) and numerous other outlets. According to the Denver Post's report, mainly taken from the WaPo's original account:


"The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, The Washington Post reported Wednesday, citing documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

A secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, indicates that NSA sends millions of records every day from Yahoo and Google internal networks to data warehouses at the agency's Fort Meade, Md., headquarters. In the last 30 days, field collectors had processed and sent back more than 180 million new records—ranging from "metadata," which would indicate who sent or received emails and when, to content such as text, audio and video, the Post reported Wednesday on its website.

The latest revelations were met with outrage from Google, and triggered legal questions, including whether the NSA may be violating federal wiretap laws. "

Process that, and then tell me - with a straight face - that the NSA isn't a rogue agency, a spook outfit run amuck, a modern day Frankenstein monster - out of control after its "makers" (the authors of the Patriot Act) looked the other way while the monster got up and wrecked the  global "village".   According to Mark Rotenberg, Executive Director of the Electronic Information Privacy Center:

"the fact that it was directed apparently to Google's cloud and Yahoo's cloud, and that there was no legal order as best we can tell to permit the interception, there is a good argument to make that the NSA has engaged in unlawful surveillance,"

When is enough, enough to warrant action on these clowns? How much longer are our lawmakers going to sit on their fat asses and wait before dropping the hammer and bringing them to heel? Isn't it enough they've gutted the 4th amendment for U.S. citizens with their dishonest cant about "protecting us" - and have now outraged most American allies, who've called it a crime in their own right?

The Post goes on to expose the new "tool' used by the NSAssers in addition to PRISM, and XKeyscore":

"The NSA's principal tool to exploit the Google and Yahoo data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency's British counterpart, GCHQ. The Post said NSA and GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information between the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.


The Post, incidentally, stands by its account and the sources - never mind how the top two lying NSA pricks have called the accounts "lies" or misrepresentation or "not occurring to the best of their knowledge". I mean, these people - if that's what they are, as opposed to alien cyber-bots operating from a "mother ship"- can't even get their own stories straight! Keith Alexander, interviewed by Bloomberg News asserted that "We are not authorized to go into a U.S. company's server and take data. We are not authorized to do that."  Meanwhile, NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines insisted the NSA "had multiple authorities to accomplish its mission".

Yeah, right, Vanee! All "authorities" that the original authors of the legislation never intended you to expand to the levels you did! As the UK Guardian (ibid.) reported,  the author of the Patriot Act, James Sensenbrenner, was up in arms and outraged at how NSA expanded the language in the original act to expand the FISA basis for searches. So the "authorities" Vines claims are obviously based on an unwarranted extrapolation of language never intended by the original author(s). Vines also claimed, dishonestly, that "the assertion we collect vast amounts of data from this type of collection is also not true."

And yet, as the Post has noted, the NSA "was breaking into data centers world wide", and also none of the NSA spooks has denied the MUSCULAR program to do so. Further, if they were telling us the truth why is the techie business bunch, including Google, Yahoo and Facebook, now ready to chew plutonium as they ream the spooks' overstretch out?  According to the (Denver) Post account again:

"David Drummond, Google's chief legal officer said the company has "long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping."

"We do not provide any government, including the U.S. government, with access to our systems," said Drummond. "We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform."

Google, which is known for its data security, noted that it has been trying to extend encryption across more and more Google services and links. "

And as the New York Times noted yesterday:

"Google has spent months and millions of dollars encrypting email, search queries and other information flowing among its data centers worldwide. Facebook’s chief executive said at a conference this fall that the government “blew it.” And though it has not been announced publicly, Twitter plans to set up new types of encryption to protect messages from snoops."

Further we learn:

"What began as a public relations predicament for America’s technology companies has evolved into a moral and business crisis that threatens the foundation of their businesses, which rests on consumers and companies trusting them with their digital lives."

So they are pushing back in various ways — from cosmetic tactics like publishing the numbers of government requests they receive to political ones including tense conversations with officials behind closed doors. And companies are building technical fortresses intended to make the private information in which they trade inaccessible to the government and other suspected spies. "

Additionally,

"as details of the scope of spying emerge, frustration has turned to outrage, and cooperation has turned to war.  The industry has learned that it knew of only a fraction of the spying, and it is grappling with the risks of being viewed as an enabler of surveillance of foreigners and American citizens. Even before June, Google  executives worried about infiltration of their networks. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that the N.S.A. was tapping into the links between data centers, the beating heart of tech companies housing user information, confirmed that their suspicions were not just paranoia."

 Much of the ability to lie is predicated on the loose language in the existing laws and hence the capacity to parse and split meanings at will - for example, in the differences between the geographical domains covered by PRISM and MUSCULAR.  Thus, in order to rein in the  NSA a better, more rigorous law is needed to cover more loopholes, bases and technology.....not to mention tighten language loose enough to drive a Mack truck through, as the NSA has. Merely because these troglodytes possess the technology doesn't mean they have any god-given right under whatever protective ruse, to use it.  This is why U.S. citizens as well as the Tech giants, all need to press and put the heat on congress to pass the new USA Freedom Act, sponsored by Sensenbrenner and Pat Leahy.

To see more go to: http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-31/usa-freedom-act-would-leash-the-national-security-agency

 Americans need to work like holy hell, contacting their reps, to get this law passed to bring this rogue Agency under control, unless we soon wish to end up in a Gestapo- Stasi state that none of us will wish to contemplate! ACT NOW!  If you've got weak knees or are in doubt, just recall the words of Sen. Frank Church from 1975:

I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

See also: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-lindorff/52437/what-s-done-abroad-can-be-done-at-home-too-is-nsa-spying-really-about-blackmail

Snowden Receives Award - His Take on NSA Mass Spying is Right On

"Mass spying is designed to identify the citizens who oppose both imperial wars and the destruction of domestic welfare.”       – James Petras
 
  For the first time since being granted asylum in Russia, Edward Snowden has emerged to receive the 'Sam Adams" award. No, it's not named after a popular beer, but after one of the nation's first whistleblower heroes. As such it is a noteworthy achievement, given our government has hounded this constitutional hero to the ends of the Earth while allowing real war criminals (hint, hint: Bush and Cheney et al) to walk free. Also present for the ceremony were former whistle blower heroes including: former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, former NSA executive Thomas Andrews Drake and former FBI agent Coleen Rowley, Jesselyn Radack of the Government Accountability Project, and Sarah Harrison of WikiLeaks .


Snowden's appearance also included a spot- on speech, especially relevant given Gen. Keith B. Alexander's blabber in testimony a few days ago,  insisting the mass dragnet approach is essential and hey, "Americans just got riled up (by the Snowden disclosures) because they didn't know how the data was being used and its limits."  Horse shit!  What does this guy take us for, idiots? A number of former NSA folks have made it abundantly clear this doesn't even pass a laugh test.

For reference, former NSA code breaker Bill Binney commenting on June 19 CBS' Early Show, on Keith Alexander's NSA spying testimony and "breaking up plots", acidly observed:

"First of all I don’t understand this being bamboozled into thinking that you have to do this to find bad guys. That’s false. There’s very simple principles you can use to find out who is the bad guy and who isn’t and you can do this without violating anybody’s privacy”.

Wow! Sounds like  Gen. Alexander is talking codswallop, no matter how "intense" he delivered his "testimony.  In contrast, Snowden's award speech underscores Binney's take to a tee.  Snowden argued that the methods employed by the U.S. to tap into phone and internet connections areound the world actually make people less safe. In short video clips posted by the WikiLeaks website on Friday, Snowden said the NSA mass surveillance he revealed before fleeing to Russia ''puts us at risk of coming into conflict with our own government.''

This is heavy stuff. It means we've all been sold a bill of goods, almost as defective as the crap put out by the Warren Commission on JFK's assassination. (Which we, serious JFK assassination researchers, believe was done to protect the national security state.)  It also means, as noted in an earlier blog post, we're all regarded as potential enemies and hence - yes, indeed - are all "at risk of coming into conflict with our own government" if they choose to regard our expressed opinions as identical with those of enemies of state. In any case, the haystack-dragnet approach automatically assumes we're all bad guys ab initio. If not, there'd be essential discrimination of signal from noise as Binney advocated.

Note that Sen. Frank Church didn’t mince words, he used the phrase  "make tyranny total”  in reference to the NSA’s potential for harm – if not properly collared by the democratic process. He may well have been able to see ahead to the COG ('continuity of government' program) which under the Bushites  equated political dissent with treason. (Enabling us to know why the security state was so hot to trot to squelch all OWS protests, including beating the living shit out of them when they tried to approach Wall Street and the Stock Exchange!)

The Bushies' COG expanded the definition of "terrorist" to include "domestic terrorist", assisted by a traitorous congress in 2001, whereby:

"…activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States"


According to the ACLU, “this definition is broad enough to encompass the activities of…prominent activists, campaigns and organizations.”  That includes Occupy Wall Streeters and anyone who protests the Keystone XL pipeline!

Five years ago, investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham also disclosed the extent of the COGo's worst component:

"The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers


Ketcham went on:

“There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources note the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”

Those who want to read more on COG can go to:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/03/31/the-showdown/

So, we've no basis for being pacified or consoled by Keith Alexander's bollocks. We're more compelled to take Snowden's words seriously. He described NSA's approach as : ''dragnet mass surveillance that puts entire populations under sort of an eye that sees everything even when it's not needed.''

This also means oversight errors are more likely to take place, such as failing to detect the Boston bombers. There is simply a surfeit of data, information which makes finding the terror 'needle' much more difficult if the data pool is thousands of time larger than it need be.  Snowden also went on to point out:

''They hurt our economy. They hurt our country. They limit our ability to speak and think and live and be creative, to have relationships and to associate freely,''


Which is 100% spot on.  Why the hell should I attend a Xmas party with people I don't know if ONE of them might (on some offhand, remote chance) be a relative of a "terrorist" - which will then put me in the cross hairs of COG, or Main Core? Thus, awareness of the NSA's panopticon spy machine makes me less likely to seek out human connections, given one or more may already be on a Watch list, a former Keystone or OWS protestor or worse. Thus, it damages relationship potential - even for introverts.

Snowden's most apt remark was when he said the U.S. government was:

''unwilling to prosecute high officials who lied to Congress and the country on camera, but they'll stop at nothing to persecute someone who told them the truth.''

He is, of course, referring to James Clapper who had the audacity to outright LIE before a Senate Committee.  This even roiled Patriot Act co-author James Sensenbrenner who agreed with Snowden's take as he was quoted in a UK Guardian piece:

"Oversight only works when the agency that oversight is directed at tells the truth, and having Mr Clapper say he gave the least untruthful answer should, in my opinion, have resulted in a firing and a prosecution,"

Which is sad, because it means the principles of our nation have been stood on their head: the bad guys prosper while the good guys and heroes are turned into refugees or outcasts. Maybe Michael Parenti is right that we have become a "gangster state" and it's been on that path  - indeed initiated - from the date Kennedy was killed in Dallas. Thus it shows how the country has mutated to become a corporatocratic war-security state. And nearly all accomplished via corporate lobbyist cash and campaign contributions, especially from defense contractors and the security hucksters.

Maybe what we need is a lot more Edward Snowdens to expose the other aspects of the corporate state we don't know.

Between the Skeleton Key and the COG: How Close NSA Mass Surveillance Really Is to Tyranny

"“So what 50 plots did NSA break up? A U.S. flag burning party in Yemen? A harsh letter to a U.S. Senator? Graffiti on the walls of a building saying ‘NO more WAR!’ – comment on UK Guardian website yesterday.


"Let's see: the costs tallied make it $2.5 billion for each 'plot' broken up. Is that really worth it?" - comment on UK Guardian site


"Sen. Dianne Feinstein and others cavalierly assert that the NSA’s surveillance of law-abiding citizens is “lawful.” Seriously? Of course it is. All you need to do is enact legislation approving tyranny and, as if by definition, tyranny becomes lawful. Add to that a “secret interpretation” of the law. Lawful? How are citizens supposed to abide by the law when it is subject to secret interpretation? It doesn’t get much more arbitrary than that. We may have less to fear from the terrorists than the overreaching zealots who would suspend the Bill of Rights" - Letter in Denver Post today from Richard Mignogna


“First of all I don’t understand this being bamboozled into thinking that you have to do this to find bad guys. That’s false. There’s very simple principles you can use to find out who is the bad guy and who isn’t and you can do this without violating anybody’s privacy”.- Former NSA code breaker Bill Binney commenting on Keith Alexander's NSA spying testimony and breaking up plots, this morning on CBS Early Show.


"Need a reason to worry about the NSA spying scandal? Try this: you legally protest an oil company in your town, are arrested, and wind up in court facing federal terrorism charges and a personal eternity behind bars. The evidence presented against you was gathered by NSA monitoring of your telephone usage and social media communications, all at the behest of said oil company, which owns every Senator who sits on the Intelligence Committee in Washington DC." - William Rivers Pitt's blog post, 'You, TERRORIST!'

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” - Sen. Frank Church, referencing the NSA in 1975.

Now that we've heard and seen the PR stunt bloviations of Keith Alexander on the Hill, it's time to get real. People need to get their thinking and heads straight and at least try to separate wheat from chaff, signal from noise, bull crap from substance. After being treated to a parade of busted plots yesterday by Alexander, I had to scratch my head and ask: "Wait, only 20% of the 50 plots were in the U.S. - so you had to use an all out, indiscriminate mass dragnet surveillance of every freaking American to do that? And even if fifty Americans might have been killed in these plots (a big IF), that's still fewer than the 55 slaughtered in the Virginia Tech and Newtown massacres .....which most people have forgotten by now!


My point is that our priorities are totally fucked up vis-a-vis our basic rights. We have tens of thousands of deaths by gun each year and basically snooze about it, and maybe we prevented 50 deaths from terrorists - if that- and we go batshit crazy and extirpate all our 4th amendment rights? WTF gives?


Let's ask the question first: What did Sen. Frank Church know 38 years ago that evidently has most Americans sleeping at the citizen switch, according to polls that show 48% have no problem with the NSA PRISM and phone data gathering program while 47% oppose it. (I call the latter group, real citizens, awake and aware – or at least more probably aware of the risks).


Note that Sen. Church didn’t mince words, he used the phrase  "make tyranny total”  in reference to the NSA’s potential for harm – if not properly collared by the democratic process. It is possible that he was aware of a deep cover, deep secret Cold War-originated program started under Ike and fully validated under Ronnie Reagan. I hadn’t been aware of it either, I must confess, until reading an article in The UK Guardian yesterday along with comments following where one commentator referred to the “fact” the NSA program isn’t designed to thwart terrorists as claimed, but American citizens themselves. He gave it the initials COG for “Continuity of Government”.

I then set to work Googling and found the following information, including an article originally published in Counterpunch by deep politics expert Peter Dale Scott (who has also made singular contributions in his Kennedy assassination research).


- In the 1980s, a secret group of planners inside and outside the government were assigned, by an Executive Order of Reagan, to develop a response to a nuclear attack in which the U.S. government had been decapitated, forcing an alternative to the constitutional rules of succession. Two of these planners were Dick Cheney, then a Congressman, and Donald Rumsfeld, then a private citizen and CEO of the G.D. Searle drug company.


- Though some reports prematurely stated the program was “abandoned” (i.e. Tim Weiner of the New York Times, April 17, 1994), in fact Reagan’s Executive Order 12656, issued in 1988, remained in effect. The order stated that Continuity of Government procedures were called for in the event of "any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States."


- In the 1980s COG planning was being handled by Louis Giuffrida. According to an article by Alfonso Chardy (‘Reagan Aides and the `Secret’ Government’, Miami Herald, July 5, 1987.) Giuffrida’s plans included "suspension of the Constitution," along with detailed arrangements for the declaration of martial law.


- According to the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 326; cf. p. 38), "Contingency plans for the continuity of government" were implemented on September 11, 2001. But what measures were invoked remains unclear, though Giuffrida’s template was believed to be integrated into it and former Reaganites were in the WH at the time, who had shared earlier in the architecture (Rumsfeld, Cheney etc.)


- Those suspicious of what COG means today have pointed to a number of post 9/11 steps to facilitate the implementation of martial law, including the creation of a new military command (NORTHCOM) for the continental United States. They note also Homeland Security’s strategic plan “Endgame”, whose stated goal is the creation of detention camps designed to "remove all removable aliens," including "potential terrorists."


- Even worse, later mutations of COG under the Bushites  equated political dissent with treason. (Now we know why the security state was so hot to trot to squelch all OWS protests, including beating the living shit out of them when they tried to approach Wall Street and the Stock Exchange!)

In regard to the last, the definition of "terrorist" was expanded to "domestic terrorist" by congress in 2001, to include:

"“…activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States"


According to the ACLU, “this definition is broad enough to encompass the activities of…prominent activists, campaigns and organizations.”  That includes Occupy Wall Streeters and anyone who protests the Keystone XL pipeline!

Five years ago, investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham disclosed the extent of the spying which was confirmed last week by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Ketcham reported:

"The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database.”

Got your attention yet? Ketcham went on:

“There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.” He and other sources note the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.”

You think this is a joke? Conspiracy theory nonsense? Then you’re not paying attention, especially on how the hammer of the security state was brought down on Occupy Wall Street protestors two years ago! See e.g. http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1494
and my December, 2012 blog post: http://www.brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/12/national-security-state-spied-on-occupy.html


Clearly most COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts. But what ought to get the hackles of any sentient American up is their potential to be yoked to an overreaching surveillance state—as seems to be the case with the “Main Core” database . In this case, even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat.


To emphasize that and ram home the point that even right wing gun owners aren’t safe in their little domeciles if previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people….including bloggers like me who may have railed against U.S. military imperialism and capitalism.


Note the “gun owners” included in the lists. So why aren’t the lists used to take away the guns or limit them now to reduce gun deaths? Because it would incite premature alarm and rebellion! The point isn’t to remove the guns now but later after martial law is declared and COG goes into effect. Can’t have any citizen resistance after all, to the forces of the military that will then occupy every U.S. major city.


The point is that the massive PRISM program and data collection is all that’s needed to assist COG plans coming to fruition in the case of any future “emergency” – real or confected. In that case, the terrorists won’t be the targets it will be “troublesome” Americans who still have a yen to express their displeasure by protesting – whether in writing or possible street protests. One thing you may be sure of is that the authorities here don’t want to see mass protests like we’ve beheld in Turkey or Egypt. Those would be the exact pretext by which to launch full COG clamp downs including martial law and suspension of the Constitution – just like Hitler’s Enabling Act did to once democratic Germany.

Think of PRISM then as a "skeleton key" to unlocking the fascist state imperatives incipient in COG. As any master locksmith knows, the skeleton key is the one which unlocks all locks, whatever their design. The principle in making a skeleton key is simple: the exclusion of everything redundant or non-essential combined with the concentration on the minimum effective part. This very efficiency and economy of technique brings the reward of massive application. In the case of PRISM, using existing technology to pinpoint every single American and paint him as "friend" or "potential enemy of the state" - if a future "emergency" is declared. It is also absolutely necessary if COG is to be effective whenever unleashed on an unsuspecting citizenry or using the pretext of the next terror attack - if one should occur.


Robert Scheer in his latest blog (‘The Terror Con’) has referred to “threat inflation” by which the security state keeps weak-kneed "citizens" panting for more protection like screaming school girls petrified of spiders. Keith Alexander's performance yesterday (and also today) are examples of such threat inflation - since while he tells us the number of threats and some vague ancillary info he gives no details on what made them important, or why mass surveillance was required to achieve the null outcome.


Scheer also referenced a June 11 column by Thomas Friedman who warned that if there was a second 9/11-type attack, "we would lose all of our civil liberties, so we should be grateful for this trade-off". WHY lose our civil liberties? Because a bunch of zealots take out maybe thousands of lives? Fucking LESS than lost each year to gun violence! Shit, we who lived through the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis – minutes from nuclear annihilation - find this preposterous! That a nation priding itself on freedom could give up all rights like a bunch of screaming sissies just because of a limited attack! NY Times columnist Bill Keller also seems to support the “Screaming sissy” hypothesis as when he writes:

“Tom’s important point was that the gravest threat to our civil liberties is not the NSA but another 9/11-scale catastrophe that could leave a panicky public willing to ratchet up the security state, even beyond the war-on-terror excesses that followed the last big attack.”

A panicky public? How about a bunch of pusillanimous pussies that don’t deserve freedom? A bunch that really wants their asses kicked to wake them from their scarified terrorist-bogeyman coma....which has repercussions on the rest of us (real citizens - not consumers) who value liberty over security! But maybe Keller and Friedman are on to something as when Friedman wrote on June 11:


“I believe that if there is one more 9/11—or worse, an attack involving nuclear material—it could lead to the end of the open society as we know it,”


Yeah, so the deep politics citizen must ask: What isn’t he saying?  Maybe that he knows COG will come into play and under its mandates, martial law will be permanent and we’ ll inhabit a full Nazified police state. How quickly that freedom went! Barely lasting 230 odd years! But maybe most of us were too damned cowardly and comatose to deserve it. We believed it was a "gift" as opposed to something one had to fight for every single day with every fiber of his mind, and might.

As Scheer puts it:

“No nation in history has ever possessed such an imbalance of military superiority and the ability to ward off foreign threats without sacrificing its core values. Never has this country been as vulnerable to foreign attacks as when the founders approved our Constitution with its Fourth Amendment and other protections of individual sovereignty against an intrusive government. They did so out of the conviction that individual freedom makes us stronger rather than weaker as a nation. In short, they trusted in the essential wisdom of the people as opposed to the pundits who deride it.”


But evidently, as soon as too many citizens became mostly consumers they devolved into crying infants and fucking babies who needed the Pappy Spy State’s protections. "WAAAAHHHHH! Please Gen. Alexander, hold me widdo hands! I don't wanna die from dem dere  t'errists!" More important to get that new X-box, Ipad or Notebook than to tend to one’s liberties, after all. Gotta make the country safe for shopping! In this case it may be too late, and the nonchalance evident now amongst the 48 percent will mutate into memory loss of the seventy percent in another few months, evoking Bradley Manning’s and Edward Snowden’s greatest fears: that their leaks won’t have made a difference at all.


“Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it” – George Santayana


Take a trip back in time:

On March 23, 1933, the newly elected members of the German Parliament (the Reichstag) met in the Kroll Opera House in Berlin to consider passing Hitler's Enabling Act- which was officially called the 'Law for Removing the Distress of the People and the Reich.' (Think of it in neo-Orwellian terms, like "the Patriot Act")

If passed, it would effectively mean the end of democracy: no more labor unions, end of voting, free speech and a free press in Germany and establishing the legal dictatorship of Adolf Hitler. The vote was taken - 441 for, only 84, the Social Democrats, against. This achieved what Hitler had wanted for years - to tear down the German Democratic Republic legally and end democracy, thus paving the way for a complete Nazi takeover of Germany.

Point? “Laws” can be implemented as abominations! Just because we are told mass spying is "lawful" or "legal" doesn't make it so - not if the original law was altered to make it conform to lawlessness. Will ‘Muricans perk up and take notice now lest history repeat, or go back to their Twitter and texting or TV? Sentient Americans have the right to know whether a COG program is still in effect, and whether the spying on our phone calls and Internet usage stems from such COG plans. Indeed, 9/11 was horrific and shocking, but certainly not a decapitating nuclear strike on our leaders as might have transpired if the Cuban Missile crisis hadn’t ended the way it did! In this case, COG and the state of emergency mandates under it should be lifted.


If COG plans are not still in effect, we the People have the right to demand that “enemies lists” and spying capabilities developed for the purpose of responding to a nuclear war be discarded , as we have not been hit by nuclear weapons … and our civilian leaders – on Capital Hill, the White House, and the judiciary – are still alive and able to govern. Let's not have an American Enabling Act take us down and a de facto dictatorship (complimentsTed Cruz or Sarah Palin) because of the fear of a terror attack. Hell, the Brits in WWII went through years of pounding and nightly terror by V2 rockets raining down and they didn't turn to jelly like we seem disposed to!
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To see Peter Dale Scott's article 'Showdown' (on which some of this blog material is based) in Counterpunch, go to:

http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/03/31/the-showdown/