Orwell's "1984": The Novel To Read For The Trump Era

"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge truth or falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."- John F. Kennedy

Emmanuel Goldstein - below- the Ultra "terrorist" in '1984'. Oceania's enforcers went crazy trying to ferret out all his allies for 'thought crimes'. Are we near such a future in the U.S.?


With Kellyanne Conway's recent defense of "alternative facts", it should  come as no surprise that sales of George Orwell's "1984" (written in 1949) are spiking beyond all expectations. It appears sensible people in the country wish to understand how governments can debase and mutate language in order to control thought. If a government is successful in controlling thought then it has a clear path to spreading propaganda and brainwashing many of its citizens.

In previous posts I've given examples of assorted deformations of language, mainly the substitution of political euphemisms for events or actions that don't need any soft soaping, because they are what they freaking are. Some examples:

"enhanced interrogation" for torture

"rendition" to remove someone to a hidden site for purposes of "enhanced interrogation"

"Collateral damage" - deaths caused to civilians when bombings or attacks are indiscriminately launched

And the classic:

"war on terror" - when one cannot make war on a mode or strategy. One makes war on a nation state.

Other examples of the uses of euphemism are well known - mostly employed by Republicans and conservatives for the purpose of mind-fucking, such as "DEATH taxes" for estate taxes, and "entitlements" for Social Security and Medicare, when people have to actually pay in for the former (out of each paycheck) and have to pay nearly $250,000 over a lifetime for what Medicare doesn't cover, including dental care.

Then there is the more recent  use of  "scandal" to replace "conspiracy". Thus, we are now supposed to accept "the Watergate scandal" as opposed to Watergate conspiracy, and the "Iran-Contra scandal" as opposed to Iran-Contra conspiracy. The effort here clearly to expunge the concept of political conspiracy from public consciousness.

With the ascension of Trump to power, along with the appointment of a long time propagandist (Steve Bannon) to a top security post, we are in a language skewering era that rivals or exceeds anything that came before, and may be one of a kind.  Trump's assorted spielers, like Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway, can seemingly blurt anything they want without most media doing due diligence. Spicer actually had the chutzpah to accuse former deputy AG Sally Yates of "betrayal" for her principled stance to defend the constitution from a clearly lawless executive order. Some Trumpies, so smitten with language mutation, have actually gone off the rails totally and called it "treason". Well, they need to read Orwell's "1984" to get a grip. Taking a principled stand of dissent to defend the core of American values (in the Constitution) is emphatically not "treason".

The plot of the Orwell novel follows an everyman drone who lives in Oceania, specifically in a region formerly known as England. The tenor of the scenes and descriptions clearly shows a society in a state of perpetual war. There are bombed out shells of buildings all around, and Winston himself lives in a dilapidated apartment.

More to the point, the society of Oceania is controlled by an omnipresent, totalitarian agency (INGSOC) which monitors citizens comings and goings, as well as erasing and altering evidence of the past as it distorts the truth by continually altering the language - even in dictionaries. (The defining language being Newspeak).    Kids in INGSOC uniforms are mandated to report every bit of odd behavior detected in adults - whether 'proles' or those like Winston Smith, charged with altering the language to Newspeak in their little agency cubbyholes.

To fix ideas, throughout the novel readers are introduced to a litany of phrases and terms describing the Oceania government's actions such as: "doublethink" (believing contradictory things and "Big Brother" the ever present controlling image on every citizen's monitor screen.

The arch villain of the Oceania state and Big Brother is intellectual Emmanuel Goldstein. One sees that  at every interlude the hapless denizens of Oceania must sit in vast halls  as Goldstein's face appears on a screen  - whereupon they begin screaming  'TRAITOR!' until they're delirious and emotionally spent.

What vile deed did this "traitor" Goldstein commit? Well,  insisting that citizens think and reason beyond Big Brother's endless lies such as "war is peace'.  Instead Goldstein argued that continuous war was used to siphon off the wealth of society to keep people living at bare subsistence. Goldstein's exact words:

"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. "

What or who represents Goldstein in the Trump era?  From what we've seen, it is anyone, or any group that  challenges what it is being told to believe by the so-called authority. Such dissenters  would be the "liberal" media as well as reflective politicians and all intellectuals worth the name. Thus, when Kellyanne Conway and other Trump lackeys (e.g. Sean Spicer) insisted the rest of us were wrong when we said his inauguration crowd was less than those for Obama (in 2009, 2013), it evoked the words from "1984":

"The party told you to reject the evidence of  your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

Compare that to Spicer's claim of "record breaking crowds" at his inauguration despite clear evidence to the contrary.

The takeaway here is that those who read "1984" are likely to be more prepared as the Trump blitz on language and evidence continues. These readers will see a fictional portrayal of what is playing out on many levels right now.

Professor Heath Brown, an expert in presidential translations at John Jay College in New York, quoted in today's Colorado Springs Independent, observed:

"The Trump administration is obsessed with controlling the message".

This we must resist with every fiber of our intellectual being. Those who haven't read Orwell's book, you might want to do so before the Trump first term runs to the conclusion of its first year. By then who knows how much havoc will be wrought on thought and  intellectuals who are the embodiment of 1984's Goldstein.

The Role of the Brain in Propaganda and Genocide

In his superb PBS documentary series, ''The Brain', Neuroscientist David Eagleman explores the role of our master organ in social connections, as well as genocide and propaganda. The origins of the latter are actually embodied in our desire to "seek out alliances" with friends, family and hopefully others who share our same interests, convictions and even political leanings. In Eagleman's words:

"It gives comfort to belong to a group"

The problem is that this same positive desire for bonding and alliance can be inverted to attack those with whom we disagree and also who may share none of our own attributes or beliefs. As Eagleman puts it:

"There's a flip side of this drive to come together. Because for every in group there are outsiders. And the consequences of that can be very dark. "

He then goes on to cite examples from history of "one group turning on another", including those who were defenseless and posed no threat. One of the starkest examples was the Jews in Nazi Germany. Defined first as an "out group" and then depicted via propaganda as vermin (rats) their fate was extermination in the 'Final Solution'. The same occurred to the Tutsis living in Rwanda who began to be depicted as 'cockroaches' by the dominant Hutus and ended up with over 800,000 slaughtered as a result.

Eagleman, after observing most of his (Jewish) family lines ended in the 1940s, asks:

"Under normal circumstances you wouldn't find it conscionable to go murder your neighbor. So what is it that provokes thousands of people to do exactly that? What is it about certain situations that short circuits the normal social functioning of the brain?"

He then goes to eastern Europe and picks up on the Bosnian Civil war over 1994-95 over which more than 100,000 Muslims were slaughtered by Serbians in actions known as "ethnic cleansing".  One of the most horrific incidents occurred in  Srebrenica where over 8,000 people were systematically killed.

The immediate cause was the expulsion of thousands of refugees by the UN command, from a safe center, delivering them right into the hands of their enemies waiting outside the gate.  Women were then raped before being killed, men were instantly executed and children butchered on the spot. And this, as Eagleman notes, was "just the beginning of the largest genocide on European soil since the holocaust".

Eagleman interviews one of the Muslim survivors, Hasan Nuhanovic, who lived because he was a UN translator and part of a protected group. But his family (mother, brother, father) was sent out of the compound to meet their deaths.

The most horrific aspect? The mass murderers weren't strangers but neighbors with whom his family had previously shared a great deal: meals, outings family get -togethers.  In Nuhanovic's words: "The mass murders were perpetrated by our neighbors, the very people we'd been living with for decades."

As he put it referring to the sudden switch: "They had been obeying 'don't kill' for many years, then it was suddenly 'Go and kill!'"

Genocides keep happening - Rwanda, Darfur, Nanking, Armenia ...and Eagleman's interest is in 'why?' Traditionally the question is asked through the lens of history or economics or politics but Eagleman is convinced (as I am) that "one more lens is needed": genocide needs to be understood as a neural phenomenon.

His research was predicated on the question; "Does our brain function differ - when we relate to someone - depending on which group they are in?"

After all, for every in group we belong to there's at least one group that we don't. That division can be based on anything: race, gender, wealth or religion.

Eagleman's experiment put 130 participants into a CT scanner and showed them six pictures in which one in particular gets stabbed (in a film) by a syringe needle. Each hand is labeled according to being a member of a putative group, e.g. Jew, atheist, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Scientologist  etc.

The stabbing scene activates the pain matrix in the brain- which occurs whenever we see someone else in pain - unless we are psychopaths.

In the experiment the question to be addressed was: Would the scanned subject care as much seeing a member of the outgroup getting stabbed as the in group?

The results? For each subject, on watching a member of his in group getting stabbed, there was a neural activity spike appearing on a graph. When one of his outgroups was stabled (e.g. for a Christian, an atheist) the response was essentially a flat line. No alarm, no connection.

Eagleman's conclusion:

A basic, single word label is enough to change your brain's pre-conscious response to a person in pain, in other words, how much you care about them.

He also adds it's not really about religion, since "even atheists care more about other atheists' hands getting stabbed than any others."  Thus, it's not about religion but "which team you're on".

To understand how whole groups like the Bosnian Serbs can go off the rails and slaughter neighbors, one can study psychopaths - like Ted Bundy, Son of Sam, Charles Manson etc. What's with their brains that allows them to act that way?  Well, Eagleman points to networks in the medial pre-frontal cortex that underlie social interactions. When we interact with other people this part of the brain becomes active. But in the brains of people with extreme psychopathy  the area has much less activity.

Because the psychopath doesn't care about you - you're just an object to be manipulated.

So, Eagleman asks: "What accounts for genocide? Can it be due to armies of psychopaths? That can't be true because psychopaths occupy only a small percentage of humans."

But genocide can engage thousands, tens of thousands or millions. So - how does one get ordinary citizens to act as psychopaths?

Eagleman then refers to experiments conducted in the Netherlands involving pictures shown to subjects and their responses via the medial pre-frontal cortex. Subjects are shown stereotypical images of other people from different social groups. In many cases, for example, the medial pre-frontal cortex is almost inactive when the subjects look at homeless people. The researcher notes the pattern observed suggest a type of mental avoidance and not thinking about the imaged person.

Eagleman avers:

"To a brain that responds this way, homeless people are dehumanized, They're viewed more like objects and that can enable us to not care. "

And as the Netherlands brain researcher adds: "If you don't diagnose this person as another human being than the normal moral rules may not apply."

Thus, Eagleman reasons that "under the right circumstances our brain activity can look more like a psychopath's"

But to get to genocide, one must understand one more thing about group behavior. Eagleman again:

"Genocide is only possible when dehumanization happens on a massive scale. Not just a few individuals but whole sections of a population. If all members of a perpetrating group are complicit then it's as if they all experienced the same reduction in brain activity.This can be investigated and studied like a disease outbreak - a group contagion. One that's most often spread deliberately."

He goes on:

"The perfect tool for this job is propaganda. It plugs right into neural networks and it dials down the degree to which we care about other people."

Just as in the former Yugoslavia, where Serbians killed their Muslim neighbors, they were bombarded by propaganda. In this case, state-controlled TV stations demonized the Bosnian Muslims. They went so far as to actually claim the Bosnian Muslims were feeding Serbian children to the lions at the zoo. While a brain disposed to critical thinking would instantly recognize this as bull pocky, an already socially degraded brain, e.g. that saw Muslims as inferior, would simply ingest the propaganda. (Very similar to how many are doing right now with Trump's despicable propaganda).

The same thing transpired in Rwanda.What began as "humorous" cartoons depicting Tutsis as the most hated insects on the planet then transmogrified to non stop hateful rants about the "cockroaches" on Kigali RTLM radio, run by the majority Hutus.  While the Tutsis could tune out this hate spiel (as most wise aleck 'free speech' mongers like to recommend for those who dislike bullying verbal taunts), the Hutus didn't - but rather fed their infernal hate on it to the bursting point. Every night more hate was ingested via this "free speech" medium until only a trigger was required to unleash the worst in Rwanda. That transpired when the Rwandan President's plane (he was Hutu) was shot down en route to what was supposed to be a peace conference in Tanzania.

See also:

http://hutututsi.weebly.com/propaganda.html

The good thing as Eagleman observes, is that propaganda is almost always easy to recognize. In the form that leads to hatred and genocide "it always plays the familiar tune of dehumanization. Make your enemy less than human. Make him like an animal."

Propaganda is a weapon but has now become an art and a science. And thus it's becomes ever more dangerous. What's more, the internet now is the most likely medium for dispensing propaganda and to reach the people most likely to act upon them: young men.

The political agendas around us, actually manipulate the brain activity inside us.

How to get around it and stop it? That usually must entail the victimized brain stepping outside its own 'box' to see the propaganda for what it is. The trouble is that most brains are not trained to do that so often need an outside interlocutor who is able to recognize the infection for what it is and 'unpack' it for the affected brain or brains. The goal: enable the person to see through the political agendas of others, especially leaders or would-be leaders.

The problem is this intervention might not be welcome by the propagandized persons especially if they embrace the propagandizer on an emotional or charismatic level (as most of Trump's supporters do). In that case the interlocutor may be treated like Emmanuel Goldstein, the character from '1984': Recall Goldstein was himself demonized as a "traitor" by the rulers and people of Oceania. What was his crime?  He attempted to break through the state's propaganda. That is, that continuous war was used to siphon off the wealth of the society to keep people living at bare subsistence. Goldstein's exact words, for which Oceania's fascists wanted him dead:

"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. "

Pope Francis Calls Out Greedheads and Power Mongers At UN - Is Anyone Paying Attention?

Pope Francis called out world leaders at the UN yesterday  morning, calling for an end to the "selfish and boundless thirst for power ...fueling poverty, inequality and destruction of the environment". He nailed it but one had to wonder how many of these leaders were really paying attention or merely pretending to, in an act of formal respect.

He added that: "The unfettered pursuit of money rules and leads to the misuse of natural resources and the exclusion of the weak. . Once capital becomes an idol and guides people's decisions, and greed for money presides over the entire socio-economic system, the service of the common good is left behind."

The Pope particularly referenced the "financial agencies and the groups or mechanisms specifically created to deal with economic crises" a potent reference to the IMF, the World Bank and others, In case people may have forgotten, all of these agencies are dedicated to the Neoliberal imperative whose prime directive is to remove security for people worldwide. As Francis noted:

"And these agencies should not subject countries to oppressive lending systems. Far from promoting progress, these subject people to greater poverty, inequality and dependence."

Thus, the agencies' yen to cut pensions in Greece as well as social supports, and to privatize pensions in Barbados and to push for currency devaluation in many other less developed nations (such as already been done in Jamaica, Guyana and Trinidad).

The Pope, let's make no mistake, hit one of the prime targets (along with religious fanaticism) for what's wrong with this world.

Francis also referred to "World War III" going on right now,  yet most of us are somnolent, or better, comatose under the haze of Neoliberal puppet media propaganda - especially economic. The barrage on the nightly news has been so effective, that the poorly informed are left with their mouths agape  while those of us who know a thing or two are left to battle newly minted Zombies and attempt to get their brains liberated from the dross.

And, of course, like the Pope we are often attacked for our stance and arguing for a saner world where inequality and financial manipulation are finally wiped out. No surprise there, or that the Neoliberal media - which tolerates no efforts at others competing - viciously attacks Jeremy Corbin in the UK and Sen. Bernie Sanders in the U.S. for their efforts to upend the imperative.

No surprise then that like the brainwashed denizens of Oceania - in the scene where the Über villain Emmanuel Goldstein is depicted on the giant theater screen - the stooges of the Neoliberal state likewise go nuts clamoring for blood and action. Hence, the jubilation of the Tea Party nuts after Boehner resigned, so they believe they can now tear into Obama's legislation even more.   Having lost the ability to critically and logically think, thanks to the bastardized vocabulary of Neolib Newspeak, the brains of these pawns have now been colonized by "Big Brother" to his own ends. Those of us who inveigh against it are the new "Emmanuel Goldsteins".

The people of Oceania were no longer authentic beings in their own right but mere extensions of Big Brother and his will to power, to keep grinding their bodies and state resources up in a never-ending war to attain global domination. So it is with the "Neoliberal Frankenstein" and how it now seeks to grind nation after nation into more fodder for its misbegotten global ends. Ends which elevate and reify a global elite but which denigrate everyone else - offering only "gigs" for jobs. This is exactly what Francis condemned.

In a slashing salon.com piece last year Patrick Smith correctly asserted  that "Neoliberalism is our Frankenstein" and also noted:  "it is profoundly undemocratic, never mind that the English and American variants of democracy are the mulch from which it arises." He also added:  "It is also unrelentingly absolutist because it is intimately related to the myth of America’s providential exception, neoliberalism can tolerate no alternative".  His definition (formal) starts out:

"Neoliberalism denotes the revival since the 1970s, plus or minus, of English liberalism as expounded by Locke in the 17th century and numerous others in the 18th—Adam Smith and his “invisible hand,” most famously. John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, the utilitarian, are notable among 19th century apostles."

But then went into a lengthy discourse comparing early and 18th century forms of  liberalism to the neo-mutant. Let's just cut to the chase here and give Smith's core definition:

"Classical liberalism in its 'neo'  phase denotes not thought but belief, ideological conviction. It is the ideology of radical deregulation, radical corporatization, radical privatization—prisons? water? kindergartens? human health?—maximal profit without regard to consequences, and the radical devaluation of any serious consciousness of the communities in which all individuals are suspended."

I would add to this columnist Jay Bookman's insight from a 1998 Baltimore Sun piece ('The New World Disorder Evident Here, Abroad'):

“The global economy has been constructed on the premise that government guarantees of security and protection must be avoided at all costs, because they discourage personal initiative."

And there is Henry Giroux's insight on Neoliberalism:

"As an ideology, it casts all dimensions of life in terms of market rationality, construes profit-making as the arbiter and essence of democracy, consuming as the only operable form of citizenship, and upholds the irrational belief that the market can both solve all problems and serve as a model for structuring all social relations. "

Thus we see where the yen to cut social insurance arises, and why profit and enormous wealth is amplified for the richest, and  also how  the wealthier nations  especially benefit by placing desperate or unstable ones in regimes of adversely structured debt. This is exactly why the West's Neolibs are determined to make Ukraine part of the Neoliberal imperative and orbit. And also why they've arrogantly refused thus far to cooperate with Putin and Russia (as well as Assad)  to rein in the radical jihadi rebels and ISIS vermin seeking to wreck the rest of that forlorn country and send its remaining 11.5 million into permanent refugee flight.

 It follows from this that the true liberal must inveigh against this mission and that means siding with Russia and Putin (who will be giving a '60 Minutes' interview Sunday that I advise everyone to watch for a great example of a rational man). "Siding" at least to the extent that we agree the Ukraine outcome ends essentially in a draw - translated to mean neither in the West's orbit or Russia's but a separate buffer state. (This was advocated by Ret. Col. Lawrence Wilkerson two years ago.)

It further means that we agree Syria be returned to stability and a stable government - even if we may not like that government. Tough shit! In our history we have tolerated tyrants before - think of Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti, or Manuel Noriega in Panama, or Fulgencio Batista in Cuba - and we can do so now if it means lessening the refugee chaos and migrant crisis.

But this may be difficult given as Smith writes:

"I was astonished many times as a correspondent to see how readily foreign leaders and their finance ministries drank the Anglo-American Kool-Aid. Here I single out Continental Europe as especially disappointing. A long social-democratic tradition notwithstanding, almost all European leaders—and every last technocrat in Brussels—went down like sticks of butter when neoliberals at State, Treasury and in the think tanks launched the post-Berlin Wall campaign."

Thus, the Europeans have now become puppets of the U.S. which let's face it, is the primary force bearer - the 'cop of the world' - enjoined to enforce Neolib standards. Hence, the threat to send lethal weapons to the Ukrainians - just as they have kept arming the jihadis in Syria seeking to overthrow Assad. But which any sober realist will assure you can never happen - and also never lead to an alternative rebel governance. For more on this please do read the FT article below (sign up for the free limited access if you have to!):

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/96bf7e48-6041-11e5-a28b-50226830d644.html#axzz3mSz73FXD

Again, what it's about is the Neoliberal imperative,  to convert nations into dependent debt slavery states and their citizens into slaves for the Neoliberals.  How accomplished? Well, via the draconian conditions required by the World Bank and the IMF: the privatization of numerous state-held assets, including airports, rails and even pensions. Also,  divestment of the most profitable of these first.  Leaving the governments impecunious, essentially beggars beholden to the Neoliberal empire.

If you consider yourself to have any skin at all in this ongoing war, you need to back Vladimir Putin and Russia as bulwarks against Neoliberal advance. If not, then you are part of the problem not the solution and if the whole world turns into a slave state for the richest, you must share the blame for the "boundless thirst for power and money" that the Pope vehemently condemned.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/thom-hartmann/64016/the-pope-says-greed-is-not-good

And:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/f7cd3f4c-6472-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html#axzz3mtG3qQGY

  

Spooks Go Ape Shit and Scarf Up Over 1.8 million Webcam Images

When does it end? Where does it end? Have the NSA and GCHQ spooks (in Britain)  nothing better to do than snoop on innocent citizens' and grab up their phone logs, email lists, and now Youtube webcam images? According to  documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, a sinister program called "Optic Nerve" began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ wiki page accessed that year. "Optic Nerve" implemented by Britain's surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the US National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

Got a webcam operating? Then HEY! Maybe you are a terrorist! After all, making porno images now likely counts as "domestic terror" and make no mistake they are all being stored.  According to The Guardian which reported the latest outrage by the spooks:

"GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not. In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally."

The  Guardian added that:

"Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of "a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy".

According to The Guardian again:

"GCHQ does not have the technical means to make sure no images of UK or US citizens are collected and stored by the system, and there are no restrictions under UK law to prevent Americans' images being accessed by British analysts without an individual warrant.

The documents also chronicle GCHQ's sustained struggle to keep the large store of sexually explicit imagery collected by Optic Nerve away from the eyes of its staff, though there is little discussion about the privacy implications of storing this material in the first place."

The Guardian goes on to note that  Optic Nerve is "eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell's 1984", and was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ's existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest. Such searches "could be used to try to find terror suspects or criminals making use of multiple, anonymous user IDs."

We also learn the program  "saved one image every five minutes from the users' feeds, partly to comply with human rights legislation , and also to avoid overloading GCHQ's servers. The documents describe these users as "unselected" – intelligence agency parlance for bulk rather than targeted collection.

Another document likened the program's "bulk access to Yahoo webcam images/events" to a massive digital police mugbook of previously arrested individuals.

It noted:

"Face detection has the potential to aid selection of useful images for 'mugshots' or even for face recognition by assessing the angle of the face. The best images are ones where the person is facing the camera with their face upright."


Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. Webcam information was fed into NSA's XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's webcam traffic.

Bulk surveillance on Yahoo users was begun, the documents said, because "Yahoo webcam is known to be used by GCHQ targets".

Another aspect that ought to get U.S. citizens' attention is that unlike the NSA, GCHQ is not required by UK law to "minimize", or remove, domestic citizens' information from its databases. However, additional legal authorizations are required before analysts can search for the data of individuals likely to be in the British Isles at the time of the search.  There are no such legal safeguards for searches on people believed to be in the US or the other allied "Five Eyes" nations – Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

In other words, all the 'Five Eyes' nations are basically in a proto-fascist panoptycon with the spooks monitoring their moves 24/7.

The spooks are also evidently alarmed at the amount of nudity in these images. Quoting one GCHQ source in The Guardian:

"Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person. Also, the fact that the Yahoo software allows more than one person to view a webcam stream without necessarily sending a reciprocal stream means that it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography."

See that, you "porno terrorists"?

The document estimates that between 3% and 11% of the Yahoo webcam imagery harvested by GCHQ contains "undesirable nudity".

A question that occurs is, if it is so "undesirable" why are the Spooks so entranced by it and grabbing 1.8 million images?

Be warned in advance, peoples!  The Spooks are everywhere and like "Big Brother" from 1984 they are watching you!

Where is  Emmanuel Goldstein when we need him?

The Biggest Conspiracy Theorist of All: Government!

"A nation that is afraid to let its people judge truth or falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."- John F. Kennedy
Emmanuel Goldstein - the Ultra "terrorist" in '1984'. Oceania's enforcers went batshit crazy trying to ferret out all his allies for 'thought crimes'. Are we near such a future in the U.S.?

In the popular  media stereotype, the "conspiracy theorist"  directs his particular brand of paranoia at the government: The CIA implemented JFK's assassination. NASA faked the moon landing.  9/11 was an inside job . The UN plans to invade our grand nation with black helicopters and the gov't is setting up FEMA concentration camps to help them. Oh, let's not forget that the CDC has designed flu shots to give you the flu not help prevent it!

The problem, of course, is the media is indiscriminate in conflating all conspiracies - the whacky and improbable, with those few actually proven in the sense of satisfying basic scientific criteria of adequacy of evidence and consistency. The latter set include: the JFK assassination conspiracy - including the evidence of cover-up in the aftermath, i.e. fake autopsy photos, destruction of key evidence(limo, suit coat); the BCCI banking conspiracy (which saw thousands in Barbados and around the world lose all their savings), the Watergate conspiracy - including the attempt at cover-up there, and of course, the Iran-Contra conspiracy, see e.g.  http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/10/argo-iran-contra-and-what-bob-sheiffer.html


But in his landmark book,  The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory, Jesse Walker- books editor for Reason magazine, makes the case that 'folklore' may underpin most CTs and that perhaps the biggest and most baseless and misdirected  conspiracy theorists inhabit the government! Or at least that paranoid clique within government that has been so confounded by the national security state that it's lost all perspective. After all, if gov't really was determined to sort out the primary conspiracy eating away at the nation's public trust and innards, they'd release all the files to do with the JFK assassination this 50th anniversary year. Unless, of course, they were involved at some level or had one or more branches involved, and hence had to resort to cover-up.

But no, that's not the case. What's transpired instead is such a free floating paranoia that Washington is petrified of itself. The latest example is the ferocious crackdown on leaks that has the government crippled by a fear of its own employees. How many people really know the extent of this? Probably not many!

According to an Op-ed appearing by Jesse Walker in the WaPo (8/19), the  paranoid federal effort  is called the Insider Threat Program, and was launched in October 2011". Be that as it may it certainly hasn’t diminished since Edward Snowden disclosed details of the National Security Agency’s domestic spying.  Walker cites the McClatchy reporters Marisa Taylor and Jonathan S. Landay who "have described federal employees and contractors are encouraged to keep an eye on allegedly suspicious indicators in their co-workers’ lives, from financial troubles to divorce. A brochure produced by the Defense Security Service, titled “INSIDER THREATS: Combating the ENEMY within your organization,” sums up the spirit of the program: It is better to have reported overzealously than never to have reported at all.”

Seriously?

Walker notes "the word 'espionage' appears 10 times in that pamphlet, while 'leak' isn’t used even once"  . The tragedy of this wholesale crackdown is that "it blurs the boundary between spies and whistleblowers". This means, logically, that whistleblowers are no longer honored, wanted or respected in any form but are treated the same way as traitors.

Walker adds:

"This comes, after all, at a time when the government is increasingly willing to prosecute leakers under the Espionage Act. An agent of a foreign power would fall under the program’s purview, but so would someone releasing information to the media. Leaking, one Defense Department document declares, “is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States.” 

Of course this is absolutely insane, and more than one astute pundit has observed that if this had been in place 40 years ago, the Nixon Watergate conspiracy never would have been exposed. All the leakers, as well as both Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would have ended up like Bradley Manning or worse.

Extreme reaction? You bet! And all out of proportion, despite the fact Obama had promised government transparency. According to Walker:

"It doesn’t help that the Insider Threat Program has been adopted in agencies that have little or nothing to do with national security, including the Social Security Administration, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of Education and the Peace Corps. A tutorial for Agriculture Department employees includes a long list of 'examples of behaviors that may indicate an individual has vulnerabilities that are of security concern.' These include sleeping at your desk — that might be a sign of alcoholism — and 'expression of bizarre thoughts, perceptions, or expectations.' The list was imported, word for word, from a Defense Department document."

Jesus Christ in a cap! You know how much this sounds like the officialdom of Oceania in George Orwell's '1984'? A LOT! In that scenario, kids in INGSOC uniforms were mandated to report every bit of odd behavior detected in adults - whether 'proles' or those like Winston Smith (a kind of bourgeois 'everyman') - charged with altering the language to Newspeak!  Eventually, Winston's behavior gets him in trouble (recall his head being strapped to a cage as rats were released and shagged to his face)  as the monitoring led the INGSOC fascists to his little room hideout where he was having it on with a prole.

Like '1984',  paranoia also runs riot  in D.C., as Walker points out:

"The enemy within.....can live anywhere and look like anyone. The men and women allegedly atop the cabal might be based in another country, but their puppets are neighbors, co-workers, members of your family. Anyone could conceivably be — or become — part of the plot."

Ahhhh! In 1984, recall the primo villain was the arch-intellectual Goldstein! At every interlude the hapless denizens of Oceania had to sit in a large auditorium as Goldstein's face appeared on a vast screen whereupon they began screaming at the top of their lungs: 'TRAITOR!' until they were delirious. Everyone - each man, woman- was watched carefully to detect any sign of 'Goldstein' contamination leading to thought crimes.  What did this "traitor" Goldstein preach? Ha! That continuous war was used to siphon off the wealth of society to keep people living at bare subsistence. Goldstein's exact words, for which Oceania's fascists wanted him dead:

"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. "


 But INGSOC's nabobs couldn't have any of that  'too intelligent' citizen crap, hence Newspeak: e.g. "War is Peace!"

So, really, have we now entered - or nearly so - the realm of Orwell's 1984, but 30 years delayed? I don't know, but Jesse Walker believes it might be so (though he doesn't reference '1984'). He does say:


"Today’s Leak Scare has the potential to be even more open-ended, since it isn’t rooted in fear of a particular country or subculture. There are countless motives for releasing classified or “sensitive” information to the media, from political convictions to bureaucratic turf wars. And there is plenty of material that has been classified not out of a genuine security concern but simply because it might make an agency — or someone inside it — look bad. Meanwhile, the Insider Threat enforcers’ profile of a potential security risk is vague and untested; it could send interrogators on wild goose chases, questioning employees based on groundless suspicions and poisoning the office atmosphere."

He adds, however, that the leakage isn't likely to be halted by even these draconian steps and references Bruce Schneier who wrote (when the WikiLeaks cables shook Washington in 2010), “The government is learning what the music and movie industries were forced to learn years ago: it’s easy to copy and distribute digital files.”

Well, this is the digital age after all. And the same technology that gives the gov't troglodytes vast power to snoop gives many others the vast power to disclose.

Another aspect of the bind the security fetishists are falling into is betrayed by their compulsive classification.  According to a report from the Public Interest Declassification Board last year, one intelligence agency alone classifies the equivalent of about 20 million well-stuffed four-drawer filing cabinets every 18 months. Nearly 5 million federal employees or contractors have access to at least some secret information. Even more have access to information that isn’t classified but might embarrass someone.

As Walker notes:

"That creates a double bind: The more the government trusts someone with sensitive data, the more it has reason to fear that person. Trust breeds mistrust. It’s the sort of situation that might make a person paranoid."

He then asks:

"Did anyone ever imagine a government so scared of its own shadow?"

He goes on to cite novelist and essayist Robert Anton Wilson, who observed: "Any secret police agency must be monitored by another arm of the government, lest it be infiltrated by its enemies. But then a sinister infinite regress enters the game. Any elite second order police must be, also, subject to infiltration. . . . So it, too, must be monitored, by a secret-police-of-the-third-order and so on. “

Walker adds:

"In practice, of course, this cannot regress to mathematical infinity, but only to the point where every citizen is spying on every other citizen or until the funding runs out.” The point applies not just to police but to any hierarchy with secrets to hide."

AHH-HA! 1984 and Oceania again! Exactly what INGSOC and its hyper spy recruits were all about, and then all the other INGSOC moles that spied on them, and the secondary moles that spied on them!

To quote Walker once more:

"And so the war on leaks degenerates to a government deliberately destroying its property to keep its staffers from catching sight of publicly available information.

Now there’s an enemy within"

The moral of the story is that paranoia feeds on itself. And the more that the paranoid - whether a person who sees UN black helicopters coming to seize his guns, or a government that sees every citizen as an enemy - the more draconian steps are taken for  pseudo-protection. In the end it never works, simply because paranoia is not the way to build a foundation of trust - say between citizens and government - or to build a mentally healthy nation.  The fact that recent stats disclose that more than 20% of  the U.S. population has serious mental health issues ought to be a wake up call. Instead, we behold the entire government veering into a "Goldstein-tracking" paranoid embolism of its own making.