No American Ought to be Complacent About NSA Mass Spying - Even with Gov't Shutdown

"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.

"Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for the purpose of a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."- Benjamin Franklin

According to assorted complaints from the NSA head spooks, including James Clapper and others, NSA hasn't been able to adhere to their full mass-spying mandate on account of the government shutdown. And so, we keep hearing the same complaints trotted out that we heard after Ed Snowden exposed this indiscriminate spying: "We're not able to protect Americans as long as this goes on". Of course, this doesn't even pass a basic laugh test. A number of former NSA people have made it clear this extreme 'haystack' approach - trying to find one "needle" to keep all of us safe - is pure bollocks.

Now, as reported in the UK Guardian we learn that the author of the Patriot Act, James Sensenbrenner, is up in arms and outraged at how NSA expanded the language in the original act to expand the FISA basis for searches. This conservative Republican who co-authored the Patriot Act is preparing to unveil bipartisan legislation that would dramatically curtail the domestic surveillance powers it gives to intelligence agencies.


Sensenbrenner's imminent bill in the House of Representatives is expected to be matched by a similar proposal from Senate judiciary committee chair Patrick Leahy, a Democrat. It pulls together existing congressional efforts to reform the National Security Agency in the wake of disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden. So again, we must honor and offer kudos for Snowden for exposing this - else we'd never have known about it - and nothing would have been done. So yeah, Snowden deserved the "Integrity in Intelligence" award he just received - probably the only one in government who deserves it.


Certainly Clapper doesn't! According to the Guardian, Sensenbrenner isn't taking Clapper's earlier lies lightly. He's  called for the prosecution of Obama's director of national intelligence,  who admitted misleading the Senate intelligence committee about the extent of bulk collection of telephone records.   According to Mr. Sensenbrenner:

"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,"


Certainly, if Obama had any balls at all, he ought to have fired Clapper on the spot. But then, I don't know, since he never prosecuted the Bushites for their war crimes (including torture and launching an illegal pre-emptive war), or went after Wall Street's denizens the way he should have, perhaps he is simply lacking the intestinal fortitude to make the hard decisions. I may be wrong, but I am - truthfully - not sanguine about any upcoming deals he plans to make with Repukes to keep the gov't open.

Or maybe Obama is terrified of the pseudo-liberal twerp, Dianne Feinstein. The Guardian notes that while Clapper has apologized for the incident, NSA reformers expect a fierce backlash to their proposals to rein in his powers in future. Sensenbrenner again:

"I anticipate a big fight, and Senator Feinstein has already basically declared war. If they use a law like Senator Feinstein is proposing, it will just allow them to do business as usual with a little bit of a change in the optics."

Why should Feinstein "declare war"? Hell, her hubby is one of the NSA contractors doing the spying, as the Guardian disclosed months ago! So, obviously, she has a vested interest in keeping this thing going the way it is, not in changing it. Which is another reason she needs to be replaced on the Senate Intelligence Committee: conflict of interest.  Another thing that bugs me: Why have the lazy U.S. media not exposed this?


Meanwhile, Sensenbrenner's twin effort with Leahy to introduce legislation via the House and Senate judiciary committees is partly intended to circumvent such opposition among intelligence committee leaders.  But make no mistake, without a leash being put on Feinstein, it will be a brutal drawn out battle and there is no assured positive result. This is also why Americans can't allow themselves to become complacent but ought to be fax blasting or emailing their reps to get this thing done.


Fortunately, there is plenty of support among other intelligence committee members. Democratic senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, who were first to seize on Snowden's disclosures as a way to make public their longstanding concerns, recently teamed up with Republican Rand Paul and colleague Richard Blumenthal to propose similar reforms of the NSA in their own bill.

Still, ordinary Americans need to care and can't let their guard down by pabulum from the spooks. By now, most people are aware that the NSA collects massive amounts of information on ordinary Americans. NSA Chief Keith Alexander would tell you that the government must collect the entire haystack to find the needle. But what happens to the rest of the haystack – the information about law-abiding citizens that gets swept up under ever-expanding collection authorities?

You may not want to know. In theory according to one Guardian columnist, the agencies involved in mass spying are obligated to separate the "needles" from "haystacks". In practice? Not so much.  Americans' communications are supposed to be destroyed as soon as possible, but they can be kept for up to six years to see if they meet certain criteria, according to recently declassified guidelines (pdf). Metadata about nearly every phone call made within the United States, kept in another NSA storehouse, can be saved for five years.

You haven't seen the worst, and a recent New York Times report revealed that the NSA keeps a wide range of information about Americans' communications for up to five years in online databases and another ten years "offline for 'historical searches'".


In addition, many other government agencies retain information about innocent Americans, according to a new report from the Brennan Center for Justice. Take the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As its mission transformed after 9/11 from crime-solving to terrorism prevention, the bureau dramatically expanded its legal authority to gather information about Americans with no basis for suspicion. At the same time, few if any additional restrictions were imposed on its powers to keep and share that information.

Today, an FBI agent can open an intrusive investigation with no reason to suspect criminal activity, and any resulting information can be kept for 20-30 years, even if it has no relationship to the investigation. Similarly, the FBI keeps so-called "suspicious activity reports" that are determined to have no relevance to terrorism – but may reflect Americans' constitutionally protected speech or other activities – for 30 years in a widely-accessible database.


Meanwhile, the National Counterterrorism Center, established in the years after 9/11 to serve as a central repository for terrorism-related information. The center issued guidelines last year allowing it to keep and search non-terrorism databases of Americans' information for up to five years, a ten-fold increase over the previous limit.

Why should we care that the government may keep and share information about us? If the government is only looking for terrorists, the vast majority of us surely have "nothing to hide".

But the government's broad sweep for information can land innocent Americans on watchlists from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to extricate themselves. Furthermore, history teaches that the accumulation of personal information about law-abiding citizens carries tremendous potential for abuse – including harassment of minorities, political enemies, and social activists.

NO American ought to put up with such clear 4th amendment violations!

Sensenbrenner, meanwhile, has rightly fulminated at how NSA's spooks have expanded the original definitions beyond their intended bounds. He told The Guardian:


"We had thought that the 2006 amendment, by putting the word 'relevant' in, was narrowing what the NSA could collect. Instead, the NSA convinced the Fisa court that the relevance clause was an expansive rather than contractive standard, and that's what brought about the metadata collection, which amounts to trillions of phone calls."


While the dissemblers in NSA and elsewhere have pointed to this 4th amendment- violating approach as the only way to reliably get data and "keep us safe". Sensebrenner, however,  claimed that NSA director general Keith Alexander only pointed to 13 possible suspicious individuals found through this method during his recent Senate testimony. According to Sensenbrenner.


"The haystack approach missed the Boston marathon bombing, and that was after the Russians told us the Tsarnaev brothers were bad guys,"


Make no mistake that none of this is tolerable. No American ought to turn a blind eye if he or she in any way embraces the Constitution.  More fundamentally, we ought to appreciate that keeping information about ordinary Americans "just in case" upends the traditional relationship between a democracy and its people. It effectively establishes a presumption that citizens are potentially guilty until proven innocent, and that the government has the right – even the responsibility – to stockpile information that may eventually prove their guilt.

In other words, it paves the way to a totalitarian fascist state. Thanks to Snowden we may have averted this future, but an immense political battle remains - and no one ought to relax their guard until our government is returned to its normal respect for our Constitutional protections.

 

The Net Rises to Fight the Surveillance State!

Ed Snowden: His revelations have set the Internet to work to combat the super snoops!

Even as the Denver Post Sunday Editorial blistered the laxity of congress and the FISA courts in failing to oversee the indiscriminate  NSA surveillance ('Surveillance Court Must Be Reformed', p.3D), noting they have "wandered far from the Constitution in the quest to keep the nation free and safe" (that's putting it mildly!), the internet is now gathering muscle to outwit and outmatch the snoops. (Essential given the NSA "can now tap into 75% of all internet traffic" according to one Post citation of a WSJ article).

Start with yesterday's Financial Times article ('Internet Launches Fight Against State Snoopers') noting that an organization called the Internet Engineering Task Force (which develops internet standards) is proposing a system whereby ALL communications between websites and browsers will be protected by encryption.  Something astounding and never before heard of? Hell NO! Merely using the same methods of encryption already used by banks and commercial entities like Amazon, to protect customers across the world wide web.

Certainly then, if customers (i.e. consumers) deserve such protection from snoops, so do citizens! Indeed, citizen rights to privacy as enshrined in the 4th amendment ought to be sacrosanct before any consumer protections.

The FT notes that while this plan is still in an early, developmental phase, it has the potential to transform the net and make it more difficult for governments and criminals to eavesdrop on citizens as they browse the web. After all, NO one is entitled to your own predilections, thoughts, opinions, words, unless you choose to disclose them - such as I do on this blog- which a certain unnamed,  deranged and hateful loser (who rails about everything on it)  would do better to avoid if he really wishes to spare himself from an early grave via stroke. (But maybe he never heard of not tuning in on a station if it evokes outrage, which leads me to conclude he's a masochist.)

Anyway, according to one software engineer cited in the FT piece: "There's been a complete change in how people perceive the world" since super patriot Edward Snowden did his patriotic duty (above any "oaths" or "orders") and revealed the extent of the NSA snoop machinery in their PRISM and Xkeyscore programs. Since Snowden did that, users of the net now understand how fragile their communications and how vulnerable their privacy, not to mention having gov't know more about them than they know about it.

Along with the IETF push to implement encryption systems impervious to the government snoops, other initiatives are also under way, such as  an impetus for assorted groups to push for fundamental reforms in laws governing the web. (To reduce user transparency)  The groups include the World Wide Web Foundation, as well as the ACLU which has condemned the NSA blanket surveillance.

Meanwhile, as a recent article ('My Own Private Internet') in Mother Jones documents (Sept-Oct, p. 30) creative software techies have already created a "parallel net" (actually a mesh) which "is faster than the Net we pay for" and which has the capability to skirt the snoopers. Data travels through this mesh  nearly 30 times faster than the commercial net.

Already Joseph Bonicioli (the developer) has created a community mesh (the Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network) which has over 1,000 members who can "send messages, video chat, and exchange huge files without ever appearing on the regular internet". In other words, beyond the ears and eyes of the snoops, whether ensconced in NSA or its Brit counterpart GCHQ.   According to Mr. Bonicioli:

"It's like a whole other web. It's our network and also a playground."

He adds his mesh has become "a major social hub with blogs, discussion forums, and a Craigs knockoff".   And all this beyond the prying eyes of the government's surveillance renegades.

Bonicioli adds that "anyone can join free by installing some equipment".

The MJ article goes on to note that the Athens mesh is by no means unique, and "scores of communities worldwide have been building these roll your own networks - because a mesh can also be used as a cheap way to access the regular internet."

The MJ piece adds:

"In an era where governments and corporations are increasingly tracking our online movements, the user-controlled networks are emerging as an almost subversive concept. 'When you run your own network, no one can shut it down' said Bonicioli."

Will the Internet finally conquer the super snoops? I believe it will and probably the community mesh solution will multiply as users become more empowered - distrusting the coziness of the commercial net  providers with the government. In the meantime, the IEFT encryption solution will be prodded onward but whether the powers-that-be allow it remains to be seen. Meanwhile, hopes for the FISA courts and congress to grow a pair to rein in NSA may be expecting too much.  Most of their members have obviously lost sight of the 4th amendment if they ever believed in it.

Stay tuned!

Bill Maher Gets It Wrong About Snowden Last Night

Look, Bill Maher's 'Real Time' is one of my favorite discussion shows. Readers will note how a number of times I've earlier credited Bill with exposing assorted morons on his show, such as Horace Cooper, Abby Huntsman, 'Kennedy' and others. But there are times Maher gets it wrong, way wrong, and one wonders whether some residue of moron DNA from past guests like Cooper didn't rub off.

A case in point was a brief interlude last night when the issue of the Quinnipiac poll (showing 55% of registered voters believe Snowden is a whistleblower and not a traitor) came up and Bill challenged it and Prof. Cornell West, by asserting: a) Snowden didn't reveal anything we didn't already know and b) he wasn't a whistleblower because that implies revealing lawless actions and the FISA courts approved what he disclosed.

Bill, Bill, Bill!

Look at what you're saying! Let's apply some logic here as well as a knowledge of recent history. First, if it indeed was true that Snowden didn't reveal anything we didn't already know, then how explain that the national security state and its assorted political class enablers and imps went bat shit crazy in the wake?  Obviously, he had to have revealed new information, including: that FISA courts were rubber stamping mass search warrants in violation of the 4th amendment - to approve NSA surveillance, and that online companies including Microsoft, Skype, Google,  Facebook, etc. were all on board with it, despite their protestations. Also, that NSA had turned its spying eyes to friends - as in the European Union, as well as to South America.

The publication of Snowden's revelations was such that The Guardian newspaper site was even put off limits to U.S. military personnel! See e.g.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/01/us-military-blocks-guardian-troops   According to the article, the block is "theater wide" and:

"the Pentagon and the US army told the Guardian that automated content filters installed on Department of Defense (DoD) networks to prevent the unauthorized dissemination of classified information had blocked access to selected aspects of the Guardian’s website."

Hence, it is ludicrous to claim all the material disclosed was already known!

The other Maher claim that the actions disclosed "didn't break any laws", falls afoul in terms of language and semantics. I already explained multiple times how the illegal was made legal in terms of the FISA 1978 laws which had been implemented to ensure civil liberties were protected. But then the Bushies began a series of mass illegal wiretaps in 2005, and when this was revealed, they needed cover to protect their sorry asses.

Instead of holding these vermin war criminals responsible, successive congresses - including DEMS I might add-  punked out like the weasels they are.  First they rewrote the 1978 FISA law under which the Bush bunch would have been found guilty of criminality (violating their oaths to preserve and protect the constitution), and they made the actions of the Bushies legal. They used the misbegotten "Patriot Act" to try to justify this.  That is, the use of an alternative, rubber- stamping FISA "court" (actually more often than not 1 or 2 judges, awakened at night to put their John Hancocks in place)  that issued mass warrants as opposed to the selective, individual warrants that are mandated under the 4th amendment.

In this devious way, they managed to produce the illusion of legality without in fact having legality. It was all a bait and switch deception, and the marks were the American People. The congressional traitors to the constitution then compounded this by approving an extension of this FISA law imitation in 2011, which Obama also gave approval to.  The sad and true fact here, Bill, is that we have been under the operation of an illegal FISA "law" since 2008.  None of our congress rats have told the people this, why would they?

As one percipient Denver Post letter writer put it in the June 19 edition:

"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. "

That Bill, a self-proclaimed libertarian, couldn't understand that in responding with his diatribe against Snowden last night is deplorable. I thought of all the remaining talking heads at least he might have gotten it right, and recognized Snowden is indeed a whistleblower, never mind what the state-supported propagandists and PR mills say. But evidently he too is overwhelmingly taken in, as too many Americans are.

One last thing: if anyone really believes that Snowden has given us "nothing new" they need to link to the Guardian website (above) and read through all the published disclosures. Then, come back with a straight face and tell me there's nothing new there.

No wonder this country now approaches at least a simple majority having mental illness. If critical thinking is the first casualty of a people, and logic is so deformed by media and gov't PR that it is impossible or rare to see exercised on the broad national stage, then mental illness must result. The only way out of this tragic morass is that more people are able to consistently think for themselves, and that means with criticality- and not trusting anything a gov't or media mouthpiece says unless it can be independently verified!

With the Extremes of the "Patriot Act" Coming Home to Roost, We Now Know the Final Victory was Osama bin Laden's

"In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and wickedness insensibly open."  - Thomas Jefferson, in 'Notes on Virginia'.

"Those who would sacrifice an essential liberty for the purpose of a temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

- Benjamin Franklin


One of the stock canards (or maybe bromides) spouted all through the 12 years of the 'War on Terror" has been that the "troops are fighting for our freedoms". As we behold the latest leaked (thankfully!) releases that government has an enormous PRISM program raking up all our personal and online info and data (they use the euphemism "metadata") we now know this is so much bullshit. The troops are merely pawns deployed in far off places to justify the ongoing massive security-surveillance network at home - which essentially has tossed all our fourth amendment rights into the dumpster. But this has been long in coming, and to me - the real outrage is those higher ups like Dianne Feinstein now calling for pursuit of the leakers when THEY are the ones ensuring we aren't sent hurling into total tyranny! Because make no mistake - as long as the "patriotic" eavesdroppers know more about us than we do about them and their doings, we are merely consumer-ite tools, hardly citizens in a democracy!

Let's back up some decades to the Church Committee, which under Sen. Frank Church found in the course of its investigations that the NSA  had gotten too big for its breeches and was involved in numerous excesses. Thanks to the Church Committee there was issued Executive Order 12333 launching  'The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978' which mandated several limits, including:


- NSA can intercept any communication - phone call, fax, electronic mail, etc. as long as at least one end is in a foreign country


- NSA cannot target individual Americans, for example, by entering the citizen's name or phone number into a computer that scans calls.


- If NSA accidentally picks up an American during targeting of a foreigner..the American's name must be removed from reports of the call and replaced with the words 'U.S. Person'.


- When NSA (or CIA) eavesdroppers are training or testing equipment they may intercept an American's calls, as long as records are destroyed 'as soon as possible'


Well, all that changed after the  9/11 attacks, when the nation allowed a group of robed lunatics to achieve the leverage of a superpower, as our misguided leaders launched a 12-yr. military buildup and two invasions- "wars" - now bankrupting us - even as they induced us to limit our OWN civil liberties in the name of protecting us from the terrorists. In many ways then, the robed lunatics and OBL got our leaders, so-called reps to do their dirty work for them and thereby emerge victorious. All this horse shit you've heard about they haven't changed our way of life? It's a cock and bull story! Just read the headlines from today's papers if you still think that's true!  The sad fact?  Our lives and every move are fully transparent to the gov't while its sundry machinations are mostly hidden from us- thanks to over-classification of everything. Is this democracy? No freaking way!

Many warnings were sounded, especially after the bogusly named "Patriot" Act emerged in 2002. Alas,  few Senators had read it but most were ready to approve it at the drop of a hat because...oh my.....if they voted against it they'd be deemed UNPATRIOTIC! In fact, the REAL patriots were those like WI Sen. Russ Feingold who rejected it - recognizing it for the Trojan horse it was. Out of the Patriot Act's clauses emerged much of the sinister manuevering, pseudo-legalistic mumbo jumbo justifying the over reach going on now, including the deliberate muzzling of internet companies so they wouldn't inform customers they'd been compromised by backdoor gates- supplied by NSA, FBI etc..

Flash forward to 2005. At least the FISA Act was still protecting us, i.e. our 4th amendment rights. But then the Bushies began taking shortcuts with it, doing their snooping without proper judicial warrants. It violated the heart of the FISA laws but given how many congress critters had been turned into lily-livered punks they didn't halt it, no -- they changed the LAW to make the FISA violations lawful! The chance then came up in 2011 to halt the renewal of this insanity and unconstitutional over reach once and for all, but all our congress whores punked out, and approved it - so here we sit- with the NSA snoops likely watching even as I type this.  Obama could have chucked the unconstitutional FISA law revision-renewal with a veto but he let it pass by signing. Odd, because as a Senator he offered a full throated defense of the Billl of Rights and warned against the very over reach we're now seeing on a mammoth scale.

On May 3, 2011, meanwhile, Gordon Rachman - writing in The Financial Times - advised it was time to declare victory in the "war on terror" and end it.  Of course,  to the hyper-militarists and security mavens this was anathema, since god forbid, they need a driving shtick to keep on pulling in federal dollars. Shut down all their anti-terror toys, surveillance and so on and what's left? Well, nothing to do but play golf every day and what fun is there in that? So, their response naturally kept the fear pipes blaring, warning of this and that or now - after Bin Laden's killing- some kind of obscure retribution from the terror cells. But as Rachman noted, this game could go on forever, because no one is going to kill or eliminate every terrorist on the planet.  Those warnings sounded by the Spy complex two years ago were re-echoed yesterday by the same Complex and its self-righteous bloviators (as well as assholes like Lindsey Graham), who are chagrined that the leaks which informed us of the extent of their snooping will now "not protect us as well".  The question emerges from what?

You're going to turn the whole country into a fascist panopticon out of fear of one or two odd attacks? Evidently yes, and both parties are hostage to this syndrome because neither wants to be known as the party of "terr'ist lovers", anti-Patriots, commies or whatever. But as Rachman noted in his piece: citing a report for the Rand Corporation by Brian Jenkens who makes a similar point:

"The average American has about a 1 in 9,000 chance of dying in an automobile accident and about a one in 18,000 chance of being murdered.".

Meanwhile, in the five years after 9/11 (including the people killed there) "the average American had only a one in 500,000 chance of being killed in a terrorist attack". By way of comparison, the chance of dying in an airline crash is one in 346,000 and the chance of being annihilated by a monster asteroid (> 0.5 km dia.) in its collision with Earth, is the same, according to Sir Martin Rees ('Our Final Hour'). SO in other words, the chance of being killed in a terrorist attack is much much less than the chance of being wiped out in an asteroid collision.

So all this hullaballoo about "protecting us" is really about taking away all the basic fourth amendment rights in the interest of trying to halt one or two odd attacks (or even more possibly) which don't even claim as many lives as gun homicides every year - and for which this nation does absolutely squatto. (As we've witnessed after the Newtown massacre). I betcha if Newtown had been a terrorist attack, there'd be no multi-clip magazine weapons left out there!

You do remember those 4th amendment rights, don't you? You're not one of those fool 'Muricans who in a poll taken ca. 2004 couldn't name 3 of the Bill of Rights? Let us recall the words from that once sacred Constitution now treated as toilet paper by most of our aristocrats in the Senate:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”


As noted by blogger Norman Solomon (http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/norman-solomon/49920/the-bill-of-rights-exists-an-open-letter-to-dianne-feinstein):

"One of the most chilling parts of that just-revealed Surveillance Court order can be found at the bottom of the first page, where it says “Declassify on: 12 April 2038.”

Apparently you thought—or at least hoped—that we, the people of the United States, wouldn’t find out for 25 years. And the fact that we learned about this extreme violation of our rights in 2013 instead of 2038 seems to bother you a lot."

Why 2038? Obviously, because the powers-that-be, bless their little hearts, know that most Boomers will all be dead by then. And we are the last generation living that can still trace back historical memory to the era of the Kennedy assassination in 1963 - while for most Gen X'ers and Millennials that is all distant fairy tale stuff so they'd have little interest anyway. (Recall, the JFK file hiders also wanted to keep hidden all the relevant files until 2037, but thanks to Oliver Stone - whose film 'JFK' launched the JFK Records Act, that was shot down)

Solomon goes on, addressing Sen. Dianne Feinstein:

"Rather than call for protection of the Fourth Amendment, you want authorities to catch and punish whoever leaked this secret order. You seem to fear that people can actually discover what their own government is doing to them with vast surveillance."

But in fact, it is the leakers who have ensured a level playing field in the matter of deep politics knowledge, at least keeping the PEOPLE somewhat knowledgeable of what their government is doing, as opposed to the gov't having it all its own way and hiding everything!

Rachman himself warned of the dimensions of the extensive surveillance state - complex barely two years ago, noting that the Washington Post's expose ('Top Secret America') pointed out that:

"In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September, 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons.. Adding - and "that is just the organizations created since 9/11, whle the CIA and NSA were hardly modest or under-resourced operations before the war on terror".

 Indeed now,  at least five counties within 150 miles of D.C. are the richest in the country, in terms of median income, and all are beneficiaries of this monstrous security state. One in which I used to live, Howard County, Maryland, is the 5th wealthiest and features the NSA headquarters, the subject of an extensive investigative piece when I lived in Columbia, MD ('No Such Agency: America's Fortress of Spies', by Scott Shane and Tom Bowman, The Baltimore Sun Special Section (Dec. 3-15, 1995)).

Of course, NSA's complexes have vastly grown since then, with its budget more than quadrupled. Recall also my earlier blog on their new facility in Bluffdale, Utah - designed to approach the state of "total information awareness" that the (Bush)- reconstructed Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter once hoped to implement - and in a way has succeeded, since the reported data scrafing functions approach it.  I noted the extent of this here: http://www.brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-biggest-spy-center-on-earth-lets.html


For example,  the program known as PRISM gives the U.S. government access to email, documents, audio, video, photographs and other data that people entrust to some of the world’s best known companies, according to The Washington Post. The newspaper said it reviewed a confidential roster of companies and services participating in PRISM. The companies included AOL Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc., Skype, YouTube and Paltalk.

Be alert, be aware. Raise a hue and cry as opposed to remaining merely a passive consumer. Now is the time for all real citizens to come to the aid of the country, if a country of democratic principles we are to still have when it's all over! If not, and the Military-Spy Complex has total control, we will know once and for all (as many of us suspect now) Osama bin Laden - though dead 2 yrs. - will have gotten our own government to do his dirty work for him in taking away our rights!

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Footnote: I just saw a nice little spiel Obama gave today about how the data collectors are all "professionals" and doing their jobs - also that he will be a private citizen soon and he may be snooped on by an administration after that. My thought? Isn't he the LEAST worried about that? He ought to be! Again, the extent of MASS surveillance - which is what he's trying to defend - is not supported by the explicit wording of the 4th amendment which calls for individual warrants for searches! This is an abomination and no amount of rhetoric can make it right. Not to me, anyway! Either we return to the 1978 FISA law, or admit we're now a lawless nation carrying on unconstitutional searches.