'Top Secret' - Game or British Acclimatisation PsyOp?

ꕤ Article SOURCE http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-01-10-where-in-the-world-is-edward-snowden 'Top Secret' - Game or British Acclimatisation PsyOp?  http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-01-10-where-in-the-world-is-edward-snowden Simon Parkin Simon Parkin is an award-winning writer and journalist from England, a regular contributor to The New Yorker, The Guardian and a variety of other publications. Where in the world is Edward Snowden? The game that puts you in search of history's most notorious whistleblower. SUMMARY: James Long British graduate in theoretical physics product, game:  Top Secret casts player as NSA employee tasked with following intel to source deciding who knows what & whether to help whistleblower blurs reality & fantasy (Snowden group + fiction) 1,000 scattered fragments / disjointed, non-linear journey played out entirely in your actual email programme to begin: send an email to member of your 'NSA team' surveillance reports return, with 'metadata' James Long "Every email you send and receive while playing the game can be intercepted by the real government," he says. "So we have a game about surveillance in which your play itself is subject to surveillance." Top Secret supports Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) encryption method used by Edward Snowden James Long "I'm nakedly partisan and a huge fan of Snowden. I believe the government has gone too far with mass surveillance." James Long "One of the reasons you play as an NSA analyst is that it allows the game to present the viewpoints of those in the security services. You are free to make up their own mind and decide how far you'll go when invading the lives of others. For change to happen you have to start a debate. It doesn't matter if people disagree with you as long as they are talking about the issue." http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-01-10-where-in-the-world-is-edward-snowden Guardian Article http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/10/video-game-makers-james-long-top-secret BY THE SAME WRITER / BRIEF VERSION ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT So, is this really a game or is it a GCHQ acclimatisation to mass surveillance and a take-the-NSA-POV PsyOp? ꕤ

Transcript - Audio - JULIAN ASSANGE Interview By Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project

ꕤ Transcript SOURCE http://www.thepressproject.gr/podcast/final_assange.mp3 TRANSCRIPT [for quotations, confirm audio] INTERVIEW JULIAN ASSANGE, WIKILEAKS INTERVIEWED BY: Kostas Ephemera The Press Project Podcast On:  Monday, 20th October 2015 AUDIO SOURCE http://www.thepressproject.gr/podcast/final_assange.mp3 Hi, I'm  Kostas Ephemera from the Press Project, and I'm speaking to you from the Embassy of Ecuador. I'm here with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and he's agreed to give us some answers for the Greek audience. The first question is:  through the work of WikiLeaks & people like Edward Snowden, people now know that the system is corrupted.  Although we've had movements like the Indignados and Occupy Wall Street, they don't seem to last.  Why is that? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks The visible, apparent failure of Occupy Wall Street to produce a clear result has discouraged people, at least in the West, from engaging in large, mass gatherings. However, a great many lessons and networks did emerge from Occupy Wall Street and have continued on in other areas. More generally, the problem of mankind has always been its lack of understanding about how the world actually works, and the first task of human beings is to educate themselves and each other.  That is what has led to all the advances that mankind has achieved. Further advances in relation to how to restructure society or how to produce better institutions can only occur as a result of: (a) new information which further reveals how modern human institutions actually behave; and (b) the conveyance of that information into people's heads, in an accurate manner. The problem of (a) is the problem of secrecy.  The problem of (b) is the problem of media accuracy. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project OK, you spoke of the media.  When you started WikiLeaks, you collaborated with some of the biggest international media, but after a while they backed off.  Why? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Well, all institutions eventually become defined by their own quest for power, regardless of how they start. Large media organisations have been around for a long time and are powerful and, so, their management and ownership class, has learnt how to exploit that power by doing favours for other power groups that are around them, or defending their own social class or their shareholders directly. The only exception is when the organisation is small, or where it has an ideological leader that has firm control over the organisation's destiny, or, perhaps, where its business model is populist and directly relies on its readers. 2:56 As a result of our publications, we have contracts with more than a hundred and ten (110) different media organisations around the world, and in a number of different publishing projects, we've given all those hundred and ten (110) media organisations exactly the same material and, so, we're able to compare results. And we can see the geopolitical biases, cultural biases, the political interference from owners, the political interference from the management class, and redaction and censorship, for political purposes or because of fears of legal costs, or because of cultural sensitivities. For example, The Guardian newspaper, El Pais, Le Monde & The New York Times, extensively redacted material in the diplomatic cables publication, for reasons other than protecting people from retribution, whereas The Hindu newspaper (which is the highest quality English newspaper in India), only redacted two cables. 4:07 Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project *** [???]  the dictum "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" works, after all, for the system. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks First of all, the national security state is very powerful. In the United States, the  Defence Department alone feeds ten percent (10%) of the US population in terms of its salaries and direct contracts. That ten percent (10%) of the population has a social group on its periphery.  It's people they are related to.  For example, they have good friends, business partners.  It maybe extends to thirty (30%) or forty (40%) percent of the entire US population. Media proprietors tend to have many business interests and, so, those business interests intersect with the national security state. So there has been suppression of the story, first of all. Secondly, it is a complex story about spy agencies and it involves the interception of nearly the entire world. It's not easy for people to imagine such a thing and still believe in it. This interception is a lot like the concept of god:  it is invisible; intangible; knows what you're doing; knows what everyone is doing; it seems that one has to take it on faith. The fact is, strangely, mass surveillance is the first god in that respect, that has been proven to exist, that even atheists can believe in. 5:53 But-- atheists can say they believe in, but, really, most people don't believe in things they haven't directly seen themselves, because most people don't see direct -- they don't see the National Security Agency or GCHQ spies under their bed -- they don't understand the danger. 6:17 But I'm pleased that they don't understand the danger, because if everyone understood the danger, the response wouldn't be to stop mass surveillance:  the response, by most people, would be become extremely conformist. Now, this old result of 'nothing wrong'.  So what is it? 'If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.' That encodes within it exactly the problem. People try and guess what it is that these powerful agencies might consider wrong, and they are not sure where the boundaries are, and so they adjust their own behaviour and start to self-censor.  But it's intellectually bankrupt. 7:00 In the end, even if you are a baker, not involved in any politics at all, its not simply a matter of arbitrary injustice might trip you up anyway, because of confusion and incompetence in the national security state.  But it is necessary to protect forces in society that keep society honest. For example, human rights activists, journalists, and opposition politicians. These are all involved in preventing society collapsing due to corruption or incompetence. And if those elements can't operate, then society will decay. 7:46 And it will even affect 'the baker' when society does decay. So it's not just about you. It is about this professional class of people who are involved in trying to holding government to account. If they can't hold government to account, government will go bad. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Oh, yeah. Lately, governments are becoming more aggressive, while their people find it harder to control them. Are conspiracy theorists not wild enough anymore? 8:11 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks The US government is prosecuting me for conspiracy to commit espionage and general conspiracy. And the government has conspiracy theories about the people, and even laws called 'conspiracy'. It is interesting if you look at some conspiracy.  You know, some unfounded paranoid conspiracy theories, spread around by people about the capacities of the National Security Agency and some other national spying services, they were not paranoid about. 8:46 I knew that at that time, and we know even more now. But the bigger concern is where all of that is going. I like to joke that the only thing that has saved mankind is bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence, because massive spy agencies like the National Security Agency that are intercepting nearly all the world's electronic communication, of nearly every person, would completely dominate the Earth if they were not corrupt, if they were not bureaucratic, and if they were not incompetent. But, fortunately, secrecy breeds incompetence and corruption, and these are very large secret organisations, so they are also very corrupt ones -- corrupt and incompetent. The problem is that the commercial sector like Google and Facebook are not corrupt or incompetent, as traditionally defined. They are in a highly competitive commercial market and so they have become extremely efficient at collecting information, and the security agencies then simply stick their fangs into the big corporate players and suck the information out from there. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Let me ask you something different. Greece, now, has a left-wing government with very friendly relationships with Ecuador and with *** [???] How would you like to ask Greece for political asylum? 10:08 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks I would be very interested to hear of such an offer from Greece, as we know there's a lot of support from the Greek population, and it would be a legally and politically important gesture here in Europe. It's an interesting question [whether] the true nature of Greek power permits such an action or not. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Why do you think Greek government is powerless to offer you asylum? 10:33 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks If I had been Cyprus, what would I have done in this conflict with the troika? I can see that there's different arguments for going different ways, but what I would have found most interesting would be to use the conflict to create an intense unity within Greece and, provided you have control over the police, the army and the law, and you have a healthy population and no natural disasters, you can do a lot. But there is really that question. And you effectively create a war-time footing, which has effectively been a problem like war for Greece, and Greece has survived much harsher circumstances in war, so there's no reason to believe it couldn't survive a conflict of that type and, in fact, a number of good things might come out of that conflict -- but only if you have control of the police and the army.  And, I think, the reality is that Syriza did not have full control over those three services, so that was not an option. 11:42 Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project In Greece, we have suffered and continue to suffer the results of austerity. Does the TTIP mean such kind of austerity for the whole of Europe? Julian Assange, WikiLeaks TTIP is the US-EU portion of a much grander project. That grand project [is] the three t'd agreements:  TTIP, TISA, and TPP. It's a project to create a new grand enclosure, a modern form perhaps analogous to the partition of Africa or the construction of the European Union -- a new economic and legal regime that will incorporate fifty-two (52) nations -- 1.6 billion people -- and, most importantly, two-thirds of global GDP. It has been constructed politically by playing the China card. So whenever something that radical and that large occurs, it's because it has the backing of several powerful forces. In this case, it has the backing of the major US multinationals, who have been always trying to achieve agreements like this. But it has also managed to get the backing of the US national security class, who view it as a strategic way of isolating China, India and Russia. 13:07 By playing that China card, they've also scared much of the establishment in Western Europe to coming into the system, and a lot of the South-East Asian countries like Australia. It is the most radical construction of an international regime since the construction of Europe [ie the European Union], and it cements once and for all, international and neoliberalism [interests?] into those fifty-two (52) countries, in a binding international treaty which is exceedingly difficult to withdraw from -- much more difficult than Greece withdrawing from Europe [ie the European Union]. 13:45 It covers nearly every aspect of the economy:  transportation, all services -- and services make up about seventy-five percent (75%) of the European economy, so that means all internet services, banking services, consulting engineers and accountants.  In fact, it covers everything that you can't drop on your foot. [Laughter] 14:10 It arises -- let's go back to World War II. After World War II, the US had fifty percent (50%) of the global GDP and it started to construct some international institutions to deal with that and the  Bretton Woods system, the WTO [World Trade Organisation] and, eventually the WTO became an institution with its own goals to expand, and it included India, Brazil, Russia and China. And the WTO became too democratised for the United States and there was several rounds of negotiation in the WTO in the 2000s, called the Doha Rounds, to negotiate some mutual lowering -- lower of tariffs and other mechanisms -- and the the US didn't like where things were going.  So it effectively created a negotiation outside the WTO with its allies that it could push around, and the result is those T-3 agreements. So, as negotiations originally started in Doha show, [the US] set up this legal and trading system covering two-thirds of global GDP.  So its multinationals get what [they] want and, also, to isolate China. 15:35 To my mind, the single most significant issue is that it locks in, for at least decades, the US model of global multinational-led neoliberalism -- this radical new form of international neoliberalism -- which means that if Greece elects a different government, or Syriza wants to go a different way, it can't.  It's too late.  There's clauses in the treaty, such as if the government tries to introduce new legislation it will be penalised. 16:25 It may even be seriously anti-economic. It does introduce the establishment of a great many new monopolies for the US pharmaceutical and copyright industries, which is anti-economic. But just having such an invasive level of regulation for ninety-seven percent (97%) of industry in an international trade agreement suggests that it will calcify around economic activity. 17:01 It's very hard to change this international agreement, and as industry changes and new inventions come onto the scene, and there's new ways of working and new ways of trading, countries which have signed up to this treaty system will be bogged down in this international regulation. 17:22 Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project One last question. These days, the refugee crisis is the main issue for all Euro summits, but the people who participate in those meetings are the very same leaders of countries who sold their weapons, or, actually, their armies actively contributed to the bombing of the refugee countries. What are your thoughts on that? 17:40 Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Well, it's a moral disgrace, you know, that the US is not taking Syrian refugees, and that the UK has said it will take only four thousand (4,000) per year over five (5) years. It's no surprise to anyone.  But, I mean, the situation comes about as a result of US, UK and French policy in the Middle East, together with the behaviour of US regional allies in the Middle East -- Qatar, Turkey, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia. But we published cables, including in my new book -- The WikiLeaks Files -- showing that the US has been trying to overthrow the Syrian government since at least 2006 and has very serious plans to do that; was trying to make the Syrian government 'paranoid,' trying to get it to 'over-react' by instilling that fear and paranoia, trying to make it worried about coups; trying to stir up sectarian tensions between Sunni and Shi'ites; trying to make its efforts to stop the originator of ISIS -- the ISI, the Islamic State of Iraq -- to make Syria look weak, and the fact that it was trying to crack down on terrorists at all, pushed that as an example of Syrian government not having full control over its territory, to encourage the government overthrow; trying to stop foreign investment in Syria and secretly funding a variety of NGOs in Syria and, also, *** [???], using Saudi and Egypt to help push that along. There's an interesting question:  what is even in it for the US, this result? 19:37 Well, it's not about the US population as a whole, of course.  It's about the particular factions that pushed for it -- whether they have a benefit -- and, of course, the CIA perceives they have a benefit.  They create a problem and then they're given a greater budget to clean 'the problem' up. Similarly, with the contractors, arms dealers and arms manufacturers:  if there's no 'problem', then their budgets are cut.  So they create problems. It's also part of a grand area strategy to, you know, weaken Hezbollah, to allow Israel greater control over Golan Heights and maybe a buffer zone as well; to knock out a regional ally of Iran; to knock out the last Russian base, that's left outside the former Soviet Union, in Tartus; to create a path for a gas pipeline [with] a proposed path from Qatar to Saudi, up through Syria to Europe, which will compete with Russian gas. 20:39 So there's like, as I said before:  like most significant changes that happen in the world, they happen because significant forces come together, and with multiple motivations. It's what we see here. But an easily predictable disaster.  But from the US perspective there's nothing for them to dislike about having Europe flooded with Syrian refugees. In fact, we have an interesting speculation about the refugee movements.  We looked through our cables. So the speculation was this: occasionally, opponents of a country will engage in strategic depopulation -- which is, to decrease the fighting capacity of a government, you try and get people to flee the country. 21:28 In the case of Syria, it is predominantly the middle class that is fleeing, because it is the most able to flee -- it has the language skills, money, some connections, and that's the engineering class, the management class, the bureaucratic class, precisely the class that is needed to keep the government functioning, and encouraging it to flee Syria -- for example, Germany saying that they will accept any refugees and by Turkey taking nearly two (2) million refugees, it does significantly weaken the Syrian government. 22:09 So we looked for other recent precedents of that. In 2007, the Iraqi government made a formal demand of Germany to stop encouraging migration from Iraq to Germany. Now, in that case clearly Germany wasn't trying to collapse the Iraqi government, but nonetheless the Iraqi government was feeling the same effect, that it was weakening its governing capacity. Sweden, in the Iraq war, is documented in the cables as making its contribution to the Iraq war, as it said to the United States, the acceptance of the Iraqi refugees was part of its contribution. So, regardless of whether there is design behind it, the forces engaged in trying to overthrow the Syrian government must be happy with the results. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project We have the same effect of brain-drain from Greece due to the economic crisis now.  Or the brains go. Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Exactly. So, the result is to weaken. As a political asylee myself, I'm not suggesting at all that Syrians shouldn't be treated kindly as refugees. But we should understand that engaging in the situation that causes depopulation of a country does encourage its collapse. Kostas Ephemera, The Press Project Thank you very much. --- end audio --- More Article by Kostas Ephemera  (Greek)  http://www.thepressproject.gr/article/83422/Ligi-ora-me-ton-Julian-Assange  (English translation)   here 2014 US population estimated at 322,583,006 -- ref:  http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/us-population/ USA DOD Beneficiaries Therefore, 10% of that estimate total population is equal to 32,258,300.6 Americans -- ie over 32-million US citizens benefit directly from US Dept of Defence. Adding estimates of periphery associations, perhaps up to over one-third of the total US population would benefit, either directly or indirectly, from the US Dept of Defence. Troika = European Troika  /  tripartite committee led by European Commission (Eurogroup) with European Central Bank (ECB) & the International Monetary Fund (IMF) - representing the European Union (EU) in its foreign relations, particularly re common foreign policy & security policy -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_troika Syriza - a left-wing political party in Greece, originally founded in 2004 as a coalition of left-wing and radical left parties. It is the largest party in the Hellenic Parliament, with party chairman Alexis Tsipras serving as Prime Minister of Greece -- ref:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syriza Bretton Woods system -- landmark system for monetary and exchange rate management established in 1944  - ref:  http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brettonwoodsagreement.asp ꕤ

Western Prisoners of Technotyranny of Shadow Governments in the Service of Corporate Elites

ꕤ Article SOURCE https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_nsas_technotyranny_one_nation_under_surveillance The NSA’s Technotyranny: One Nation Under Surveillance By John W. Whitehead May 26, 2015     “The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control.”—William Binney, NSA whistleblower We now have a fourth branch of government. As I document in my new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC. You might know this branch of government as Surveillance, but I prefer “technotyranny,” a term coined by investigative journalist James Bamford to refer to an age of technological tyranny made possible by government secrets, government lies, government spies and their corporate ties. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. The police state is about to pass off the baton to the surveillance state. Having already transformed local police into extensions of the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI are preparing to turn the nation’s soldier cops into techno-warriors, complete with iris scanners, body scanners, thermal imaging Doppler radar devices, facial recognition programs, license plate readers, cell phone Stingray devices and so much more. This is about to be the new face of policing in America. The National Security Agency (NSA) has been a perfect red herring, distracting us from the government’s broader, technology-driven campaign to render us helpless in the face of its prying eyes. In fact, long before the NSA became the agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug Enforcement Administration were carrying out their own secret mass surveillance on an unsuspecting populace. Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power. And of course that doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine. The raging debate over the fate of the NSA’s blatantly unconstitutional, illegal and ongoing domestic surveillance programs is just so much noise, what Shakespeare referred to as “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” It means nothing: the legislation, the revelations, the task forces, and the filibusters. The government is not giving up, nor is it giving in. It has stopped listening to us. It has long since ceased to take orders from “we the people.” If you haven’t figured it out yet, none of it—the military drills, the surveillance, the militarized police, the strip searches, the random pat downs, the stop-and-frisks, even the police-worn body cameras—is about fighting terrorism. It’s about controlling the populace. Despite the fact that its data snooping has been shown to be ineffective at detecting, let alone stopping, any actual terror attacks, the NSA continues to operate largely in secret, carrying out warrantless mass surveillance on hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone calls, emails, text messages and the like, beyond the scrutiny of most of Congress and the taxpayers who are forced to fund its multi-billion dollar secret black ops budget. Legislation such as the USA Patriot Act serves only to legitimize the actions of a secret agency run by a shadow government. Even the proposed and ultimately defeated USA Freedom Act, which purported to restrict the reach of the NSA’s phone surveillance program—at least on paper—by requiring the agency to secure a warrant before surveillance could be carried out on American citizens and prohibiting the agency from storing any data collected on Americans, amounted to little more than a paper tiger: threatening in appearance, but lacking any real bite. The question of how to deal with the NSA—an agency that operates outside of the system of checks and balances established by the Constitution—is a divisive issue that polarizes even those who have opposed the NSA’s warrantless surveillance from the get-go, forcing all of us—cynics, idealists, politicians and realists alike—to grapple with a deeply unsatisfactory and dubious political “solution” to a problem that operates beyond the reach of voters and politicians: how do you trust a government that lies, cheats, steals, sidesteps the law, and then absolves itself of wrongdoing to actually obey the law? Since its official start in 1952, when President Harry S. Truman issued a secret executive order establishing the NSA as the hub of the government’s foreign intelligence activities, the agency—nicknamed “No Such Agency”—has operated covertly, unaccountable to Congress all the while using taxpayer dollars to fund its secret operations. It was only when the agency ballooned to 90,000 employees in 1969, making it the largest intelligence agency in the world with a significant footprint outside Washington, DC, that it became more difficult to deny its existence. In the aftermath of Watergate in 1975, the Senate held meetings under the Church Committee in order to determine exactly what sorts of illicit activities the American intelligence apparatus was engaged in under the direction of President Nixon, and how future violations of the law could be stopped. It was the first time the NSA was exposed to public scrutiny since its creation. The investigation revealed a sophisticated operation whose surveillance programs paid little heed to such things as the Constitution. For instance, under Project SHAMROCK, the NSA spied on telegrams to and from the U.S., as well as the correspondence of American citizens. Moreover, as the Saturday Evening Post reports, “Under Project MINARET, the NSA monitored the communications of civil rights leaders and opponents of the Vietnam War, including targets such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohammed Ali, Jane Fonda, and two active U.S. Senators. The NSA had launched this program in 1967 to monitor suspected terrorists and drug traffickers, but successive presidents used it to track all manner of political dissidents.” Senator Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated the NSA, understood only too well the dangers inherent in allowing the government to overstep its authority in the name of national security. Church recognized that such surveillance powers “at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.” Noting that the NSA could enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny” upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared that he did not “want to see this country ever go across the bridge” of constitutional protection, congressional oversight and popular demand for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating both Congress and its constituency in this duty, “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 over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” The result was the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), and the creation of the FISA Court, which was supposed to oversee and correct how intelligence information is collected and collated. The law requires that the NSA get clearance from the FISA Court, a secret surveillance court, before it can carry out surveillance on American citizens. Fast forward to the present day, and the so-called solution to the problem of government entities engaging in unjustified and illegal surveillance—the FISA Court—has unwittingly become the enabler of such activities, rubberstamping almost every warrant request submitted to it. The 9/11 attacks served as a watershed moment in our nation’s history, ushering in an era in which immoral and/or illegal government activities such as surveillance, torture, strip searches, SWAT team raids are sanctioned as part of the quest to keep us “safe.” In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans’ phone calls and emails. That wireless wiretap program was reportedly ended in 2007 after the New York Times reported on it, to mass indignation. Nothing changed under Barack Obama. In fact, the violations worsened, with the NSA authorized to secretly collect internet and telephone data on millions of Americans, as well as on foreign governments. It was only after whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 that the American people fully understood the extent to which they had been betrayed once again. What this brief history of the NSA makes clear is that you cannot reform the NSA. As long as the government is allowed to make a mockery of the law—be it the Constitution, the FISA Act or any other law intended to limit its reach and curtail its activities—and is permitted to operate behind closed doors, [relying] on secret courts, secret budgets and secret interpretations of the laws of the land, there will be no reform. Presidents, politicians, and court rulings have come and gone over the course of the NSA’s 60-year history, but none of them have done much to put an end to the NSA’s “technotyranny.” The beast has outgrown its chains. It will not be restrained. The growing tension seen and felt throughout the country is a tension between those who wield power on behalf of the government—the president, Congress, the courts, the military, the militarized police, the technocrats, the faceless unelected bureaucrats who blindly obey and carry out government directives, no matter how immoral or unjust, and the corporations—and those among the populace who are finally waking up to the mounting injustices, seething corruption and endless tyrannies that are transforming our country into a technocrized police state. At every turn, we have been handicapped in our quest for transparency, accountability and a representative democracy by an establishment culture of secrecy: secret agencies, secret experiments, secret military bases, secret surveillance, secret budgets, and secret court rulings, all of which exist beyond our reach, operate outside our knowledge, and do not answer to “we the people.” What we have failed to truly comprehend is that the NSA is merely one small part of a shadowy permanent government comprised of unelected bureaucrats who march in lockstep with profit-driven corporations that actually runs Washington, DC, and works to keep us under surveillance and, thus, under control. For example, Google openly works with the NSA, Amazon has built a massive $600 million intelligence database for the CIA, and the telecommunications industry is making a fat profit by spying on us for the government. In other words, Corporate America is making a hefty profit by aiding and abetting the government in its domestic surveillance efforts. Conveniently, as the Intercept recently revealed, many of the NSA’s loudest defenders have financial ties to NSA contractors. Thus, if this secret regime not only exists but thrives, it is because we have allowed it through our ignorance, apathy and naïve trust in politicians who take their orders from Corporate America rather than the Constitution. If this shadow government persists, it is because we have yet to get outraged enough to push back against its power grabs and put an end to its high-handed tactics. And if this unelected bureaucracy succeeds in trampling underfoot our last vestiges of privacy and freedom, it will be because we let ourselves be fooled into believing that politics matters, that voting makes a difference, that politicians actually represent the citizenry, that the courts care about justice, and that everything that is being done is in our best interests. Indeed, as political scientist Michael J. Glennon warns, you can vote all you want, but the people you elect aren’t actually the ones calling the shots. “The American people are deluded … that the institutions that provide the public face actually set American national security policy,” stated Glennon. “They believe that when they vote for a president or member of Congress or succeed in bringing a case before the courts, that policy is going to change. But … policy by and large in the national security realm is made by the concealed institutions.” In other words, it doesn’t matter who occupies the White House: the secret government with its secret agencies, secret budgets and secret programs won’t change. It will simply continue to operate in secret until some whistleblower comes along to momentarily pull back the curtain and we dutifully—and fleetingly—play the part of the outraged public, demanding accountability and rattling our cages, all the while bringing about little real reform. Thus, the lesson of the NSA and its vast network of domestic spy partners is simply this: once you allow the government to start breaking the law, no matter how seemingly justifiable the reason, you relinquish the contract between you and the government which establishes that the government works for and obeys you, the citizen—the employer—the master. Once the government starts operating outside the law, answerable to no one but itself, there’s no way to rein it back in, short of revolution. And by revolution, I mean doing away with the entire structure, because the corruption and lawlessness have become that pervasive. https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_nsas_technotyranny_one_nation_under_surveillance ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT I switched my attention to another topic because the mass non-European invasion in Europe was seriously freaking me out, while the events in Israel were also beginning to do my head in.  But reading this is just as depressing. What applies in the US, applies elsewhere.  It's just different nations and different agencies, operating in much the same way and in cooperation with their US counterparts and allies (see Five Eyes & note the German BND cooperation with US spying, along with the Five Eyes partners). It sounds like all ordinary people are doomed to being controlled by shadow unelected governments, that are operating in the service of the corporate elite's interests, and evidently a law unto themselves. Can't see a revolution coming any time soon, so we're all prisoners and the entire Western democratic government edifice is a lie. ꕤ

Surveillance & Intel News

ꕤ Article SOURCE surveillance | intel PETITION #Surveillance #Privacy #uspoli #law stop backdoor govt access to encrypted services - #Petition https://www.savecrypto.org/ #uspoli #surveillance #California Police fake phone tower  spy tech approved by DOJ https://www.revealnews.org/article/east-bay-cellphone-surveillance-plan-gets-attorney-generals-support/ #Berlin campaigners launch Intelexit support group for #NSA & #GCHQ to quit http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/09/30/intelexit_for_nsa_surveillance_self_help_group_for_intelligence_agents_started.html #France Draft Bill #Surveillance mass surveillance carte blanche Similar plans are already in place in the UK and the Netherlands. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/09/france-must-reject-law-that-gives-carte-blanche-to-mass-surveillance-globally/ #military Nearly 120 soldiers from 163rd and 303rd Military Intelligence Battalions deployed to #Afghanistan http://kdhnews.com/fort_hood_herald/across_the_fort/fort-hood-military-intelligence-troops-deploy-to-afghanistan/article_42e4c9c0-66b0-11e5-8fd1-5f39ca88a06f.html #military US army #SouthKorea hoover up radio transmissions & detect underground tunnels fleet of new spy planes http://theweek.com/articles/577905/new-american-spy-planes-could-spot-kim-jong-uns-secret-tunnels ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/world/asia/kunduz-taliban-afghanistan.html?_r=0 Afghanistan Kunduz Still Held by Taliban, Locals Say, Despite Afghan Government Claims By ALISSA J. RUBIN  OCT. 1, 2015 Afghan soldiers preparing on Wednesday for a counteroffensive to try to retake the city of Kunduz from the Taliban. Credit Najim Rahim/European Pressphoto Agency KABUL, Afghanistan — Kunduz residents and provincial officials said the city remained in Taliban hands on Thursday, despite claims from the Afghan government that it had retaken the city. Kareema Sediqi, a member of the Kunduz provincial council, said that “the city is still in Taliban control,” but that Afghan security forces had advanced as far as a roundabout near the city’s entrance. Interviews with several residents suggested that the situation was fluid, with fighting continuing. Ms. Sediqi, who spoke from Kabul but was in contact with family members trapped in Kunduz, said, “The Afghan security forces are struggling against strong Taliban resistance from Taliban who are wearing A.N.A. uniforms,” referring to the Afghan National Army. It is a common Taliban tactic to obtain uniforms of the government security forces and use them to confuse their enemies. [...] But before residents had gone far from their homes, the Taliban counterattacked, wearing the uniforms of Afghan security forces, with some riding motorcycles and others driving captured Humvees and sports utility vehicles. They pushed back the Afghan forces, who remained on the city’s outskirts, according to Ms. Sediqi and some residents. [...] Saad Mukhtar, the director of public health for Kunduz, said that since the city fell, his office had recorded 49 dead and 332 wounded in local hospitals, including civilians and members of the Afghan security forces. Hundreds of civilians and members of the government forces have been holed up in the airport south of Kunduz, and reinforcements sent from other provinces have been delayed or halted by Taliban resistance in outlying areas. Residents reached in parts of Kunduz Province beyond the city said that the Taliban remained in control in the district of Chardara. That district is one of the most strategically important in the province because a road to the largest city in Afghanistan’s north, Mazar-i-Sharif, runs through it. [...] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/02/world/asia/kunduz-taliban-afghanistan.html?_r=0 ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- Pentagon Pushing to Increase Post-2016 Troop Levels in Afghanistan New Plans Aim to Give Military 'Leeway' on When to Carry Out Drawdown by Jason Ditz, September 30, 2015 Every planned drawdown of US military forces from Afghanistan seems to turn up later than announced and smaller than planned, and despite officials still sticking to the NATO narrative that the Afghan War “ended,” some 10,000 US troops remain there. Officially, the plan is for a major drawdown by the end of next year that will finally catch up with what was supposed to be a 2014 pullout. Unsurprisingly, the Pentagon is once again fighting against following through on the plans, with officials saying the “plans” they are advancing both intend to withhold the troop level reductions deeper into 2017, and to give the Pentagon more “leeway” in when and how many troops get removed from the country after 2017. Already 14 years into the occupation of Afghanistan, the continuing struggles of the Afghan military continues to drag US ground troops into combat, and many officials seem to favor just maintaining the occupation essentially forever instead of ending the war and watching the government continue to lose territory to the same insurgency they’ve been fighting throughout that war. With less and less media coverage of the Afghan War, there seems to be less political interest in seeing the troops brought home, which likely will ensure that the Pentagon proposals to keep troops there get through without too much debate. http://news.antiwar.com/2015/09/30/pentagon-pushing-to-increase-post-2016-troop-levels-in-afghanistan/ ---------------------- ꕤ ---------------------- COMMENT Thought I'd look up to see what's going on with Afghanistan, seeing the US is sending out over 100 intelligence staff. Looks like Taliban's winning? Fourteen years is such a long time to occupy a country. Surprised how sophisticated Taliban are, wearing uniforms of Afghan government troops etc. It sounds like life goes on around the fighting and bystanders get shot if they're unlucky. Don't know enough about Afghanistan to make anything of what's going on. ------- Spy planes that find tunnels is pretty cool ... & especially handy near Gaza. ------- The French are going to subject everyone to mass surveillance, which is pretty standard for countries that expose themselves to internal risks. ꕤ

WikiLeaks: Information Suppression, Compliant Corporate Media - Evidence - Afghanistan

ꕤ Media Bullsh*t Corporate-Serving Corporate Media In Service of Aggressive Neoliberal Foreign Policy |  Manufacturing Consent Bias.  Censorship.  Disinformation.  Compliance. censorship & disinformation is denial of informed consent COMPLIANT CORPORATE & 'ALTERNATE' CORPORATE MEDIA Why We Need WikiLeaks EVIDENCE USA's spy agency, NSA, conducted mass surveillance on entire country (actually, more than one country ... but let's focus on Afghanistan) James Clapper says: 'untold damage'  Well, he would say that to justify US mass surveillance of entire countries in the free world & mass surveillance of free Americans.  Duh! Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper: #Snowden killed ‘important’ program in #Afghanistan / unnamed 'Intercept' country = Afghanistan http://pakobserver.net/detailnews.asp?id=272816 UPDATE It was the WikiLeaks follow-up identification of Afghanistan as country being surveilled that led to surveillance program closure/rejection by Afghanistan: In March 2014, The Washington Post, citing documents provided by Snowden, reported on a program called MYSTIC, under which the NSA was collecting “every single” phone conversation in a foreign country. The Post, following requests by U.S. officials, withheld the country’s name. Two months later, the Intercept news site published a similar story about the NSA’s “secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation” in two nations. The site named the Bahamas as one country. It refrained from naming the other, citing concerns that doing so “could lead to increased violence.” Several days later, the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks reported that the country was Afghanistan. Soon after, “the program was shut down by the government of Afghanistan,” said Clapper, speaking at the Intelligence and National Security Summit in Washington. SOURCE https://archive.is/94N16 ---------------------- ꕤ  ---------------------- NO words for the suppression of truth by the corporate and 'alternate' corporate press: Washington Post The Intercept  It's anger provoking to see information denial and abuse of state power, in black and white. WikiLeaks was the only publisher that gave the world:  the truth. PS It's just occurred to me that the US spies on Japanese leaders, and European politicians and corporations, as well as entire countries. So if the public is told that a surveillance program has been rejected by a vanquished state, does anyone really believe there's genuinely been follow-through from the US-appointed Afghan government or from USA? On consideration, I really don't buy that they're done spying on Afghanistan. ꕤ

Thomas Drake Interview - Transcripts - Series of Five (5)

Espionage Act Case USA (One of Few) Thomas Drake US Air Force / short stint CIA  /  US Navy veteran ex NSA / computers / whistleblower   "I flew in RC-135s, listening in on the Warsaw Pact. I became--the target country in which I became an expert as a crypto linguist was East Germany." " ... says he was targeted by the NSA because he exposed that the agency had intel that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks and because he blew the whistle on a massive secret surveillance program aimed at Americans -   August 2, 2015" "In 2010 the government alleged that he 'mishandled' documents, one of the few such Espionage Act cases in U.S. history. His defenders claim that he was instead being persecuted for challenging the Trailblazer Project."  [therealnews] Transcript Interview #1 - http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14393 Transcript Interview #2 - http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14395 Transcript Interview #3 - http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14399 Transcript Interview #4 - http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14405 Transcript Interview #5 - http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=14423 ---------------------- ꕤ  ---------------------- SUMMARY Part 1 NSA Key stakeholder = Congress, particularly the intelligence committees   Raised objections to NSA having knowledge re  9/11 & not making use of that knowledge to prevent 9/11 Objections internal - then public. Waste of multibillion-dollar mass surveillance program / he thought violated the Fourth Amendment USA - dragnet electronic surveillance indicted whistleblower  /  no prison NSA - had 9/11 knowledge  / at issue what NSA actually knew what they should have known what they didn't share what they kept hidden info they never even discovered until later   "I consider NSA quite culpable.  ... extraordinarily culpable. And they've been covering up their culpability ever since" *NSA did not not share intel properly with national command authorities massive multibillion-dollar fraud   mass surveillance regime put into place in the deepest of secrecy NSA didn't like Drake 'speaking truth to power" - witness various investigations. 2007 FBI raid of house and office (National Defence University). Indictment   "I was very publicly indicted on a ten felony count indictment, five under the Espionage Act, facing 35 years in prison." April 2010 was an exciting month: April 5th, 2010 - here WikiLeaks releases Collateral Murder video April 15, 2010 - here Thomas Drake indicted "DRAKE:  My eyes were wide open coming into NSA. Some people have this idea that somehow I was naive coming into NSA. In fact, I was actually--my sanity was questioned as to whether or not I really wanted to join NSA. JAY: And your first day of the NSA is actually 9/11. DRAKE: First day I reported. I actually took the oath prior. It was all in processing. But the first day that I reported to my new job was the morning of 9/11." Post 9/11 US govt operating in equivalent of secret marital law "verbal authority from the White House, authorizing NSA to start spying on the U.S. on an extraordinary scale, starting with phone numbers and special arrangements of certain telephone companies, starting with AT&T" " ... eyewitness to the subversion of the Constitution. " Oath to defend "Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." [NSA] "... had what they call cast-iron coverage on the Yemeni switchboard, the safe house. They'd been monitoring that safe house since at least 1996. It's an absolute lie of the U.S. government to say that we didn't know about the two hijackers in San Diego, for example. Absolute lie." "... when confronted with the prospect of fessing up, NSA chose instead to obstruct the 9/11 congressional investigation, play dumb, and keep the truth buried, including the fact that it knew about all inbound and outbound calls to the safe house switchboard in Yemen. " ---------------------- ꕤ  ---------------------- COMMENT That's it for my lame summary. I'm not really into the 9/11 stuff and I'm not up for the summary of another 4 parts of the interview. Thought it was good to post here for anybody who might be more interested than I am. Might just quickly skim a few more bits of the interviews to see if there's anything earth-shattering in them that I might otherwise miss.  lol ꕤ