Be very afraid; only an idiot wouldn’t be.
~ Anonymous
As far as I know, the only remaining hardware the US lacks that the UK has already, is surveillance cameras on every corner in major cities. My best guess is that unless we can stop this nightmare, cameras will be coming soon, enabling the ability to link the data from the host of existing security agencies to real-time cameras with facial recognition capabilities that are able to track a person from camera to camera. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide; and I think we should be very afraid, as did Senator Frank Church who chaired the committee to investigate agencies like the NSA and the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO, and prophetically predicted in 1975:
“Th[e National Security Agency's] capability 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. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.“
This video is a DemocracyNow interview with NSA whistleblower William Binney who resigned from a thirty year career at the agency in 2001 due to the extreme illegality of the post 9/11 decisions to disregard any Constitutional protections of American citizens.
Binney was the key source for James Bamford’s columns at Wired.com (more later on him after the video).
According to James Bamford, writing at Wired.com Threat Level, the massive data collection complex, benignly named ‘Utah Data Center’ under construction in Bluffdale, Utah is:
“A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.”
“…it caused an outcry over it’s potential for invading Americans’ privacy.” How quaint that sounds nine years later, doesn’t it? The Good Olde Days of Yore…
Bamford is a former intelligence analyst and author of the book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA From 9/11 to The Eavesdropping on America. In his Wired piece he quotes an anonymous senior intelligence officer who was involved in the project who told him that beyond the storage of exabytes and eventually yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data, its importance will be utilizing the recent NSA breakthroughs in breaking encryptions used by governments all over the world, and “financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications…personal computers. Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”
Bamford’s piece on the self-contained, fortified Utah Data Center, five times larger than the nation’s capital is long, chilling, and a must-read, imo. Can someone coin a term a notch or three higher than ‘Orwellian’, please?
This link is to the panel discussion that followed the interviews with Binney, Jacob Applebaum (up next) and Laura Poitras who is working on a post 9/11 documentary series. It’s chillingly called: “The NSA is Lying–U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails”. Not surprising, but ugly and so Unconstitutional.
Jacob Appelbaum is a computer security researcher who has volunteered with WikiLeaks. He is a developer and advocate for the Tor Project, a network enabling its users to communicate anonymously, speak freely, and browse the web without restriction.
After bemoaning the fact that many Americans get suckered into believing there are ‘freedoms’ in the media because they can watch Maddow or Limbaugh or the standard ‘we’ll let ya let off some steam but not get any real news or government critique’ programming, Greenwald says in his recent column, ‘Surveillance State Evils’ :
“Whether a country is actually free is determined not by how well-rewarded its convention-affirming media elites are and how ignored its passive citizens are but by how it treats its dissidents, those posing authentic challenges to what the government does.”
Waaaay back in 1975, the final report of the Church Committee on intelligence activities emphasized:
“Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association, and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied.”
“…abuse of power has not been applied.” I shake my head, wondering why even “they” don’t see the dangers, and will hand all this off to the next group that gains all this unchecked power. Are they so cavalier because they reckon they’re all so much the same, with the same end goals and think ‘fuck the means getting there’? Do they think, do they consider what’s next, or is this all some self-perpetuating aggregate program ‘for fun and profit’ by now…unless we stop it?
When you speak to your brother and sister Americans while Occupying, or in any other similar conversations you may have, please remember to let them know that all this is occurring, and that we are all targets now. Advise them that the ‘guilty’ or ‘the terr’ists’ aren’t the only ones swept up in these draconian invasions of privacy, and that many innocents have been, and will be increasingly, as the most patriotic members of our society, fighting against a total police and security state and rule by plutocrats continue register our dissent. Remind them, as well as yourselves, that those of us endeavoring to save our democracy will come with constantly increasing jeopardy to ourselves, and risk to our families…as the Ring Is Fully Forged, and hasn’t even had time to cool.
We must prevail; we are legion, but they’ are growing in number. This threat doesn’t get changed by lying down in front of a bulldozer or chaining yourself to a tree. It will take all hands on deck willing to risk…a lot.
