Puppet MastersS


Vader

The making of a global security state

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© Flickr/Abode of Chaos
As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we've come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 - waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it's always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Here's my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing story (which, it is promised, will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse.

1. The Urge to be Global

Corporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at least the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the twenty-first century has that globalizing urge fully infected the workings of the American state itself. It's become common since 9/11 to speak of a "national security state." But if a week of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance practices has revealed anything, it's that the term is already grossly outdated. Based on what we now know, we should be talking about an American global security state.

Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now sweeping up and about the ways in which such activities may be abrogating the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other U.S. intelligence outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via the just-revealed Prism and other surveillance programs.

Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the National Security Agency's key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 of gathering "97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide," has been named "boundless informant." If you want a sense of where the U.S. Intelligence Community imagines itself going, you couldn't ask for a better hint than that word "boundless." It seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no limits left on this planet.

Eye 1

The terror con

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© AP/Google/Connie ZhouIn this undated photo made available by Google, hundreds of fans funnel hot air from the computer servers into a cooling unit. Google vehemently denies allowing the government direct access to its servers, though the company is named along with other industry leaders as part of one of the NSA’s massive surveillance programs.
For defense contractors, the government officials who write them mega checks, and the hawks in the media who cheer them on, the name of the game is threat inflation. And no one has been better at it than the folks at Booz Allen Hamilton, the inventors of the new boondoggle called cyberwarfare.

That's the company, under contract with the National Security Agency, that employed whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the information security engineer whose revelation of Booz Allen's enormously profitable and pervasive spying on Americans now threatens the firm's profitability and that of its parent hedge fund, the Carlyle Group.

Booz Allen, whose top personnel served in key positions at the NSA and vice versa after the inconvenient collapse of the Cold War, has been attempting to substitute terrorist for communist as the enemy of choice. A difficult switch indeed for the military-industrial complex about which Dwight Eisenhower, the general-turned-president, had so eloquently warned us.

But just when the good times for war profiteers seemed to be forever in the past, there came 9/11 and the terrorist enemy, the gift that keeps on giving, for acts of terror always will occur in a less than perfect world, serving as an ideal excuse for squandering resources, as well as our freedoms.

Red Flag

Ed Snowden's magic thumb drive and other NSA fantasies

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Well, they've solved the riddle. Ed Snowden was able to steal thousands of highly protected NSA documents because...he had a thumb drive.

This is the weapon that breached the inner sanctum of the most sophisticated information agency in the world.

This is the weapon to which the NSA, with all its resources, remains utterly vulnerable. Can't defeat it.

NSA bans thumb drives, but certain special employees are allowed to use them.

Would Snowden have been in that elite circle? He was an outside contractor who'd been assigned to the NSA, and he was only there for four weeks, on his latest tour, when he did the infamous deed and then departed, never to return.

Not only did Snowden stroll into NSA with a thumb drive, he knew how to navigate all the security layers put in place to stop people from stealing classified documents.

Bad Guys

Did the CIA give the NSA documents to Ed Snowden?

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Current press reports focus on PRISM, the NSA's relationships with the biggest tech companies in the world, and the spilled leaks of Ed Snowden.

I've already laid out serious questions about Snowden's work history and whether he's told the truth about it.

Is it likely he could have accessed and snatched thousands of highly classified NSA documents?

"Let's see. Who's coming to work for us here at NSA today? Oh, new whiz kid. Ed Snowden. Outside contractor. He's not really a full-time employee of the NSA. Twenty-nine years old. No high school diploma. Has a GED. He worked for the CIA and quit. Hmm. Why did he quit? Oh, never mind, who cares? No problem.

"Tell you what. Let's give this kid access to our most sensitive data. Sure. Why not? Everything. That stuff we keep behind 986 walls? Where you have to pledge the life of your first-born against the possibility you'll go rogue? Let Snowden see it all. Sure. What the hell. I'm feeling charitable. He seems like a nice kid."

Megaphone

Senator Al Franken: from SNL spoofer to State surveillance hawk

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Al used to be a funny guy. Now, he's not.

Make no mistake about it, if Bush were president at the moment, Little Al would be attacking him mercilessly.

But with Obama in the White House, Al sings a different tune.

The NSA spying is A-OK. No problem.

"I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people."

Thanks, Al.

"There are certain things that are appropriate for me to know that are not appropriate for the bad guys to know."

Al, you see, has been briefed. He's bought into those "high-level" briefings. He now resides in a rarefied elite atmosphere. If Senator Al says NSA is good, it must be.

If you believe him, I've got condos for sale on Jupiter.

Whistle

Did someone help Ed Snowden punch a hole in the NSA?

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Ed Snowden, NSA leaker. Honest man. Doing what was right. Bravo.

That still doesn't preclude the possibility that, unknown to him, he was managed by people to put him the right place to expose NSA secrets.

Snowden's exposure of NSA was a righteous act, because that agency is a RICO criminal. But that doesn't mean we have the whole story.

How many people work in classified jobs for the NSA? And here is one man, Snowden, who is working for Booz Allen, an outside contractor, but is assigned to NSA, and he can get access to, and copy, documents that expose the spying collaboration between NSA and the biggest tech companies in the world - and he can get away with it.

If so, then NSA is a sieve leaking out of all holes. Because that means a whole lot of other, higher NSA employees can likewise steal these documents. Many, many other people can copy them and take them. Poof.

Sherlock

NSA leaker: are there serious cracks in Ed Snowden's story?

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First, I'm not doubting the documents Ed Snowden has brought forward. I'm not doubting the illegal reach of the NSA in spying on Americans and the world.

But as to how this recent revelation happened, and whether Ed Snowden's history holds up...I have questions.

Could Snowden have been given extraordinary access to classified info as part of a larger scheme? Could he be a) an honest man and yet b) a guy who was set up to do what he's doing now?

If b) is true, then Snowden fits the bill perfectly. He wants to do what he's doing. He isn't lying about that. He means what he says.

Okay. Let's look at his history as reported by The Guardian.

Vader

NSA, the secret AT&T spy room, 2 Israeli companies, and loss of American privacy

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Boom. Explosive revelations. The NSA is using telecom giants to spy on anybody and everybody, in a program called PRISM.

But the information is not new.

Three books have been written about the super-secret NSA, and James Bamford has written them all.

In 2008, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewed Bamford as his latest book, The Shadow Factory, was being released.

Bamford explained that, in the 1990s, everything changed for NSA. Previously, they'd been able to intercept electronic communications by using big dishes to capture what was coming down to Earth from telecom satellites.

But with the shift to fiber-optic cables, NSA was shut out. So they devised new methods.

Snowflake Cold

Pentagon bracing for public dissent over climate and energy shocks

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© Les Stone/REUTERSUS domestic surveillance has targeted anti-fracking activists across the country.
NSA Prism is motivated in part by fears that environmentally-linked disasters could spur anti-government activism

Top secret US National Security Agency (NSA) documents disclosed by the Guardian have shocked the world with revelations of a comprehensive US-based surveillance system with direct access to Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants. New Zealand court records suggest that data harvested by the NSA's Prism system has been fed into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance whose members also include the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But why have Western security agencies developed such an unprecedented capacity to spy on their own domestic populations? Since the 2008 economic crash, security agencies have increasingly spied on political activists, especially environmental groups, on behalf of corporate interests. This activity is linked to the last decade of US defence planning, which has been increasingly concerned by the risk of civil unrest at home triggered by catastrophic events linked to climate change, energy shocks or economic crisis - or all three.

Comment: Read Laura Knight Jadczyk's writing's about possible future (and past) climate and political events:

Comets and the Horns of Moses
The Apocalypse: Comets, Asteroids and Cyclical Catastrophes
Tunguska, Psychopathy and the Sixth Extinction
Fire and Ice: The Day After Tomorrow

Listen to a discussion on the topic of growing concern:

SOTT Talk Radio: Climate Change, Food Shortages and the Future


Radar

Senators skipped classified briefing on NSA snooping to catch flights home

A recent briefing by senior intelligence officials on surveillance programs failed to attract even half of the Senate, showing the lack of enthusiasm in Congress for learning about classified security programs.


Many senators elected to leave Washington early Thursday afternoon instead of attending a briefing with James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency (NSA), and other officials.

The Senate held its last vote of the week a little after noon on Thursday, and many lawmakers were eager to take advantage of the short day and head back to their home states for Father's Day weekend.

Only 47 of 100 senators attended the 2:30 briefing, leaving dozens of chairs in the secure meeting room empty as Clapper, Alexander and other senior officials told lawmakers about classified programs to monitor millions of telephone calls and broad swaths of Internet activity. The room on the lower level of the Capitol Visitor Center is large enough to fit the entire Senate membership, according to a Senate aide.

The Hill was not provided the names of who did, and who didn't, attend the briefing.


Comment: Ask the NSA, they'll analyze the metadata and tell you exactly who was or wasn't there.