Thread: Privacy Alert! Big Brother is watching and listening, UPDATED

Follow the Money: The Secret Heart of the Secret State. The Deeper Implications of the Snowden Revelations

By Chris Floyd
Global Research, June 23, 2013
Empire Burlesque

Region: USA
Theme: Intelligence, Media Disinformation



No one, anywhere, has been writing about the deeper and wider implications of the Snowden revelations than Arthur Silber. (I hope you’re not surprised by this.) In a series of powerful, insightful essays, Silber has, among other things, laid bare the dangers of the oddly circumscribed ‘gatekeeper’ approach of the journalistic guardians (at, ironically, the Guardian) of Snowden’s secrets, particularly their slow drip-feed of carefully self-censored tidbits from the famous Powerpoint presentation that Snowden secreted from the bowels of the United Stasi of the American intelligent apparat.


Eschewing the Wikileaks approach, the guardians at the Guardian have not let us judge the material for ourselves, opting instead to adopt, unwittingly, the same approach of the apparat: “we are the keepers of knowledge, we will decide what you need to know.”

As Silber notes, this doesn’t vitiate the worth of the revelations, but it does dilute their impact, leaving gaps that the apparat — and its truly repulsive apologists all through the ‘liberal media’ — can exploit to keep muddying the waters. He explores these ramifications, and others, in “In Praise of Mess, Chaos and Panic” and “Fed Up With All the Bullshit.”

In his latest piece, “‘Intelligence, Corporatism and the Dance of Death,” he cuts to the corroded heart of the matter, the deep, dark not-so-secret secret that our secret-keepers are trying to obscure behind their blizzards of bullshit: it’s all about the Benjamins.

After noting the gargantuan outsourcing of “intelligence” to private contractors like Booz Allen — the very firm that employed Snowden — Silber gives a quick precis of the essence of state-corporate capitalism (see the originals for links):

The biggest open secret all these creepy jerks are hiding is the secret of corporatism (or what Gabriel Kolko calls “political capitalism”):

There is nothing in the world that can’t be turned into a huge moneymaker for the State and its favored friends in “private” business, at the same time it is used to amass still greater power. This is true in multiple forms for the fraud that is the “intelligence” industry.

The pattern is the same in every industry, from farming, to manufacturing, to every aspect of transportation, to the health insurance scam, to anything else you can name. In one common version, already vested interests go to the State demanding regulation and protection from “destabilizing” forces which, they claim, threaten the nation’s well-being (by which, they mean competitors who threaten their profits). The State enthusiastically complies, the cooperative lawmakers enjoying rewards of many kinds and varieties. Then they’ll have to enforce all those nifty regulations and controls. The State will do some of it but, heck, it’s complicated and time-consuming, ya know? Besides, some of the State’s good friends in “private” business can make a killing doing some of the enforcing. Give it to them! Etc. and so on.

Silber then goes on:

… But that’s chump change. The real money is elsewhere — in, for instance, foreign policy itself. You probably thought foreign policy was about dealing with threats to “national security,” spreading democracy, ensuring peace, and whatever other lying slogans they throw around like a moldy, decaying, putrid corpse. The State’s foreign policy efforts are unquestionably devoted to maintaining the U.S.’s advantages — but the advantages they are most concerned about are access to markets and, that’s right, making huge amounts of money. Despite the unending propaganda to the contrary, they aren’t terribly concerned with dire threats to our national well-being, for the simple reason that there aren’t any: “No nation would dare mount a serious attack on the U.S. precisely because they know how powerful the U.S. is — because it is not secret.”

How does the public-”private” intelligence industry make foreign policy? The NYT story offers an instructive example in its opening paragraphs:

When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi.

It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s cyberstrategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the N.S.A. and pushed the United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians.

“They are teaching everything,” one Arab official familiar with the effort said. “Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.”

See how perfect this is? All the special people are making tons of money — and, when the day arrives that the U.S. wants to ramp up its confrontational stance with Iran, well, there’s the UAE helping to “track the Iranians” with all the tools that the U.S. has given them and taught them to use. And how easy would it be to get the UAE to provide the U.S. with just the right kind of new and disturbing “intelligence” that would get lots of people screaming about the “grave Iranian threat”? You know the answer to that: easy peasy. A wink and a nod — and off the U.S. goes, with bombing runs or whatever it decides to do. But whatever it does will be determined in greatest part not by a genuine threat to U.S. national security (there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Iran’s leaders are all suicidal), but by what will make the most money for the State and its good friends.

Silber then underscores once more the highly instructive principle laid out by Robert Higgs:

I remind you once again of what I call The Higgs Principle. As I have emphasized, you can apply this principle to every significant policy in every area, including every aspect of foreign policy. Here is Robert Higgs explaining it:

As a general rule for understanding public policies, I insist that there are no persistent “failed” policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S. policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics: follow the money.

When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. policies in the Middle East to have been wildly successful, so successful that the gains they have produced for the movers and shakers in the petrochemical, financial, and weapons industries (which is approximately to say, for those who have the greatest influence in determining U.S. foreign policies) must surely be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

So U.S. soldiers get killed, so Palestinians get insulted, robbed, and confined to a set of squalid concentration areas, so the “peace process” never gets far from square one, etc., etc. – none of this makes the policies failures; these things are all surface froth, costs not borne by the policy makers themselves but by the cannon-fodder masses, the bovine taxpayers at large, and foreigners who count for nothing.

….It’s all about wealth and power. Here and there, in episodes notable only for their rarity, “the intelligence world” might actually provide a small piece of information actually related to “national security.” Again, I turn to Gabriel Kolko:

It is all too rare that states overcome illusions, and the United States is no more an exception than Germany, Italy, England, or France before it. The function of intelligence anywhere is far less to encourage rational behavior–although sometimes that occurs–than to justify a nation’s illusions, and it is the false expectations that conventional wisdom encourages that make wars more likely, a pattern that has only increased since the early twentieth century. By and large, US, Soviet, and British strategic intelligence since 1945 has been inaccurate and often misleading, and although it accumulated pieces of information that were useful, the leaders of these nations failed to grasp the inherent dangers of their overall policies. When accurate, such intelligence has been ignored most of the time if there were overriding preconceptions or bureaucratic reasons for doing so.

Silber concludes:

…The intelligence-security industry isn’t about protecting the United States or you, except for extraordinarily rare, virtually accidental occurrences. It’s about wealth and power. Yet every politician and every government functionary speaks reverently of the sacred mission and crucial importance of “intelligence” in the manner of a syphilitic preacher who clutches a tatty, moth-eaten doll of the Madonna, which he digitally manipulates by sticking his fingers in its orifices. Most people would find his behavior shockingly obscene, if they noticed it. But they don’t notice it, so mesmerized are they by the preacher with his phonily awestruck words about the holy of holies and the ungraspably noble purpose of his mission. Even as the suppurating sores on the preacher’s face ooze blood and pus, his audience can only gasp, “We must pay attention to what he says! He wants only the best for us! He’s trying to save us!”

What the preacher says — what every politician and national security official says on this subject — is a goddamned lie. The ruling class has figured out yet another way to make a killing, both figuratively and literally. They want wealth and power, and always more wealth and power. That’s what “intelligence” and “national security” is about, and nothing else at all. When you hear Keith Alexander, or James Clapper, or Barack Obama talk about “intelligence” and surveillance, how your lives depend on them, and why you must trust them to protect you if you wish to continue existing at all, think of the preacher. Think of his open sores, of the blood and pus slowly dribbling down his face.

All of them are murdering crooks running a racket. They are intent on amassing wealth and power, and they’ve stumbled on a sure-fire way to win the acquiescence, and often the approval, of most people. They are driven by the worst of motives, including their maddened knowledge that there will always remain a few people and events that they will be unable to control absolutely. For the rest of us, their noxious games are a sickening display of power at its worst. For us, on a faster or slower schedule, in ways that are more or less extreme, their lies and machinations are only a Dance of Death.

There is much more in Silber’s essays; go read them all now, if you haven’t done already.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/follow-...en-revelations

11m ago
WikiLeaks has released a statement claiming that Snowden is "bound for Ecuador" and is awaiting the processing of his application for asylum:

Mr Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower who exposed evidence of a global surveillance regime conducted by US and UK intelligence agencies, has left Hong Kong legally. He is bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.
Mr Snowden requested that WikiLeaks use its legal expertise and experience to secure his safety. Once Mr Snowden arrives in Ecuador his request will be formally processed.
Former Spanish Judge Mr Baltasar Garzon, legal director of Wikileaks and lawyer for Julian Assange has made the following statement:
"The WikiLeaks legal team and I are interested in preserving Mr Snowden’s rights and protecting him as a person. What is being done to Mr Snowden and to Mr Julian Assange - for making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest - is an assault against the people".

19m ago
Here is a copy of the United States-Ecuador extradition treaty. Ecuador, of course, would face heavy diplomatic pressure from the United States if it chose to grant Snowden asylum.

Updated 15m ago

36m ago
Here's the news of the asylum request, straight from the Twitter feed of Ecuador's foreign minister.


39m ago
Snowden reportedly seeking asylum in Ecuador

This is from AFP via Ecuador's foreign minister.


54m ago
Dominic Rushe in New York has a fuller summary of US politicians' words of warning to Russia, among others, over the Snowden case.


58m ago
Summary

It’s past midnight in Hong Kong and late evening in Moscow, so time for a summary of the events so far on a day of extraordinary drama:
• Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor whose revelations to the Guardian about the scale and scope of US spying and hacking activities has prompted global headlines, has fled Hong Kong and is now in Moscow.
• His plane arrived in Russia shortly after 5pm local time. Snowden is not believed to have a Russian visa and is thought to be staying overnight at a capsule hotel inside Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport after reportedly being met on the tarmac by diplomatic cars.
• Snowden was allowed to leave despite the US having filed a request for Hong Kong to arrest him. Hong Kong’s government said the documents sent by Washington did not fully meet legal requirements, the statement added, so Snowden was allowed to leave. It has since been reported that the US revoked Snowden’s passport on Saturday. It is not clear how he was allowed to leave Hong Kong if this happened.
• Snowden is reportedly booked on a flight on Monday from Moscow to Havana, after which he is believed to be heading for another Latin American destination, reported variously as Venezuela or Ecuador.
• The Ecuadorean ambassador to Russia is at the airport but said he had not met Snowden and was not entirely sure where he is.
• WikiLeaks has claimed in tweets it "assisted Mr Snowden's political asylum in a democratic country" and that its "legal advisers" are with him, including Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks staffer.
• There has been an angry reaction in the US to news of Snowden’s departure. Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, called Snowden “an individual who is not acting, in my opinion, with noble intent".
• Snowden's departure came on the same day the South China Morning Post carried detailed reports of claims from him about US actions against China, including allegations of the hacking of phone text messages. China has said it is “gravely concerned” about the revelations. The country’s Xinhua news agency called the US “the biggest villain in our age" when it comes to hacking.




http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/201...ng-moscow-live

http://www.alipac.us/f9/turning-tabl...-filed-281696/

Former Facebook Security Chief Works for NSA

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by Wynton Hall 23 Jun 2013, 3:59 PM PDT 6 post a comment

Facebook’s former security chief Max Kelly now works for the National Security Agency (NSA), reports the New York Times.

Kelly, whom the Center for Responsive Politics lists as having donated $1,150 to the Obama campaign in 2008, also previously worked at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). He left Facebook for the NSA in 2010, one year after the social media giant reportedly joined the NSA's top-secret PRISM program. Kelly's position at the NSA is presently unknown.
The revelation is the latest example of the growing fusion between so-called Big Data Silicon Valley tech firms and government. Indeed, given the limited pool of high tech talent, the lines between government and Big Data increasingly blur.
“These worlds overlap,” Explorist Internet upstart chief executive Philipp S. Krüger told the Times.
Kelly has previously advocated for greater information sharing between commercial enterprises and the government in battling cyber threats.
“Commercial entities and the military are dealing with the same problem,” said Kelly. “They should both understand their roles in the larger picture. There isn’t enough information shared.”
Less clear are the political implications of the growing coziness between Big Data and government, especially in the wake of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal where government agents targeted conservative groups. As the graphic below by New York Times pollster Nate Silver reveals, Silicon Valley employees overwhelmingly donate to Democrats.

Source: Five Thirty-Eight Blog/New York Times
Some exceptions stand out. Libertarian PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel backed Ron Paul, and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman ran for California governor as a Republican. But Silver says that with so many tech geeks being Democrats, the party has “access to the most talented individuals working in the field.”
Whether such partisanship bleeds over into the ever-growing information access Big Data and government agencies wield and weaponize for intelligence purposes is uncertain.
Either way, myriad policies stand to be influenced by the cronyism between Big Data and big government. Silicon Valley’s flexing of its well-funded muscles in the immigration debate provides a window into its policy-shaping power. Furthermore, things like contracting with major medical technology companies for digitization of medical records as part of Obamacare, and expanding online education in schools and colleges, all stand to benefit from the crony connections between Silicon Valley and government.
As Obama told Google employees in 2007, “what we shared is a belief in changing the world from the bottom up, not from the top down.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/23/Facebook-Securit...

NSA Leaker Seeks Asylum Where Julian Assange Found it

When National Security Agency (NSA) leaker Edward Snowden left Hong Kong during the morning hours of June 23, it was believed he was going to make a stop in Russia and then on to Cuba. Now, it has become apparent he is seeking asylum from the same country that has keep Wikileaks founder Julian Assange safe for more than 365 days--Ecuador.

Sarah Harrison – Edward Snowden’s Travel Companion – Is Top WikiLea...

Posted by Jim Hoft on Sunday, June 23, 2013, 11:58 AM

Sarah Harrison, assistant to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, thanks supporters outside Ecuador’s embassy in west London on June 21, 2012. (Business Insider)
Wikileaks announced earlier that Harrison was traveling with Edward Snowden today on his flight from Hong Kong to Moscow.
Business Insider Australia reported:

Russia’s Interfax news agency reports that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is hanging out at the Russian airport, waiting for a flight to Cuba, and is accompanied a woman named Sarah Harrison.
Harrison is the closest adviser to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who orchestrated the release of reams of classified U.S. government documents and other embarrassing information,
Wikileaks confirmed: “Miss Harrison has courageously assisted Mr. Snowden with his lawful departure from Hong Kong and is accompanying Mr. Snowden in his passage to safety.”.
Harrison is a UK citizen, journalist, legal researcher, and section editor for WikiLeaks.
She previously worked as an investigative researcher for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Centre for Investigative Journalism.
Here’s Harrison in July 2012 reading a statement from Assange — who, like Snowden, isavoiding U.S. prosecution for espionage — about the release of the Syria Files i.e., emails from the Syrian government.

Wikileaks has this on Harrison:

Sarah Harrison is a UK citizen, journalist, and legal researcher who is currently working with the WikiLeaks Legal Defense team led by former Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzon.
Miss Harrison has worked on important investigative projects that have uncovered serious human rights violations and aspects of the global surveillance industry in her capacity as a journalist and section editor for WikiLeaks, and as an investigative researcher for The Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Centre for Investigative Journalism.

UPDATE: Snowden is heading to Ecuador.

Originally Posted by AirborneSapper7

http://www.alipac.us/f9/turning-tabl...-filed-281696/

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW

TURNING THE TABLES ON THE SPIES

Lawsuits seeks to expose NSA secrets to the public

Attorney Larry Klayman has filed the first lawsuits in the NSA spying case and they are receiving a lot of attention.

In this exclusive interview, Klayman tells WND how the lawsuits could affect every American.

Klayman is a WND columnist, the founder of both Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, a prosecutor in the Reagan administration Justice Department and a member of the trial team that broke up the AT&T monopoly.

He is suing President Obama, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, the director of the NSA, the NSA, the CEO of Verizon, the U.S. Department of Justice and Judge Roger Vinson of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court.

Klayman alleges the NSA’s massive telephone surveillance program violates the “reasonable expectation of privacy, free speech and association, right to be free of unreasonable searches and seizures and due process rights.”

The suits are class-actions on behalf of everyone in the country but also on behalf of Charles Strange, the father of a Navy SEAL who tragically died on August 6, 2011, in an attack in Afghanistan.

In this exclusive interview, Klayman and Strange tell WND in detail what led them to file suit.

1st Video at the Page Link: http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/turning-t...-on-the-spies/


Klayman told WND he believed the outrage over the NSA spying scandal could help unite the country. WND asked him how the left and right could come together.

2nd Video at the Page Link: http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/turning-t...-on-the-spies/

As WND reported, Strange and other parents of the SEALS who were killed believe their sons were targeted for retaliation and ambushed by the Taliban after Vice President Joe Biden revealed, and the administration then confirmed, that it was a SEAL Team VI unit that had killed Osama bin Laden just three months earlier.

Strange says his phone has been tapped ever since he began criticizing the administration.

3rd Video at the Page Link: http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/turning-t...-on-the-spies/

WND mentioned the president assured us no one from the government is listening to the content of our phone calls unless a court has given permission.
However, WND reported a Democratic congressman who came out of a closed briefing last week said that’s not true, any number of analysts at the NSA can obtain the content from any phone call or email if they choose to do so, without a court authorization.

WND asked Klayman if he believes that has happened in this case.

4th Video at the Page Link: http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/turning-t...-on-the-spies/

Strange told WND he strongly believes there is a cover up of his son’s death that goes all the way to the top.

5th Video at the Page Link: http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/turning-t...-on-the-spies/

http://www.wnd.com/2013/06/turning-t...-on-the-spies/

Palin: “Snowden Is Not The Problem; The Problem Is Government Violating Our Fourth Amendment Right”

By RandPaulReview On June 23, 2013 · Add Comment · In Liberty




Related posts:

conservative • Edward Snowden • Fourth Amendment • government • rand paul •republican • Rights • Sarah Palin • tea party


http://www.randpaulreview.com/2013/0...endment-right/

1. Ben Swann on Obama’s Process For Government Assassination Of US Citizens [Video]
2. Rand Paul Op-Ed: The moment of responsibility for Hillary Clinton
3. Rand Paul: “A President Who Really Believes In Civil Liberties Would Have Vetoed The NDAA Bill!”
4. Rand Paul: How Republicans Can Win California
5. Rand Paul: ‘Constellation Of Scandals’ Means Obama Is Losing ‘Moral Authority To Lead The Nation’
6. Rand Paul to Introduce Fourth Amendment Restoration Act of 2013
7. Ron Paul: Governments Cannot Make Us “Safe”
8. Rand Paul Blasts Dick Cheney: ‘Someone Should Have Been Removed From Office’ For Pre-9/11 Failures

http://www.alipac.us/f19/mark-zucker...4/#post1351647