Monday, March 10, 2008
Welcome to George's Wild West Show
The idea of the United States of America as a nation of citizens bound by the rule of laws is close to shattered forever.0 comments
George W. Bush (Bush 19%) and Dick Cheney have combined to oversee the complete dismantling of the American legal system.
America is now a "wide open town," in the parlance of past lawless towns and locales, and Mafia-run places. It's a return to the Wild West. We're probably not too far away from train robberies and bank robberies, and folks shooting each other down on the streets, just as in the 1880s.
If the President of the United States can be a crook, and get away with everything he chooses, why shouldn't the country's spy agencies, which have always run up hard against powerful congressional oversight, and had always been forced to curtail their zeal in doing whatever hair-brained scheme popped into their heads.
A few years ago, the Pentagon got caught hatching a system called Total Information Awareness (TIA), headed by Iran-Contra criminal Admiral John Poindexter. It was meant to find out and list everything about everybody in the United States who wasn't a member of the ruling elite. That, of course, means YOU. As you would imagine, when it was disclosed, Congress killed it. But just as in every horror movie you've ever seen, you sense there's plenty of running time left, so you know the evil will pull itself back together and live to destroy the good and the innocent another day, or in another movie.
And everyone, of course, is totally against this evil as a concept, unless THEY get to be the one who gets to use it. Then, it's Lord of the Ring time.
Well... guess what?
It's Alive!!!!!!!!
TIA has been re-mantled over at the NSA.
It's so bad now, that even the now-Rupert Murdoch-owned and ultra-conservative The Wall St. Journal is freaked out. One could safely assume that Murdoch would love to see a secret police force here in his adopted homeland, but the NSA's and FBI's activities are too much even for this right-wing crackpot.
Keep in mind, that it's the the Republicans who have done this to what's left of the Constitution.According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called "transactional" data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counter-terrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.
The NSA's enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world's main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.
The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called "black programs" whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.
It isn't clear how many of the different kinds of data are combined and analyzed together in one database by the NSA. An intelligence official said the agency's work links to about a dozen anti-terror programs in all.
Officials repeatedly avow that all safeguards are being met. Then, information on how they ARE ACTUALLY dealing with what they consume appears. Guess what? It never matches what they've been feeding us along the way. Wow. What a shock.
It's more like this:Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting with some sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI, the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated with that item -- and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city—for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans—the government's spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.
The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.
The information doesn't generally include the contents of conversations or emails. But it can give such transactional information as a cellphone's location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting. For an email, the data haul can include the identities of the sender and recipient and the subject line, but not the content of the message.
Remember in the recent past, when Republicans were all hot to trot over "Tort Reform"? That was their corporate way to keep you from using the courts to hold them to account for injurious actions their corporate leadership signed off on. The backbone of this country has been a court system where the smallest could demand redress of grievance on a level playing field with the greatest. So, the courts had to be killed or tamed.
Are you shocked then that this is where the nastiest fight of our country's survival is being waged today?The White House wants to give companies that assist government surveillance immunity from lawsuits alleging an invasion of privacy, but Democrats in Congress have been blocking it. The Terrorist Surveillance Program has spurred 38 lawsuits against companies. Current and former intelligence officials say telecom companies' concern comes chiefly because they are giving the government unlimited access to a copy of the flow of communications, through a network of switches at U.S. telecommunications hubs that duplicate all the data running through it. It isn't clear whether the government or telecom companies control the switches, but companies process some of the data for the NSA, the current and former officials say.
On Friday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released a letter warning colleagues to look more deeply into how telecommunications data are being accessed, citing an allegation by the head of a New York-based computer security firm that a wireless carrier that hired him was giving unfettered access to data to an entity called "Quantico Circuit." Quantico is a Marine base that houses the FBI Academy; senior FBI official Anthony DiClemente said the bureau "does not have 'unfettered access' to any communication provider's network."
The political debate over the telecom information comes as intelligence agencies seek to change traditional definitions of how to balance privacy rights against investigative needs. Donald Kerr, the deputy director of national intelligence, told a conference of intelligence officials in October that the government needs new rules. Since many people routinely post details of their lives on social-networking sites such as MySpace, he said, their identity shouldn't need the same protection as in the past. Instead, only their "essential privacy," or "what they would wish to protect about their lives and affairs," should be veiled, he said, without providing examples.
As with every crime conspiracy everywhere, live or in fiction, it's when you see the co-conspirators falling out with each other that all hell is about to hit the fan.
God save our Nation.
posted by Gotham 5:26 PM
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