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| #OCCUPYBLACKBOX - NSA's latest to be at Ft. Meade, Md. $565MLN |
It’s a pretty sad spectacle watching the US Congress toading up to the National Security Agency. With the exception of a few stalwarts like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and to a lesser extent Ron Wyden (D-OR), most of the talk in the halls of Congress is about how to keep the army of Washington private contractors from accessing too many of the government’s secrets (which need to be protected by government employees!), and about whether to try NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden for treason.
NSA Director James Clapper was able to lie bald-facedly to the Senate Intelligence Committee last week without even a reprimand, much less a contempt citation, claiming that the NSA does not spy on millions of Americans’ telecommunications. That type of behavior by members of the executive branch makes a laughing stock out of Congress, but the members of Congress don’t seem to care. They know that they are already viewed as corrupt and loathsome toadies by the broad spectrum of Americans who continue to elect them to office, their collective approval rating now having fallen to a record low of 10% (who are those 10%, anyhow, the extended families of the members of Congress, or dead people in Chicago whose names are being forged on polling forms?). I guess the attitude among Congresspersons must be that they don’t have anything to lose by being accommodating to the march of the national security state. They have hit bottom already.
Poor Snowden, who has put his life on the line in an attempt to try and wake up the somnolent American public to how our free society has been hijacked by a fascist consortium of security agencies and private corporations, has to watch as the broad mass of Americans turn away from the news and switch to the endless stream of police dramas, where the Constitution is viewed as an anachronistic impediment to justice, and the cops are all good guys dedicated to protecting the rest of us.
The frightened and vengeful police state is intent on shutting Snowden down.
Fortunately, Snowden is no slouch, and has given himself some personal insurance in the form of downloaded information that, as he put it in his initial television interview from Hong Kong, could “shut down” the US intelligence machine overnight. He’s already shown his enemies in the White House and the NSA his power, by dropping the information to the South China Morning Post that his files show the US has been at least as an aggressive an international hacker as has China, hacking into the main Internet switching systems in both China and Hong Kong.
That news seems to have gotten China’s attention...
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent three-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1803
1 comment:
Dave, in order to "be selective" by searching only on certain key words within ANY of these communication modes, you can not have "real people" sitting and listening to these alleged long-playing tapes in real-time or reading every email or letter or fax or memo. That would mean 3/4 of all the people in the USA would be sending messages while 1/4 of all the people in the USA would have to be monitoring or listening to or reading these messages 24/7/365. And we have just established that there is not enough disk storage space available manufactured since 2000 to "store all audio based messages" or to "scan and digitize all written communications" for later selective culling, monitoring or processing by computing devices. Mostly because there are just not enough "computing cycles" available to process even a 24-hour supply of these digitized communication messages within a 24-hour period. You with me? If this type of "Big Brother" recording was really going on, don't you think that somebody in an IT Department at a major Telecom would have "gone public" already with this info? Don't you think that I would have been asked to work on either storing, retrieving or processing this info if it really existed? Or maybe I would have known the names of the departments or the computers or the persons actually performing these tasks? How could NYNEX keep this a secret from all 50,000 employees for 25 or more years? It is just not happening, my friend. Sleep easy. No one cares about what we post, what we write or what we say. The reality is that these paranoia mongers just love to spread paranoia for their own anti-Establishment, anti-computer, anti-Society and anti-Politician purposes. And right now, they are laughing their collective butts off at this entire media blitz.
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