In an attempt to bring publicity to the mass surveillance and data-mining activities of the American Stasi a blimp with the message "Illegal Spying Below" was flown over that massive data storage facility that the NSA has built in Bluffdale, Utah. The blimp was a joint venture between three disparate activist groups Greenpeace, The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tenth Amendment Center in an alliance that confounds the corrupt two-party power structure and the phony left-right paradigm and proves that people can set aside differences and unite against a shared enemy. I have long advocated for a coming together of libertarians, progressives and principled conservatives to push for a restoration of the rule of law as set forth in the US Constitution and the defeat of the creeping fascism that is now evolving into full-blown totalitarianism - largely thanks to the NSA - because if it isn't stopped or at least significantly slowed, then nothing else is really going to matter.
The Bluffdale center provides the government and those with the money to purchase political clout as well as vested special interests with a veritable wet dream of locking down their power for perpetuity by allowing for the hoarding and storage of every aspect of a person's life so that when a threat to the system is identified then a case will be able to be built for their prosecution and imprisonment. There has already been a revelation of "parallel construction" activities in which law enforcement uses data illegally provided by the NSA for targeting purposes and then goes about building a completely phony case against the individual. This is what one might expect to exist in a classical totalitarian state where government goons like the Gestapo, the NKVD, SAVAK or actual Stasi operated with impunity to crush dissent and to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis - it can happen here.
The world of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report and Pre-Crime is coming and coming soon once that data center is fully operational and stocked with information and the political climate dictates it. The NSA has always been about going after dissent and not any bullshit war on terror unless one realizes that the rogue state views us, it's own citizens as the "terrorists". The real targets - and I am anxiously awaiting the "imminent" Glenn Greenwald story on Snowden's list - will be environmentalists, anti-government activists and writers, human rights activists and lawyers, supporters of Wikileaks, Anonymous and the Occupy movement, antiwar activists, climate change activists, privacy advocates, anti-corporate activists, ACLU members, bloggers and journalists, BDS activists and any other organization that serves to challenge the corrupt elite and those sympathetic to anti-establishment views. The crimes of hijacking the system, destroying democracy and stealing from the poor and middle class to enrich the elite have already been perpetrated and it is the job of the NSA and it's corporate partners to ensure that they are never discovered or challenged.
Other than the "Illegal Spying Below" blimp another NSA related story from Friday is the findings of a transparency report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) which is the agency headed up by pathological liar James Clapper. For what it's worth the report claims that the NSA only actually queried the phone records of 248 Americans, a ridiculously low number considering the extent of the mass surveillance and probably more of the total bullshit that has been shoveled down the throats of Americans by an agency that has no inclination to provide anything remotely resembling the truth. Per a story from The Guardian entitled "NSA queried phone records of just 248 people despite massive data sweep" from which I excerpt:
The National Security Agency was interested in the phone data of fewer than 250 people believed to be in the United States in 2013, despite collecting the phone records of nearly every American.
As acknowledged in the NSA's first-ever disclosure of statistics about how it uses its broad surveillance authorities, released Friday, the NSA performed queries of its massive phone records troves for 248 "known or presumed US persons" in 2013.
AND
The number of "selectors" NSA queried from that data trove, a term referring to an account and not necessarily an individual user, was 423 in 2013, an increase from the "less than 300 times" it searched through the data trove in 2012, according to former deputy NSA director John Inglis.
"This transparency report is significant because it shows for the first time on an annual basis both targets of business-record orders and the number of US persons specifically targeted with these metadata queries," said Alan Butler, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"These are critical numbers to review when talking about a program that sweeps in the records of hundreds of millions of Americans."
Considering the billions if not trillions of dollars invested in the surveillance colossus the "248" number is suspect for several reasons. First and foremost is that if that is a true number (just for argument's sake let's say it is) then the entire surveillance state Gomorrah is an enormous waste of money that exists to loot the American taxpayers to create jobs for the millions who are employed by the intelligence agencies, their extensive networks of contractors and the infrastructure that the politicians who benefit continue to fund. We have far too many legitimate problems in this country to throw money into an domestic surveillance apparatus that only finds "248" targets. Secondly, these are ODNI figures and again, James Clapper is a man who perjured himself in front of Congress so really, how much credence can possibly be put into such a report. Thirdly, the numbers are subject to being cooked in that the NSA has that extensive network of contractors as well as foreign partners such as the UK's GCHQ which as has been already revealed by the Snowden documents as engaged in critical activities such as sexual blackmail so as to ostensibly lend the NSA plausible deniability. The report just doesn't pass the smell test, again I excerpt from The Guardian: story:
"These are critical numbers to review when talking about a program that sweeps in the records of hundreds of millions of Americans."
Some privacy advocates expressed scepticism about how genuine and accurate an account of NSA surveillance the report actually provides.
"The ODNI report calls itself into question by saying they're providing numbers, but immediately saying those numbers are only true to the extent the intelligence community believes it can release them without compromising sensitive information," said Amie Stepanovich of the digital rights group Access.
"The numbers could be much greater, and made to look smaller because of what the intelligence community calls preserving intelligence programs.
Weasel words if there ever were any - "preserving intelligence programs" - that is just more of the same Orwellian nonsense like calling torture "enhanced interrogation techniques" but sadly the bastards continue to get away with it all.
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