Second Source of Surveillance State Leaks is Big Trouble for Obama

A new story that was published yesterday by the online magazine The Intercept  has the potential of being big trouble for President Barack Obama and the national surveillance state. The piece, by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux is entitled "Barack Obama's Secret Terrorist-Tracking System  by the Numbers" and expands on their earlier piece "The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist". The latest set of leaked secret documents come from 2013, after former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had fled Hawaii with his cache of information. The timing makes for a very nice birthday present for Mr. Transparency, especially since the massive expansion of the terrorist watchlist and the TIDE database has taken place on his watch.  TIDE is an acronym for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment.

According to Scahill and Devereaux "Nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group" and the story quotes a former FBI special agent as saying that “If everything is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism”. This is the point when one realizes that tracking potential "terrorists" is only a cover for a massive expansion of government surveillance and the compiling of detailed dossiers on millions of law-abiding Americans. The targets are people whose grave offense is in having views that are not compatible with those of  the criminals who are running the show. What do you think that massive NSA storage facility in Utah is for? 

With technology continuing to advance in condensing the amount of physical space that is needed to store more and more data, a facility of that size is not needed to house only that of suspected "terrorists". The phony war on terror has always been a war on Americans themselves. It is only a matter of when the conditions are right for the official government policies to be changed and the contingency plans implemented. It could be a massive financial collapse (which is coming), a war with Russia, another 9/11 style of terrorist attack as former Vice President Dick Cheney has predicted or a wild card like an Ebola virus outbreak.

CNN has confirmed that there is now a second leaker. In a story published on Tuesday entitled "New leaker disclosing U.S. secrets, government concludes" from which I excerpt:

The federal government has concluded there's a new leaker exposing national security documents in the aftermath of surveillance disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, U.S. officials tell CNN.

Proof of the newest leak comes from national security documents that formed the basis of a news story published Tuesday by the Intercept, the news site launched by Glenn Greenwald, who also published Snowden's leaks.

The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration.

The article cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left the United States to avoid criminal charges.

Greenwald has suggested there was another leaker. In July, he said on Twitter "it seems clear at this point" that there was another.

Government officials have been investigating to find out that identity.

Those who trivialize the surveillance as being largely directed towards Muslims are short-sighted and living in denial. This is not the only government database or tracking system, there are other more secret ones buried deep within the bowels of the alphabet soup agencies. Take for example "Main Core" which was revealed in 2008 by Christopher Ketcham in his story for Radar Magazine, "The Last Roundup" about a top secret U.S. government database that targeted political dissidents in a time of "national emergency". "Main Core" is in all probability housed within some component of the massive Department of Homeland Security. I strongly encourage readers to check out the Ketcham story as it offers the context missing in the stories based on the Snowden leaks. I excerpt briefly from "The Last Roundup":

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a "national emergency." Executive orders issued over the last three decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a trigger.

Given the uproar from conservatives over the apparent targeting of political groups, primarily the so-called Tea Party by Obama's IRS Gestapo, it is both surprising and dismaying that there isn't similar outrage over the NSA surveillance programs. Liberals are also largely silent, when it is their guy who is running amok everything is fine but they would have been shrieking for George W. Bush's head on a platter for something like this.

This is a time when Americans need to be made aware of the massive abuses of power of the Executive Branch under Obama who is able to get away the expansion of the surveillance-police state in ways that no other U.S. President ever has before.

Anti-Spying Blimp Flown Over Massive NSA Data Storage Facility in Utah

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.  

DiFi is an Enormous Hypocrite

In a classic case of the injurious treatment of one who enjoys the exalted status of being above the law and therefore free to operate with impunity Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman blew her stack on Tuesday morning. DiFi, who has served as the impenetrable firewall of cellulite standing between the NSA Stasi and efforts to bring it under control for a spree of unconstitutional mass surveillance and data-mining doesn’t like it quite so much when the shoe is on the other hoof. The CIA, arguably the foremost terrorist entity on the face of God’s green Earth since its inception in 1947  seems to have been caught trolling through committee computers for information relating to a suppressed report on the agency’s role in the torture programs that took place during the reign of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

With her chins trembling like so much pink JELL-O the pride of California erupted for the cameras on the Senate floor raging against the CIA for - and get this - violating the Fourth Amendment. Raging for the maximum effect DiFi bellowed “I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers embodied in the Constitution” and that “Besides the Constitutional implications, the CIA’s search may also have violated the Forth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333 which prohibits the CIA from conductiong domestic searches or surveillance".  Now just let all of that sink in for just a moment.

First off, Senator Feinstein wouldn’t know the Constitution if it sneaked up behind here and bit her in the ass when you consider her ongoing protection of the surveillance/warfare state and the myriad of crimes that are committed by it every single day against the little people. Other than the reigning king of Michigan’s safely gerrymandered 8th Congressional district, the foaming at the mouth fascist Mike Rogers there has been no bigger defender of the unconstitutional spying on millions upon millions of law-abiding American citizens without bothering with that pesky Constitution in regards to obtaining  warrants or for that matter recognizing probable cause. She has prevented any and all accountability for the menace from Fort Meade and has actually been working towards getting a bill passed that actually protects the power of the NSA to spy on everybody - except her of course. That she only manages to get up in arms when it is her own self and her own committee that are being spied on it is the utmost in hypocrisy. Not that anyone should ever bother to expect anything else from the rancid assembly of corrupt bitches and bastards who have occupied Congress, turned it into a money processing machine for corporate, military, big energy and foreign interests and feel that they are some sort of American royalty. Invoking the Constitution is laughable for the reigning queen of its violation.

Then there is the mention of that mysterious Executive Order 12333 put into place by Ronald Reagan. This is one document that certainly deserves scrutiny for it has been used as some sort of divine mandate to run roughshod over the civil liberties of everyone that Feinstein's hallowed NSA is currently accumulating massive and all-inclusive electronic dossiers on to be stored in restricted buildings the size of football stadiums for some vague future use that at best will be used to set up a system based on Philip K. Dick's "Pre-Crime" and at worst the equivalent of Gestapo style lists for apprehension, persecution and disappearing. This order if anything is the proverbial elephant in the room and the lid of secrecy must be pried off of the deep state sewer so that the American public can see exactly what sort of government malevolence has been spawned by it - that is what democracy is about is it not? 

Despite the odious messenger it is good to see the CIA finally taking some well-deserved flak, I am sure that Obama's hand-picked director John Brennan has been ecstatic with all of the attention being focused on the NSA while his own thugs are able to engage in their criminality out of the limelight. That is about to change because as of this morning the firestorm over Feinstein's hissy fit continues and she is getting backing from the neocon beltway propaganda organ The Washington Post, notably in a column by Dana Milbank - allegedly another member of Skull and Bones, the elitist Yale secret society that Secretary of State John Kerry also belongs to. In the Milbank column which is entitled “Allegations of CIA spying on the Senate deserve investigation” I excerpt the following:

President Obama’s foes have been trying for years to uncover scandal in his administration. But the most damning allegation of wrongdoing was leveled on the Senate floor Tuesday morning — by a friend.

California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, has been an ally of Obama and a staunch defender of the administration during the controversy over the National Security Agency’s surveillance programs. So her credibility could not be questioned when she went public, reluctantly, to accuse Obama’s CIA of illegal and unconstitutional actions: violating the separation of powers by searching the committee’s computers and intimidating congressional staffers with bogus legal threats.

All of this was allegedly being done to keep quiet information about the CIA’s detention and interrogation programs during the George W. Bush administration. Feinstein said that the CIA’s actions may have violated the Constitution’s speech-and-debate clause and the Fourth Amendment, not to mention criminal law and the ban on domestic spying by the CIA.

This is a serious scandal alright and it isn’t only Obama’s presiding over a run amok national surveillance system that he has only further empowered through his inaction. There is also the inconvenient truth that he chose not to hold the Bush regime torturers and war criminals legally accountable for their actions post-September 11, 2001, many of them that should have the perpetrators and those who provided legal cover such as John Yoo who despite his interpretation of the law to include the chief executive’s right to order the crushing of a child’s testicles has landed an elite position in academia. We are an exceptional people in how we honor rather than punish our war criminals. Not that Obama broke any new ground with his ‘looking forward’ failure to punish or even bother to acknowledge the high crimes of his predecessor’s administration – Bubba Clinton let Poppy Bush and his minions slither away from their roles in Iran-Contra and Gerald Ford pardoned Richard M. Nixon.

The festival of bloviating ignoramuses that held their annual festival of the victimized at CPAC where they railed against Barack Obama for basically bullshit now have a real scandal on their plates if they choose to pursue it. This isn’t the futile tilting at windmills of trying to repeal Obamacare nor of trying to manufacture criminal complicity in the Benghazi disaster that resulted in the death of a US ambassador and others – they never had the street cred on this one anyway given their failure to hold Bush in any way accountable for 9/11 happening on his watch. They now however have Obama by the balls and have true bipartisan support for an investigation as long as DiFi’s outrage holds up, it is only a matter of whether they choose to give them a good hard squeeze.

Now is the time to impeach the bastard.