NSA Collecting Far More Info on Non-Targets per WAPO Story

According to a new story based on documents obtained by former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden there are vastly more innocent victims of mass surveillance than acknowledged. The story broken by The Washington Post and written by Pulitzer Prize winner Barton Gellman along with Julie Tate and Ashkan Soltani reports that 90 percent of of those whose data was collected - at least according to this sample being analyzed- were not legitimate targets of the spying but rather they were innocent internet users both domestically and abroad. The sample is described as "roughly 160,000 intercepted e-mail and instant-message conversations, some of them hundreds of pages long, and 7,900 documents taken from more than 11,000 online accounts" which shows that the numbers of the ballyhooed just released PCLOB "independent" executive branch report are total bullshit.

The is entitled "In NSA-intercepted data, those not targeted far outnumber the foreigners who are"   states that:

Nine of 10 account holders found in a large cache of intercepted conversations, which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden provided in full to The Post, were not the intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.

Many of them were Americans. Nearly half of the surveillance files, a strikingly high proportion, contained names, e-mail addresses or other details that the NSA marked as belonging to U.S. citizens or residents. NSA analysts masked, or “minimized,” more than 65,000 such references to protect Americans’ privacy, but The Post found nearly 900 additional e-mail addresses, unmasked in the files, that could be strongly linked to U.S. citizens or U.S.residents.

The surveillance files highlight a policy dilemma that has been aired only abstractly in public. There are discoveries of considerable intelligence value in the intercepted messages — and collateral harm to privacy on a scale that the Obama administration has not been willing to address.

Not that this is news, despite the ongoing denials from the government and from President Barack Obama himself only chumps and suckers would take anything that these people say at face value given the level of systemic corruption and their history of fibbing but when such a story does run - especially within the state-corporate media it is evidence that the powers that be (TPTB) even can see the slow awakening to their arrogance, incompetence and criminality.

The WAPO story goes on to provide multiple examples of those who are caught up in the dragnet collection and states that the extra data not target related as:

Many other files, described as useless by the analysts but nonetheless retained, have a startlingly intimate, even voyeuristic quality. They tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes. The daily lives of more than 10,000 account holders who were not targeted are catalogued and recorded nevertheless.

And in one section describes the information collected as:

… medical records sent from one family member to another, résumés from job hunters and academic transcripts of schoolchildren. In one photo, a young girl in religious dress beams at a camera outside a mosque.

Scores of pictures show infants and toddlers in bathtubs, on swings, sprawled on their backs and kissed by their mothers. In some photos, men show off their physiques. In others, women model lingerie, leaning suggestively into a webcam or striking risque poses in shorts and bikini tops.

Despite the ongoing denials and obstruction tactic of continuing to insist that the NSA is only collecting "metadata" the WAPO story makes it evident that content is not only being collected but stored. Where the story doesn't go, and perhaps the drip, drip, drip nature of these revelations may eventually lead (especially if there is indeed a second NSA leaker as has been speculated) is that the additional information can be used for blackmail, intimidation and turning innocent people into government informants - specifically note the reference to pictures of "infants and toddlers in bathtubs" which could be interpreted as being child pornography. Not that I would expect the WAPO to go there and while having a good share of new information it just seems to be more than a bit of a limited hangout in that it doesn't have the real stuff - maybe Glenn Greenwald still will be able to unleash some journalistic shock and awe but after just caving in to to the US government skeptics will always wonder whether that too will be a limited hangout.

There are though other aspects to the Post story that are of particular interest including:

In order to allow time for analysis and outside reporting, neither Snowden nor The Post has disclosed until now that he obtained and shared the content of intercepted communications. The cache Snowden provided came from domestic NSA operations under the broad authority granted by Congress in 2008 with amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA content is generally stored in closely controlled data repositories, and for more than a year, senior government officials have depicted it as beyond Snowden’s reach.

Which shows that former NSA Stasi Commandant General Keith Alexander who is  now whoring himself out to Wall Street is as much a liar as DNI James Clapper. Gellman and his fellow reporters go on to point this out:

As recently as May, shortly after he retired as NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander denied that Snowden could have passed FISA content to journalists.

“He didn’t get this data,” Alexander told a New Yorker reporter. “They didn’t touch —”

“The operational data?” the reporter asked.

“They didn’t touch the FISA data,” Alexander replied. He added, “That database, he didn’t have access to.”

It would seem that the information contradicts the good retired general who is either an idiot or full of shit and likely a bit of both. It sure didn't take the man who was at one time the most powerful man in the government if not the world for the sheer reach of his ability to gather information. Information that he is apparently now cashing in on like so many other former high officials who travel through that revolving door from supposed government service to the private sector. Considering that nearly all of this creepy and Orwellian surveillance, data-mining and sick voyeurism as well as the circumventing of the Constitution occurred on his watch if there is ever accountability then he should be the first in line for a life in a prison cell for his crimes against the American people.

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.  

SOMALGET: NSA Recording all Cell Phone Calls in Bahamas

In a new story on the authoritarian American Stasi that is the NSA it is now out that the agency is actually recording the content of telephone calls - in the Bahamas. The story that was published on Monday at First Look Media's The Intercept and was written by Ryan Devereaux, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras. It is entitled "Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahamas" and reveals that the NSA is indeed doing more than just "data collection".

The story is of particular interest in that it is a key piece of the puzzle being that the Bahamas are a haven for offshore banking and others including myself have long speculated that some of the more secret aspects of NSA surveillance programs include money laundering. This is speculative on my part but it fits the pattern and pathology and is far more likely than not one of the real functions of the NSA instead of the massive hoax needed to keep the money flowing in and ensure public compliance. I eagerly await that really big story that Greenwald in his GQ interview promises: "There's a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I'm saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece".The buildup continues and when it is published let us hope that it does the trick to mobilize Americans against the out of control NSA.

The program used in the Bahamas is named SOMALGET - a part of the already revealed MYSTIC that is described in a story published by the Washington Post story entitled "NSA surveillance program reaches 'into the past' to retrieve, replay phone calls" - according to The Intercept "was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government" by being essentially piggy-backed on top of an existing DEA program. I excerpt the following from The Intercept:

SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called "metadata" -- information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls -- SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.

All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere.

This blows the official US Government fairy tale of not recording content out of the water and once again catches Barack Obama in a lie or at the very least a prevarication reminiscent of Slick Willie. Obama is ever the artful dodger while he continues to defend the "modest encroachments on privacy" by his NSA goons while the corrupt surveillance state stooges in Congress seek to exploit public lethargy to ensure that any "reforms" will be cosmetic changes at best. The government may not be "listening" to calls per se but the dragnet surveillance will provide it or it's foreign and private industry partners with the ability to do exactly that. The big lie is that it has always been about "metadata" but that is deceptive in that the metadata is the necessary indexing system to get at the actual content. As former NSA official turned whistleblower Thomas Drake explainedin an interview with Rob Kall of OpEd News:

But they're desperate to use the meta data, somehow they're justified in collecting it without any warrants by the way, except the equivalent of a general order which is a violation to the constitution, the very thing we had in part a revolution over against the crown two hundred and forty years ago, here the meta data itself is somehow justified because oh it's not worse than that, meaning we need that because that's the only way we can figure out where the needles are except you're copying everything.

So it's not just meta data. But they're restricting even the conversation, even the president only talked when you really look at it, he only talked about mass collection of phone data and remember they said they don't have location information of subscriber, take a look at the Verizon order that was disclosed by Snowden through reporters and journalists. Meta data on a phone record by definition includes location and subscriber information.

That's the nature of meta data. This idea that they don't have it, oh maybe it's under that program they don't obtain it well they must obtain it by some other. That's like taking the white pages and cutting out the address and obviously there's a subscriber who has a location and a name.  That's why you have look up tables.

That gargantuan NSA facility in Utah is not about just the collection and storage of metadata - it is too big for that alone so while its real function continues to be denied - particularly by amoral members of Congress like Senator Dianne Feinstein, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, they are lying.

The Intercept story is a fascinating and ominous read and an obvious move from the existence and capability of already revealed NSA and affiliate programs as are published in Greenwald's new book "No Place to Hide"as well as available for download separate from the book in that new ground is being broken here as to the actual big picture. I excerpt the following:

If the U.S. government wanted to make a case for surveillance in the Bahamas, it could point to the country's status as a leading haven for tax cheats, corporate shell games, and a wide array of black-market traffickers. The State Department considers the Bahamas both a "major drug-transit country" and a "major money laundering country" (a designation it shares with more than 60 other nations, including the U.S.). According to the International Monetary Fund, as of 2011 the Bahamas was home to 271 banks and trust companies with active licenses. At the time, the Bahamian banks held $595 billion in U.S. assets.

But the NSA documents don't reflect a concerted focus on the money launderers and powerful financial institutions -- including numerous Western banks -- that underpin the black market for narcotics in the Bahamas. Instead, an internal NSA presentation from 2013 recounts with pride how analysts used SOMALGET to locate an individual who "arranged Mexico-to-United States marijuana shipments" through the U.S. Postal Service.

AND

The presentation doesn't say whether the NSA shared the information with the DEA. But the drug agency's Special Operations Divison has come under fire for improperly using classified information obtained by the NSA to launch criminal investigations -- and then creating false narratives to mislead courts about how the investigations began. The tactic -- known as parallel construction -- was first reported by Reuters last year, and is now under investigation by the Justice Department's inspector general.

So: Beyond a desire to bust island pot dealers, why would the NSA choose to apply a powerful collection tool such as SOMALGET against the Bahamas, which poses virtually no threat to the United States?

The answer may lie in a document that characterizes the Bahamas operation as a "test bed for system deployments, capabilities, and improvements" to SOMALGET. The country's small population -- fewer than 400,000 residents -- provides a manageable sample to try out the surveillance system's features. Since SOMALGET is also operational in one other country, the Bahamas may be used as a sort of guinea pig to beta-test improvements and alterations without impacting the system's operations elsewhere.

The use of Bahamas as a beta-test environment "guinea pig" for a rollout (or tweaking of an existing system) on a larger scale - the entire United States - makes sense in that the stopping "terrorism" justification for the NSA programs has always been hogwash. Former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden hit the target in an open letter to the Brazilian people per The Guardian:

"These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power."

That is the power to crush dissent and to enable criminality through subterfuge, to get the US taxpayer to fund their own enslavement and to use the data gleaned through mass unconstitutional surveillance conducted without probable cause through either blackmail or parallel construction or worse to silence critics once and forever. Another former NSA official turned whistleblower William Binney hits it dead on in an interview that he did with Nick Gillespie for Reason magazine:

Binney: That's the reason I've been coming out publicly-because where I see it going is toward a totalitarian state. I mean you've got the NSA doing all this collection of material on all of its citizens. That's what the SS, the Gestapo, the Stasi, the KGB, and the NKVD did. These are the people I worked for for 30 years.

Reason: A common feature in East Germany or in the Soviet Union was that you'd look out the window and you'd see your neighbor being hustled out and then nobody ever talked about them again. Is that really happening in the U.S., or is it likely to?

Binney: Well, they're using that data that the NSA is collecting to arrest people right now, through the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI. They're already doing that. And they don't have a warrant so they have to do a parallel construction to go out and find other material that would substitute for that.

Reason: Wait. So you're saying then that the DEA uses data that they gather from an intelligence agency-

Binney: From NSA.

Reason:-and then they can't say "we got this tip from NSA so we're arresting you," but they know that this person is doing this, that, and the other thing so then they go out and track them?

Binney: Actually, they go out and arrest them. In the article at Reuters they said, "We were told simply to go to this parking lot, wait for this truck to come in, and when it comes in and parks over there, go arrest them. Bring the drug dogs in and go find the drugs."

The political persecutions and frame-ups are a given we have already seen what the government is willing to do with COINTELPRO. What remains to be disclosed is the probable involvement of the NSA in rigging the system for those with the juice by facilitating money laundering - the monitoring of financial transactions works both ways and the profits can be enormous. This is after all a gangster state anymore.

Finally in "Data Pirates of the Caribbean" there is a reference to that giant elephant in the living room of what exactly gives the NSA the authorization to go rogue in such a manner to avoid oversight and that is President Ronald Reagan's Executive Order 12333:

SOMALGET operates under Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era rule establishing wide latitude for the NSA and other intelligence agencies to spy on other countries, as long as the attorney general is convinced the efforts are aimed at gathering foreign intelligence. In 2000, the NSA assured Congress that all electronic surveillance performed under 12333 "must be conducted in a manner that minimizes the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of information about unconsenting U.S. persons." In reality, many legal experts point out, the lack of judicial oversight or criminal penalties for violating the order render the guidelines meaningless.

The biggest missing piece to all of the NSA revelations of the past year as well as the ongoing dismantling of the US Constitution to strip citizens of protections and protect a corrupt political and financial elite is HOW LONG has such activity been taking place? If you use Executive Order 12333 as a marker then such activities would have had to have been on the radar since at least December of 1981. That would oddly coincide with a sordid affair that has been flushed down the memory hole which was the Reagan administration's involvement in the theft and alteration

of INSLAW Corporation's highly advanced PROMIS software, a precursor of the programs in use today.

But that is a story for another time, as for now we just wait for the other shoe to drop on the Snowden revelations.

Smear Machine to Be Unleashed on Greenwald

Tuesday marks the release date of the long-awaited book by Polk Award winning journalist Glenn Greenwald on the NSA and the Edward Snowden leaks. No Place to Hide officially came out today and contains additional revelations on the unconstitutional exploits of the American Stasi at Ft. Meade as well as the suffocating surveillance state that we all must live under in The Homeland of the 21st Century. While I have yet to read the book - I have it on order - early accounts report that in addition to the Snowden story that there will also be material included on the NSA intercepting US manufactured routers for the implanting of surveillance tools, that Obama darling Susan Rice enlisted the NSA to assist in spying on diplomats and more. Unfortunately the book seems to be something of a tease as the author is still holding back the really good stuff which will likely be published when they finally get their shit together over at First Look Media's The Intercept.

As of early this morning the establishment attack dogs have yet to be loosed but they are coming and probably less for what Greenwald writes in the book than for some of the statements from a GQ interview entitled "The Man Who Knows Too Much" which is either here or as excepted for easy consumption over at the libertarian financial blog Zero Hedge. Some of the better chunks of red meat that will be thrown to the wolves the sun sets tonight are:

What do you think would happen if Snowden were to fly from, say, Moscow to New York today?

I think it would be a huge media circus, and then he would be instantly arrested and probably rendered incommunicado for the entire duration of his judicial proceeding on the grounds that he has classified information that could damage the United States. The prosecutors would say he would have to be kept away from media. He would just be disappeared. Rendered completely invisible and mute.

[Wonderful analysis on the current state of our judicial system and very true. There are authoritarian fiends right now who are absolutely drooling over the prospect of getting their hands on Snowden and torturing him to death]

AND –

You call out a few other names in this book, including David Gregory and Tim Russert. Why are these guys targets in your mind?

I think most TV journalists, like all those Sunday-talk-show hosts like David Gregory and Bob Schieffer and George Stephanopoulos, to a lesser extent—the whole kind of dynamic of those Sunday shows is to ensure that the most powerful people come on their shows, which they accomplish by giving them a platform to basically spew what they want in an unchallenged manner. I mean, there's the appearance of adversarial questioning, but it's all very reverent.

[If Joseph Goebbels had the ability to use television he would have invented the Sunday morning "news" shows]

You write that when Cheney wanted to get his message out, he'd go on Meet the Press.

Right, and that was with Tim Russert, who was depicted as hard-nosed. You know, like everyone was petrified of him. When he died, Lewis Lapham described him as the overaccommodating head waiter at some really swanky restaurant who's just really good at ass-kissing every rich person who comes into the door. And that was Tim Russert—which is why they all loved Tim Russert, right? Because the benefit of Tim Russert was that not only did he let them control the message, but he cast the appearance that they were subjected to really rigorous questioning. So it was the extra bonus of propagandizing while convincing the public that they weren't being propagandized. And so I think all those TV hosts do that, and I think that most major newspapers are incredibly deferential to high-level government officials, and especially to military and intelligence officials.

[BLASPHEMY! How dare Greenwald call out a deceased celebrity brown-noser like Tim Russert as the courtier to power that he always was and spot on about Cheney showing up on MTP to spew his fascist lies]

AND -

How do you feel about the early presidential jockeying?

Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she's been around forever, the Clinton circle. She's a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She's surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she's going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It's going to be this completely symbolic messaging that's going to overshadow the fact that she'll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They'll probably have a gay person after Hillary who's just going to do the same thing.

I hope this happens so badly, because I think it'll be so instructive in that regard. It'll prove the point. Americans love to mock the idea of monarchy, and yet we have our own de facto monarchy. I think what these leaks did is, they demonstrated that there really is this government that just is the kind of permanent government that doesn't get affected by election choices and that isn't in any way accountable to any sort of democratic transparency and just creates its own world off on its own.

The Democrats and their shills will be loudly wailing about the impugning of the inevitable Queen Hillary alone and the reference to a “gay person” as president will be seized upon as the same sort of vicious slander towards gays as Putin is accused of. Not that it bothers that Greenwald himself is openly gay one can already hear the workers in the propaganda chop shops busily concocting a Greenwald-Snowden-Putin axis of espionage. He also calls it spot on with Obama in that opposition to him has been so easily cast as being “racist”, one can largely thank the rebranded neo-Confederate, Jesus juicing GOP Religious Right base that became the “Tea Party” for a lot of it but it is also used to deflect legitimate condemnation of Obama policies. It is all so cynical but lost on the average American who still foolishly believes that they live in a functional democracy. 

The ginned-up outrage will be rolling in soon so grab a seat and enjoy the show.

The War on Snowden Continues as Does NSA Spying

Given the amount of coverage churned out by the sycophantic gravy trainers in the US state-corporate media about the latest Republican Benghazi spectacle, the 24/7 Putin bashing, missing flight MH-370 and assorted celebrity driven swill the biggest story of the last year has been buried int he bullshit. The story of course are the startling revelations of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden of the massive domestic surveillance and data-mining programs being conducted against tens of millions of law-abiding Americans. Outside of the random drive by denunciations of Snowden as a "traitor" by the criminal political class there has been an absence of the sort of breaking stories of unconstitutional malevolence by the American Stasi, most of them the work of the award winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. That is about to change as Mr. Greenwald's long awaited book on Snowden and the NSA entitled "No Place to Hide" is due to come out on Tuesday.

Therefore the uptick in smearing Snowden is a predictable response by the rogue state and its foreign partners in crime and I have no doubt that this weekend's Sunday morning bloviation circuit will be filled with the most vile freaks that the US political system has to offer with all of them peddling the usual unproven horseshit that Snowden is a Russian spy. The point man in the coming attack is former NSA commandant General Keith Alexander, the man with the Star Trek fetish and a seething contempt for the US Constitution.  The now retired Alexander, who has previously called for the control and censorship of the media (and these pigs call Putin an authoritarian?) surfaced in an extended interview for the Australian Financial Review to launch the line of attack that Mr. Snowden is being manipulated by Russian intelligence. It is never mentioned thought that Snowden only ended up in Russia because the freedom loving Obama administration revoked his passport and was closing in on the man for one of those now as American as apple pie extraordinary renditions. Snowden fled Hong Kong and was holed up in Moscow's airport transit area for weeks until the demonized Russian leader offered him temporary asylum.

Rather than attempt to pick through Alexander's hogwash myself I excerpt from the fine piece on the Australian interview done by Greenwald over at The Intercept entitled "Keith Alexander Unplugged: on Bush/Obama, 1.7 million stolen documents and other matters":

The just-retired long-time NSA chief, Gen. Keith Alexander, recently traveled to Australia to give a remarkably long and wide-ranging interview with an extremely sycophantic “interviewer” with The Australian Financial Review. The resulting 17,000-word transcript and accompanying article form a model of uncritical stenography journalism, but Alexander clearly chose to do this because he is angry, resentful, and feeling unfairly treated, and the result is a pile of quotes that are worth examining, only a few of which are noted below:

AFR: What were the key differences for you as director of NSA serving under presidents Bush and Obama? Did you have a preferred commander in chief?

Gen. Alexander: Obviously they come from different parties, they view things differently, but when it comes to the security of the nation and making those decisions about how to protect our nation, what we need to do to defend it, they are, ironically, very close to the same point. You would get almost the same decision from both of them on key questions about how to defend our nation from terrorists and other threats.

The almost-complete continuity between George W. Bush and Barack Obama on such matters has been explained by far too many senior officials in both parties, and has been amply documented in far too many venues, to make it newsworthy when it happens again. Still, the fact that one of the nation’s most powerful generals in history, who has no incentive to say it unless it were true, just comes right out and states that Bush and The Candidate of Change are “very close to the same point” and “you would get almost the same decision from both of them on key questions” is a fine commentary on a number of things, including how adept the 2008 Obama team was at the art of branding.

The fact that Obama, in 2008, specifically vowed to his followers angered over his campaign-season NSA reversal that he possessed “the firm intention — once I’m sworn in as president — to have my Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future” only makes that point a bit more vivid.

This underlines a point that I have spent endless hours of frustration attempting to convince my liberal friends of in that Obama is simply a more refined extension of Bush and that in reality very little has actually changed - except for the worse - since the pope of hope was elected. The warrantless surveillance continues, the Wall Street gamblers and connected corporate parasites continue to feed at the taxpayer funded trough, our civil liberties continue to be diminished and the war machine keeps running. Then there is also Obama's escalation of the drone assassination programs, the precedent set for the extrajudicial killing of a US citizen and not even Bush would be so vile as to not speak out in condemnation of that atrocity that took place in Odessa last week where US backed neo-Nazi militias ambushed and slaughtered a yet to be determined number of anti-austerity protesters then set the trade union hall in which it took place on fire.

I look forward to the Tuesday release of the Greenwald book once again putting a spotlight on the cockroaches at the mammoth nest in Fort Meade and the scumbags in Washington who provide cover for this most un-American of agencies and its ongoing fascist conduct.

Queen Hillary the Inevitable Joins the Fray

It was a foregone conclusion but Hillary Rodham-Clinton has just locked down the Democratic party nod to replace Barack Obama as the reigning imperial warlord of planet Earth. She may as well just start picking out the color of the drapes for the Oval Office because it is a done deal. Elizabeth Warren? You have to be kidding. Joe Biden? He personifies Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous description of Gerald Ford as “so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time" - no way. The Republicans have zilch and their coming electoral triumph in November will be washed away by Hillary and mass voter turnout for the Democratic party like a silly little sandcastle in 2016. While the push is on for the restoration of the Bush dynasty with Dubya’s smarter brother Jeb, let's face it - he just isn’t racist enough to appeal to the dregs of the GOP base. Chris Christie? The greatest gasbag flameout in the state of NJ since The Hindenburg crash. Rand Paul? He tries too hard to appeal that the same base and ends up being associated with Negro hating yahoo’s like conservative talk radio hero Cliven Bundy while moderating his principled criticism of the NSA Stasi and US interventionism and never ending war and serves as his own worst enemy. When it comes to triangulation there is nothing quite like a Clinton and Hillary will be sworn in as the forty fifth president of the United States come January 2017. Chisel it in stone.

Mrs. Clinton’s de facto entry into the race occurred when she jumped on the authoritarian bandwagon when she spoke at the University of Connecticut this past week and pulled off a Mike Rogers style dirty knee-capping of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Mrs. Clinton’s remarks also doubled down on the Snowden as Russian agent meme so hammered by Rogers and this fellow jackbooted scum when she invoked the devil Putin along with the patriotic Snowden. I excerpt from a piece at Mother Jones where the video can also be viewed:

Clinton questioned Snowden's intentions in fleeing the country before offerring his information to the public. "When he emerged and when he absconded with all that material, I was puzzled, because we have all these protections for whistleblowers," Clinton said, when the moderator asked if there had been any positive effects for security policy following the NSA leaks. "If he were concerned and wanted to be part of the American debate, he could have been. But it struck me as—I just have to be honest with you—as sort of odd that he would flee to China, because Hong Kong is controlled by China, and that he would then go to Russia, two countries with which we have very difficult cyber-relationships, to put it mildly."

Clinton also suggested that Snowden had inadvertently helped terrorists. "I think turning over a lot of that material—intentionally or unintentionally, because of the way it can be drained—gave all kinds of information, not only to big countries, but to networks and terrorist groups and the like," she said.

Not that Hillary’s credentials as a world class bullshitter were ever in question and as one whose inclination is to go full neocon to the extent that she is worshipped by warmongers but she is parroting the official state lies in a warm up for what is to be a tour de force media blitzkrieg for the next two years or so.  We already have seen that nobody in the corrupt state-corporate media ever bothers to call any of these criminals in high places out for their horseshit, we saw it with the lies peddled on Syria’s alleged gas attack, on the NSA unconstitutional surveillance and data-mining and now on pushing a false one-sided narrative for a war on Russia via Ukraine. The presstitutes live for a chance to carry water for someone like Hillary, the nation’s first female president who is hellbent on ensuring her place in history and nothing could be more pleasing to the power elite, the moronic identity group obsessed liberals and their grand wars for humanitarianism than her finishing the job of the establishment of the global Empire.

There is no better example of the coming wave of media adoration than the recent gut-wrenching AP Story entitled “McCain-Clinton Bond Crosses Partisan Waters” from which I excerpt the following:

Sen. John McCain and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton share a friendship forged in the Senate and on fact-finding trips around the globe. And then there were those vodka shots in Estonia.

He's a former Republican presidential nominee. She could be the next Democratic presidential nominee. Lately, the Clintons and McCains seem to have embraced each other, offering up their families' working relationship as an example of ways that political leaders can overcome the partisan divide.

Clinton and McCain are appearing together Saturday in Sedona, Ariz., at the McCain Institute's annual gathering of political, business and philanthropic leaders. The closed-door forum - no reporters are allowed - comes as Clinton presents an above-the-fray image in speeches that often criticize the polarization of national politics and could serve as a warm-up to a presidential campaign.

AND

Last month, McCain was a guest of the Clintons at their annual meeting of college students. Former President Bill Clinton welcomed McCain to the stage at Arizona State University, drawing laughs when he suggested their friendship might be a liability.

McCain is "a good friend of Hillary's and mine, although we permit him to deny it at election time," Clinton said. He credited McCain, who spent 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, with helping him normalize relations with Vietnam in 1995.

Clinton recalled that McCain conferred with him during the 2008 campaign after Russia invaded neighboring Georgia. "You called me and said, `Look, I know you're on the other side, but we need to talk about Georgia,'" Clinton said. McCain returned the favor, complimenting Clinton's post-White House work and willingness "to make tough decisions."

AND

The Clinton-McCain relationship flourished in the Senate while the two worked together on the Armed Services Committee; they traveled with other lawmakers to Iraq, the Arctic and the Baltics. During a 2004 visit to Estonia, the senators reportedly shared vodka shots after a day of meetings, a tale that generated chatter as the two prepared for their 2008 presidential campaigns.

"From a personal experience, there is nothing quite like traveling in Europe with John McCain and Hillary Clinton. It's like being on tour with the Beatles and the (Rolling) Stones," said former Sen. John E. Sununu, a New Hampshire Republican who attended the Baltic trip. He politely declined to discuss the vodka story.

You just have to love it, the references to partisan acrimony apparently never take into account the two things that ALWAYS unite the dueling crime syndicates in Washington – WAR!  There will be plenty of it too with the Clinton restoration and by the time that she is finished Obama will look like a real Nobel Peace Prize winner by comparison. When a bloodthirsty, pathological war criminal like John McCain has your back you have been firmly identified as someone who can be sure to max out the body count.

Real Purpose of NSA Programs: Targeting Dissent

These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.

 -Edward Snowden

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia briefly let the mask slip during recent comments to University of Hawaii law students it was a rare moment of openness as to reveal the pathology of the leadership class here in The Homeland.  During an exchange over a World War II era case involving Japanese Americans who were rounded up and placed in internment camps such as the infamous Manzanar Scalia stated that  “…you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again” and "In times of war, the laws fall silent." Times of war such as the permanent war on terror that is now in its thirteenth year running and still picking up steam as the oppressive apparatus of the state power of Leviathan has been exposed thanks to the sacrifices of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The ongoing flow of revelations provided by the documents that Snowden appropriated as a public service to an America that has ever since the 'day when everything changed' on September 11, 2001 has been bludgeoned by fear into a state of meek acceptance and submission to their own enslavement continue to emerge. What is starting to come out now is even worse than just the massive unconstitutional warrantless surveillance, data-mining and mass storage of all of the communications and financial information of millions of law-abiding citizens that has been a constant nuisance to the Obama administration. Now we get the real stuff, first there was the trolling of porn sites for incriminating data, the obvious involvement in economic trickery and industrial espionage, blackmail of political officials and now thanks to Polk Award winner Glenn Greenwald - targeting political dissent.

In a story that broke yesterday by Greenwald and Ryan Gallagheron First Look Media's new online magazine The Intercept entitled “Snowden Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks and Its Supporters” it was revealed that the NSA and its foreign partners went after supporters of Wikileaks as well as other activist groups. The greatest enemy of the secret state is transparency and the relentless manner in which the U.S. government and its lackeys have gone after first Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald is an indication of just how much it fears the truth about the real intent of the surveillance programs ever getting out. The list of those who have run afoul of the secret state is long and the vengeance has been severe.

Some targets of note with the exception of the aforementioned three are the free lance journalist Danny Casolaro who was investigating high crimes involving government officials when his body was found in a West Virginia hotel room in 1991 in a blood filled bathtub. It could be speculated that he was on to something big involving the surveillance state, particularly the CIA and NSA as well as foreign intelligence services as his research included matters associated with the now forgotten PROMIS software, a powerful and advanced precursor to today's NSA surveillance and data-mining programs. He could have been the first casualty in the war on journalism and it was the era before the internet so it was much easier to simply 'shut down' a dangerous line of inquiry by eliminating a 'nuisance' than it is in 2014. Then there was Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings whose reporting brought down General Stanley McChrystal formerly of JSOC and had amassed a large list of enemies. His mysterious and fiery death in an automobile 'accident' has been relegated to the memory hole just months afterwards, it is of note that according to some reports that he was also onto something big and was allegedly in contact with Wikileaks lawyers shortly before his new Mercedes was engulfed in a ball of fire.

But l digress...

Greenwald's expose is a damning indictment of just how out of control that the rogue elements of the deep state have become in their relentless drive to forever lock down their power and the targeting of dissenters is the most critical component of their long term strategy. I excerpt from the piece:

The efforts – detailed in documents provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – included a broad campaign of international pressure aimed not only at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but at what the U.S. government calls “the human network that supports WikiLeaks.” The documents also contain internal discussions about targeting the file-sharing site Pirate Bay and hacktivist collectives such as Anonymous.

 One classified document from Government Communications Headquarters, Britain’s top spy agency, shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.

Another classified document from the U.S. intelligence community, dated August 2010, recounts how the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group’s publication of the Afghanistan war logs.

 A third document, from July 2011, contains a summary of an internal discussion in which officials from two NSA offices – including the agency’s general counsel and an arm of its Threat Operations Center – considered designating WikiLeaks as “a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting.” Such a designation would have allowed the group to be targeted with extensive electronic surveillance – without the need to exclude U.S. persons from the surveillance searches.

 In 2008, not long after WikiLeaks was formed, the U.S. Army prepared a report that identified the organization as an enemy, and plotted how it could be destroyed. The new documents provide a window into how the U.S. and British governments appear to have shared the view that WikiLeaks represented a serious threat, and reveal the controversial measures they were willing to take to combat it.

Two quick things to take away from the excerpt is that the rogue agency as well as the U.S. military is not only speaking of designating WikiLeaks as a "malicious foreign actor" which would make it subject to the anti-terror (anti-dissent) secret system of laws jammed down Americans' throats after 9/11 but that it is also going after those who are even supportive of the organization - including domestic targets. This is the key component of the entire piece in my personal opinion in that all of that data-mining that will take up residence at the massive NSA Utah facility and other locations for vague future purposes has now become a little clearer. The data will be perused for going after 'enemies of the state' and the oppression will not be limited to dissenters and sympathizers but also to all of their known acquaintances, family members, friends and other associates past and present so as to intimidate, bully, threaten and extort in order to build a case against the targets.

NSA whistleblower William Binney perfectly sums it up in a recent interview with Rob Kall of the progressive website OpEd News available here:

R.K.: Anything that we haven't covered yet?  We have got to wrap this up.  Anything that we haven't covered that's really important that you would like the listeners to know about?

W.B.: Just that my major concern isn't with NSA having access to this data or having this data, it's the use of it and once they get it and store it, being used by law enforcement and our law enforcement is spreading that around the world to other law enforcement and so it's corrupting not just our democracy, we're becoming a police state because of this but it's also corrupting the countries around the world so it's really endangering the democratic process and the court systems that we have established.  That is really destroying our society.  We may not know it yet but eventually it'll get to all of us.

R.K.: Bad news.  So you told me that you're going to spend the rest of your life on this. 

W.B.: Yes.  Until my government basically starts to do the right thing, and that means become a constitutionally based operating government.

R.K.: Do you see any ideological or party differences in the way this is being handled?

W.B.: Actually no.  I think they're all basically the same.  They've been, I mean for example you know Bush would refer to have acquired the terrorists, captured them, put them in to torture them to get information; whereas Obama would kill them with a drone.  So it's the same principle, I mean they're just doing whatever they want, there are no limits to what they want to do.  Especially the latest NDAA that talks about giving the president the power to declare anybody, any US Citizen even in this country a terrorist and have the military pick them up, take them off the street, incarcerate them indefinitely, and give them no due process. 

That to me is executing something very similar to what the Nazis did in 1933, Special Order 48, that did exactly the same thing.  And that's how they got rid of all of their opposition.  All the communists and anybody else that opposed them.  But I mean they sent them to the concentration camps.  So far we have not been sending them to the concentration camps but they'll do things like send the FBI after you or maybe attempt to put you in jail like they tried to do with a number of us. 

So they're not as radical yet but the problem is that when you give people that kind of power or they hold that kind of power, sooner or later, they're going to use it. One way or another. 

R.K.: You know it seems to me that the same applies to technology.  If the technology is available or if it can be developed they're going to develop it and they're going to use it.  

The elimination of political opponents and crushing of dissent is essential for authoritarian regimes, it is notable that it was Justice Scalia, a Ronald Reagan appointee who brought up the internment camps in American's future for it was another former Reagan official, Lt. Colonel Oliver North whose REX 84 program was similarly targeting political dissidents and using the aforementioned PROMIS software to do so. I excerpt from a 1990s WIRED magazine piece "The Inslaw Octopus" by Richard Fricker:

 Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ's command center.

 Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States as part of a domestic emergency preparedness program, commissioned under Reagan's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to sources and published reports. Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude. This operation was so sensitive that when Rep. Jack Brooks asked North about it during the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearing was immediately suspended pending an executive (secret) conference. When the hearings were reconvened, the issue of North's FEMA dealings was dropped.

The greatest yet to be asked question about the ongoing surveillance programs, given the comments by Scalia is not how much has yet to be revealed but when did it all begin in the first place?