Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste: French Pass Fascist Surveillance Law

It might as well be the USA PATRIOT Act served up in a piping hot Brie cheese smothered crock as the frogs have utilized the Rahm Emanuel maxim of never letting "a good crisis go to waste”. The French government – the descendant of the one that surrendered to the Nazis – used January’s assassination of several staff members of the sleazy anti-Muslim rag Charlie Hebdo as well as two cops to ram through a new total surveillance law that would do the Gestapo proud. Alexis de Tocqueville must be rolling over in his grave today as his home country is now serving as an inspiration on a corrupt and debauched American political class who long ago spat on democracy.

As reported by the Guardian in the story “France passes new surveillance law in wake of Charlie Hebdo attack”:

The French parliament has overwhelmingly approved sweeping new surveillance powers in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris in January that killed 17 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery in Paris.

The new bill, which allows intelligence agencies to tap phones and emails without seeking permission from a judge, sparked protests from rights groups who claimed it would legalise highly intrusive surveillance methods without guarantees for individual freedom and privacy.

Protesters for civil liberties groups launched a last-ditch campaign against the bill under the banner “24 hours before 1984” in reference to George Orwell’s dystopian novel about life under an all-knowing dictatorship. Groups including Amnesty International warned of “extremely large and intrusive powers” without judicial controls.

AND

The new law will allow authorities to spy on the digital and mobile phone communications of anyone linked to a “terrorist” inquiry without prior authorisation from a judge. It forces internet service providers and phone companies to give up data upon request.

Intelligence services will have the right to place cameras and recording devices in private homes and install so-called keylogger devices that record every key stroke on a targeted computer in real time. The authorities will be able to keep recordings for a month and metadata for five years.

One of the most contentious elements of the bill is that it allows intelligence services to vacuum up metadata, which would then be subject to analysis for potentially suspicious behaviour. The metadata would be anonymous, but intelligence agents could follow up with a request to an independent panel for deeper surveillance that could yield the identity of users.

Another controversial element is the so-called “black boxes” – or complex algorithms – that internet providers will be forced to install to flag up a succession of suspect behavioural patterns online, such as keywords used, sites visited and contacts made

Surveillance agencies will also be able to bug suspects’ homes with microphones and cameras and add keyloggers to their computers to track every keystroke.

Times have really changed. Way back in 2001 it took the complete circumvention of all U.S. intelligence capabilities, the national air defense command and a lot of bad luck to allow 20 religious fanatic misfits to hijack airplanes and fly them into buildings to get such laws implemented. But with the ongoing, gradual conditioning of the American sheeple to kiss the whip and submit to the metastasizing police state the next iteration of the fascist surveillance society will take much less.

Look at the way that two losers who happened to run across ISIS propaganda on the internet that inspired them attacked an event staged by anti-Muslim provocateurs in Garland, TX over the weekend. A few more incidents like that and we will hear renewed cries for the rolling out of even more egregious attacks on civil liberties here in the Homeland.

Washington is listening and waiting for their opportunity to finally bring down the hammer on political dissent in America and are no doubt inspired to see how easily that the cheese eating surrender monkeys over in Paris just caved. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his lieutenants are right now putting the final touches on an effort to make the USA PATRIOT Act permanent. It will be one more capitulation to Emperor Barack Obama whose regime has now fully recovered from the exposure of the spying on millions of law-abiding Americans by his NSA Stasi.

Just imagine how much worse that it can get if there is an actual attack on domestic soil because sooner or later one of the nutjob self-styled jihadists won't be mentally ill and incompetent. The corrupt media is aiding and abetting ISIS by acting as it’s de facto public relations arm in sowing the seeds of fear and that is a very hot commodity in an election year while the authorities salivate over the stomping up and down of the big red, white and blue jackboot .

Time to Let the American Enabling Act Expire

In an all too rare display of chutzpah in post-September 11, 2001 America which has been hammered home incessantly as 'the day when everything changed' for nearly twelve and a half years by fascist opportunists there is a growing move to pushback against Obama's NSA Stasi and its illegality. Without delving into the depths of speculation and conspiracy trafficking it is apparent that the USA PATRIOT Act was to 9/11 what the Enabling Act was to the Reichstag Fire in the terms of historical analogies. While admittedly less ostentatious than the depraved Nazi regime and their orgy of state sanctioned thuggery and oppression, this anti-American piece of legislation has largely served the same purpose in empowering a criminal state to act with impunity. With the firewall of the surveillance state and all of its proctor - like the unhinged fascist demagogue Mike Rogers who is popping off today about stringing up journalist Glenn Greenwald by his balls for doing his job - flying like antibodies to protect a diseased system against any attempts to implement even the most tepid of controls over the NSA spying monstrosity which are destined to fail. The corruption is just too deeply entrenched and there is too much money and power at stake to expect a failed political system to function by implementing the now laughably outdated term of 'checks and balances'. So it is now being proposed to just let the American enabling act expire which would be a good start, having a national holiday every September 10th to celebrate the public burning of this fascist travesty and toast the trial and imprisonment of all who have foisted it upon us would be ideal.

That being said and according to a story in The Guardian (the state media is too busy performing necrophilia on the corpse of Phillip Seymour Hoffman to be bothered with covering actual news) members of the House Judiciary Committee boldly challenged Obama/Holder lackeys from the Justice Department. In demanding that the NSA bulk collection of telephone "metadata" be reigned in and the USA FREEDOM Act be supported that the most insidious piece of legislation in the lifetimes of all Americans currently alive be allowed to simply expire come renewal time in June of 2015 -  a mere decade after a sunset clause was to have rid of us all of this abomination. The "metadata" phone collection also does not cover the actual content collection which the Obama regime and the filth like Mike Rogers are so desperate to keep secret therefore the regular "two minutes hate" sessions denouncing Greenwald and former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden who are both rising to the top of that kill list that El Presidente presides over. That it is Congressman James Sensenbrenner, a father of the PATRIOT Act himself who is now one of the most vocal opponents is telling, it is his very own Frankenstein monster careening through the village today.

I excerpt from the Guardian piece, entitled "House committee urges US government to get behind NSA reform bill":

Members of Congress who want to end the National Security Agency's mass collection of Americans’ phone data sharply warned the Obama administration on Tuesday to get behind a bill to end the controversial practice, or risk losing the counter-terrorism powers provided by the post-9/11 Patriot Act.

Deriding the paucity of legislative alternatives after President Obama's announcement last month that he wants to transfer the responsibility for bulk collection out of the NSA, congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, the co-sponsor of the USA Freedom Act, told deputy attorney general James Cole at a House judiciary committee hearing that "you will get nothing" if the administration does not endorse the bill.

AND -

John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the panel, warned that permitting bulk data collection to continue unabated risked congressional support for the entire portion of the Patriot Act the government claims authorizes it, known as Section 215, a provision set to expire on 1 June 2015. "We should address bulk collection today, or we risk losing all of Section 215 this time next year," Conyers said.

AND -

Much as support for bulk surveillance is a bipartisan position in the House intelligence committee, opposition in the judiciary committee is bipartisan. Liberal Democrat Zoe Lofgren and conservative Republican Darrell Issa, both of California, probed Cole to say on the record that the NSA phone records trove includes legislators' call records, something the NSA has been hard-pressed to deny on the record.

"202-225 and four digits. Do you collect it?" Issa asked Cole, referring to the prefix of office numbers for members of the House of Representatives.

"Probably we do," Cole answered.

Issa rejoindered that he had been in touch with the deputy prime minister of Lebanon after accusations emerged that the official had given money to Hezbollah, warning that a senior member of Congress was only two degrees of separation from terrorists.

It is about damned time that Congressman Issa stopped pissing away taxpayer dollars on politically motivated witch hunts and devoted some time and effort towards getting these fascists not only under control but stripped of their God mode power to spy on everything that millions of law abiding American citizens do. Not only that but to also address the ongoing data-mining and exactly why that massive NSA facility sitting in a remote area of Utah is needed if the American Stasi is NOT collecting content for future persecution of dissidents. The USA PATRIOT Act should be stricken from the law of the land and the Constitution restored. All that it is going to take is a bit of effort from a failed and feckless Congress but at least there are signs of life albeit they are faint.

Were this to be allowed to happen I would be the first one to volunteer to kick in some money to deport Mike Rogers to a country where they have a similar contempt for journalists - Egypt seems to be a prime location these days and if that doesn't work there are plenty of other authoritarian regimes that would love to have a deranged swine like this guy as a key member of their intelligence service goon squads.  As I have previously noted, he conjures up valid comparisons to  the similarly minded thug Reinhard Heydrich and would very fittingly have belonged in a prior historical era given his blatant and constant state of venomous contempt for anything other than the most tyrannical of political systems.

There will be no stopping this ongoing use of the Constitution as so much toilet paper until the USA PATRIOT Act is revoked and relegated to our national history as the shameful attempt to eliminate our very cherished freedoms that it has always been. 

(Image: Dees Images)