There has never been anything like the NSA’s omnivorous appetite for every item of information available on the planet and now we see that they are checking out porn sites to see if anyone they want to smear is using them. Joe McCarthy is alive and living in NSA headquarters. Texts, tweets, phone calls, posts, credit card sales, smoke signals and drum beats are all grist for the voracious appetite of our intelligence gathering machine. But is it all necessary and does it leave the system open for negative interpretation by the young, super intelligent men and women currently part of the intelligence gathering system?
This is, after all, what happened with Edward Snowden, a young, man with a moral center saw that the organization for which he worked had lost its vision, its goal, and was intruding on the lives of the citizens that it was supposed to be protecting, simply because it had the technological where-with-all to do so.
Because of Snowden’s revelations, we now know that the NSA is everywhere, in our businesses, our homes, our very beds; but why? Where is the balance? Does NSA need all this information? Can it possibly interpret all this information? And even if it does and can, has it the ability to make use of it on a scale that will make this monumental invasion of privacy with the attendant loss of personal freedom, inherent in the future American way of life?
The invasions of foreign embassies, the tapping of phones of members of foreign governments, military information glommed from our allies and our enemies, the use of surveillance materials in the UN and other international organizations are surly the meat of media outrage and talking head bluster but that, after all is what intelligence services are for. And everyone does it. That’s why we have lead lined walls in our embassies. We don’t care if the ambassador’s kids get led poisoning, as long as the Egyptians or Malaysians don’t find out what he had for breakfast and what time he took a crap.
The big problem with the intelligence community’s massive invasion of privacy in this country is that it doesn’t end there. It has made possible an even more massive, even more invasive erosion of our freedoms because of Obama’s signing of the odious NDAA bill that allows American citizens to have their homes invaded without warrant, their persons imprisoned without charge and held indefinitely, without legal counsel. This is Nazi Germany, Soviet, Russia and the worst of all totalitarian regimes rolled into one. In a country that has always prided itself on the freedom and protection of the rights of its citizenry this is the ultimate betrayal. Our freedoms, which no longer exist, thanks to the NDAA, are what has always separated us from and set us above the rest of the world. They no longer exist and it is the information that has been provided by the likes of NSA’s invasive intelligence gathering that has made this outrage to democracy possible.
Interestingly enough it is NSA’s concept of knowing everything about everybody that has already come back to bite it in the ass, and that will continue to do so as long as it continues to exist on an other than moral plane. Edward Snowden and before him Chelsea Manning, in other circumstances, are only the precursors of what will eventually become a tidal wave of betrayals of a system that is, itself, a betrayal of our most basic rights.
If there are no longer to be secrets in the world, what makes NSA think it can keep them for themselves? What makes them think that of the tens of thousands of tech geeks that they have recruited, all will drink the Cool Aide?
Are they so incredibly hubristic that they truly believe that everyone in their and their contractor’s employ will continue to worship at the feet of James Clapper? Can they really believe that there will never be any more deserters? Is there no one in the entire agency that is intelligent enough to understand the unreality of that kind of thinking?
In fact there will be more Edward Snowden’s, more Barrett Brown’s, more Chelsea Manning’s as more and more of the young people involved in government security realize how they and their fellow citizens are being betrayed by a monster that seeks power rather than information, a betrayer of the constitution that cannot even organize and understand what it has already acquired.
What good does it do us if we are able to gather all the intelligence available from foreign sources if we don’t have the capability, and we don’t, to translate all this information? What good does it do us to gather all the communication that takes place in the United States every minute of every day, if we don’t, and we don’t, have the capability to shift through it and see what we’ve got? To do that we would have to exponentially increase the capability of our system and to what end? We are already wasting billions that are critically needed in other areas that will have a more immediate impact on the lives of Americans.
The intelligence community points to slightly over fifty occurrences that have been headed off on US soil, supposedly by our intelligence capabilities, since 911. In twelve years that’s about 4.5 occurrences per year. Each of those acts, if successful, would have to have killed 6,667 people, just to match the deaths by gun violence in this country every year; something that we try very hard to do nothing about. Get the picture?
To accomplish the goal of stopping these imaginary terrorist activities, we spend billions, money that could educate our youth, heal our sick, feed our poor and rebuild our crumbling infrastructure. But the reality is, the fifty plus occurrences, have been denied by all but Clapper and his closest associates. Less than one a year, say those in the know, and only two or three of any significance in the whole twelve year period; the most significant of which, The Times Square bomber, wasn’t stopped by any intelligence coup but by his own incompetence.
The reality is that the cost of our intelligence empire far outweighs its value as a safety instrument. Yes we need intelligence and in fact, much better intelligence, as has been proved in Benghazi and the ten-year, finally successful, search for bin Laden, but to get efficient intelligence we don’t need to stick a probe up the rear end of every American in the country. Clapper and his goons have the sensitivity to the constitution of a dump truck and the subtlety in decision making of an oil spill.
Knowing what every American is saying on his phone is a waste of time and money, knowing who to listen to and how to interpret what that person is saying, are what intelligence is all about. Unfortunately our intelligence system is sadly lacking in, yes, that’s right, intelligence.