With all the noise about the Ukraine, the Korean ferry and a mysteriously disappeared airplane, the media is finding it damned hard to find space for insignificant stuff like people out of work or working for too low wages, our immigration problems, our crumbling infrastructure or the planet destroying environmental disaster our corporations support; and, oh yes, the police state that is being built around us, even as we ignore all the signs.
But the apathy of the media doesn’t make these problems any less important, even if some of them are less immediate. Each has its own significance and each its own time table, but the one that we really have to look out for, mostly because it is already a fait accompli, is the reality that we are living in a police state that makes the one in 1984 look insignificant.
Don’t take my word for it. Just look at what our intelligence agencies are currently doing to prove my point. California Senator, Diane Feinstein is anything but a defender of the whistleblower concept. She is in fact a vicious attacker of people like Edward Snowden and a staunch backer of our intelligence community. So why would the CIA be so stupid as to hack into her phones and computers just because she and her Senate Intelligence Committee are holding hearings on the since discarded CIA torture programs.
You have to be right off the train from the corn belt to think that she would let anything bad happen to any of the programs she has so vehemently defended, so why is the CIA so brain dead as to give her an excuse to get mad at them? Feinstein has figuratively gone down on the agency as a whole, and has been even more complementary toward other security agencies like NSA, attacking Snowden even more viciously that James Clapper.
So what moron at CIA decided to tap her phones and email? Must be the same dim bulb who was in charge of keeping track of the fortunes of the Soviet Union pre- 1993 or, maybe, the one who didn’t know who was attacking their installation at Benghazi last year.
Or maybe it wasn’t stupidity; maybe, more likely, it was hubris. Maybe the intelligence community just doesn’t care because they are already to powerful, so untouchable that they have no fear of anything as insignificant as a committee heading congresswomen like Feinstein? How could that be? Simple, they know they already are untouchable.
Of course Feinstein, being the true butt girl of the intelligence community that she is, hasn’t completely changed her tune. She still thinks Snowden and all whistleblowers should be boiled in oil but she is also angry that someone had the effrontery to look into what she is doing. My point being, that the intelligence community is so lacking in intelligence and so powerful and out of control, that it must have someone looking over its shoulder and monitoring its moves. They have all the technical help available to mankind, which makes them unbelievably powerful, but seemingly, no one to make sensible decisions on how to use that power.
Just when I need something to prove my point, Bill Binney steps out of the shadows and comes to the rescue. Binney is a 32 year veteran of NSA, a high level executive, widely regarded as a legend in the intelligence community. He was a senior tech director for them and managed thousands of employees. He was recently interviewed by almost all of the mainstream media. You name it, they talked to him. His guy didn’t beat around the bush. He came right out and said that the US already has a police state. How is this possible? Easy, everything that NSA gets from their spying on us is easily accessible to every federal, state and local agency of any kind, giving them everything they need to prosecute any of us on myriad laws that we don’t even know exist. Ever hear of High Mopery, the practice of walking down the street with no clear destination? Well it’s a crime in some states and so are a lot of other ridiculous laws that should have long ago been struck from the books but stick around to give law enforcement an excuse to harass you when they feel a need to, but no real facts to back them up.
Binney states clearly in his interviews that the main use of the mega data collection by the NSA is law enforcement, not protection from terrorists and he produces slides that have appeared at programs for Law Enforcement agencies that illustrate how this information can be used by them, even though under current law, it is illegal to do so. The slides show how a local law enforcement agency can create a parallel construction that will allow them to pursue a case for which they would not be able to legally use the information purloined from the NSA files. In this process, the law enforcement launders the information they have gotten illegally from NSA and then builds a wholly false series of steps by which the same information is produced by a heretofore non-existent source. Binney further states that NSA is providing this same information to foreign counterparts, like UK, Canada, & Australia.
If this isn’t the operation of a police state, then we have to change the definition. If this is the way you want to live, ignore this blog, but if you don’t want to have Big Brother continually looking over your shoulder then it’s time to do something about it. Don’t forget; this guy Binney has been a major player in the intelligence community for over three decades. He knows whereof he speaks. It’s time for America to get off its butt and stop the police state that has been built. It will, only get stronger, more constrictive and more smothering, the longer that it exists.