The opening segment of this two part text explained how the intelligence community has been busy claiming to protect us while they were invading our privacy and setting us up to lose our freedom. Now we’re going to look at the reality of the bloated security industry, which because of its size and the general lack of comprehension of said size has become like a giant beast devouring everything in its path; its only goal to keep expanding until it fulfills the prophecies of “1984.”
To get back to the opening premise; computer technology has run amok. It is now possible for NSA to recover a billion pits of information in any given day. A billion! It is also possible and it seems to have happened on a couple of occasions that the technology has taken itself over and is making decisions on its own. This is really scary, but what’s more scary is that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper found it necessary to perjure himself during hearings before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when he answered Senator Ron Wyden’s question, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans,” with a flat “No.”
They tried to fudge around it later, Wyden even giving him a chance to cover his lie, but the fact is that the director of DNI lied before congress and it looks like nothing is going to be done about it. But why would he tell such an obvious lie? Maybe because he thought he could get away with it, but more probably because the national intelligence conglomerate has overstepped its legal parameters by so much that there is nothing to do but lie about it , that the American public, if they actually knew what was going on would rebel and possibly cause the whole structure to collapse, and it can’t do that without leaving the country open to cyber attack by nations all over the world.
The truth is that the intelligence community has gotten so far into your life that it can’t extract itself without exposing its creators to prosecution.
William Boardman in his excellent article in Reader Supported News has come up with some astonishing figures. First he asked the rhetorical question, “Does anyone know the full scale and scope of the US Surveillance State?” and nobody could come up with an answer.
We’re not talking here just about NSA but about the 17 various intelligence entities, most of them military that comprise the vast intelligence establishment; organizations like the CIA, the Treasury, FBI, Dept. of State, Energy and Homeland Security.
There is no available figure for just how many people are in the intelligence community but Homeland Security alone is said to employ around 250,000. That’s just one tentacle of the octopus and it doesn’t count outside contractors. Of all these people in all these agencies there are around 5 million that have some kind of security clearance and over 1.5 million who hold top-secret credentials. Is there anything more ludicrous? Any seven-year-old child knows that nothing is a secret if more than one person knows about it. But the government hands out top-secret classifications like penny candy. They give them to people like Bradley Manning without realizing that giving access to the kind f information that the government holds in its secret files to anyone with any kind of moral conscience is catastrophic.
The current American intelligence community created as a result of 911 is so large and widespread that no one actually knows what it costs to maintain but you can bet that manufacturers of military technology have a pretty good idea because they spend millions on lobbyists each year just to keep it chugging along.
A recent article published in the Washington Post found that the intelligence network comprised 1,272 federal organizations and 1.932 private organizations operating at some 10,000 locations across the country. They employ approximately 845,000 agents with top-security credentials. In addition there are about 16,000 state, local and tribal law enforcement organizations. Before 911 there were about 3,000.
So what we have here is a picture that shows unknown numbers of people operating in uncounted numbers of organizations spending uncharted billions of dollars on secret projects, with limited restraints or needs for justification. Is it any wonder that the intelligence community doesn’t want the public to know what they are doing? It’s obvious, they are stealing with both hands and no one wants it to stop. Is it any wonder that the head of DNI lies about what is going on? No one wants to kill the golden calf and the only way to assure its continued existence is for it to have something on everyone. It’s classic J. Edgar Hoover.
When Wyden asked Clapper if NSA was collecting billions of bits of information on all the American people he knew the answer before he asked the question. Maybe that’s why he asked it. Now it’s up to the justice department to do something about Clapper’s obvious lie.
When Andrea Mitchell, in a later interview asked Clapper, “How has it, (Snowden’s leak) hurt American Intelligence, she was leaving him an open invitation to go after Snowden, but Clapper couldn’t take it because the premise that Snowden has actually endangered anyone was obviously false and impossible to prove. He simply wormed his way out of the question by answering; “it potentially has.” The few smart people left in the intelligence community don’t want Snowden prosecuted, the just want him to go away.
The government tells us that they aren’t invading our privacy and that they have noting but good intentions about that privacy and our freedom but they offer no proof. Don’t forget that the government and the intelligence community like any other businesses, are made up 100% of people who have some kind of ax to grind. For some it’s a paycheck, for some it’s advancement, for some it’s patriotism for others it can be any kind of personal motive but everyone has something that they are trying to protect or advance and if any part of what they are working on conflicts with your interests or mine what do you think they are going to support?
There are no morals in government, just goals and points of view. J. Edgar Hoover proved that when he launched his FBI initiative to get something on everyone who could possibly do him any damage. Since Hoover we have been subjected to operations like Cointelpro, Mockingbird, Ultra and Chaos, all far greater than anything Hoover could have imagined, all run by CIA, FBI and NSA, all of which managed to subvert democracy as we know it, none of which have ever been called to task.
Remember, even though you may think of the U.S, as a shinning example of what a benevolent government should be, we are still the only nation in the world that has dropped a nuclear bomb on civilians. We are the only nation in the world that has instituted a cyber attack on a nation with which we were not in a formally declared war. We are the world’s aggressors in nuclear and cyber technology and there is no reason to believe that we will act benevolently toward anyone, foreign national or U/S. citizen that interferes with our national plans for either aggression or defense. Bradley Manning is finding that out now. Edward Snowden will find it out as soon as he runs out of nations who are willing to take a moral stand against the world’s greatest financial and military power.