Why doesn't government ASK us what we think instead of spying on us?

[yurbud]

If it really wants to know how we feel asking is always cheaper than spying.

Edward Snowden
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/edward-snowden-christmas-message-101529.html

This is so obvious I'm surprised it hasn't been said more often and loudly.

Why do you suppose the government chooses this spying approach rather than asking both in polls and open ended questions to the general public?

They certainly do polling on various issues. Wouldn't it be cheaper to do that on a larger scale with less push-poll and questions that limit your choices instead of large scale spying on us?

Why the spying approach?

I have an idea, but I'd like to hear what other people think.

[nadinbrzezinski]

1. Things like Occupy scare the living daylights

Out of the 1%

It is actually that simple. It is about terrorism, when you define it as not just Al Qaida, but any civil and peaceful resistance of things like the TTP, nafta and the new economic order.

[dawg]

2. It isn't about information. It's about control.

It's possible that members of Congress are already being extorted over information gleaned by the NSA. Does that sound paranoid? Well, maybe. But explain to me what makes it impossible.

[yurbud]

10. I think blackmail is a big part of how politics work: look at all the closeted gay Republicans

I think they actually recruit those guys because people with something to hide are easier to control than ideologues who might not follow orders that don't fit their ideals.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. This comes to mind:

When I want to find the vanguard of the people I look to the uneasy dreams of an aristocracy
and find what they dread most.
-- Wendell Phillips

[yurbud]

11. great quote

[Octafish]

21. +2

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few."

Thank you for the heads-up on Wendell Phillips, dixiegrrrrl! For some reason, I don't recall him ever being mentioned in my history classes or newspapers. I know he's not brought up on the tee vee.

[dixiegrrrrl]

29. The Truth....is out there.....

Lemme add...
One of the marvels of teh internet is a doorway to history.
From what I have read, the 1800's were much like today....many battles for justice, for unions, equality,
against the TBTF of the time, the Robber Barons.
Technology was primed for a leap forward; there were climate problems, in the form of severe blizzards.
In the cities reformers were at work tackling poverty, fighting against the adulteration of food,
fighting for an end to child labor and for unions and better pay, and clean water.
Oh, and a severe financial collapse.

the cycle continues.

[klook]

31. Great perspective - thanks much for the quote, and for the glimpse into the mirror of the late 1800s

I'm not familiar with Wendell Phillips, so I got some readin' to do.

We certainly do live in a modern Robber Baron era!

[The2ndWheel]

4. People lie

You can probably get a more accurate picture of what someone thinks by bypassing the middleman, the mouth, and heading straight for the mind. Spying gets closer to that, and modern day digital spying closer still.

[yurbud]

12. good point

[tblue37]

5. They don't want to know what we want, nor do they really care about our opinions.

What they want is information *about* us that they can use to control us and, if they want, to oppress us.

Citizens are not going to answer a question like "Have you done anything recently that we can use to smear your reputation or that we can twist into a criminal offense so we can put you in prison for a few decades?"

[OldEurope]

6. This! And...

... they fear you, the people.
They are afraid that your requirements do not correspond with those of their masters - the corporations and the 1 %.

[yurbud]

13. funny and probably true

[jsr]

37. +1.

[gulliver]

7. Snowden should have just asked the NSA people to tell everyone what they were doing.

It wouldn't have hurt to at least ask. Might have avoided this whole misunderstanding.

[yurbud]

17. funny. I think he did do something like that

not all the way up through the chain of command, but enough to figure out not enough other people in the agency had a problem with what they're doing.

[Autumn]

8. They no longer care what we think. They no longer care what we want.

They no longer care to represent us.

[PowerToThePeople]

9. Good thing we have a

Where would the discussion be had he not shown up?

[spin]

14. Knowledge is power. ...

Assume that an agency of the government is able to gather data on every citizen in our nation including all telephone calls, internet posts and where all people travel. This mega data can be used for good (stopping a terrorist attack) but could also be used to stifle any opposition to the goals of those who run the data gathering.

While they would not really care that Joe Blow who lives in Montana had a girlfriend that his wife was unaware of, they might find it useful if he were a newspaper reporter planning to publish a series of articles that might be damaging or a member of the Senate or House who opposed a certain policy.

It is quite conceivable that with access to enough information on the activity of all citizens, a small group of individuals would be able to control our government. We could elect politicians who support our views and desires and find that once in office, they no longer followed the policies they ran on. Hidden behind a curtain, the puppet masters would be able to pass any legislation they desired and quite possible profit from it.

Years ago I was watching an interview with Newt Gingrich and when a reporter asked him a question he replied, "You don't mess with the Big Boys". Although I have searched for a transcript of this obscure interview, I have never been able to find it. I have always wondered who the "Big Boys" are.

Free speech, a free press and the privacy rights of citizens are essential to insure a working democracy.

In passing I should note that I don't wear a tin foil hat nor do I buy into most conspiracy theories. Most are laughable and foolish. While I don't believe the theory that explosives were planted in the World Trade Center buildings, I will admit that I am somewhat distrustful of computerized voting machines that do not have a good paper trail. For example I found this Popular Science article on computerized voting somewhat disturbing.

How I Hacked An Electronic Voting Machine
What do you need to rig an election? A basic knowledge of electronics and $30 worth of RadioShack gear, professional hacker Roger Johnston reveals. The good news: we can stop it.
By Roger Johnston (as told to Suzanne LaBarre) Posted 11.05.2012 at 11:00 am 14 Comments

http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2012-11/how-i-hacked-electronic-voting-machine

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

15. Well, that would demand consulting the people...I think it's called "democracy".

[yurbud]

19. and if we were consulted instead of spied on, we might expect them to ACT in accord with our opinion

another aspect of democracy.

[tularetom]

16. They already KNOW what we think they just want to keep us from acting on it

[yurbud]

18. well-said

[TheKentuckian]

20. They aren't interested in what we think in that kind of way.

[JoePhilly]

22. Next we'll all be in FEMA camps.

[treestar]

23. that's the dumbest part of his spiel

We are free to speak up every day as to what we think.

There are constant polls being done.

[stevenleser]

24. I read through this thinking it was satire. I can't believe Snowden and his supporters believe this

crap.

[solarhydrocan]

25. Insulting them might win more votes for (D)'s nt

[stevenleser]

27. Sometimes, that is exactly what is needed. An insult to shock them back to reality.

This line of thinking is just short of Alex Jonesian.

[Progressive dog]

26. I can't either. nt

[treestar]

30. It's getting surreal

How could they analyze our thoughts with phone metadata? When they have polls and free media and much better ways of figuring that out. And it's so wrong to want to know what we think? That shows they know they can't get re-elected without knowing something of what we think.

It's the same people being concerned with "corporate power" too, where the private corporations are much more likely to attempt to find out what we think to sell us stuff. Google can read your email, or at least the headers. I've used gmail and seen immediately ads about subjects in the email. Yet that is not nearly as terrifying as having a list of numbers dialed, not even to look at but just to use as a reference.

[Octafish]

33. That's what Gen. Alexander said.

How many terrorists were caught by illegal/legal 24/7 spying on Americans?

Was it zero or none?

[treestar]

34. They have a list of phone numbers of one company

I can understand the need to exaggerate though.

The government does have your private data. It has all of your financial data.

If we had single payer, it would have all of your health data.

And yet there is no complaint about giving all that information to any bank that lends you money.

[Octafish]

35. A few on DU have tried to raise awareness of the privatization of intelligence gathering.

Not as many, as we'd like, but still it's a start.

Prof. McCoy spells out exactly how U.S. intel started in the Spanish American War days and evolved through the work of private corporations and individuals:

Surveillance Blowback: The Making of the U.S. Surveillance State, 1898-2020

By Alfred W. McCoy
July 15, 2013 by TomDispatch.com

The American surveillance state is now an omnipresent reality, but its deep history is little known and its future little grasped. Edward Snowden’s leaked documents reveal that, in a post-9/11 state of war, the National Security Agency (NSA) was able to create a surveillance system that could secretly monitor the private communications of almost every American in the name of fighting foreign terrorists. The technology used is state of the art; the impulse, it turns out, is nothing new. For well over a century, what might be called “surveillance blowback” from America’s wars has ensured the creation of an ever more massive and omnipresent internal security and surveillance apparatus. Its future (though not ours) looks bright indeed.

SNIP...

Today, as Washington withdraws troops from the Greater Middle East, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus built for the pacification of Afghanistan and Iraq has come home to help create a twenty-first century surveillance state of unprecedented scope. But the past pattern that once checked the rise of a U.S. surveillance state seems to be breaking down. Despite talk about ending the war on terror one day, President Obama has left the historic pattern of partisan reforms far behind. In what has become a permanent state of “wartime” at home, the Obama administration is building upon the surveillance systems created in the Bush years to maintain U.S. global dominion in peace or war through a strategic, ever-widening edge in information control. The White House shows no sign -- nor does Congress -- of cutting back on construction of a powerful, global Panopticon that can surveil domestic dissidents, track terrorists, manipulate allied nations, monitor rival powers, counter hostile cyber strikes, launch preemptive cyberattacks, and protect domestic communications.

Writing for TomDispatch four years ago during Obama’s first months in office, I suggested that the War on Terror has “proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling ‘the homeland.’"

SNIP...

During the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, Mark Twain wrote an imagined history of twentieth-century America. In it, he predicted that a “lust for conquest” had already destroyed “the Great [American] Republic,” because “trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home.” Indeed, just a decade after Twain wrote those prophetic words, colonial police methods came home to serve as a template for the creation of an American internal security apparatus in wartime.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/07/15

PS: Alfred W. McCoy is professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a TomDispatch regular, and author most recently of the book, Torture and Impunity: The U.S. Doctrine of Coercive Interrogation (University of Wisconsin, 2012) which explores the American experience of torture during the past decade. Previous books include: A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (American Empire Project); Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, and The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. He has also convened the “Empires in Transition” project, a global working group of 140 historians from universities on four continents. The results of their first meetings were published as Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State.

PPS: IMO, this is a must-read, download and pass-around. Please let me know your thoughts or rat me out to Erik Prince and whatever his old Blackwater's called these days. The corporation's name and amounts owed by the U.S. taxpayer are certainly on an invoice that will be paid, sequester or no sequester, and classified above this civilian's need-to-know.

Here's the OP: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023284547

Then, there was this beaut:

NSA data could be most useful for connected types on Wall Street.

The "Take" could be very, very, large. And, after it's sifted, make for a very, very large payday.



Gosh, maybe financial success isn't determined by hard work or who you know. It's just what you know and when you learn it.

CIA moonlights in corporate world

By EAMON JAVERS
Politico, 2/1/10

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.

In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in “deception detection,” the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.

The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.

SNIP...

But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.

The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.

CONTINUED...

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/32290.html#ixzz0eIFPhHBh

Here's that OP: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022983519

Certainly doesn't seem like a transparent process to the 99-percent of us used as marks and cannon fodder.

This one spells out the Who benefits from the modern day warmongering:

Know your BFEE: WikiLeaks Stratfor Dump Exposes Continued Secret Government Warmongering

War is big business. It's an insider's game. It's why we have so much secret government.

The last remaining enormous wads of cash in the Treasury are to be had for purchasing today's modern military industrial intel complex.



There's more than a trillion to be grabbed -- just for the Lockheed-Martin F-35.

Now keeping tabs on us -- people interested in using some of the nation's treasure for more peaceful purposes -- are for-hire spies. How do I know this? Julian Assange and Anonymous:

WikiLeaks' Stratfor Dump Lifts Lid on Intelligence-Industrial Complex

WikiLeaks' latest release, of hacked emails from Stratfor, shines light on the murky world of private intelligence-gathering

by Pratap Chatterjee
Published on Tuesday, February 28, 2012 by The Guardian/UK

What price bad intelligence? Some 5m internal emails from Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based company that brands itself as a "global intelligence" provider, were recently obtained by Anonymous, the hacker collective, and are being released in batches by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowing website, starting Monday.

The most striking revelation from the latest disclosure is not simply the military-industrial complex that conspires to spy on citizens, activists and trouble-causers, but the extremely low quality of the information available to the highest bidder. Clients of the company include Dow Chemical, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon, as well as US government agencies like the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Marines.

SNIP...

Assange notes that Stratfor is also seeking to profit directly from this information by partnering in an apparent hedge-fund venture with Shea Morenz, a former Goldman Sachs managing director. He points to an August 2011 document, marked "DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS", from Stratfor CEO George Friedman, which says:

"What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor's intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like."

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/02/28-10?print

If it weren't for Anonymous and WikiLeaks, we probably wouldn't know about any of that.

It's no joke. It's no unimportant story. It's no boring history. Run by insiders, the secret government is key to making the system run on behalf of the few -- the 1-percent of 1-percent. Central to that is intelligence -- economically, politically and military useful information.

Which brings up the nation's purported free press, the only business mentioned by name in the entire United States Constitution, and how the organizations therein have miserably failed to feature prominently the sundry and myriad ways the insiders on Wall Street and their toadies in Washington do the work for Them.

The problem is systemic. The corruption is systemic.

Because it involves oversight of secret organizations -- the Pentagon, Homeland Security, CIA, etc -- Congress and the Administration often have no clue, let alone oversight, to what is happening because the corruption is marked "Top Secret."

Secret government also means We the People can't do our job as citizens, which is to hold them accountable and find the ones responsible in order to vote the crooks out and, it is hoped, the honest ones in.

With no citizen oversight, anything goes. And it doesn't stop.

Remember this fine fellow, US Navy fighter ace Randy "Duke" Cunningham?

Later a member of the United States Congress, he used his position to feather his nest, Big Time.



In his political career, Cunningham was a member of the Appropriations and Intelligence committees, and chaired the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Human Intelligence Analysis and Counterintelligence during the 109th Congress. He was considered a leading Republican expert on national security issues.

Currently, he's in USP Tuscon or another fine facility where he gets three squares, medical and dental.
He's due for release in a year or so. He'll be able to pick up his pension.

"The Duke Cunningham Act, also known as the Federal Pension Forfeiture Act, was introduced by U.S. Senator John F. Kerry in 2006. The bill would have denied pension benefits to any members of Congress convicted of bribery, conspiracy or perjury. The bill died in committee. (Source: The Press Enterprise)

Duke wasn't alone. He really was just one snake in a long line of snakes. Remember Dusty Foggo, Number 3 at CIA and close associate of CIA Director and former Congressman Porter Goss? Swells sitting atop the peak of political and military secrecy and power.

Unfortunately, when it comes to modern governance, no oversight means means the insiders are getting away with murder, and warmongering and treason and all the power that they bring. Appointed pretzeldent George W Bush on Valentine's Day 2007 put it in words: "Money trumps peace."

Secret government warmongering and war profiteering are systemic. Secret government is rotten to the core. What's more, in a democracy that once really was land of the free and home of the brave, secret government poses the greatest threat to true national security.

That OP: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=366571

There are dozens more, going 12 years back to when I was new to DU.

The point is: Secret government is un-American; when combined with privatized secret beneficiaries, it's fascistic.

[Progressive dog]

28. 35,000 NSA employees spy on 300,000,000 plus Americans

and use the information for nothing. They do it during the spare time they have after spying on the rest of the world.

[yurbud]

32. that does sound a lot more expensive than asking

[Progressive dog]

36. Close to free since they're doing it in their spare time nt