Never Forget: On this Day in 2001, Bush Ignored the Bin Laden Threat.

[Fire Walk With Me]

37. The system existing prior to 9/11 was apparently sufficient to detect and avert terrorism.

It was ignored (on purpose or through incomparable incompetence).

The present trillion-dollar-a-year "surveillance state" is nothing more than a pig's trough of contractors sucking up our tax dollars (ala' what Halliburton did in Iraq:

Halliburton bills taxpayers $45 per case of soda, $100 per bag of laundry
http://www.halliburtonwatch.org/news/whistleblower_hearings_denied.html

only it's being done to sell drones and security tech and to militarize police and to FUCKING SPY ON US CITIZENS WITHOUT WARRANTS.

Fuck the surveillance state and its cash lackeys who are killing the Bill of Rights for power and profit!


Meet the Contractors Turning America's Police Into a Paramilitary Force
http://www.alternet.org/meet-contractors-turning-americas-police-paramilitary-force?paging=off

The national security state has an annual budget of around $1 trillion. Of that huge pile of money, large amounts go to private companies the federal government awards contracts to. Some, like Lockheed Martin or Boeing, are household names, but many of the contractors fly just under the public's radar. What follows are three companies you should know about (because some of them can learn a lot about you with their spy technologies).

L3 is everywhere. Those night-vision goggles the JSOC team in Zero Dark Thirty uses? That's L3. The new machines that are replacing the naked scanners at the airport? That's L3. Torture at Abu Ghraib? A former subsidiary of L3 was recently ordered to pay $5.28 million to 71 Iraqis who had been held in the awful prison.

Oh, and drones? L3 is on it. Reprieve, a UK-based human rights organization, earlier this month wrote on its Web site:

“L-3 Communications is one of the main subcontractors involved with production of the US’s lethal Predator since the inception of the programme. Predators are used by the CIA to kill ‘suspected militants’ and terrorise entire populations in Pakistan and Yemen. Drone strikes have escalated under the Obama administration and 2013 has already seen six strikes in the two countries.”

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/

But why militarize our police forces if Ray Kelly would lead them (DHS controls PDs through "iWatch&quot ?


“I think Ray Kelly is one of the best there is,” Obama said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/07/18/would-obama-consider-ray-kelly-for-homeland-security-amid-stop-and-frisk-controversy/

However:

Occupy Wall Street ‏@OccupyWallStNYC

Secret police recordings: "We're going to go out there and violate some rights." Disgusting.
#StopAndFrisk
http://ow.ly/ncTK0

NYC 'Stop and Frisk' Policy Ruled Unconstitutional
http://www.policymic.com/articles/22375/nyc-stop-and-frisk-policy-ruled-unconstitutional-conservatives-immediately-start-whining

Racial Profiling Muslims: NYPD is Violating Civil Liberties by Spying on Religious Groups
http://www.policymic.com/articles/24817/racial-profiling-muslims-nypd-is-violating-civil-liberties-by-spying-on-religious-groups

"Every year since 2003, blacks and Latinos have consistently accounted for around 85 percent of stop-and-frisk selectees."
http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2013/07/01/mayor_bloomberg_stop_and_frisk_yes_the_controversial_policy_is_really_really.html




Further reading:

CIA Agent Had "No Limitations" Working With NYPD After 9/11
http://gothamist.com/2013/06/27/cia_agent_had_no_limitations_workin.php

How LAPD are made into a tentacle of the DHS
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022154200

Bringing the argument home about domestic spying (Look no further than the Los Angeles Police Dept.)
http://upload.democraticunderground.com/10023101984

How America's Top Tech Companies Created the Surveillance State
http://www.nationaljournal.com/magazine/how-america-s-top-tech-companies-created-the-surveillance-state-20130725

With Edward Snowden on the run in Russia and reportedly threatening to unveil the entire “blueprint” for National Security Agency surveillance, there’s probably as much terror in Silicon Valley as in Washington about what he might expose. The reaction so far from private industry about the part it has played in helping the government spy on Americans has ranged from outraged denial to total silence. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, he of the teen-nerd hoodie, said he’d never even heard of the kind of data-mining that the NSA leaker described—then fell quiet. Google cofounder Larry Page declared almost exactly the same thing; then he shut up, too. Especially for the libertarian geniuses of Silicon Valley, who take pride in their distance (both physically and philosophically) from Washington, the image-curdling idea that they might be secretly in bed with government spooks induced an even greater reluctance to talk, perhaps, than the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which conveniently forbids executives from revealing government requests for information.

But the sounds of silence from the tech and telecom sectors are drowning out a larger truth, one that some of Snowden’s documents might well supply in much greater detail. For nearly 20 years, many of these companies—indeed most of America’s biggest corporate sectors, from energy to finance to telecom to computers—have been doing the intelligence community’s bidding, as America’s spy and homeland-security agencies have bored their way into the nation’s privately run digital and electronic infrastructure. Sometimes this has happened after initial resistance, and occasionally under penalty of law, but more often with willing and even eager cooperation. Indeed, the private tech sector effectively built the NSA’s surveillance system, and got rich doing it.

Books have been written about President Eisenhower’s famous farewell warning in 1961 about the “military-industrial complex,” and what he described as its “unwarranted influence.” But an even greater leviathan today, one that the public knows little about, is the “intelligence-industrial complex.”

The saga of the private sector’s involvement in the NSA’s scheme for permanent mass surveillance is long, complex, and sometimes contentious. Often, in ways that appeared to apply indirect pressure on industry, the NSA has demanded, and received, approval authority—veto power, basically—over telecom mergers and the lifting of export controls on software. The tech industry, in more than a decade of working-group meetings, has hashed out an understanding with the intelligence community over greater NSA access to their systems, including the nation’s major servers (although it is not yet clear to what degree the agency had direct access). “I never saw come and say, ‘We’ll do this if you do that,’ ” says Rebecca Gould, the former vice president for public policy at Dell. “But the National Security Agency always reached out to companies, bringing them in. There are working groups going on as we speak.”