Ten Years Later: Surveillance in the 'Homeland'

[Octafish]

Despite the best efforts of the majority of Americans, the nation continues to lurch rightward.


The Eavesdropper by Andrea Eckert, 2008, mixed media

IMFO, this resource from TruthOut.org and the ACLU spells out big reasons why:

Ten Years Later: Surveillance in the "Homeland"

Ten years after the devastating attacks on New York and Washington, the fundamental promises of American democracy are hanging by a thin thread. Promoted by a culture of war and fear, the US government has steadily chipped away at those legal protections that enabled 'we the people' to rule ourselves. "Ten Years Later: Surveillance in the Homeland" charts the course of this shift, exposing the rapid advent of a technologically advanced surveillance state in the shadows of the Twin Towers.

I remember the United States before Sept. 11, 2001. Now, We the People are ALL suspects.

[Rex]

1. 9/11 changed everything. We went from innocent until proven guilty

to guilty until proven innocent. Now we find out Rupert Murdoch (a very good friend of the GOP) controlled the UK and SHOULD have a full investigation into how much he helped out the GWB administration in domestic spying/criminal activity.

We live in a more divided, frightened country then we did after 9/11. We are a police state eager for draconian laws for the working poor and total immunity for the ruling class.

OBL might be dead, but his goals seem to be achieved in America. We really have lost our freedoms to fear and a police state. Can't even take a picture of a cop committing a crime! Yep, 9/11 changed everything!

Looks like the M$M won!

[Octafish]

2. Corporate McPravda is a wholly owned subsidiary of the GOP.

For instance:

ABC and the rise of Rush Limbaugh

EXCERPT...

Capital Cities was born in 1954, and rapidly prospered. Many of its founders had previously worked in the U.S. intelligence community and had a great amount of wealth, social contacts and influence in government. Yet they opted to keep the company's actions out of the public eye -- they did not flaunt their wealth with private planes and lavish offices the way so many successful companies do. Just exactly how well-connected Capital Cities was to the CIA is unknown, but it is clear that the CIA concerned itself with the company at various times. The fact that the CIA has often used private businessmen, journalists and even entire companies as fronts for covert operations is not only well-known by historians, but legendary. (Recall Howard Hughes and Trans-World Airlines...)

One of Capital City's early founders was William Casey, who would later become Ronald Reagan's Director of the CIA. At the time of Casey's nomination, the press expressed surprise that Reagan would hire a businessman whose last-known intelligence experience was limited to OSS operations in World War II. The fact is, however, that Casey had never left intelligence. Throughout the Cold War he kept a foot in both worlds, in private business as well as the CIA. A history of Casey's business dealings reveals that he was an aggressive player who saw nothing wrong with bending the law to further his own conservative agenda. When he became implicated as a central figure in the Iran-Contra scandal, many Washington insiders considered it a predictable continuation of a very shady career.

Another Capital Cities founder, Lowell Thomas, was a close friend and business contact with Allen Dulles, Eisenhower's CIA Director, and John Dulles, the Secretary of State. Thomas always denied being a spy, but he was frequently seen at events involving intelligence operations. Another founder was Thomas Dewey, whom the CIA had given millions to create other front companies for covert operations.

SNIP...

By the 1980s, Capital Cities had grown powerful enough that it was now poised to hunt truly big game: a major television network. A vulnerable target appeared in the form of ABC, whose poor management in the early 80s was driving both its profits and stocks into oblivion. Back then, ABC's journalistic slant was indeed liberal; its criticism of the Reagan Administration had drawn the wrath of conservatives everywhere, from Wall Street to Washington. This was in marked contrast to the rest of the White House press corps, which was, in Bagdikian's words, "stunningly uncritical" of Reagan. Behind the scenes, Reagan was deregulating the FCC and eliminating anti-monopoly laws for the media, a fact the media appreciated and rewarded. The only exception was ABC. Sam Donaldson's penetrating questions during press conferences were so embarrassing to Reagan that his handlers scheduled the fewest Presidential press conferences in modern history.

CONTINUED...

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-libmedia.htm

ABCNNBCBSFixedNoiseNutworks don't want nobody messing around no how, no where, no time with their 24/7/265 propaganda formula:

Permanent Military Industrial Secret Intelligence Complex multiplied by (Permanent War + Permanent Fear) multiplied by All the TV Time There Is = Permanent Power for the Plutonomy

[HCE SuiGeneris]

8. + (insert number)

:kick:

[Rex]

12. Perfect formula Octafish!

The M$M is our enemy, somehow we must stop them from re-writing history for the GOP. We can already tell by the way the M$M behaves that they want Rick Perry to be the next POTUS. Another sock puppet for their paymasters to abuse and discard after 4-8 years!

[CrispyQ]

3. "Now, We the People are ALL suspects."

And we have a culture that encourages us to turn on each other & turn each other in.

[Octafish]

9. Sen. Frank Church (Democrat-Idaho) warned us in 1976...

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

"I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

SOURCE: http://www.opednews.com/articles/THE-NATIONAL-SECURITY-AGEN-by-Douglas-A-Wallace-110829-806.html

[90-percent]

4. Yeah - I'm against America's totalitarian police state

We gave up three or four CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS in the name of fighting the GWOT. (I prefer Gore Vidal's "war on dandruff", personally...) So on this tenth anniversary once again we seem to have "the system glowing red" with the fear of Anniversary Terrorists attacks "on our homeland". (Homeland - a term right out of Goebbels propaganda playbook)

We gave up all these rights and still we face such threats? Well, obviously we all need to give up even more rights. Only then can we be safe.

:sarcasm: :sarcasm:


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=439&topic_id=1905745&mesg_id=1905745

The "Powers that be" are out from behind the curtain and revealing themselves to be nothing more that "treacherous cretins"*

-90% jimmy

*a song by Frank Zappa

[Octafish]

10. "Treacherous Cretins" is right. And they don't care if we know it or not, they're above the law.

More from 1976:

The National Security Agency

excerpted from the book

The Lawless State

The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies

by Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, Christine Marwick

EXCERPT...

What is extraordinary about the NSA is its capacity for collecting information, and the tool that this gives the government for intruding upon the lives of its citizens Referring to the NSA, Senator Frank Church viewed the problem in this way:

The U.S. government has perfected a technological capability that enables us to monitor messages that go through the air . . . between ships at sea, between military units in the field. We have a very extensive capability of intercepting messages wherever they may be in the air waves. That is necessary and important as we look abroad at potential enemies. At the same time, that same capability at any time could be turned around on the American people. And no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything-telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide.'

The NSA has a greater potential for gathering information than any police state has ever had. The FBI can merely dream of putting an agent behind every mailbox; the NSA literally has the capacity to intercept all communications. As far as the record shows, it has so far limited itself to eavesdropping on communications that have at least one terminal in a foreign country-although this "restriction" allows it to intercept all international messages of Americans.

The NSA has not developed its own covert action programs to disrupt and neutralize selected political groups. It did carry out several burglaries during the 1950s, installed a few bugs to maintain its own security, and inspired the CIA and FBI to commit burglaries in foreign embassies on its behalf. More important, the NSA has complemented the programs of the other intelligence agencies by servicing their requests for information. Using -its own "watch list" and those provided by the CIA, the FBI, the Secret Service, and the BNDD (Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs), the NSA has used its special technology to run a program of information collection and dissemination. The watch lists determined what messages were targeted and to which agencies-in addition to its own Office of Security-the information was passed.

CONTINUED...

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/NSA/NSA_LS.html

So, a secret agency chartered to spy on foreign governments is now turned on America? Does my mentioning that now make me an "enemy of the state"?

I thought this was a democracy. Is thinking that now illegal?

[AndyTiedye]

5. 9/11 Was Our Reichstag Fire

[Octafish]

17. Absolutely. Both hastened the end of Democracy.

Bush's 9/11 Reichstag Fire

by Harvey Wasserman
Published on Friday, September 13, 2002 by CommonDreams.org

EXCERPT...

This unelected regime---Hitler also came to power with a minority of votes---has used the terrible tragedies of September 11 in much the way the Nazis jumped on the Reichstag fire. Bush has failed to capture or try 9/11's alleged perpetrators. But he's used the tragedy to push an extreme rightist agenda aimed at crushing civil liberties, silencing all opposition, fattening a war machine, and arrogating the right to unilaterally attack other countries without tangible provocation.

With this has come an assault on the natural environment, women's rights, gay rights, organized labor, a wide range of international treaties, and the need of the public to know about and prosecute corporate crime and fraudulent stock dealings, which seem to involve at least half the Bush cabinet, including its two ranking members.

Fittingly, just as the nation was mourning those who died in one of the most twisted acts of terrorism imaginable, Bush's brother Jeb made another mockery of the electoral process. In Florida, where the 2000 election was most blatantly stolen, faulty voting machines were again foisted on districts filled with primarily with blacks and Jews. While the nation's eyes were elsewhere, major---perhaps fatal---chaos was injected into the Democratic primary meant to choose Jeb's fall opponent. As the unusable ballots, dysfunctional voting machines and manipulated poll hours again shredded the democratic process, one could hear Republicans smirking from Tallahassee to DC.

SNIP...

Meanwhile John Ashcroft has shredded the American Bill of Rights as Osama Bin Laden or Saddam Hussein could never imagine. Under the cloak of terror, the new Grand Inquisitor has virtually eliminated the first ten amendments to the Constitution---except the second, which guarantees that he and his gun lobby sponsors (and innumerable potential terrorists) can continue to carry guns.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0913-03.htm

For those people wondering why I so often "violate" the so-called "Godwin's Law":

Know your BFEE: Like a NAZI.

[90-percent]

6. Magnitudes

If my math is correct, we lost 3,100 people in the 9-11 attacks. I think we loose about 50,000 souls per year in automobile accidents. The death toll of 9-11 is about 6% of our yearly car accident deaths.

It was a horrible thing this 9-11, but for God's sake, why do our leaders have no sense of proportion (or rationality) about the appropriate response?

"There are two things in the universe that are universal; oxygen and stupidity" - Frank Zappa

We are a nation of morons led by people even stupider than we are!

-90% jimmy

[Octafish]

20. No Place to Hide

http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/noplacetohide/transcript.html

EXCERPT...

O'Harrow: If Asher's supercomputer were used to conduct a background check on Asher himself, it might reveal his association with drug-smugglers. According to confidential Florida police documents and interviews with law enforcement authorities and Asher, in the early 1980s, Asher flew planes to and from Central and South America carrying marijuana and cocaine. He says he regrets that episode of his life and blames it on a hunger for adventure.

Asher: I didn't feel like I had done a crime ... until it occurred to me I had just done a crime. ... I was a criminal. And I can tell you since June of 1982, I have never broken the law.

O'Harrow: Asher was never arrested or charged. He's worked hard to make amends, giving generously to police groups and other charities. He's also given hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to politicians in both major parties.

Biewen: Asher's rehabilitation seemed complete in January of 2003 when he flew to Washington, D.C., for a meeting at the White House. He and a colleague from his company, Seisint, were invited to demonstrate a powerful information system Asher had invented and billed as a counterterrorism tool. The entrepreneurs were escorted by Jeb Bush, the Florida governor and president's brother.

Asher: We were waiting and then all of a sudden the entourage of Dick Cheney and his people, all the Homeland Security people were there. Tom Ridge was there; Mueller came in. We all sat down.

O'Harrow: That is, Robert Mueller, the FBI director. Also at the meeting was Tim Moore, commissioner of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and a friend of Hank Asher's.

Asher: Governor Bush started it with saying that Commissioner Moore and FDLE, working, especially with Seisint, have come up with what we feel is a very important tool for this country.

Gosh. It seems like our assymetrical response had a "commercial component."

[lonestarnot]

7. watchers watching the watched watching the watched watching the watched and so on and so forth.

[Octafish]

19. Frank Church, Gary Hart, lots more Democrats and a few good Republicans tried to watch...

...and warn us:

The natural tendency of Government is toward abuse of power. Men entrusted with power, even those aware of its dangers, tend, particularly when pressured, to slight liberty.

Our constitutional system guards against this tendency. It establishes many different checks upon power. It is those wise restraints which 'keep men free. In the field of intelligence those restraints have too often been ignored.

The three main departures in the intelligence field from the constitutional plan for controlling abuse of power have been: (a) Excessive Executive Power.

In a sense the growth of domestic intelligence activities mirrored the growth of presidential power generally. But more than any other activity, more even than exercise of the war power, intelligence activities have been left to the control of the Executive.

For decades Congress and the courts as well as the press and the public have accepted the notion that the control of intelligence activities was the exclusive prerogative of the Chief Executive and his surrogates. The exercise of this power was not questioned or even inquired into by outsiders. Indeed, at times the power was seen as flowing not from the law, but as inherent, in the Presidency.

Whatever the theory, the fact was that intelligence activities were essentially exempted from the normal system of checks and balances. Such Executive power, not founded in law or checked by Congress or the courts, contained the seeds of abuse and its growth was to be expected.

(b) Excessive Secrecy.

Abuse thrives on secrecy. Obviously, public disclosure, of matters such as the names of intelligence agents or the technological details of collection methods is inappropriate. But in the field of intelligence, secrecy has been extended to inhibit review of the basic programs and practices themselves.

Those within the Executive branch and the Congress who would exercise their responsibilities wisely must be fully informed. The American public, as well, should know enough about intelligence activities to be able to apply its good sense to the underlying issues of policy and morality.

Knowledge is the key to control. Secrecy should no longer be allowed to shield the existence of constitutional, legal and moral problems from the scrutiny of all three branches of government or from the American people themselves.

(c) Avoidance of the Rule of Law.

Lawlessness by Government breeds corrosive cynicism among the people and erodes the trust upon which government depends.

Here, there is no sovereign who stands above the law. Each of us, from presidents to the most disadvantaged citizen, must obey the law. As intelligence operations developed, however, rationalizations were fashioned to immunize them from the restraints of the Bill of Rights and the specific prohibitions of the criminal code. The experience of our investigation leads us to conclude that such rationalizations are a dangerous delusion.

SOURCE: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0426-30.htm

So, we must watch the watchers. Thanks, lonestarnot.

[msongs]

11. lol yet another thread criticising obama and his policies. will they never stop? hmm nt

[Rex]

13. You're joking right?

[Octafish]

14. Laugh all you want. The president is continuing policies begun under his GOP predecessors.

Didn't mean for the facts to get in the way of anyone's opinion.

[Jamastiene]

16. So, these policies were really Obama's policies when Bush was still pResident too?

I'll take that into account. I did NOT know that.

[Jamastiene]

15. I can feel the "being watched" thing every time I go anywhere in public.

It's downright creepy. I don't feel safer...at all. I want my rights back now.

[Octafish]

18. What Henry Kissinger said...

"Even a paranoid can have enemies."



DUer Are grits groceries brought this to my attention:

Turning the Mall into a Police State

On May 1, 2008, at 4:59 p.m., Brad Kleinerman entered the spooky world of homeland security.

As he shopped for a children’s watch inside the sprawling Mall of America, two security guards approached and began questioning him. Although he was not accused of wrongdoing, the guards filed a confidential report about Kleinerman that was forwarded to local police.

The reason: Guards thought he might pose a threat because they believed he had been looking at them in a suspicious way.

Count me as paranoid or kooky, I don't care which.

One thing I do care about: I'm glad to know I have friends who give a damn about the Constitution and our rights. Thank you, Jamastiene.

[ProSense]

21. A Win for Free Speech: ACLU Recommendations Adopted by DHS!

A Win for Free Speech: ACLU Recommendations Adopted by DHS!

Posted here

[Octafish]

22. That is great. So DHS won't spy on peace groups any more without a warrant.

A Win for Free Speech: ACLU Recommendations Adopted by DHS!

EXCERPT...

In March, we received a letter from OCRCL indicating that FPS had acted within its authority when monitoring and collecting data on the non-violent political activities of advocacy groups. In response to this finding, we wrote a blog, highlighting our concerns about OCRCL's conclusions on this matter. After seeing our blog, OCRCL decided to take another look at our complaint, and it concluded that DHS will adopt our recommended reforms, and that FPS will no longer distribute this type of information on a regional or national basis. We thank OCRCL for their willingness to review this matter and resolve the issue favorably.

PDF of the Letter from DHS: http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/dhs_ocrcl_letter.pdf

So, when will DHS and the rest of the national security state stop universal electronic surveillance of Americans? That continues, relatively unabated. A handy resource:

Electronic Frontier Foundation

[Faryn Balyncd]

23. This is the worst legacy of that day....and a measure of what we have lost.

K and R