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Thomas Drake: You're Automatically Suspicious Until Proven Otherwise
colinneagle writes "RT had a very interesting interview with former NSA official turned whistleblower Thomas A. Drake, who said, 'Security has effectively become the State religion; you don't question it. And if you question it, then your loyalty is questioned.' 'Speaking truth of power is very dangerous in today's world,' he added. The interviewer pointed out that investigative journalists are labeled as 'terrorist helpers' for trying to reveal the truth, to which Drake said the government's take is 'you go after the messenger because the last thing you want to do is deal with the message.'"
Network World also has a pretty good article on William Binney's keynote at HOPE 9, wherein he revealed some technical details and a bit more background on the NSA's domestic surveillance program. Unfortunately, neither audio or video of the talk are available yet.
It was a good talk. I found it interesting.
I think the big take away from his insights was that the root of this evil was the corruption that consumed the NSA, and the pressure to send money out to the military industrial complex that surrounds government agencies.
It seems to me, in the context of this article, that the security religion is used as a veil to hide that corruption. By now, they may be using doublethink to believe their own lies, but that is the root cause. To fix it, we have to remove the dirty ties between the NSA and the MIC.
He repeatedly said in his talk that no matter what he did to solve a problem, he was never allowed to call it solved. There was always more at stake, more danger around the corner that would be used to scare Congress into spending more money. As he said... keep the problem going so the money keeps flowing.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
RT is Kremlin-controlled Russian state media. They love to do stories like this lately.
Second, Binney hasn't been at NSA since shortly after 9/11. And a LOT of stuff was happening immediately after 9/11. His statements to the effect that NSA is "building a dossier on every American" are not based in any sort of proof.
Also keep in mind that for NSA to perform its foreign signals intelligence mission — which INCLUDES discerning and targeting foreign communications within the US and on US equipment and networks, and does not require a warrant — mechanisms to identify that traffic are a necessity.
Furthermore, it is unlawful to collect, store, analyze, or disseminate the CONTENT of the communications of US Persons without a warrant. Period. This is not some kind of a joke.
("But they did it before!" Yes. To numbers of people in the hundreds, thought to have direct ties to terrorism, under a program asserted under the President's Article II authority under the AUMF, and briefed to Congress every 45 days. So to now say that NSA is wholesale building "dossiers" on EVERY American is a bit ludicrous. "But what about the data center in Utah? Did you see that article?" Yes. Yes I did. I have seen them all.)
That said, there are many things that may indeed be collected and analyzed without a warrant, including certain kinds of communications metadata. This is a simple fact, and is not a new construct. Doing this for phone records was affirmed by the Supreme Court in Smith v Maryland (1979).
So yeah, excuse me if I am suspect of something that is literally Russian propaganda pushing this story. That's completely separate from whether Drake had legitimate whistleblowing concerns. Whistleblowers being punished is, sadly, also not anything new.
Really, how many of you have been stopped at government checkpoints and asked to show your papers (except when leaving the country)? Further, if you failed to supply papers, were you under threat of arrest?
Just a guess, mind you, but maybe 10% of the Hispanic readership in Arizona?
This has been a test. If this had been an actual Sig, you would have been amused.
You need to read more than corporate media accounts before you decide to get so close to branding them a violent group of people. Every big demonstration attracts people who want to be violent who may or may not have anything to do with group itself. It sounds like you are taking the corporate media story of the events for granted.
And the issues at OWS goes way beyond wrongfully jailed person to police beatings, to police whose overtime is being paid by banks (which happened in New York), and all other types of problems. The corporate media *does*not*like* people that don't fall in line with their way of thinking.
The kind of slippery slope towards more and more blind zeal and further-reaching powers from agents of every kind of administration (private or public, it makes little difference) was at the center of Ludwig von Mises' 1944 short book Bureaucracy. He tried to explain why and how this happens in terms of systemic incentives and asymetry of information:
- promotion works mainly on seniority inside a bureaucracy, thus the top bureaucrats are restricted in their long-term planning by having their own retirement as an event horizon, and having grown a bias towards the statu quo ; while the newly appointed officials are being selected only on their then characteristics (good grades and diplomas mostly), and then all innovation and vigor they might have is sucked out by the subordinate positions they are forced to go through and the fact that none of it will matter much, if at all, to their advancement.
- having no market appraisal of the value of their action (which is not the same as there being no value to it, please mind), they they get no valuations of their own initiatives or actions from the rest of society, and they have no guidance for allocating their efforts and resources across many tasks and priorities, they cannot know how good or bad a job they're doing, except through conforming blindly to the rules and laws they enforce, and enforcing them as closely to the letter as they can - 'doing a good bureaucrat's job' often equates 'not doing anything that triggers the ire of your hierarchical superiors'
- being on the side that enforces the law often makes them forget that they, too, are subject to it, especially when things like due process hampers their enforcement of the law ; this creates a double standard in their mind where the law is never applied strictly and widely enough to the general population, and always too tightly and too often to themselves
- serving in an administration often has the perverse effect of turning the means at the disposal of the agents, into ends of their own:
Maybe we deserve this world ?
With power as finely balanced as it is in the US, a party doesn't need anything like a third of the vote. A percent or less of the vote - if concentrated so that it elects one or two congressmen - can give a party power way out of proportion to its actual electoral vote. Countries like Israel have long suffered from a tail-wagging-the-dog syndrome where tiny parties have vastly disproportionate power for that very reason: if they leave the coalition, taking their two or three votes with them, the government loses its majority.
or the 30 million Jews that were murdered by Hitler
Nice. You not only Godwin the discussion but you miss the number by a factor of five. Hitler murdered 6 million Jews, not 30 million. So I'm not really inclined to read past that point of your post.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.