Thousands of people from across the country are planning to converge on Wall Street this Saturday to protest America’s “corrupt democratic process” and the use of corporate moneyin American elections.
The day has already seen support from hactivist group Anti Sec, which wrote on Twitter Thursday: “Americans it is now our time. The Tunisians did it, then the Egyptians. It is OUR time. It is OUR America.” Anti-consumerist magazine AdBusters asked on its site: “Is American ripe for a Tahrir moment?”
Phi Beta Iota: There isn't a single politician out there that “gets” this, with one possible exception we will identify if and when he makes reference to the connection between the USA Day of Rage, his campaign, and the need for Electoral Reform–there is nothing wrong with America that cannot be fixed relatively quickly and simply via the restoration of the integrity of our electoral process and our government.
The posting of Jim Bamford’s Politico article on today’s Public Intelligence Blog or rather the accompanying comment on it by Robert Steele [Jim Bamford: How 9/11 Fearmongering Grew NSA Into a Very Expensive Domestic Surveillance Monster] identifies the principal problem with the outrageously expensive NSA. His comment is directly related to earlier comments he made on a Wall Street Journal article written by General Jim Clapper (USAF ret.) the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) [David Isenberg: Jim Clapper Claims Transformation — Robert Steele Comments on Each Misrepresentation] Steele did a brilliant job of refuting the claims that General Clapper advanced in this article about how much the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) has improved since 9/11. Yet the article really wasn’t serious to begin with because it obviously was written with the purpose of telling the American people what the General wanted them to know. I am sure it was vetted carefully by his staff and possibly CIA as well.
In the interests of clearing the air a bit I would like to add a couple of comments of my own to supplement those that Steele has made.
In the wake of 9/11 people, who did not know what they were talking about, had a good deal to say concerning the “lack of sharing” within the IC. In point of fact NSA and its technical counterpart the National Geo-spatial [Intelligence] Agency (NGA) are required by law to make their products available to analysts holding the proper clearances in entire IC as well as the President and his National Security Staff. The real lack of sharing was and is between the FBI and CIA. The FBI is unwilling to share because its agents fear damaging ongoing investigations while CIA is unwilling to share because its intelligence officers fear compromising sensitive sources. Had this issue been approached with integrity and directly between the two agencies it could have been resolved years ago.
General Clapper argued that the changed “culture” within the intelligence community had made its members much more efficient at dealing transnational terrorist and criminal organizations. Neither CIA nor NSA has a clue on how to deal with widely dispersed networked type of organizations. Indeed CIA has yet to build a realistic model of the organizational structure or personnel staffing of al Qaeda. CIA’s current methodology of using ‘targeters’ to find and track individual al Qaeda members is simply doing what the original CIA Counter Terrorism Center (CTC) was doing in the 1990s. Indeed their analytic approach is the same as used during the Cold War with “Soviet Type Armed Forces” (the actual name of a class that many of us attended).
Finally there are Bamford’s article and Steele’s comments on it. Steele in his comments went right to the heart of the matter by noting that NSA was incapable of processing more than a small percentage of the material it collects on a 24/7 basis. This goes directly to an issue that General Clapper clearly did not wish to discuss in his article: for all the money being poured into NSA specifically and the IC more broadly, how much return in enhanced security are we really getting? It would not seem to make much sense to continue to spend even more money for collection systems to collect ever more traffic if what is being gathered now can’t be adequately processed.
Robert David STEELE Vivas
Robert Steele: Emphasis added above. Richard Wright (Retired Reader at Amazon) focuses on the longest largest divide in the US intelligence community itself, as well as the complete abject failure of analysis as a whole and analysis in relation to crime and terrorism, but it bears mention that other divides are equally unattended to by the current leadership:
1) The secret world ignores 90% of the full-spectrum threat to obsess on counter-terrorism (badly).
2) The secret world ignores 90% of the Whole of Government customer base, while badly serving the President and a few senior national security officials. It is worthless on strategy, acquisition, campaign planning, and tactical real-time actionable intelligence in 183 languages.
3) The secret world ignores 90% of the relevant sources (in 183 languages) and methods (modern human and machine processing that is commonplace within major insurance and financial companies).
On a scale of 100%, ten years after 9/11, the US secret intelligence world earns a grade of 10% (not just failing, but a dishonorable discharge and shame for all eternity). The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) are been impotent since their inception, and appear content to continue in that fashion.
Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide.
Within weeks of the attacks, the giant ears of the National Security Agency, always pointed outward toward potential enemies, turned inward on the American public itself. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established 23 years before to ensure that only suspected foreign agents and terrorists were targeted by the NSA, would be bypassed. Telecom companies, required by law to keep the computerized phone records of their customers confidential unless presented with a warrant, would secretly turn them over in bulk to the NSA without ever asking for a warrant.
. . . . . .
So much intercepted information is now being collected from “enemies” at home and abroad that, in order to store it all, the agency last year began constructing the ultimate monument to eavesdropping. Rising in a remote corner of Utah, the agency’s gargantuan data storage center will be 1 million square feet, cost nearly $2 billion and likely be capable of eventually holding more than a yottabyte of data — equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
. . . . . .
A surveillance system capable of monitoring 10 million people simultaneously this year will be able to monitor 100 million the next year — at probably half the cost. And every time new communications technology appears on the market, rest assured that someone at the NSA has already found a way to monitor it. It’s what the NSA does.
What Church likely never anticipated was the rise of the security-industrial complex, a revolving door between those generating the fears and those profiting from them.
Phi Beta Iota: NSA leadership is blatantly corrupt (this is the same person who destroyed ABLE DANGER rather than share the information with the FBI). The only good news is that NSA is also inept–it processes less than one percent of what it captures, and is essentially cheating the taxpayer at the same time that it is spying on the taxpayer. The time has come to create a whole new cadre of ethical leaders who actually understand the new craft of intelligence as decision support (outputs) instead of budget share (inputs), and to slam it back from $90 billion a year toward $20 billion a year. With the savings the next President can afford to give all displaced personnel a year's salary and a year's re-training toward education, infrastructure, and information-era jobs.
Defining Psychological Operations is straightforward enough, but
determining where exactly it ends is extremely tricky. The US Department of Defense has infiltrated institutions around the world, they expend billions every year on domestic and foreign propaganda, yet they still only represent a single slice of the spectrum. Intelligence agencies, private think tanks and public corporations are all competing for attentional bandwidth, too. PSYOPS has become ubiquitous, metastasized into Standard Operating Procedure for the entire edifice of Western Culture. Our news and our entertainment, scientific studies, history books, political campaigns and activist movements are all just sponsored messages and paid promotions. From advertisements to astroturfing, everyone's got “desired effects” and everyone's got a “target audience” now.
Phi Beta Iota: PSYOP succeed when education fails. Education fails and PSYOP succeed when integrity fails. This ultimately boils down to Philosophy and the Social Problem (Will Durant, 2008 x 1916).
Below the line: structured and expanded list with links.
Our various editors have been receiving emails from people we all deeply respect. Below is my response on behalf of the community we represent, but strictly my personal interpretation and cautionary note. Below was provided in email form to NO LABELS and to the circle being Moon-eized by NO LABELS.
NO LABELS and Americans Elect are both fraudulent
Folks, I have no doubt about the generally good intentions of Schultz and others, but NO LABELS is a fraud, as is Americans Elect.
Below provide some background. Those of us who have been attentive have exposed the manipulative nature of these two entities, as well as their complete lack of transparency. The staffers fronting for these two organizations are well-intentioned but witless of their being used, just as the Tea Party rank and file are witless of the Koch brothers financial campaign that puts the booboise in front.
A hundred and fifty years ago, adults were incensed about child labor. Low-wage kids were taking jobs away from hard-working adults.
Sure, there was some moral outrage at seven-year olds losing fingers and being abused at work, but the economic rationale was paramount. Factory owners insisted that losing child workers would be catastrophic to their industries and fought hard to keep the kids at work–they said they couldn't afford to hire adults. It wasn't until 1918 that nationwide compulsory education was in place.
Part of the rationale to sell this major transformation to industrialists was that educated kids would actually become more compliant and productive workers. Our current system of teaching kids to sit in straight rows and obey instructions isn't a coincidence–it was an investment in our economic future. The plan: trade short-term child labor wages for longer-term productivity by giving kids a head start in doing what they're told.
Large-scale education was never about teaching kids or creating scholars. It was invented to churn out adults who worked well within the system.
Of course, it worked. Several generations of productive, fully employed workers followed. But now?
My very close friend Mike Lofgren, and Republican of the Old School, one of the smartest people I have ever met, backs out of the Capital Hill Saloon with both guns blazing. Knowing the truly dedicated people like Mike in government over the years is one of the things that made my 33 years in government service both a privilege and honor for which I will remain ever thankful.
Barbara Stanwyck: “We're both rotten!”
Fred MacMurray: “Yeah – only you're a little more rotten.”
– Double Indemnity (1944)
Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten – how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests – no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
Full safety copy with added emphasis below the line.
