Paul Craig Roberts: ObamaCare — and TSA Searching Traffic on Easter Sunday

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, DHS, Government
Paul Craig Roberts

What is ObamaCare?

Growing up in the post-war era (after the Second World War), I never expected to live in the strange Kafkaesque world that exists today. The US government can assassinate any US citizen that the executive branch thinks could possibly be a “threat” to the US government, or throw the hapless citizen into a dungeon for the rest of his or her life without presenting any evidence to a court or obtaining a conviction of any crime, or send the “threat” to a puppet foreign state to be tortured until the “threat” confesses to a crime that never occurred or dies at the hands of “freedom and democracy” while professing innocence.

It has never been revealed how a single citizen, or any number thereof, could possibly comprise a threat to a government that has a trillion plus dollars to spend each year on security and weapons, the world’s largest navy and air force, 700 plus military bases across the world, large numbers of nuclear weapons, 16 intelligence agencies plus the intelligence agencies of its NATO puppet states and the intelligence service of Israel.

Nevertheless, air travelers are subjected to porno-scanning and sexual groping. Cars traveling on Interstate highways can expect to be stopped, with traffic backed up for miles, while Homeland Security and the federalized state or local police conduct searches.

I witnessed one such warrantless search on Easter Sunday. The south bound lanes of I-185 heading into Columbus, Georgia, were at a standstill while black SUV and police car lights flashed. US citizens were treated by “security” forces that they finance as if they were “terrorists” or “domestic extremists,” another undefined class of Americans devoid of constitutional protections.

Continue reading “Paul Craig Roberts: ObamaCare — and TSA Searching Traffic on Easter Sunday”

John Robb: When Security is Huge, Stupid, & Out of Control

10 Security, Blog Wisdom, DHS, IO Impotency
John Robb

Simple equation:

A national security system that is mostly bloat and mission creep instead of real, honest to goodness, security

+

Badly design social media monitoring tools that are sifting through billions of messages a day?

=

FAILURE

Here's a simple example.  A young British guy makes a tweet to his friends:

Tweet on destroy

Easy to discern the tweet is about hard drinking/partying.

He flies to Los Angeles with a friend.  He is promptly arrested.  Held in cuffs/cell for 12 hours and deported.

Why?  The Department of Homeland Security flagged his tweet  as a possible threat to the US.

Huh?

Automated security at its finest.

Add lethal drones that kill people due to “terrorist” signature behaviors and we have a problem Houston.

Phi Beta Iota:  Oddly enough, this is the exact unclassified parallel of the National Security Agency (NSA) that processes less than 1% of all traffic, and less than 5% of “high priority” traffic, according to various open source reports.  At what point–in the midst of economic collapse–do serious people get to say “enough – let's get real about needs, capabilities, costs, outputs, and trade-offs?”  Has anyone been able to find the “M” in OMB?  This is what you get when “management” is non-existent, money is printed without pause, and very expensive executive merely channel dollars rather than actually thinking about what they buy, what the produce, and how we might better spend (or not spend at all) those dollars.

John Robb: Drone Diplomacy – Comply or Die + Meta RECAP

07 Other Atrocities, Blog Wisdom, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call
John Robb

Drone Diplomacy: Comply or Die

Gunboat diplomacy was the essence of military power projection for centuries. Want to coerce a country? Sail a aircraft carrier battle group into their national waters.

However, carrier battlegroups are hideously expensive, increasingly vulnerable to low cost attack, and less lethal than they appear (most of the weapons systems are used for self-defense).

What are nation-states replacing them with? Drones. You can already see it in action across the world as drone staging areas are replacing traditional military bases/entanglements. Further, drones already account for the vast majority of people killed by US forces.

Of course, the reason for this is clear. Drones are relatively cheap, don't require many people to deploy/operate, don't put personnel directly at risk, can be easily outsourced, can be micromanaged from Washington, and are very effective at blowing things up.

The final benefit of Drone Diplomacy: drones make it possible to apply coercion at the individual or small group level in a way that a blunt instrument like a carrier battle group can't.
What does this mean?

It allows truly scalable global coercion: the automation of comply or die.

Call up the target on his/her personal cell (it could even be automated as a robo-call to get real scalability — wouldn't that suck, to get killed completely through bot based automation).

Ask the person on the other end to do something or to stop doing something.

If they don't do what you ask, they die soon therafter due to drone strike (unless they go into deep hiding and disconnect from the global system).

With drone costs plummeting, we could see this drop to something less thanWhat can we look forward to?

The mid term future of a national security apparatus in secular ($$) decline?

Drones, drones, and more drones. Shrink the headcount. Cut training. Put manned weapons systems in life support mode. Cut mx.

All the money is on cyber intel (to generate targets based on “signatures”) and drones to kill them. When domestic unrest occurs in the US due to economic decline, these systems will be ready for domestic application.

Oh joy.

See Also:

Is There a Defense Against Drones?

Chuck Spinney: Real Cost vs Real Value of Drones? + RECAP

DefDog: Iran Hijacks US Drone Shows Film + RECAP

G.I. Wilson: Killer Drones, Moral Disengagement, + War Crimes RECAP

John Robb: Micro Drones Threaten US Citizens at Home

Marcus Aurelius: US Navy Hypes Water Drone Threat

Mini-Me: Assassination – Made in America – At What Cost? Impeachable Treason.

 

Owl: Internment Camps for Isolating Unemployed in Federal “Work Camps”?

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Blog Wisdom, Corruption, DHS, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Military, Officers Call
Who? Who?

Al Martin, former Navy intelligence officer and former Wall Street broker, former Iran-contra co-conspirator with Ollie's Follies, is starting to write about the possible use of the many civil unrest internment camps built in the US by Halliburton and related contractors. In his view, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), makes it possible for expanded use of the US military and expanded powers for law enforcement to “contain” the unemployed in work camps–which might be a good thing, in his view. [The bill passed the Senate but has not passed the House at this time.]

Here are some fragments about these camps.

Alleged Gulag Regions

Alleged KBR Memo with Details for Rapid Construction of Camps for 300-1000

List of Alleged US Internment Camps (12 Pages)

Exclusive: Government Activating FEMA Camps Across U.S. [Prison Planet / Alex Jones / Substance]

Concentration Camps for US Citizens

Our government, under a program called REX 84 (Readiness Exercise 84) runs over 800 detention camps nationwide. They are all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners should the US government institute martial law.


DefDog: DHS Comedy of Errors on Water-Pump “Hack”

10 Security, Corruption, DHS, Government, IO Impotency
DefDog

If there is ever a story to validate the reduction of spending in the
intelligence community, this would be it……….

Exclusive: Comedy of Errors Led to False ‘Water-Pump Hack’ Report

It was the broken water pump heard ’round the world.

Cyberwar watchers took notice this month when a leaked intelligence memo claimed Russian hackers had remotely destroyed a water pump at an Illinois utility. The report spawned dozens of sensational stories characterizing it as the first-ever reported destruction of U.S. infrastructure by a hacker. Some described it as America’s very own Stuxnet attack.

Except, it turns out, it wasn’t. Within a week of the report’s release, DHS bluntly contradicted the memo, saying that it could find no evidence that a hack occurred. In truth, the water pump simply burned out, as pumps are wont to do, and a government-funded intelligence center incorrectly linked the failure to an internet connection from a Russian IP address months earlier.

Read full article with two photos.

More reporting on this event, with some detail showing the lack of “intelligence” within this intelligence activity…….

America's critical infrastructure security response system is broken

Following SCADA water utility ‘hack', is the reporting system in need of re-thinking?

By Ellen Messmer | Network World US | Published: 16:01, 02 December 2011

The flap over the reported water utility hack in Illinois begs the question: Is the reporting system that the US has set up to identify cyberattacks on critical infrastructure broken and in need of re-thinking?

Read full article.

Patrick Meier: Architecture and Calendars as Trojan Horses for Repressive Regimes [Cognitive Dissonance 101]

07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, DHS, Government, IO Impotency
Patrick Meier

Why Architecture and Calendars Are Trojan Horses for Repressive Regimes

by Patrick Meier

The simple thought first occurred to me while visiting Serbia earlier this year. As I walked in front of the country's parliament, I recalled Steve York's docu-mentary, “Bringing Down a Dictator.” In one particular scene, a large crowd assembles in front of the Serbian parliament chanting for the resignation of Slobodan Milosevic. Soon after, they storm the building and find thousands of election ballots rigged in the despot's favor. I then thought of Tahrir Square and how more than a million protestors had assembled there to demand that Hosni Mubarak step down. There was one obvious place for protestors to assemble in Cairo durin g the recent revolts. The word Tahrir means “liberation” in Arabic. That's what I call free advertising and framing par excellence.

These scenes play out over and over across the history of revolutions and popular resistance movements. In many ways, state architecture that is meant to project power and authority can just as easily be magnets and mobilization mechanisms for popular dissent; a hardware hack turned against it's coders. A Trojan Horse of sorts in the computing sense of the word.

Read rest of post.

Phi Beta Iota:  Understanding cognitive dissonance between a public and a regime (or between troops / officers and their corrupt chain of command) is not a competency of the national intelligence communities or their political “clients.”  What is so sad is that this is the PRECISE competency needed to avoid an all-consuming revolution.