Mini-Mi: DHS Has Not Gotten Its Death Notice — Planning $5 Billion Make-Over of Former Insane Asylum for Hill-Top Empire

07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, DHS, Government
Who? Mini-Me?

The Department of Homeland Security’s New HQ is an Abandoned Insane Asylum

public intelligence.net, 26 September 2011

Five miles southeast of the gleaming Capitol dome, on a scenic bluff overlooking the confluence of the Potomac and Anacostia rivers, the future office of the secretary of Homeland Security sits boarded up and abandoned.

Four years ago, U.S. officials announced plans to renovate the dilapidated, castle-like structure —opened in 1855 as the Government Hospital for the Insane — to anchor Washington’s largest construction project since the Pentagon was built 70 years ago.

Click on Image to Enlarge

The goal was to unite on a single campus the 22 agencies that were stitched together to form the Department of Homeland Security after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

But the $3.4-billion headquarters project stalled as Congress tried to cut the federal deficit.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  There is no evidence that in the meantime, the CIA is using the facility as a secret prison for US citizen dissidents.  As clear as it is to the public that DHS needs to be eliminated immediately, DHS has clearly not gotten the memorandum.  We believe there will be a one-third cut in federal funding and federal employment beginning in 2012.  The current leadership of the two parties, of Congress, and of the Executive appears to be grotesquely out of touch with reality, out of control, and operating completely against the public interest.

Robert Steele: Ignored 1994, Ignored 2011–Deja Vu

07 Other Atrocities, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, Hill Letters & Testimony, IO Impotency, Legislation, Military, Policies, Standards, Technologies
Robert David STEELE Vivas

One of our contributors passed this to me and asked me to comment in relation to the alarm that Winn Schwartau, Bill Caeli, Jim Anderson, and I sounded in 1994, in writing, to Marty Harris, then head of the National Information Infrastructure (NII).

First, the item.

From the man who discovered Stuxnet, dire warnings one year later

Mark Clayton

Christian Science Monitor, 22 September 2011

Stuxnet, the cyberweapon that attacked and damaged an Iranian nuclear facility, has opened a Pandora's box of cyberwar, says the man who uncovered it. A Q&A about the potential threats.

EXTRACT:

CSM: How would you characterize the year since Stuxnet – the response by nations, industry and government?

LANGNER: Last year, after Stuxnet was identified as a weapon, we recommended to every asset owner in America – owners of power plants, chemical plants, refineries and others – to make it a top priority to protect their systems…. That wakeup call lasted only about a week. Thereafter, everybody fell back into coma. The most bizarre thing is that even the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Siemens [maker of the industrial control system targeted by Stuxnet] talked about Stuxnet being a wakeup call, but never got into the specifics of what needed to be done.

Continue reading “Robert Steele: Ignored 1994, Ignored 2011–Deja Vu”

DefDog: US Surveillance Law Goes to Supreme Court

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Ethics, Government, IO Technologies, Law Enforcement
DefDog

Court allows challenge of U.S. surveillance law

By

Washington Post, 21 September 2011

A group of plaintiffs hoping to mount a challenge to U.S. surveillance law secured a major victory Wednesday when a federal appeals court upheld their standing to sue the government.

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ 6-6 decision allows a group of American lawyers, human rights activists and journalists to challenge the constitutionality of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as amended by Congress in 2008.

The revision expanded the government’s surveillance authority, permitting intelligence agencies to collect information on U.S. soil without a warrant identifying a particular individual — as long as the government could assure a surveillance court that its targeting procedures are designed to find people who are not U.S. persons and who are overseas.

U.S. government has typically attempted to block such challenges by arguing that litigation would reveal state secrets or that the plaintiffs lack standing to sue. But in March, a three-judge panel accepted the argument of the plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, that the law had harmed them by forcing them to take draconian measures to avoid government interception of their phone calls and e-mails to overseas clients.

In other words, the plaintiffs in the case, Amnesty International v. Clapper, had standing.

Continue reading “DefDog: US Surveillance Law Goes to Supreme Court”

Marcus Aurelius: Covert Action – Who’s on First?

09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military, Officers Call
Marcus Aurelius

Washington Times
September 9, 2011
Pg. 1

Military, CIA Shun 9/11 Panel On Covert Operations

Special-ops lead urged in report

By Bill Gertz, The Washington Times

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  Below are the three traditional forms of covert action, and the four new forms.  CIA stinks at all of them, but so does the US military.  No amount of excellence at the tactical level can overcome either comatose leadership at the agency level, or a strategic thinking vacuum at the national leadership level.

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Covert Action – Who's on First?”

John Robb: ROI for 9/11 Attacks 10 Million to One….

03 Economy, 04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, IO Deeds of War, Military
John Robb

September 11: Counting the Costs to America

Al Jazeera, 1 September 2011

$5 trillion, and counting

Osama bin Laden spoke often of a strategy of “economic warfare” against the United States, a low-level war aimed at bankrupting the world's economic superpower.  A decade after the 9/11 attacks, it's hard to argue that bin Laden's strategy was ineffective.  The attacks themselves, according to the September 11 commission, cost Al Qaeda between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute.  They have cost America, by our estimate, more than $5 trillion – a “return on investment” of 10,000,000 to one.

Continue reading “John Robb: ROI for 9/11 Attacks 10 Million to One….”

Jim Bamford: How 9/11 Fearmongering Grew NSA Into a Very Expensive Domestic Surveillance Monster

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Government, InfoOps (IO), IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Military
Jim Bamford

September 11 fearmongering grew NSA

Jim Bamford

Politico, 9/8/11

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.

Read full story (3 screens).

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.

DefDog: Nation’s Top Cops Slam US Intelligence

03 Economy, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, DHS, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement
DefDog

Failure, across the board…..implications of this for domestic security abound…..where has all the money gone?

Report: Nation's Top Cops Say U.S. Counterterror Effort Is Lacking

Ten years after 9/11, top cops in the nation's biggest cities feel there
are still significant gaps in the intelligence and analysis they receive
about terrorism, even as the homegrown terror threat looms larger.

A survey of intelligence commanders from America's 56 biggest cities conducted by the Homeland Security Policy Institute found the police chiefs believe the nation's intelligence enterprise is less robust than it could be, and that 62 percent of the chiefs felt this lack left them “unable to develop a complete understanding of their local threat.”

Read full article.

Read full report.

Phi Beta Iota:  The “top cops” are great people, they just do not understand that the terror threat is fradulent and that the homeland security industrial complex is working precisely as intended, wasting hundreds of billions on fraudulent dysfunctional white and white-collar employment while channeling hundreds of billions in unearned profits to the homeland security industrial complex.

See Also:

Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State

No More Secrets: Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence