5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond 5 Stars, Epic, Poetic, Startling, Reasoned,September 9, 2011
I am the one who urged the author to get his book into Amazon's excellent CreateSpace. As much as I personally hate electronic books, I absorbed this book in electronic form and can only say that in print it has got to become a collector's item. This is hard truth, straight up. It should certainly be translated into Arabic, Chinese, and other languages. This book goes into my top ten percent “6 Stars and Beyond.” See the others at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, under Reviews (middle column).
Right up front, let me give the author and this book my highest praise: both have INTEGRITY. Integrity is not just about honor, it's about doing the right thing instead of the wrong thing righter, it's about being holistic, open-minded, appreciating diversity, respecting the “other.” There is more integrity in this book than in the last thousand top secret intelligence reports on Afghanistan, all full of lies and misrepresentations.
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.
In addition to making the United States a global laughing stock, last month's dismaying political circus over what used to be routine legislation to increase the debt ceiling solidified the “let them eat cake” politics among the courtiers and plutocrats calling the shots from behind the curtains in the hall of mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac. The general view is that there is nothing that can be done help the American people economically — at least some of the people — and those in trouble must tough it out on their own. Of course the funding for the perpetual war on terror will continue, and money will continue to flow to the welfare queens in the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex, although perhaps at a slower rate in the short term, not mention the continued subsidies flowing to the banksters, agribusiness, big pharma, etc.
One outcome is out in the open, however: Obama may talk about jobs, but a fiscal policy designed to put common folk back to work is a non starter.
Joseph Stiglitz is perhaps the most erudite exponent of fiscal policy among the mainstream economists. To be sure, in this age of name-calling, he would be labeled as being left of center, or perhaps branded as a dreaded progressive, or even worse, a hated lefty socialist, but no one (irrational nut cases excepted) would call him a whacko.
In the op-ed below, he makes the clearest and most concise argument for an activist fiscal policy that I have yet read. Even readers viscerally disposed to hate the Keynes' theory of fiscal policy make an effort to deconstruct his arguments, to see if they have the intellectual wherewithal to refute his points without resorting to name-calling.
[note: I reformatted the op-ed slightly to highlight his main points, but did not change any text — readers will find original version at the link.]
Chuck Spinney
Sanary sur Mer, France
Published on Thursday, September 8, 2011 by Politico.com
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.
Nothing DIA does really matters–its leadership, like that of NSA, CIA, and the NRO–lacks integrity. All of them are sucking chest wounds on the Republic, along with the service “intelligence” elements. Below are four links, one positive, one provocative, one starkly negative, and the fourth referential.
Recent Bin Laden Show from CIA/JSOG
Recent 9/11 RECAP
DVD's Reviewed at Phi Beta Iota
Books Reviewed at Phi Beta Iota
Other Posts
9/11 Web Sites (Selected)
9/11 Online Videos
9/11 Audio
