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Alea Iacta Est: -- And Here's The Latest On The Fully Operational Police State...
Posted By: Watchman
Date: Wednesday, 31-Jul-2013 14:17:31
The Latest
The United States government has the capability to turn the country into a police state. That fact receives less attention from many Americans than Kate and Will’s new baby or Anthony Weiner’s wiener. Like the shock of the rebels in Star Wars when they discover the death star can blow up planets, those so preoccupied are one false flag terrorist “attack” (an attack actually perpetrated by the purported target of the attack), riot, or epidemic away from discovering our government’s “fully operational” totalitarian infrastructure.
Consider that infrastructure. At the apex is the National Security Administration (NSA), headquartered in a sprawling, high security, top-secret complex of fifty-plus buildings in Fort Meade, Maryland. The director is four star army general, Keith Alexander, who has lately emerged from his preferred low-profile posture to defend the NSA's surveillance of foreign and domestic telecommunications and internet traffic (see "It's Probably Much Worse Than You Think," June 10, 2013).
If knowledge is power then Alexander is without a doubt the most powerful man in the world. In addition to its already enormous headquarters complex, which is slated to quadruple in size over the next sixteen years, the NSA has various facilities around the country, some linked with private telecommunications firms and Internet Service Providers (ISPs), and this September its crown jewel, the $2 billion Utah Data Center, in Bluffdale, will come on line. This massive, self-sustaining facility, four 25,0000 foot halls filled with computer servers and 900,000 square feet for technical support and administration, will collect and store much of the data that passes through NSA surveillance (see: “Inside The Matrix,” James Bamford, Wired, March 15, 2012). According to Alexander, "the US's inherent vulnerability to digital attacks requires him to amass more and more authority over the data zipping around the globe. In his telling, the threat is so mind-bogglingly huge that the nation has little option but to eventually put the entire civilian Internet under his protection, requiring tweets and emails to pass through his filters, and putting the kill switch under the government's forefinger" (see: “The Secret War” James Bamford, Wired, June 12, 2013). Last week, the House of Representatives rejected a proposal to restrict the NSA’s domestic surveillance.
The NSA does not just monitor cyber threats, it has developed the world's most advanced offensive cyber capability. The NSA, CIA, and Israeli intelligence designed a computer "worm,” Stuxnet, to infiltrate the Iranian nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz. Stuxnet apparently damaged about a thousand centrifuges. Chillingly, the Stuxnet attack led to suspected Iranian cyber-counterattacks on Saudi Aramco, the Saudi state-owned energy company, RasGas, the Qatari natural gas company, and denial-of-service attacks on large American financial institutions. This has led to ever larger budgets for Pentagon cyber operations, and the NSA has hired thousands of computer systems and hacking experts and accredited four universities to train the next generation of cyber operators. The cyber arms race is here; the next world war may start not with an invasion or a mushroom cloud, but with everybody's screens going black.
Encryption is the use of complicated mathematical algorithms to code all things digital. In theory, only those with the algorithmic "key" to the code can unscrambled encrypted material. It is supposedly what keeps your credit card numbers and personal data safe on the Internet. A good part of computer hacking efforts around the globe attempt to break encryption systems, and that will be a big part of the Utah Data Center’s mission. The government hires obscure but well-funded firms to discover the chinks in various private computer systems and hack into them. One such firm, Endgame Systems, offers intelligence clients a program, Bonesaw, that displays the location and digital address of every device on the Internet around the world, what software is running on those devices, including malware, and a menu of programs through which the user can gain entry to them. ("The Secret War”).
Given the government's capabilities, the only rational assumption is that it knows everything you do or say on your computers, the Internet, or your phone. But wait, there’s more. ObamaCare creates a new Federal Data Hub, which will centralize much of the information federal agencies, including the IRS, have on individuals and make it available to “patient navigators,” who will have no background checks and will not be required to have a high school degree. Of course this will not be subject to abuse; ObamaCare records will have the same level of protection as the IRS’s.
Think you can either get away or hide? Think again. All those nifty GPS systems found in phones, computers, and cars not only let you know where you are, they track you as well, even when they are turned off. Cars are now basically mobile computers, and they can be hacked. Michael Hastings was the Rolling Stone reporter who wrote the story that forced General Stanley McCrystal to resign as U.S. commander in Afghanistan. He was reportedly on to another big story, feared for his safety, and contacted Wikileaks, claiming he was subject to an FBI investigation a few hours before his death. He was killed when his new Mercedes crashed at high speed into a palm tree in Los Angeles. The car’s explosion was so intense that the coroner took two days to identify the body and the engine was found 200 feet from the car. There were no skid marks although the car made a sixty degree turn into the palm tree. The lack of skid marks is the hallmark of “the Boston brakes” technique, so named because it was first employed by the CIA in Boston. A microchip transceiver is fitted to a vehicle’s on-board computer, (the technique can also be used on airplanes) allowing for remote control of the vehicle’s computerized acceleration, turning and braking systems (see these links: “Boston Brakes, No Skidmarks in the Sky,” Veterans Today, July 25, 2010; “Details of Reporter Hastings’ Death Remain Elusive,” San Diego 6 News, July 8, 2013).
Do not think you can just stay in your house and mind your own business, either. Most phones and computers now have cameras, and it would be a simple matter to put them in television sets and other devices as well. Such cameras can be "on" full time, the house’s occupants unaware, and their images collected and stored in Utah. Works continues on ever smaller drones; some are now the size of an insect. That fly on your wall may soon be a drone, transmitting everything you do, with an evasion program or body armor that renders it impervious to your fly swatter.
Some people will approve―no price is too high for safety―and most of the rest will fatalistically accept all this―what can you do? Our government's ability to monitor and control its citizens would have been the envy of Hitler, Stalin or Mao. For the few who will not be cowed, who will somehow resist, the government has been beefing up the "police" part of police state. In many cases, police tactics, weaponry, and attitudes have become indistinguishable from the military's, and the enemies are U.S. citizens.
The first Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team grew out of Los Angeles' race riots in the 1960's, modeled on the Marines’ Special Forces. It had its maiden raid on a holdout cell of the Black Panthers in 1969. Since then, SWAT teams have grown like weeds at both the local and federal level. By 2005, 80 percent of towns with populations between the size of 25,000 and 50,000 had SWAT units. In that year, SWAT teams at all levels conducted approximately 50,000 raids. Within the federal government, the Department of Education, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, NASA, the Fish and Wildlife Service, among other agencies, all have SWAT teams. SWAT teams have raided poker games, a woman suspected of not paying her student loans, a Gibson Guitar factory in Nashville for using illegal hardwoods, and Tibetan monks in Iowa who had overstayed their tourist visas. In 2006, Sal Culosi, an optometrist, was "accidentally" killed by a bullet through his heart, fired during a raid by a Fairfax County, Virginia, SWAT officer. His crime? An undercover detective heard him at a bar betting with some buddies on college football games. ("The New Military Police," The Wall Street Journal, July 20-21, 2013, pg. C1)
Ultimately, opponents of the impending police state have one thing going for them: it will not work. A telling detail of Orwell's 1984 is the dreary destitution of the society it depicts. Command and control apparatuses are unproductive and cost a lot of money. On a deeper level, threats, blackmail, and rule by brute force are incompatible with human nature, productive endeavor, or progress. If people are supposedly unfit for freedom―the ability to run their own lives―then they are even more unfit to coercively run other people’s lives. Try as statists might to obscure it, two diverging trends clearly emerge from even a cursory study of human history: mankind only thrives and grows under conditions approaching freedom, and every social unit based on force fails.
There will always be those craven, pathetic excuses for human beings who will take their daily ration of gruel and accept what the government does without question or challenge. But it is free, independent minds who discover, invent, imagine, invest, take risks, build mankind’s store of knowledge, and pull it forward. Every miserable dictator and would be dictator since human society began has eventually discovered that free minds do not think under threat of a club, spear, sword, gun, thermonuclear device, concentration camp, or gas chamber; thought and freedom are inseparable. When they try to kill freedom, and consequently the mind, they sign their own death warrant.
Robert Gore, straightlinelogic.com, robertgore1@me.com
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