Homan Square -- Chicago, America

Finally.

 Notice is being paid. There are black sites in the American Domestic Gulags where particularly interesting or difficult detainees are being taken and held for more or less time.

One of them is in Chicago, a warehouse blandly referred to as "Homan Square" where (mostly) black and brown suspected gang members are taken to be worked over in hopes of coercing confessions. At least that's what they say.

But in 2012, CPD raided crash pads ahead of the NATO summit in Chicago and nabbed several white men who were taken to Homan Square and -- at least for a time -- were disappeared there.

Now, years later, on the eve -- indeed the very day -- of Chicago's mayoral election, the Guardian posts a story by Spencer Ackerman using testimony from one of the NATO 3 detainees describing the Homan Square detention site and what happened to him when he was taken there. Other testimony is emerging of much worse treatment at Homan Square, including the death of a certain detainee under interrogation.

We can be sure it's not the only domestic black site nor is the reported death the only one in custody.

Testimony from one of the other detainees from the NATO summit raids was posted at FDL and dKos shortly after he was taken away in handcuffs and questioned and held at Homan Square until his release was arranged.

Three of the others who were taken that day were not released but were charged with various ridiculous crimes, including "terrorism" -- which led most sentient beings in those days to comprehend that in fact, according to Our Government, protesters against the Established Order are equivalent to and should be treated as terrorists. 

There is no other way to interpret what goes on with regard to protests and protesters and the police in this country.

This is a link to TarheelDem's testimony regarding his detention at Homan Square. Note the date of the post: June 7, 2012. His testimony matches almost exactly the testimony of the detainee who spoke with Spencer Ackerman at the Guardian link.

As they point out, this is not new. This has been going on for decades, and the problem is that Americans tolerate it, and some actively encourage it, regardless of political persuasion.

When that's the case, it's little wonder that police act the way they do. They don't just think it's a game and a joke, they think it's their job...

So Now Comes Word From the NYT

That there are all kinds of surveillance activities going on, not just the NSA, and Oh Gee, Isn't It A Shame?

Jeebus.

Gosh almighty. Ya think?

I seem to recall I was yapping quite some time back that the obsessive focus on NSA surveillance was a smokescreen covering up all the other surveillance activities going on, by both the public and private sectors, most of which was far-far closer to you'n'me than the NSA ever gets.

While everyone was keening and rending their garments over the NSA surveillance revealed in the Snowden docs, all the rest of it, from the FBI and the Post Office and Google -- and ALL the rest -- was utterly ignored, and anyone who pointed out these other more intrusive surveillance activities going on all the time was denounced or dismissed.

The only thing that mattered -- absolutely the ONLY thing -- was that the NSA was hoovering everyone's phone calls and internet searches and was storing them in some server farm in Utah.

But the surveillance is so much closer to ordinary folks than that, and it's so much more intrusive, and it is so much more likely to result in harm to ordinary people than almost anything the NSA does or has ever done.

To say so, though, is to risk being labeled a crank.

At least until now, when the New York Times announces its semi-official findings of, well, surveillance all the way down.

There was a recent story about surveillance by the Post Office that caused a bit of a ruckus, but that's only part of the surveillance they do. There is so much more. So very much more. But the media and public obsession with NSA surveillance overwhelmed any consideration of the surveillance conducted so widely by so many agencies and businesses.

It's as if it were by design.

Being the cynic I am, I think it was by design.

By focusing so much attention where nothing was ever likely to be done, and where very few individuals would be directly harmed by the surveillance, the other closer surveillance activities and agencies could consolidate and coordinate their effort far more closely and completely within a kind of protective cloak that would only be removed once the job was done.

That point seems to have been reached, now that the New York Times sees fit to print news of these Other Surveillance Activities.

"Oh and by the way..."

Sigh.

Is That All There Is?

There's a long well-written piece over at the now nearly moribund Intercept that informs us that five prominent and well-connected Muslims (or four and and atheist, accounts vary, even within the piece) had their emails intercepted and spied upon by the NSA -- or maybe it was the FBI using technology provided by the NSA, accounts are unclear -- from about 2003 to about 2008, though it's neither clear nor certain when the interception started and whether it has stopped.

What is apparently clear is that the email interception and surveillance happened, and that these five men agreed to be interviewed for the Intercept, and their stories are interesting.

As I say, the article is quite long, some 8,000 words, and there are embedded videos that continue their sagas in some detail. All of these men were and are well connected in the American Muslim community, and most were very well connected with Power. Some were fairly frequent visitors to the White House and one ran for office. The idea that these men were subjected to surveillance -- by having their emails intercepted and read -- is apparently supposed to shock our consciences, as it is patently obvious that these men were not deserving of such scrutiny, even if it was legal, which is not entirely clear. It may well have been legal, but even if it was, these men of all men did not deserve the dishonor and humiliation of being surveilled by the state.

They were and are prominent, important people, you see. Men of substance, gravitas. Leaders among men. High ranking staff of important elected officials. Lawyers. These men, of all men, did not deserve to be treated like the common herd.

Should these men have been exempt from surveillance by reason of their status? That seems to be the upshot of the long anticipated story "naming names."

That only five names are named -- out of a list of several thousand email addresses that was provided by Edward Snowden -- and all of those named are Muslims (or four Muslims and an atheist) has caused something of a stir among the rabble who were so eagerly awaiting the post that would "name names" and be a "fireworks finale" and so on and so forth. Greenwald hyped this thing to the heavens in numerous teevee and print interviews over the past few months, waxing rhapsodic (well, as rhapsodic as he can wax) over the spectacle he was preparing to unleash around the end of June/Fourth of July.

Some of his thunder was stolen by Bart Gellman at the WaPo who wrote -- before the release by the Intercept -- that the NSA actually sweeps up many hundreds of thousands of emails in their surveillance dragnet, and most of them -- more than 90% -- are in no way related to investigations into terrorism or various prioritized criminality. They are "innocents."

Just as Greenwald's named names are.

Of course, in the minds of many Americans, Muslims, per se, are not innocents at all, and the more scrutiny and surveillance they are subjected to, the better. This is pure bigotry in most cases, and the article describes a somewhat astonishing level of crude bigotry that informed the actions of the FBI at the time these men were being surveilled. Good heavens! How unprofessional! Indeed. It was the Cheney era. What does one expect?

Which leads to a consideration of the letdown this supposed "fireworks show" and finale represents for many who have seen it and read it.

If that's truly all there is, it's pretty much a nothing-burger.

Airy but not very nutritious.

Everyone knew, did they not, that American Muslims were being spied upon,  sometimes very intrusively, and in great numbers, said to be justified by the threat they supposedly posed to the good order, peace and security of Regular Americans, thanks in large measure to the attacks on 9/11/2001 which killed several thousand innocents.

Their actual innocence can be disputed, but that's another issue.

The Muslim threat was and is considered real by the malefactors of the State. The threat is not to "innocents"-- the threat is to the State and to the Power of the State.

When Cheney was running things, paranoia was rampant within the government to the point where he ordered a bunker built under his mansion at the Naval Observatory. Thousands were rounded up, protesters were encaged, innocents were rendered and tortured, wars of aggression were ordered and undertaken against peoples who had nothing to do with the attacks, millions have died or been displaced.

That's the legacy of what happened one day in September so many years ago. That's the Cheney legacy, too, for Cheney let it happen -- whether deliberately or not is beside the point. He had and has another priority than the protection and security of the American people: his priority was his own protection and financial well-being and after the attacks, he concerned himself with the protection and security of the State and particularly its executive apparatus.

Anything and everything was fair so long as his priorities were met.

The loyalty he inspired and still inspires within the confines of the Government and its contractors is something of a wonder, especially given the nearly universal contempt with which his ostensible Boss, George Bush, is held.

The five men named and profiled in the long-awaited Intercept report were close to the Bush-Cheney White House, and given the paranoia of the times and the paranoid natures of the men and women in charge in those days, it's no wonder at all that these five men were placed under surveillance. They and many tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of others were and are subject to the gentle kindness of State surveillance, on the basis of the lingering paranoia that seems to have wormed its way into the foundations of government today.

By no means were or are Muslims the only targets, any more than the NSA is the only or the primary surveillance outfit.

The problem with Greenwald's reporting on the topic all along has been its narrow focus and its obsession with the NSA. Well, that and the endless hype that leads... essentially nowhere.

The stories, when they are well-written as this one is, are interesting but apart from The Debate, they have led to no substantive positive changes in the surveillance state at all. In fact, the argument can be and has been made that the changes that have taken place and those to come have strengthened and expanded the surveillance state, not weakened it at all. The revelations have mostly been of "things we already knew" at least in broad outline. They've filled in details, but the details simply let us know how very pervasive corporate and government surveillance is. It hasn't provided us with tools to do anything about it; in fact, the revelations have essentially let it be known that "you can't do anything about it." And so, knowing they are under surveillance, Americans are more careful about what they say and what they do, aren't they? And isn't that the point of telling people they are -- or at least could be -- under surveillance?

These revelations serve the State, whether they are intended to or not. And this latest article does the same -- in this case by making clear to American Muslims that there is no exemption for even their highest ranking comrades. They are all considered suspect.

But we knew that, didn't we?

So really, is that all there is?

Then let's keep dancing...

Trusting Greenwald??!

I understand Glenn Greenwald has a new book out which can be seen as the capstone of the long-term project he's been undertaking to have his voice heard at the highest levels of government and corporate board rooms.

It would appear they're listening now.

To what object may still be something of a mystery, but an overall goal, beyond being "heard" has never been entirely clear with Greenwald. "Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person!" Yes, well...

It would appear he got his wish. The toast of the town, he is, at least for now, wined and dined among the highest of the mighty, with abundant accolades, prizes and gravitas besides. He is someone now, and that seems to be what he's wanted more than anything all along. To be known, to be recognized, to be honored, and more than anything, to be reckoned with.

His personal toxicity aside, Greenwald has actually accomplished quite a feat. He's managed to rise to the top of the profession of journalism primarily by means of the NSA scoop, not through any particular writing talent, understanding of the issues, or ability to tell a cohesive and compelling story. His writing throughout has been one of his weaker aspects, as much of what he writes unedited reads like a legal brief rather than news, and it became clear to me (if to no one else) that the NSA articles he was bylined for the Guardian were heavily edited by someone or someones into something more "journalistic" before publication. In fact, in the end, they didn't read like they had been written by him at all, whether or not he shared a byline with someone else.

Those many others who helped make Greenwald's meteoric rise as a journalist possible have been essentially "disappeared." This is most telling in the case of Ewen MacCaskill of the Guardian who, along with quite a few others at that institution, have essentially vanished in the marketing and tale-telling surrounding the NSA scoop. MacCaskill was awarded a Polk for his work on the NSA stories, but you'd never know it to listen to the current hagiography surrounding the "biggest story of the first half of the 21st Century" -- or however it's being marketed these days. This was made painfully obvious in Amy Goodman's coverage of the Polk Awards and Greenwald's prodigal return to the USofA from his exile in Brazil. Amy, in a nearly Stalinist propaganda move, literally erased MacCaskill from the record of the Polk Award, and ever since has barely mentioned him at all. Yet he was apparently the old-hand journalist who was sent by the Guardian to accompany Greenwald and Poitras to Hong Kong to vet Young Snowden's validity, and so far as I can tell, MacCaskill was the one who edited and co-wrote the original stories that appeared in the Guardian.

Also, there is a widespread claim that Greenwald "won a Pulitzer" -- when he specifically did not. The papers that initially published the NSA stories (the Guardian and the Washington Post) won the Pulitzer Public Service Award -- which only goes to institutions, not to individuals. But in the telling of the story of the Pulitzer Prize for the NSA stories, the nearly universal convention among Greenwald's acolytes is to claim he (sometimes he and Laura Poitras) won the Pulitzer themselves as individuals, when they clearly did not.

There's another actor in this drama, Bart Gellman for the Washington Post, who has written some of the most incisive investigative reports on the NSA documents. Gellman is also part of the team -- that's not really a team at all, it would appear -- who was given access to the Snowden Trove at the outset of the undertaking. He's a long-time serious journalist whose work is well-respected within the profession. Thus, apparently, he has to be essentially disappeared as well from the received narrative of Greenwald's intrepidness and daring.

Ah yes, and about that daring... One of the primary themes in Greenwald's narrative of himself has been his trembling fear and anger at the perfidy of the National Security State's potential to arrest him and throw him "in a cage" for being a journalist, because high-ranking individuals in Congress have suggested as much and the lawyers at DoJ wouldn't assure his lawyers that he wouldn't be arrested if he returned to the USofA. Same with Laura Poitras who lives in Berlin.

So, quaking with fear of being arrested and rendered for torture to some demonic foreign land, Greenwald and Poitras sat in exile in Rio and Berlin respectively (though apparently they traveled fairly extensively during the interim, just not to the United States or Britain) until such time as they were awarded the Polk and determined to return like prodigals to the US and to dare the authorities to do anything about it.

Of course, the authorities paid no attention to them, any more than they would to anyone else, and their breathlessly awaited return went off without a hitch. No one in a position to do anything about their arrival in the USofA let alone render them seemed to care.

And so it has been ever since, as Greenwald has embarked on a nationwide book tour, unmolested, and Poitras, well, who knows what's happened to her? She is like a wraith, appearing and disappearing at will, offering stern and sturdy perspectives now and again, but more often she is referred to but neither seen nor heard from.

And Snowden? So far as we know, Snowden is still comfortably ensconced as a resident guest of the Kremlin, in what appear to be very nice digs, somewhere in Moscow or its environs. He has "given up so much" -- and yet seems to be well provided for and happy enough in his Russian exile, able to "appear" pretty much whenever he wants to and wherever he wants to via electronic means, including (notoriously) during Vladimir Putin's annual call in show on Russian television.

It was a notorious appearance not so much because of what Snowden had to say, which was relatively innocuous, but because of the relentlessness of the anti-Russian/anti-Putin propaganda campaign that's been waged by all the capitals of the West for many months now. For Snowden to appear "with" Putin (even if only electronically and recorded at that) was yet another emblem of his supposed "treason."

Snowden doesn't get as many awards as Greenwald, doesn't have a book, isn't -- so far as we know -- profiting from any of this hoo-hah, though he seems to enjoy at least some modest luxury and apparently some freedom of movement while he is a guest of the Kremlin. There have been many stories about his life in the US and as an international spy or perhaps not a spy but a genius at IT matters, or perhaps... the stories are legion. What's true and what's not is open to speculation. There are significant portions of the received narrative that don't fit, but that's another issue for another day. The only question I would ask right now is what Snowden is actually doing in Moscow, as there have been a number of reports that he has been hired by one or another private Russian enterprise as an IT consultant. If it's true, it might be interesting to find out more, but when it comes to Snowden, fact and fiction are so intermingled, the real story is pretty much unknowable -- at least not until the book comes out and the movie is released. Even then, mystery will no doubt continue to abound.

But speaking of Snowden... one thing that was very intriguing to me (though it may not mean anything) is that Snowden was living in Hawaii -- allegedly with his high-class artistic stripper girlfriend -- while he was acquiring the data trove from the NSA through his private contractor employment with Booz Allen Hamilton. Now of course this is the story; we don't know that it is true, and we will probably never be able to know for sure given the nature of spycraft and all...

At any rate, assuming it's true, Snowden was living comfortably in Hawaii, acquiring his NSA data clandestinely while a few miles away, Pierre Omidyar was also living in Honolulu, taking care of his many far-flung projects. Projects, in the Islands, on the Mainland, and well, let's face it... all over the world, including the soon-to-erupt in revolt and civil war Ukraine. Oh yes, Pierre has his fingers in many ((MANY)) pies simultaneously. And he's not shy about it, either. He's one of the richest men in the world and he uses his wealth for whatever objective he has in mind, whether it is educating the masses in Ukraine about the wonders of European Democratic Capitalism (or is it Fascism?), or building luxury condos on unspoiled Hawaiian beaches, or getting into the lucrative micro loan business on the ground floor and making out like a bandit.

Oh but there's more. As far as I know, Pierre lives primarily in Hawaii, though he has a number of homes in United States and apparently in Europe as well.

I'm given to understand he is financially involved with Booz Allen through interlocking boards, and his PayPal subsidiary of eBay is apparently closely tied in with NSA and law enforcement at all levels all over the world. One assumes that eBay is just as closely linked with these contractor, surveillance and law enforcement outfits as PayPal is. Then of course, there's the whole PayPal14 imbroglio which dogs both Pierre and Greenwald.

Pierre owns a news outlet in Hawaii which focuses on aspects of corruption as seen through a particular lens. (There's a similar outfit in New Mexico, though it has a much lower profile and is not, so far as I know, an Omidyar project.) That lens is essentially libertarian.

At some point around the time that Young Snowden went to work for Booz Allen in Hawaii, Pierre was taking the initial steps to form First Look Media, the umbrella under which he has placed a rather impressive stable of journalists -- including, of course, Greenwald and Poitras, whose Snowden docs are their principal claim to fame ...and fortune.

It's been pointed out by some observers that once Pierre's stable was essentially filled with formerly prolific journalists, their output declined, and for some it came to a screeching halt. In other words, going to work for Omidyar meant... silence, or nearly so.

"Transformative media" indeed. When you think about it, saying and publishing nothing on a regular basis can be just as "transformative" as anything else. It's all in the way you look at it, no?

Or in the case of The Intercept, Greenwald's personal fief under the First Look umbrella, "nothing" has been accompanied by fluff, nonsense, and occasional bursts of interesting stories of Surveillance State operations both here and abroad, but without any indication of how or whether they can be controlled, curbed or thwarted.

Of course the lack of any idea of what could or should be done about the All-Pervading and All-Knowing Surveillance State has been a consistent theme in the revelations to date. The world is to know in substantial detail about the surveillance they are under, but they are not, ever, to imagine anything can be done about it. Knowing about it without the ability to thwart it is an Orwellian means of control.

When this was pointed out by Naomi Wolf so long ago now, back in June of last year, she was viciously attacked by some of those who saw her questions about the purpose of what were then called the Snowden leaks as some kind of uncalled-for assault on Snowden and/or Greenwald, no doubt set up by the NSA. Or something. No, she had it right. Knowing that there was mass surveillance going on, without the ability to do anything about it, was and is a means of controlling the behavior of the population; it works quite well, as those who have lived under such conditions can tell you.

One of the keys to understanding the NSA Surveillance is the fact that nothing has been done about it -- and the implication is that nothing can be done about it. Greenwald has shown an interest in gaining exemptions from blanket surveillance for certain categories of people, such as journalists like him, but y no means has he shown an interest in undermining the Surveillance State itself, any more than Snowden has.

Well, it's not entirely accurate to say that "nothing has been done about it." Because something most definitely has been done: The #1 and #2 at NSA were... "retired" under pressure. In other words, they were forced out, though it was with great good will, of course. Policies have been (they say) revised to better attend to the privacy interests of the public, and there has been a good deal more "transparency" about the surveillance programs under way. Further, there are a number of efforts at beginning "reform" of the NSA to enable more oversight of its surveillance activities.

Cool.

So there is that.

Meanwhile, Greenwald seems quite delighted with himself and has even taken to being somewhat less abrasive and contemptuous of others in his public appearances (which are legion). He's explained that his antagonistic and sometimes over the top assholitry/performances in public were meant to propel him into the limelight sufficiently to be heard -- apparently in the mainstream, where he seemingly wanted to be.

Well, he's heard nowadays, but what does he really have to say?

There are those who say that Greenwald is one of the few journalists -- or the only journalist -- they trust.  As far as I can tell, Greenwald is as trustworthy as most others in the field -- which is to say, somewhat, though never absolutely. Critical thinking is necessary no matter who the messenger is. Greenwald has established a place in the firmament, but neither he nor anyone else in that field should be granted blanket trust. His narrative on the Snowden matter is filled with gaps and contradictions, and his stories about it are just that, stories. Take them for what they are worth, but don't take them on faith.

It seems so obvious, and yet the desire for a heroic figure is strong. As conditions get worse for so many, the need for a heroic figure grows stronger.

Many have placed their faith and trust in Greenwald.

Some have felt betrayed by him for various reasons, others feel rewarded to bask in his reflected glory.

But in the end, we're still pretty much in the same place we were vis a vis the Surveillance State. We know a bit more about it now, but we don't have the ability to control it or to thwart it, nor does Greenwald have any intention to provide that kind of control.

Even if we were able to have some measure of control over the government's surveillance activities, there is still the little matter of corporate surveillance which is even more pervasive and intrusive than that of the state. In other words, even if we we were able to tie a rope around the All-Knowing, All-Pervading Surveillance State, it would still go on, unimpeded, through its many corporate partners.

So what ultimately has been accomplished?

And what do we want to accomplish?

The Public Had A Right

I'm listening to Young Snowden's ARD interview for German television that was posted at Cryptome the other day. It's kind of repetitive given the multiplicity of stories already aired and published about NSA surveillance and the Security State, but it is one of the few times that Young Snowden himself has been seen/heard from in all the HooHah.

I watched a few minutes of the video of the interview and noted with interest that it seemed to be conducted in a very luxurious Russian hotel suite or possibly in a suite of rooms in an expensive new dacha, perhaps just outside of Moscow.

Regardless of whether it's a hotel or a dacha, if that is where Young Snowden is now being housed, rather than a place selected specifically for the interview, I wouldn't agree that he has "given up" much comfort in his (likely temporary) exile. It appears, in fact, that he is living in high style -- and very expensively -- in Russia. Moscow, after all, is one of the most expensive cities on Earth. It was pointed out that when he was supposedly trapped at Sheremetyevo Airport, the cost of one of the roomettes he was believed to be occupying while there was on the order of $600 a day (given that they rent by the hour), and people were wondering then who was paying for his upkeep.

Even in Hong Kong, where stories now suggest he was for weeks or even a month, he was staying in a very luxurious hotel at considerable expense -- for someone. Initially it was said that he was paying his own freight from his savings from his employment, but if you can sort through the confusing timelines that have been aired/published, each slightly different and some rather remarkably different, you see he had a rather spotty employment record, at least "officially." How long he was actually employed in his various contracted and in house positions (with the CIA, NSA, Dell, and Booz Allen, among apparently others) is something of a mystery. His postings were apparently scattered widely -- among them Switzerland, CONUS, and eventually Hawaii -- but none of them seem to have been for very long. A few months or a year tops.

There's nothing particularly amiss with that kind of record in the Federal Service. That's how they generally hire; employment is frequently intermittent, and it may be with a contractor rather than with the government itself. One's assignment, status, employer of record and posting location can change quite suddenly. It's not unusual to stay on this irregular status for years. This practice keeps the total number of FTE Federal employees lower -- following a Congressional mandate.

As I listen to Young Snowden speaking to the German interviewer, I'm reminded, very strongly, of some of the training personnel I worked with during my time in the Federal Service. It is as if he is conducting a training session to his interlocutor, and for a moment I wonder -- was that his actual job? Was he responsible for training staff to accomplish various spytech tasks, and is that a reason why his work was fairly intermittent and his employer of record went back and forth between agencies and contractors? I have no way of knowing, of course, but from what I've seen and read (and based on my own experience), I wouldn't be surprised. It would also help explain how he manages to "know" so much and yet... not.

Knowledge is compartmentalized in government and among its many contractors. While various low-level individuals (as Snowden apparently was) may have extensive knowledge of a wide range of programs and activities, as a rule, their knowledge is incomplete. They only know what they need to know for a particular assignment. Some of what they may see or have irregular access to as part of that assignment is likely to be incomprehensible because it's not something they have been briefed or trained on. That may be a reason why Young Snowden doesn't want to be responsible for releasing information about Surveillance/Security State programs and operations -- because he cannot "know" for sure what these slides and other information actually contain. So he (supposedly) leaves it up to journalists to vet it and make sense of it -- in consultation with... government. Yes, it's important to remember, as has been repeated fairly often, that every story that has been published or aired about these programs and operations has been done in "consultation with" government agencies and officials. Exactly what that means has never been clarified, of course, nor will it be. But given the repeated references to "legal" issues and potential "legal" jeopardy that reporters and Snowden may be in if they don't tread a very fine line (notwithstanding all the charges that have already been leveled at Young Snowden, though not -- so far -- at Greenwald or any of the other reporters and publications involved)  in releasing these top secret and other elements of the Snowden Trove, it seems to me that there is an ad hoc collaboration between the government and the publications and individuals involved in the stories to, let's say, limit the damage all around.

This is quite different than the situation with the Manning Trove and WikiLeaks, though there may be a superficial resemblance. Clearly, the participants learned from the mistakes made in that one, though so far as I could tell, there was actually nothing in the Manning Trove that was actually damaging to the government. Not even the "Collateral Murder" gun camera video. What the War Logs and Cables showed was military and State Department business as usual, much of which had already been reported, some of it extensively. What was odd  to me about it was that so many people -- literally millions -- had almost unimpeded access to the full trove, just as Manning did, and the Defense Department waited months before doing anything substantive to restrict access. (State, on the other hand, acted almost immediately). To me, this was bizarre behavior. A breach of this sort, had it happened in my agency, would have been acted on and plugged within hours. I had some experience with relatively minor security breaches in my agency and know how they were handled. It was nothing like the situation with the Manning breach. Nothing at all.

With the Snowden Breach, it's not entirely clear what has and has not been done by the NSA in response. There's apparently been a series of ongoing investigations, but beyond that -- and the "consultations" which take place before airing or publication of any story about NSA programs and operations -- I don't know.

I notice, as well, that Young Snowden refuses categorically to reveal any new classified information in this interview, referring to his preference that journalists do that. This is clearly part of the legal line he must toe -- but why, exactly? According to his legal advisers, and the DoJ, he's been charged under the Espionage Act, which strictly and severely limits the defenses he can utilize.

But wait. He is a guest of the Russian Federation, and doesn't actually need legal defenses against the United States in Russia. So what's going on?

Is this a case in which he adhering to an agreement he supposedly has with the Russian Federation not to provide any information that can harm the United States while he is a guest of the RF? I don't know. None of these supposed agreements he's made have been detailed for the public.

What he has detailed, however,  and what the various news organizations that have aired and published this stuff have reinforced, is that the various national and international surveillance agencies of the global security state (let's call it what it is) have the capability to "watch you" in real time, no matter who you are, wherever you are, and whatever you are doing. This capability is frightening.

Be Afraid.

Be Very Afraid.

The Government Is Watching You!!!!!!

Except that over and over again, it's pointed out and acknowledged that the government is (probably) not watching you at all, but in fact, private commercial interests are. They're not just watching, they're tracking and recording and monetizing everything you do, all the time. That is, they're doing it if they have access to you, which they do if you are using any kind of electronic communications.

Young Snowden is intent on letting us know that the government is surveiling one's activities, but he dismisses, with an airy wave of his hand, the fact that commercial interests are the major culprits in this more and more universal surveillance regime because he claims -- wrongly -- that commercial interests don't have the power of government to execute or incarcerate you. Either he's grossly ignorant or he is deliberately deceiving (as so many who make this bogus claim are). Private interests and corporation power more and more are indistinguishable from government power. Surely Young Snowden knows that. Later in the interview, he acknowledges that private companies -- like Booz -- should not be doing the kinds of surveillance and security activities that are properly a function of government. But they do.

Just to be clear, the government maintains massive databases on every one of us; they can, should they want to, discover just about anything on just about anyone, either through their own data collection or by purchasing data from commercial interests -- or just by using the Google, for criminy sakes. We are constantly under surveillance by government and private interests, almost without exception.

There is no doubt in my mind that the public has a right  to know these things. The question is whether they have a right to do anything about it. I think they do, but that makes me a troublemaker at the very least. Doing anything about the all encompassing and pervasive surveillance we are under means fugging up and taking down whole systems, and that is something Young Snowden has repeatedly claimed he has no interest in doing. What he has said over and over is that he wants the public in the United States and abroad to have enough information about the NSA's surveillance programs and operations to make informed decisions about their appropriateness and continuation. Apparently, he assumes that an informed public has any real say in these matters. Or... maybe he's assuming something else. That, as he's said and others have pointed out, the knowledge of this surveillance is sufficient to control people's behavior.

I got this notice in my email, about the February 11, "Day We Fight Back" demonstration,  and I have to ask, "Just what do they expect to accomplish?"

Aaron Swartz lost his life in pursuit of something bigger than himself, on behalf of open access to information people need or even might need in their lives.  The Day We Fight Back is supposed to be in honor of Aaron Swartz and his work to make information a common currency not the exclusive property of a handful of institutions.

I'm all for what he was trying to do -- and his death so shamed JSTOR that most of their millions of documents are now available for the public to read online for no charge as opposed to their previous practice of charging individuals and institutions a veritable fortune for access to almost any of their document trove.

If there were some substantive reforms of -- or preferably abolition of  -- the Surveillance/Security State as a result of the Snowden Revelations, then I would be all for it. So far, I have seen little or nothing to encourage me on that front.

But I have seen some people who realize they are being "watched" curb their activities.

That's worrisome. There are many ways around the surveillance/security apparat, but they seem to be the purview of a tiny fragment of the public. How will the general public come to understand and use them? Or is that not a matter we should be concerned with?

People will do what they will do, and no surveillance regime will keep them in check forever.

----------------------------------------------------
UPDATE: There is now a Vimeo video of the interview. One doesn't have to download a zip file. But according to Jonathan Turley, YouTube video versions, and apparently some other video versions are being taken down. According to him it is a concerted government action. I suspect it has more to do with ARD making copyright complaints, but that would be too unconspiratorial of me... heh.



UPDATE: And sure enough, the Vimeo video of the interview is now gone. Government plot? Ohhhhh... if Turley says it is, it must be, right?

The complete interview transcript is apparently available at the German NDR site. But the embedded video doesn't work for me, and it may be blocked in the US.

How To Beat the Surveillance Cams

Disguises the cams can't penetrate:

http://cvdazzle.com/

Via NYT, via Lisa Simeone at Ian's Place.

I like it.

Strange...

Greenwald has said (December, 2013, via his very active Twitter account) that the purpose for the knowledge of the panopticon which he and Young Snowden and the others have been at some pains to reveal to the shocked and disbelieving world is to ensure and enforce conformity.... as was pointed out by George Orwell in "1984" and which was what Naomi Wolf said back in June of last year was her instinct about why the these revelations were being made in the way they were. She was pilloried for daring to raise questions about the motives and methods of those who were so prominent in this story and for pointing out the obviousness of some of it. To quote Wolf in June, 2013:

d) It is actually in the Police State’s interest to let everyone know that everything you write or say everywhere is being surveilled, and that awful things happen to people who challenge this. Which is why I am not surprised that now he is on UK no-fly lists – I assume the end of this story is that we will all have a lesson in terrible things that happen to whistleblowers. That could be because he is a real guy who gets in trouble; but it would be as useful to the police state if he is a fake guy who gets in ‘trouble.’

 Further, there have been recent headlines regarding the urge some outspoken members of the "intelligence" community (sometimes an oxymoron) have to "put a bullet" in Snowden's head. This recent headline grabbing exactly parallels the ArsTechnica examination of Snowden's online persona prior to his revelatory reconception.

Now that the President Has Spoken regarding "reform" of the NSA, and it is obvious to all sentient beings that there will and can be no substantive reforms of such an agency, it appears that the "debate" Snowden, Greenwald, et al, wished to instigate has concluded.

Those who questioned were correct. But it doesn't matter. Nothing (much) has changed, but now we know with perfect certainty that we can be watched at any time by those Machines of Loving Grace... and so, if we know what's good for us, we will conform and behave. Which is the whole point of letting us know about the watching and the watchers.

Those who denounced the questioners are left to ponder what's next on the agenda...

Let Us Reason Together -- the Panopticon (5)

The Panopticon was Jeremy Bentham's 18th Century enlightenment notion of how it would be possible for a very limited staff of keepers to control a large population of inmates by making it possible for one keeper to look into any cell simply by turning around. The beauty of it was that the inmates would never know whether and when they were being watched, and that fact would work with innate human nature to enforce proper behavior within the prison. Rebellions and uprisings wouldn't occur. They couldn't. None could be organized without detection. There would be less need for brutality and the usual cruelties prisoners were subjected to. Harmony would reign.

Well, there was more to it than that, of course, but the general idea of the All Seeing Panopticon seemed perfectly rational at the time, and in due time, versions of Bentham's vision were tried with varying results. Part of the rationale for the Panopticon, in addition to the ability to watch prisoners at will, was the isolation of inmates, each to their own cell, rather than being held en masse in cages in the dungeons. A way to control unruly types through isolation was long known and understood, but employing it in general was considered too expensive. But the Panopticon made isolation economically reasonable because it reduced prison staffing requirements substantially.

Ultimately it was understood more or less widely that the simplest way to keep prisoners and reduce rebellions was to hold them in isolation and keep watch on them in ways they could never fully know while severely punishing any infraction of increasingly arbitrary and draconian rules.

Harmony would reign.

Then it was realized that the same principals that underlay the Panopticon for Prisons could be applied to the general population, thus curbing non-conformity and rebellion among the Rabble. The only problem was that there was no technology to do it efficiently and broadly until very recently. But even with more or less inefficient and primitive tactics, the principles of the Panopticon were employed in all sorts of social and political situations The watched actually become the watchmen and women and enforce conformity of mind and body without the necessity for an overly large and intrusive surveillance apparatus. Sure enough, it worked.

Until it didn't.

Harmony reigned temporarily, sometimes for quite a long time, and then it broke down.

Studies have been going on ever since to figure out why that breakdown occurred and to ensure that it never happens again, at least never again in that way. Our Chinese friends may be furthest along in figuring out how to suppress rebellion and enforce conformity on a more permanent basis. But that remains to be seen. As China undergoes as thorough a remaking of its social economy as it has ever endured, rebellion is constant. At the same time, there seems to be a level of relative harmony and peace, in the midst of fierce competition, that is unprecedented. From the perspective of many social engineers, China is obviously doing something very right. But what it is and exactly how they are doing it isn't entirely clear.

The recent hoo-hah around the world about the NSA and to a lesser extent (much lesser extent) about the more or less pervasive corporate and lower-level law enforcement surveillance of entire populations is related directly to the notion of the Panopticon and the principles of its operation. What we have learned is that the keepers now have the technology to keep an eye on every one of us essentially all the time or whenever they want, and we can never know for certain whether we are being watched at any particular moment. Thus our behavior is controlled in theory and largely in fact just by our knowing that we can be watched and any deviation from accepted norms in our behavior noted -- and can be used against us at any time our keepers choose. Even if we don't necessarily deviate from the norm (whatever that is declared to be at any given time), patterns of behavior can be manipulated to create false "deviations" which can then be utilized for prosecution or persecution -- or to sell you something you neither want nor need but which your "pattern" suggests you are susceptible to purchasing with the right persuasion.

It's a wonderful thing from the point of view of those who make and operate these surveillance/marketing/and population control systems. As for the general public, what I've taken to calling the Rabble, it's not so wonderful, but as long as it is not too intrusive, it seems, most people don't much mind that it is going on. Many may actually appreciate it on a visceral level.

Think Facebook, Twitter, and the endless devices of our modern world which make instant communications possible and inevitable and which for the most part provide the user with no privacy at all. Anyone can observe anyone else, and many, many people want to be observed in practically every aspect of their lives pretty much continuously. They can easily get their wish, more easily than ever before in human history. Nearly the entire world can vicariously participate in nearly anyone's life through modern technology.

That includes governments and their private sector sponsors. (Increasingly, "government" and "corporate" are distinctions without a difference as they subsume one another.)

The Panopticon principle as it is today is a versatile and useful tool of population control employed by corporate-governments on a broader scale than ever before in history. Because so many people are eager to share their lives with others through social media and the like, it is remarkably easy to get people in general to adopt technology which utilizes the Panopticon principle for control.

The notion that one can have privacy under the circumstances is absurd. You can't. No matter what you do, you cannot opt out of the technology of observation and surveillance that is built in to the devices, hardware and software of our lives, and even the loudest "privacy advocates" know this full well. There is no "secret place" within our devices where we can whisper secrets to one another without being overheard, any more than inmates in Bentham's Panopticon Prison could ever be sure they were unobserved.

The Revelations we've been exposed to the past few months are the details of a surveillance regime that is pretty much universal at this point and cannot be undone.

Where did the idea that electronic communications were somehow private come from?

It came from marketing. Marketing which obscured the facts.

One was sold the idea of encryption and secure communications, but it was never real in the sense that your online communications were ever truly private  and inaccessible to interested parties -- as we're finding out with more and more detail. A few adepts may have been able to temporarily secure and privatize their own communications, but for most internet users, there never was a time when the bulk of communications couldn't be accessed either by the carriers or by governments whenever and however desired. And there's never been a time that I was aware of that carriers weren't eager to sell their bulk information on their customers to government. The architecture of the internet is purpose-designed for this very practice, as most of us once knew but seem to have forgotten.

The ability to surveil the activities of users online -- constantly and automatically -- is one of the key industry ideals and motivations, both to be able to sell something to them and to be able to keep tabs on their potentials for disruption and rebellion (what's generally called "criminality.")

This has always been true of the intranets that gave birth to the internet -- which itself has never ever been either "free" or "private." Marketing myths that have long been sold to the public promise otherwise, of course, but they are simply false and always have been.

The notion of "privacy" itself is actually a recent social development that is in many ways tied to marketing ideas of the early 20th Century ("Blame Bernays.")  What I think the idea of universal privacy and the right to privacy came out of was the understanding that the Overclass of the 19th and early 20th centuries used their position to live private lives out of the view of the Rabble and more importantly to develop products and policies in secret from the public, policies and products which were then imposed often by main force, without consultation with or approval by the public. The idea was that if the public didn't know (at all or very much) about how their Betters lived their lives and what was being planned, they wouldn't be able to object or rebel before the policy was instituted, and they could be induced to admire rather than object to the lives of their Betters.

The idea of "privacy" as a general matter turned that understanding of what was being done to the public by the Overclass on its head by proposing a general right for everyone to the same sort of private lives their Betters had long enjoyed.

That's where I think the idea of "privacy" as it is commonly understood in the western world came from. It was heavily marketed as something desirable and necessary to a full and rewarding life -- because Our Betters had it. And you want to be like them, don't you?

Which is not to say that personal space of some sort ("A Room of One's Own" as it were) has not always been with us. It is the fetishization of privacy as the defining characteristic of what it means to be "human" that simply never existed before very recent times, and for most people, it doesn't compute at all.

Most societies exist under forms of formal and informal surveillance. The discovery that Our Own (Exceptional) Society is also under surveillance, and that our corporate-government is a -- or perhaps the -- leading purveyor and employer of surveillance technology is much less of a surprise than our media is making it out to be. We knew, but we made less of it, for the most part, than apparently we are supposed to now that we really know.

Yet there is no plan or movement to reduce or eliminate mass surveillance, quite the opposite. Instead, we are seeing any number of calls to restrict surveillance activities of government while leaving in place or even expanding corporate surveillance -- on the false premise that corporate surveillance is benign. It is not. It is extraordinarily invasive and potentially more dangerous to individual liberty ("") than anything the government might be able to do. Which is of course why corporate surveillance gets a pass.

The current drive for online privacy has many components, of course. One of them is intended to make it difficult or impossible for government to have access to certain aspects of one's life online, akin to the constitutional restrictions placed on government regarding reasonable search and seizure of one's home, papers, and effects requiring a warrant issued by a competent court before any such action can be taken. This is the Fourth Amendment restriction -- which unfortunately has been so riddled with holes and exceptions that it's all but moot in today's world. If some court actually wants to return the 4th to something akin to its original intent, I'm all for it, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

Meanwhile, it's hard to imagine real online privacy unless the whole architecture of the internet is reconfigured to provide it, and I don't see that happening any time soon, either. Well, at least not on the "free" internet that most of us use.

There could well be another, "secure" internet established for use by "members," say by subscription -- and I'm not so naive to imagine such a thing doesn't already exist in some respects, I'm just noodling for the moment. This is where I see the "privacy" movement (such as it is) headed. We'll have a two-tier "public access" internet, part of which is "free" -- in that use does not require payment (whereas access still will) and which is essentially open to corporate-government surveillance, and there will be another, more costly, internet (parts of which already exist) that is not quite so open -- though still not entirely secure -- for use by those who choose what we might call a higher level of service, and there will be a multiplicity of proprietary, highly secure, internets not available or accessible to the public at all, which will be used by the High and the Mighty. All of these things are essentially already in place, they just need some tweaking to become the standard.

When the Snowden Thing first broke, Naomi Wolf expressed some reservations about it based on her personal knowledge of whistleblowers and how they had approached their duties and actions in the past. The Snowden Thing was a distinct outlier compared to previous episodes of whistleblowing. She noodled for a bit wondering why it might be so, and she suggested that there might be an ulterior reason for exposing the doings of the NSA in the way it was being done: when people know they are being watched -- or rather, can be watched at will -- they tend to modify their behavior, "conform" in a word, almost instinctively. Letting people know that the NSA was "watching" them was, she thought, a useful way to ensure conformity. It's based on human psychology and the principles behind the Panopticon.

Snowden partisans immediately denounced and smeared Wolf for daring to raise questions about the true nature of the Snowden Thing. It was done in a manner that formed the template for denouncing and smearing anyone who expressed reservations about Snowden's motives or authenticity. These denunciations are a form of propaganda -- quite obvious to anyone who has made a study of propaganda and its effects -- a form that was raised to practically an art form by previous totalitarian regimes (Stalin, Hitler, Mao...) and it's effective, at least for a time.

And then it isn't.

Continuing to Slog Through "The Report"

I realize I'm not offering up commentary on specific recommendations or details of The Report at this point. It's partly due to the structure of The Report itself, heavy on conclusions at the outset, then quite dense (for this kind of thing) with details to back them up. What I've been trying to do is understand the subtext that flows through the whole thing and get a better idea of what's (perhaps) really going on.

The Snowden Thing is obviously the trigger mechanism for this Report, but where Snowden fits in the whole assembly is still somewhat obscure. I've had my doubts about the "genuineness," shall we say, of his whistle blowing from the outset of the summertime media frenzy over the story mainly because of the way it was being packaged and marketed and due to the rather surprising reluctance of the any of the participants to get into anything particularly substantive regarding the omnipresent Surveillance/Security State they were supposedly exposing.

The story had the earmarks of a Limited Hangout, purposely engineered by a faction within the Security State in order to hamstring or undermine some other faction.

Focusing almost exclusively on the NSA when there are dozens if not hundreds of elements to the overall apparat of surveillance and security in this country alone, most of them much, much closer to the day-to-day lives of individuals and affecting them much more immediately and stringently, was a "tell" for me that this set of revelations and the summertime media frenzy it engendered was not what it seemed and was being sold as.

There was clearly a background and backchannel within the government itself that was directing this story.

I saw it as a likely contest between the CIA and the NSA for Security State Pre-eminence, and I mentioned several times that there was a curiously silent Spook in all of this, one John Brennan, recently selected head of the CIA -- the very agency Snowden came out of before going to the NSA (or so the story went.)

The overall point of the stories was clearly to diminish the powers and authorities of the NSA -- some of which it had arrogated to itself contrary to law and custom  -- but not to get rid of them altogether. Instead, the idea seemed to be to put those elements elsewhere, either in other agencies or in the private sector.

This is clearly the intent and upshot of the recommendations in The Report. In no way that I can discern are the powers and authorities of the Surveillance/Security State diminished by the recommendations, nor are their validity and utility disputed within the detailed narrative. Their application by the NSA is, however, clearly recognized as a problem. Time after time, the NSA is singled out for criticism for overstepping its authorities, violating court orders, lying to oversight bodies and so on. If this is not a "rogue agency," I don't know what is.

On the other hand, there is no sign I've found in The Report that the powers and authorities that the S/S State holds should be diminished or removed. They should merely be better monitored by courts and "policymakers" (which is a whole other kettle of fish) and -- importantly -- should be redistributed among extant agencies (mostly unnamed).

The Report does take pains to point out that the NSA is only one aspect of the S/S State, and that it is not the primary element in many ways (though obviously it would like to be). This is something that the media (in the person of Greenwald) nearly completely ignores, but it is something that more and more other media have come to recognize -- slowly and timidly, but still....

The Report also goes into great, almost exhaustive, detail about some of the Programs that have caused so much heartburn during the past six months, much more detail about them than appeared in the media. For The Report to be so open about the Programs -- when the Agency has a history of being so secretive, and even the Snowden Revelations didn't get into such a level of granularity about them -- indicates to me that there has long been some kind of urge within the S/S State to reveal itself as fully and clearly as possible, an urge which heretofore, the NSA has opposed and resisted.

Well, they can't do it now.

An internal shake-up is underway.

But will it be more the cosmetics? Time will tell.

Oh What A Tangled Web

Now that I've got about half way through the Report (see posts below), it's clear that the Review is intended do a number of things simultaneously, the first, and perhaps most important to the purposes of the Government, to expose and detail insofar as possible what sorts of domestic and international intelligence gathering have been authorized and under what authorities they are conducted, and to describe insofar as possible how those authorities have been implemented, which includes plenty of instances of overreach and worse.

The Report seems to be organized and presented as a point-by-point response to the Snowden/Greenwald revelations and demands, and to a surprising -- or perhaps not-so-surprising -- degree, it concedes the points that Snowden and Greenwald make: that the NSA and other branches of the intelligence community have taken upon themselves authorities they don't really have, they have been repeatedly told to reform and/or desist by courts, their provisions for privacy protection are inadequate or nonexistent, their structures are open to abuse, and their mission is compromised by their own actions as well as those of people like Snowden and Greenwald who went to the trouble to expose to the public aspects of what was really going on that the agencies would prefer that people (including Congress, Courts and the President) not know.

The recommendations of the Review Group are actually quite startling, given the vilification heaped upon panel members for their close connections with the Security/Surveillance State. It was assumed, after all, that this panel would go out of its way to protect and defend the actions of that State, no matter what. This they have not done at all.

The Report goes into much more granular detail about the missteps of the Surveillance State than most of the press has been able to get into, and the recommendations reflect the panel's interests in reducing to the extent possible further missteps. Many of those missteps involve actions outside the legal authorities of the agencies involved, but clearly, part of the problem has been the laws themselves, and the over-generous interpretation of those laws and authorities by the heads of agencies over quite a long period of time.

This has been allowed in part because no one fully knew what was going on, as the agencies concealed their activities from the public and the oversight bodies that were supposed to be monitoring them. Consequently, many of the recommendations have to do with timely information about what is going on and how it is being done, not simply by stating "we are in compliance," but requiring extensive and more detailed reporting not only to Congressional oversight bodies but to the public as well. The agencies would consider these requirements to be onerous punishment, but too bad. This country has had far too much experience both recently and throughout its history with certain agencies of government spinning out of control and harming more than helping the nation. Reining in rogue agencies is a constant challenge and necessity.

While one of the recommendations deals with the transfer of bulk collection and storage of telephone meta data from the government to the carriers or a separate third party private entity (for a fee of course for the private entity or entities which shall hold the data for a specified period), I haven't yet found what I suspected I might: that the recommendations would foster and feature even greater levels of privatization of the Security/Surveillance State than already exists.

The upshot of the recommendations instead seems to be to significantly curb and constrain the actions of the Security/Surveillance State on its own account and to bring it into a narrower, more targeted and much more accountable (to the public) framework within government, rather than spinning off its activities to the private sector.

Of course, I may still run into rationales to further privatize the intelligence/surveillance operations of government, but so far, I haven't.

As a side note, most if not all of the information the government seeks in connection with the Security/Surveillance State is relatively easily available from the private sector -- which has a vast, growing and intrusive surveillance apparatus in place. Were government agencies forbidden to collect this information on their own (none of the recommendations suggest any such thing, btw), little or nothing would prevent them from getting the same sort of information -- or even more complete information -- on the open market. So even a prohibition on direct collection of surveillance data by government could be circumvented quite easily.

There have been rumors that the President will accept all of the recommendations and that most of them will be implemented. There are counter rumors that say just the opposite, that the Report goes too far, and the President will reject most of the recommendations.

What I find interesting is that this Report is apparently written in response to Snowden/Greenwald, it accepts their reading of the situation with regard to the NSA's overreach and the inadequacy of legal restraints on its activities, and it recommends some relatively harsh corrections. This suggests to me that there has been a "Snowden Faction" within the Security/Surveillance Apparat for some time (whether or not Snowden knew of it or was acting independently) and they needed some sort of engineered crisis in order to a) present their case, and b) press for reform. In other words, these recommendations and much of the study that brought them forth were pre-prepared awaiting only the crisis to be presented.

But in the meantime, what a tangled mess the Security/Surveillance State is revealed to be in this report.

What a full on mess.

I've always been an abolitionist when it comes to these sorts of things, and this report makes clear (to me at any rate) the reasons why.

Progress? Has the Time Come?

Having spent the better part of the day yesterday on The Report (see post below), I'm still plowing through it today, but so far, my initial impressions are confirmed rather fully. The whole thing is an argument -- essentially a legal brief -- for reigning in and enhancing oversight of the NSA, almost exactly along the lines of Snowden's and Greenwald's objections to NSA domestic (and foreign, but I haven't got to that part yet) surveillance as highlighted in the series of Bombshell Revelations over the summer.

Isn't that interesting?

Well, it should be.

The composition of the panel that did the review and came up with the Report (Richard Clarke,  Michael Morell, Geoffrey Stone, Cass Sunstein and Peter Swire) was fiercely criticized by Snowden/Greenwald fans for including a former CIA acting director and Cass Sunstein,  (aka: The Devil Incarnate) as well as a number of  other usual suspects. It was expected that the panel would therefore whitewash the NSA's programs and recommend post facto legalizing everything they've been doing. But it turns out not to be that way at all.

In fact, the panel uses the opportunity presented by the Snowden/Greenwald revelations and the presidential directive to "review" intelligence operations to dig relatively deep into the Intelligence community as a whole -- not just the NSA -- and make observations and recommendations regarding the way that community behaves in the Post 9/11 world. Its observations and recommendations are aligned almost exactly with the perceptions and demands of Snowden and Greenwald. In other words, the panel seems to see the revelations over the summer as a means to engage the administration and the public in a discussion of "proper" reform of these agencies which have been out of control for most of the years since 9/11.

The time has come.

Now of course I'm not a reformist when it comes to the intelligence community. I don't believe it can be "reformed" -- due to its intrinsic nature. It may be possible to abolish and reconstitute it, but even then, the abusive nature of the enterprise is bound to reassert itself, especially if -- as now -- the intelligence community is so deeply intertwined with corporate interests as opposed to the public interest.

I haven't got far enough into the report to suss out just how much the recommendations serve the private sector corporate interests which have always had a strong hand within and  over the intelligence community, but I have little doubt that the Report skews heavily toward those interests -- while calling them the 'public interest.'

Unfortunately for the public, this seems to be the direction Snowden/Greenwald want "reform" to go, by institutionalizing the primacy of corporate interest over the public interest as expressed through government.

But there is still quite a lot of the report I haven't read. I am not a speed reader, and I'm trying to find dots which may ultimately be connected to understand what this whole hoo-hah as been about.

Been Reading the Report

You know, this one. (308 page pdf)

Interesting to say the least, and hardly what one might have expected given the hoop-lah and hoo-hah over the summertime.

At least from the cursory view that I've been able to give it so far, it appears to be a nearly complete capitulation to the Snowden Faction among Our Rulers.

Very interesting indeed.

Well, I intend to read it more closely and will evaluate my initial impression anon.

NSA Back In the News

Young Snowden has been photographed pushing a shopping cart at the Moskva Target (or its equivalent, one assumes) and sailing on the Moskva River with Sarah Harrison (one assumes). Of course they may not be Snowden, just a look alike. They appear to have been taken during the summertime, which doen't mean a whole lot, since Young Snowden was said to have been freed from his airport captivity sometime during the summer, but that these pictures would only now surface, and on what's said to be a sleazy tabloid news site in Russia as opposed to prim and proper FOX News in America, makes you wonder, doesn't it?

Of course this is nicely timed with the story of Greenwald finding  his billionaire and leaving the Guardian for greener -- much greener -- pastures to play in with his buds Laura and Jeremy.  With the addition of Froomkin and Segura, it's a media empire-in-process. All they'll need to add now is Michael Hastings. Oh, wait.

Who Is Really In Charge -- Of What?

Uhhh.... guys...

T've heard rumblings that the "Health Care Rollout Cockup" was an act of sabotage deliberately staged by certain interests -- either in the government or in the contractor sector, or by both working hand in glove -- for some nefarious purpose, testing, perhaps, the levels of anxiety and endurance the public can be subjected to over basic matters like access to something.

In other words, how difficult/impossible can we make something a significant portion of the public will be compelled to do before they snap? I hate to use Nazi allusions, but this is was something the Nazis were masters at in their conquests of Europe. They would institute orders for compelled actions by selected populations that could not be obeyed rationally, but only in a kind of mindless stupor could part of an order be complied with. This had profound psychological effects that helped enable the mass murder to come. People went on command -- and essentially willingly -- into the ghettos, the cattle cars, the camps and the gas chambers, in part because they had been pre-conditioned to do irrational things and to follow irrational orders simply to survive. They believed sincerely that if they didn't do what they were told, or they unimaginably rose up against this madness, they wouldn't/couldn't survive for even a moment longer. At least they had a chance if they complied...

Well, yes, some did survive all of it. A handful.

During Occupy Wall Street actions in New York, I saw (via livestream) people herded onto the Brooklyn Bridge and corralled there, arrested, hundreds of them, maybe more than a thousand, and I saw how they willingly submitted themselves to the authorities who had basically tricked them and trapped them in this pen over the East River, and I was gobsmacked and horrified at what I was witnessing. It wasn't so much what the police had done -- though that was itself horrifying and inexcusable -- it was the immediate and instant compliance of the crowd. Oh. My. God. When I saw a handful of people escaping the trap by climbing up to a higher level of the bridge and slipping away, I was momentarily cheered. Some knew not to comply. But for most? Jesus. They should know deep in their bones where this sort of thing leads.

And thankfully, later, it was clear that many of them did know. And they weren't about to fall into this kind of mental trap and follow these sorts of orders and commands again.

So. Is the Rollout something of the same sort? Perhaps. I don't know. I have some knowledge of relatively huge government projects and how they go "live" and how badly they can be bolloxed initially. If there is sabotage involved, it appears to be the result of contractors (sometimes with the assistance of government functionaries) figuring out how to squeeze as much more money as possible out of the system before it either works or collapses. That's what this cock-up looks like to me from the outside. It wasn't ready, the hundreds of millions poured into it already were not nearly enough to satisfy the contractors who built it -- they want double the money, triple or more -- and so it will be "difficult" for as long as it takes to satisfy them, which could conceivably mean forever.

At least in Iraq they were shipping over pallets of hundred dollar bills, as well as seizing all the hundred dollar bills stashed away in the Republican Palace villas along the Tigris (said to be about a billion and change worth) for the grand par-tays being conducted by the military contractors, some of whom turned around and carried the loot home in sacks and suitcases.

We do these things a little differently in the Homeland, yes?

So from my view, the cockup is deliberate, but it's a money issue, not some nefarious scheme to pre-condition the population to OBEY. On the other hand, we've been immersed in that conditioning for generations, haven't we? We are being conditioned all the time, in addition to being spied on and exploited and everything else.

But then I saw part of the Sebelius hearing on "what went wrong" -- and it was so scripted, I thought, "Wait a minute, this is just for show and sound bites. We are finding out nothing, nothing at all from this hearing. It's just show business."

Oh. So something IS going on. OK. What?

The only thing I could come up with was that the Rollout occurred during the Shutdown, when much of the federal government that the People would ordinarily deal with -- like the parks and such -- was inaccessible (something made plain on the teevee at the monuments in the Mall). The Shutdown was something planned months in advance, a cooperative venture, not spontaneous at all, and I wondered... why?

The Rollout was planned, months (actually years) in advance to occur simultaneously. This was no accident.

It was a coordinated bollox. Was it intentionally planned and coordinated to show the government as useless, incompetent and ultimately "not there" in any case? Had somebody really been thinking things through like this? Oh please.

Who? Who is fucking in charge here, and what exactly are they in charge of?

During the Shutdown and the Rollout, the NSA stories seemed to go on hiatus. But as soon as the government reopened we were told that Glenn had found himself a billionaire and he would be leaving the Guardian to establish a new media venture that he would be in operational and editorial control of, funded by Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay. Oh. Well. Isn't that special. (My reservations about that are another story altogether...)

After all the hoo-hah in Yurp and particular parts of Latin America over spying on the people and the political leaders, we were treated to the information via the WaPo and a little pencil sketch that the personal/private information held by Google and Yahoo (one assumes others)  is accessible by the NSA (one assumes other agencies as well) through various "sekrit" means, and oh, my isn't it a terrible thing, though! And of course Google and the others had no idea, OMG! We are being spied upon!

Jesus. This is such complete bullshit.

The pencil sketch was the tell, if it wasn't for all the other signs that this was yet more "conditioning" to accept the previously unknown/unacceptable.

 Please.

 I'm sorry, if this is how Our Rulers are conducting their business, on the back of a napkin, then it's a wonder anything works at all, isn't it? Well, isn't it?

Who is in charge of this muddle? What are they really in charge of?

Not only are we pretty fully through the looking glass, we're deep in outer space without a pressure suit.

Wheels within wheels is putting it mildly.

Celestial Wheels

The Actual Surveillance State

I've been saying ever since the NSA Domestic Surveillance story broke that there is a whole vast apparatus of domestic surveillance that is much, much closer to the ground than the almost Star Trek fantasies of the NSA.

The NSA is part of the National Surveillance State, of course, but I have maintained that its surveillance of Americans is relatively less significant than the surveillance that goes on all the time by commercial interests and local, state and federal police forces. For whatever reason -- and I have my theories -- those more fundamental aspects of domestic surveillance were routinely dismissed or ignored while quite a few of those on the internet were literally ordering people to only pay attention to the story of the NSA, nothing, NOTHING else mattered.

Comes now the story of the ACLU's ongoing investigations into the breadth and depth of domestic surveillance as described in Suspicious Activity Reports filed with local, state and federal police forces by suspicious citizens and others and processed by authorities at 77 fusion centers throughout the country.

This is part of the domestic surveillance apparatus I have been railing about for months, but because there were few or no sensational media stories about it, people had a hard time focusing on it. It was much easier to focus on the NSA -- because it was a sensational story, even though it is a story that serves to mask just how deep and pervasive domestic surveillance is and long has been.

And this is still only a part of the surveillance apparatus in place and affecting all of us all the time. There's much, much more to it.

I maintain that the NSA should not be the focus of concern about domestic surveillance largely because its contribution to the domestic surveillance apparat is relatively minor compared to the daily surveillance by government and private agencies we're all under all the time, and due to which some communities and individuals face terrible and too frequently arbitrary consequences.

This is the reality of domestic surveillance that the obsessive focus on the NSA story has all but completely obscured.

Miscellany

Random notes that have come up over the last few days that I didn't think warranted a full post at this point.

On the Surveillance State: one of the repeatedly heard issues about the Surveillance State is that  the compromises of corporate integrity and user privacy forced by the government on their corporate partners in surveillance has mortally wounded the American IT Business abroad to the point where no one will do business with them.

Well:

Despite emphatic predictions of waning business prospects, some of the big Internet companies that the former National Security Agency contractor showed to be closely involved in gathering data on people overseas - such as Google Inc. and Facebook Inc. - say privately that they have felt little if any impact on their businesses.

Insiders at companies that offer remote computing services known as cloud computing, including Amazon and Microsoft Corp, also say they are seeing no fallout.

Meanwhile, smaller U.S. companies offering encryption and related security services are seeing a jump in business overseas, along with an uptick in sales domestically as individuals and companies work harder to protect secrets.

"No fallout?" "Little if any impact?" How ever can it be? We'll see. All I would add at this point it that the NSA's corporate partners have been notorious "untruth" tellers from the day the revelations of massive NSA surveillance broke last June, and I wouldn't take anything they say about anything at face value. They -- like the NSA -- lie. So I question even the statements in this story.

The Syria Thing, NSA, CIA and That Old Man's Hard On

I've been pretty strident about the NSA story that has dominated so much of the political media throughout the summer. I saw it and see it as a Summer Shark and Missing White Boy story that has been purpose made to obscure something else, something much more immediate and consequential -- and probably dreadful.

We now know what it is: A planned US attack on Syria which may well turn into an apocalyptic conflagration.

Jeebus Dancing Christo.

What the Holy Hell is wrong with these people?

While it's fun to make a whipping boy of the NSA -- or any other spookery -- the issue of domestic surveillance and the concomitant police state is far too serious for far too many people to let the singular issue of "NSA" surveillance overwhelm the reality of how deep-seated and pervasive the surveillance state really is in this country. It's far too serious to let NSA surveillance be seen as the only or even the most serious threat to privacy in the whole wide world -- as it has been promoted throughout the summer.

It's not. It's simply not. It never was. Other threats however...

We don't know what happened in Syria, nor do we know who was responsible. Because of the consistency of the falsehoods that emanate from our government and our spookeries, let alone the falsehoods that come from the Israeli "intelligence" (the source, apparently, for the claim that intercepted phone calls among Syrian officials were the "smoking gun" that "proved" the Assad regime was responsible for the CW attack), people must be skeptical of any pronouncement from On High about what they are doing, or anything they say about what anyone else has done.

They lie.

It's in their nature, and in the nature of the agencies and operations they have nominal charge of.

They lie, and they will do what they wilt, and they will do it without let or hindrance from We, the Rabble.

That Old Man's Hard On will have its release, no matter what.

Our government has now fully divorced itself from We, the Rabble.

The "intelligence" services will have their way. The MIC will have its way.

And that, as they say, is that.

Continuing Slaps in the Face

When His Serenity, the President, announced there would be an "outside review" of the spookeries, no one much believed him. Why should they? The spooks have long resisted the very idea of scrutiny of their own activities. That isn't how it works in these United States of God Damn, not even on a bet.

The way it works is this: The spooks tell their clients what they need to know to serve the interests of the Spookeries, and the interests of the Spookeries are ever greater levels of power and money. They claim, of course, that it's "protecting us from Communism" -- or whatever the enemy and/or bugaboo might be at the moment -- but this is a pious fraud. They offer "protection" for a price to some, those with whom they are aligned politically or financially or socially.

For the rest of us? Not so much. In fact, their actions, never benign, often jeopardize the well-being of the Rabble, sometimes it seems for the sheer thrill of it.

End of Summer Data Dumps and Exemptions From the Police/Surveillance State

As summer gets closer and closer to its conclusion, the NSA is furiously pumping out declassified documents to show... something. Exactly what it is we're seeing will take months or years of combing through and evaluation to clarify. It is in the nature of the beast.

The main issue -- that our lives are being surveilled and we're being spied upon by Our Rulers -- has been known and understood and talked about and so forth for years. We may not have known exactly what sorts of surveillance programs were in place or their names, but we knew they were there, and we knew that our personal lives were subject to all kinds of scrutiny by all kinds of entities, both public and private. We may not like it, but there is little we can do about it if we want to live in the material and modern world. Fact. Of. Life.

This summer's shark and missing white boy story over domestic and international surveillance has caused plenty of uproar and bombast, but there has been almost no effort to curb or restrict or abolish the Spy State under which we (all) live.

What there has been is a continuing effort to carve out exemptions from surveillance and the police state consequences of same. In other words, the continuing "civil liberties" campaign throughout the summer -- beginning with the AP Thing in May -- has been one to provide certain segments of the domestic and global population with assurances that they are not being (routinely) targeted and surveilled and that they will not be held to answer for matters that routine surveillance might disclose.

Starting with the Press and Media.

Tired Now

As at least 5% of Americans must know by now, the Guardian has been regularly publishing stories about domestic and international surveillance from the trove of NSA documents they got through Edward Snowden, who is now an asylee/exile in Russia.

There's been something peculiar about this story from the get, but just what is going on in and through the national and international spookeries continues to be something of a mystery. The fact that so much media attention has been focused on NSA!!! spying and almost none on the pervasiveness of domestic surveillance through many public sector and private sector operations is one of the reasons why I have suggested this is a Summer Shark and Missing White Boy Story, a time-honored summer media diversion from things that actually matter. This story is a classic of the genre, and I suspect it will go away and be all but forgotten (until next summer) right around Labor Day.

Ah but, before it goes away, there will be several more bursts of OUTRAGE!!!!™ and scare mongering like there was on Sunday when Greenwald's Brazilian life-partner was -- erm -- detained at Heathrow and his things were confiscated.

The hysteria was immediate and nonstop. Though I don't follow Greenwald on the Twitter -- don't follow anyone anymore -- I read that he was just burning up the Twit Feeds with accusations and imprecations that went on and on and on about abuses of power, tyranny, and intimidation. The usual Greenwald stuff.

I got tired of it a long time ago.

Actually, it was a little more than getting tired of it.