Welcome to the future, where the NSA black hole lords over all as the ultimate Panopticon

Digital Blackwater rules

By Pepe Escobar 
The judgment of Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg is definitive; "There has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material". And that includes the release of the Pentagon Papers themselves. Here is the 12-minute video by The Guardian where Snowden details his motives.

By now, everything swirling around the US National Security Agency (NSA) points to a black box in a black hole. The black box is the NSA headquarters itself in Fort Meade, Maryland. The black hole is an area that would include the suburbs of Virginia's Fairfax County near the CIA but mostly the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32. 

There one finds a business park a mile away from the NSA which Michael Hayden, a former NSA director (1999-2005) told Salon's Tim Shorrock is "the largest concentration of cyber power on the planet". [1] Hayden coined it "Digital Blackwater". 

Egypt’s Perils and Paradoxes

A proud civilization confronts the twin challenges of Gulf-state extremism and American pop culture

By ANDREW DORAN

“The country that was the beacon of tranquility, the society that was an example of peacefulness and tolerance — one that had never witnessed a civil war in over seven thousand years — has turned into … a breeding ground of aggression.” These words from the foreword of Tarek Osman’s 2010 book, Egypt on the Brink, which anticipated the Arab revolution in Egypt by mere months, capture a trend toward extremism in recent decades. This extremism adds a dimension to Egypt’s already numerous complexities and contradictions.

Egypt’s move toward radicalism may be principally attributed to two encounters.

Criminals in the White House - Victims in Jail

Only One Big Telecom CEO Refused To Cave To The NSA ... And He's Been In Jail For 4 Years

Joseph Nacchio, the CEO of Qwest Communications International Inc. from 1997 to 2002, arrives at the Denver Federal Courthouse with his wife, Anne, for sentencing on 19 counts of illegal stock sales in Denver, Colorado July 27, 2007.

By MICHAEL KELLEY

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio is currently serving a six-year sentence after being convicted of insider trading in April 2007 for selling $52 million of stock in the spring of 2001 as the telecommunications carrier appeared to be deteriorating.

During the trial his defense team argued that Nacchio, 63, believed Qwest was about to win secret government contracts that would keep it in the black.

Nacchio alleged that the government stopped offering the company lucrative contracts after Qwest refused to cooperate with a National Security Agency surveillance program in February 2001.

That claim gains new relevance these days, amid leaks by whistleblower Edward Snowden that allege widespread domestic surveillance by the NSA.

Back in 2006 Leslie Cauley of USA Today, citing multiple people with direct knowledge of the arrangement, reported that shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks America's three largest telecoms signed contracts to provide the NSA with detailed call records from hundreds of millions of people across the country.

Cauley noted that Qwest's refusal to participate "left the NSA with a hole in its database" since the company served local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states.

From USA Today (emphasis ours):

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard. ...

... the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government.

Nacchio's legal concerns about the NSA program at the time mirror those of civil liberty groups today.

Cauley, citing sources familiar with events, reported the NSA asserted that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which oversees NSA snooping) — to provide the data.

"They told (Qwest) they didn't want to [run the proposal by the FISA court] because FISA might not agree with them," one NSA insider told USA Today.

There is a record of the NSA running afoul of FISA: In July the FISA court ruled that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment's restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures "on at least one occasion."

Furthermore, Nacchio felt that it was unclear who would have access to Qwest customers' information and how that information might be used. Sources told Cauley that the NSA said government agencies including the FBI, CIA, and DEA might have access to its massive database.

Nacchio entered prison on April 14, 2009 and is scheduled for release on September 21, 2013  (Federal inmates are typically required to serve at least 80 percent of a sentence, which would be 3.5 years in this case.) 

Dystopian secrecy fuels clueless wars

Knowledge is not evil

By Chase Madar 

The prosecution of Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks' source inside the US Army, will be pulling out all the stops when it calls to the stand a member of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden. The SEAL (in partial disguise, as his identity is secret) is expected to tell the military judge that classified documents leaked by Manning to WikiLeaks were found on bin Laden's laptop. That will, in turn, be offered as proof not that bin Laden had Internet access like two billion other earthlings, but that Manning has "aided the enemy", a capital offense. 

Think of it as courtroom cartoon theater: the heroic slayer of the jihadi super-villain testifying against the ultimate bad soldier, a five-foot-two-inch (1.57 meters) gay man facing 22 charges in military court and accused of the biggest security breach in US history. 

But let's be clear on one thing: Manning, the young Army intelligence analyst who leaked thousands of public documents and passed them on to WikiLeaks, has done far more for US national security than SEAL Team 6. 

The assassination of Osama bin Laden, the spiritual (but not operational) leader of al-Qaeda, was a fist-pumping moment of triumphalism for a lot of Americans, as the Saudi fanatic had come to incarnate not just al-Qaeda but all national security threats. This was true despite the fact that, since 9/11, al-Qaeda has been able to do remarkably little harm to the United States or to the West in general. (The deadliest attack in a Western nation since 9/11, the 2004 Atocha bombing in Madrid, was not committed by bin Laden's organization, though white-shoe foreign policy magazines and think tanks routinely get this wrong, "al-Qaeda" being such a handy/sloppy metonym for all terrorism.) 

Al-Qaeda remains a simmering menace, but as an organization hardly the greatest threat to the United States. In fact, if you measure national security in blood and money, as many of us still do, by far the greatest threat to the United States over the past dozen years has been our own clueless foreign policy. 

Putin's Self-Destruction

Russia's New Anti-Corruption Campaign Will Sink the Regime

A flyswatter with an image of Russia's President Vladimir Putin, part of an art installation by Russian artist Vasily Slonov, is on display at the Krasnoyarsk Museum Centre in Russia's Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, 2012

By Ivan Krastev and Vladislav Inozemtsev

This spring has been almost eerily calm in Russia. The protest movement, which coalesced after the rigged parliamentary elections in the autumn of 2011, has all but disintegrated, and hopes for substantive political opening have faded. High-profile liberals are in retreat or retirement, a dozen opposition activists are in jail, and President Vladimir Putin’s will is unchallenged. Even the weather has been nice, perhaps lulling the Kremlin into believing that it has little to fear. In fact, it does: unwittingly, Putin’s recent anti-corruption campaign has set the stage for the system’s collapse.

The anti-corruption campaign was a choice. In April, the lower house of the Russian legislature passed a law that bans members of both houses from holding foreign bank accounts. The prohibition was extended to include all public servants, including central bank officials and functionaries of state-owned corporations. Three months after Putin signs the law, government officials will be barred from opening bank accounts abroad, even to pay for educational or medical expenses.

Putin has pledged that this is only the beginning. He and his advisers know well that attacks on corruption are popular with the public. They are counting on the campaign to shore up support after the protests and to mobilize Putin’s supporters. What the Kremlin is neglecting, however, is that the campaign could be a double-edged sword that ultimately delegitimizes the regime, as Putin’s own acolytes are swept out while the government’s house is cleaned.

Putin faces a critical moment and is at risk of losing his sway over the elites.

FROM GORBACHEV TO PUTIN

The fate of Mikhail Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign in the last years of the Soviet Union should have provided a warning. By the 1980s, alcohol had become a major cause of death, absenteeism, and low labor productivity in the country. Its cost to the Soviet economy totaled no less than 10 percent of national income. When Gorbachev launched a program to end alcoholism in 1985, he was celebrated across the country for his courage and strategic vision. The campaign did succeed in reducing alcohol consumption, but that didn't stop it from quickly becoming a political disaster. Ordinary Soviet citizens believed that drinking themselves to death was their right, and they actively resisted the state’s attempt to infringe upon it. They ridiculed the policy, disobeyed regulations, and made their own alcohol. These low-risk forms of everyday resistance were an enormous problem for Gorbachev, because they turned the people against the Communist Party. By the time the anti-alcohol campaign was abandoned at the end of 1987, it had severely damaged both the credibility of Gorbachev’s reforms and the Soviet leader’s popularity.

27 Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send A Chill Up Your Spine

If you have a spine, that is ...

Would you be willing to give up what Edward Snowden has given up?  He has given up his high paying job, his home, his girlfriend, his family, his future and his freedom just to expose the monolithic spy machinery that the U.S. government has been secretly building to the world.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where there isn't any privacy.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where everything that he says and does is recorded.  Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the U.S. government has been spying on us to a degree that most people would have never even dared to imagine.

Up until now, the general public has known very little about the U.S. government spy grid that knows almost everything about us.  But making this information public is going to cost Edward Snowden everything.  Essentially, his previous life is now totally over.  And if the U.S. government gets their hands on him, he will be very fortunate if he only has to spend the next several decades rotting in some horrible prison somewhere.

One man stands up against the Panopticon

God help us if we lose

by Justin Raimondo

At the end of the eighteenth century, the laissez-faire-philosopher-turned-statist Jeremy Bentham devised a scheme for the design of a prison he called the Panopticon: a circular building at the center of which is a watchtower made of glass from which it is possible to observe the inmates at all times. If we look at America as one vast prison, with ourselves as the inmates, we can get some idea of what the national security bureaucracy was envisioning when they conceived PRISM, “Boundless Informant,” and the program that records the details (minus content) of every phone call made in the US (which, as far as I know, doesn’t have a name). Derived from documents leaked to the Guardian newspaper columnist Glenn Greenwald, these revelations throw back the curtain on a modern day, hi tech Panopticon, with the high priests of the National Security State sitting at the center of it, relentlessly observing us, the prisoners—who don’t even know we’re prisoners – 24/7.

PRISM allows the National Security Agency (NSA) “direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants,” according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian newspaper. The information scooped up by the NSA includes “search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats,” according to the Power Point presentation leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The document claims the US (and British) governments collect this information “directly from the servers” of internet service providers. While at first denying even knowing about any such government program, as well as the idea that they would allow direct access to their servers, the named ISPs later conceded the truth of these accusations by acknowledging that the information is indeed being provided in a “online room,” where massive amounts of information are stored and then transferred to government snoops.

Smear Brigade Goes After Snowden

... and Greenwald. They can't refute the message – so they go after the messengers

by Justin Raimondo

When whistleblowers expose government wrongdoing and abuses, the procedure is always the same: the regime’s defenders focus on the whistleblower’s alleged personality defects and smear him within an inch of his life. They did it with Dan Ellsberg, they did it with Julian Assange, they did it with Bradley Manning, and that all too familiar modus operandi is unfolding pretty quickly in the case of Edward Snowden, the heroic libertarian who exposed Washington’s massive and unconstitutional spying operation against American citizens. The pundits who take seriously their job as the power elite’s Praetorian Guard are going after Snowdenhammer and tongs, and in these dark times their polemics provide a rich source of humor.

The funniest one – although this is admittedly a hard choice to make – has got to bethis piece by one William Foxton, a rather pathetic Tory “moderate” who claims to care about “civil liberties, Internet freedom, that sort of thing.” So you see he’s one of us – but he’s “never liked Glenn Greenwald,” the journalist who broke the story. Well, why not? Greenwald, after all, has been one of the staunchest advocates of those very causes, almost single-handedly responsible for calling foul on the foulest attack on civil liberties since the era of J. Edgar Hoover.

Foxton is coy on this point: he says maybe it’s because Greenwald’s pieces are “enormous,” not to mention “turgid” – although this doesn’t appear to deter Glenn’s numerous readers. Oh, but you see, they’re a “cult” – although he doesn’t let us in on the secret ceremonies, complete with Satanic altars and Druidic incantations, that no doubt figure prominently in the activities of the Greenwaldian sect. So then how do Greenwald’s many admirers – myself among them – qualify as cult members? Well, you see:

Let the smearing of Edward Snowden begin

The debate about this Short, Fat, Narcissist, Loner, Coward, Defector, Traitor, Cross-dressing Little Red Riding Hood Communist is over.

By Elias Groll

Edward Snowden's decision to publicly reveal his identity has placed him at the center of growing controversy about the U.S. government's intelligence-gathering activities.

But by stepping forward, Snowden, the source behind reports in the Washington Post and the Guardian about highly classified U.S. intelligence programs, has also come under fire in the media. "I don't want public attention because I don't want the story to be about me," Snowden told the Guardian. "I want it to be about what the U.S. government is doing." Snowden hasn't exactly gotten his wish.

While hailed as a hero in some quarters, Snowden has also been described as a coward and a traitor. Here is a thematic guide to the Snowden smear campaign.

Traitor

None other than John Boehner, the speaker of the House, took to ABC's Good Morning America to brand Snowden a traitor -- a sentiment echoed by former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

This is, hands down, the scariest part of the NSA revelations

Metadata is more invasive and a bigger threat to privacy and civil liberties than the PRISM system

By Shane Harris

Forget PRISM, the National Security Agency's system to help extract data from Google, Facebook, and the like. The more frightening secret program unearthed by the NSA leaks is the gathering and storing of millions of phone records and phone-location information of U.S. citizens.

According to current and former intelligence agency employees who have used the huge collection of metadata obtained from the country's largest telecom carriers, the information is widely available across the intelligence community from analysts' desktop computers.

The data is used to connect known or suspected terrorists to people in the United States, and to help locate them. It has also been used in foreign criminal investigations and to assist military forces overseas. But the laws that govern the collection of this information and its use are not as clear. Nor are they as strong as those associated with PRISM, the system the NSA is using to collate information from the servers of America's tech giants.

Google chief wrote about 'terrifying' surveillance months before NSA leaks

Big Brother tyranny is probable but not inevitable

By John Hudson

Before defending the U.S. government's surveillance apparatus -- as he did last week -- Eric Schmidt wasn't so blasé about government snooping.

In an overlooked chapter of his recently released book The New Digital Age, Google's executive chairman described the battle for Internet privacy as a "long, important struggle" and depicted the emergence of Big Data surveillance tactics as a threat to a free society.

"Governments operating surveillance platforms will surely violate restrictions placed on them (by legislation or legal ruling) eventually," he wrote in a chapter on the future of terrorism. "The potential for misuse of this power is terrifyingly high, to say nothing of the dangers introduced by human error, data-driven false positives and simple curiosity."

Sounds like a familiar problem, right?

Little did Schmidt know that two months after his book's release, an intelligence contractor named Edward Snowden would carry out the biggest leak in the history of the National Security Agency, exposing its surveillance program PRISM and the cooperation of top technology firms including Google.

Was Cheney right about Obama?

Presidential authority is easy to accumulate and very difficult to undo

BY PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE

After Barack Obama was elected to his first term as President but before he took the oath of office, Vice-President Dick Cheney gave an exit interview to Rush Limbaugh. Under George W. Bush, Cheney was the architect, along with his legal counsel, David Addington, of a dramatic expansion of executive authority—a power grab that Obama criticized, fiercely, on the campaign trail, and promised to “reverse.” But when Limbaugh inquired about this criticism Cheney swatted it aside, saying, “My guess is that, once they get here and they’re faced with the same problems we deal with every day, they will appreciate some of the things we’ve put in place.”

I was reminded of that line during last week’s revelations about mass-surveillance programs administered by the National Security Agency. When Cheney said it, the remark struck me as cynical and self-serving. Now it seems prescient. Many observers have lamented Obama’s war on leaks—which has been distinguished by an unprecedented number of prosecutions—suggesting that there is some hypocrisy in a President who, having promised to roll back Bush’s “policy of secrecy,” has devoted his time in office to the merciless pursuit of whistle-blowers.

Why Edward Snowden is a hero

“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”

BY JOHN CASSIDY

Is Edward Snowden, the twenty-nine-year-old N.S.A. whistle-blower who was last said to behiding in Hong Kong awaiting his fate, a hero or a traitor? He is a hero. (My colleague Jeffrey Toobin disagrees.) In revealing the colossal scale of the U.S. government’s eavesdropping on Americans and other people around the world, he has performed a great public service that more than outweighs any breach of trust he may have committed. Like Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department official who released the Pentagon Papers, and Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli nuclear technician who revealed the existence of Israel’s weapons program, before him, Snowden has brought to light important information that deserved to be in the public domain, while doing no lasting harm to the national security of his country.

Doubtless, many people inside the U.S. power structure—President Obama included—and some of its apologists in the media will see things differently. When Snowden told the Guardian that “nothing good” was going to happen to him, he was almost certainly right. In fleeing to Hong Kong, he may have overlooked the existence of its extradition pact with the United States, which the U.S. authorities will most certainly seek to invoke. The National Security Agency has already referred the case to the Justice Department, and James Clapper, Obama’s director of National Intelligence, has said that Snowden’s leaks have done “huge, grave damage” to “our intelligence capabilities.”

Kindness and Strangers

Treating Immigrants Like Strangers

Ellis Island 

By BRYAN CAPLAN

Immigrants are strangers, and we should treat them accordingly.

On the one hand, this means that we should consider all of the ways–good and bad–that immigrants affect us.  We shouldn’t merely consider the fiscal effects of immigration.  We should consider the broader economic effects, including those on innovation and entrepreneurship.  And we should consider the political effects–how immigrants will sway our future policies and priorities.

None of this means, however, that we may ignore the welfare of immigrants.  They’re strangers but still human beings.  No one is obligated to hire strangers, house strangers, or support strangers in the lifestyle to which they’d like to become accustomed.  When someone else offers to hire, house, or support a stranger, however, we are normally obliged not to interfere.  If you disapprove of your employer’s latest recruit or your landlord’s new tenants, you have every right to quit or move.  But to overrule other people’s agreements requires a very good excuse.

How America Lost Its Way

Our institutions need fixing

By NIALL FERGUSON

Not everyone is an entrepreneur. Still, everyone should try—if only once—to start a business. After all, it is small and medium enterprises that are the key to job creation. There is also something uniquely educational about sitting at the desk where the buck stops, in a dreary office you've just rented, working day and night with a handful of employees just to break even.

As an academic, I'm just an amateur capitalist. Still, over the past 15 years I've started small ventures in both the U.S. and the U.K. In the process I've learned something surprising: It's much easier to do in the U.K. There seemed to be much more regulation in the U.S., not least the headache of sorting out health insurance for my few employees. And there were certainly more billable hours from lawyers.

This set me thinking. We are assured by vociferous economists that economic growth would be higher in the U.S. and unemployment lower if only the government would run even bigger deficits and/or the Fed would print even more money. But what if the difficulty lies elsewhere, in problems that no amount of fiscal or monetary stimulus can overcome?

Nearly all development economists agree that good institutions—legislatures, courts, administrative agencies—are crucial. When poor countries improve their institutions, economic growth soon accelerates. But what about rich countries? If poor countries can get rich by improving their institutions, is it not possible that rich countries can get poor by allowing their institutions to degenerate? I want to suggest that it is.

Consider the evidence from the annual "Doing Business" reports from the World Bank and International Finance Corporation. Since 2006 the report has published data for most of the world's countries on the total number of days it takes to start a business, get a construction permit, register a property, pay taxes, get an export or import license and enforce a contract. If one simply adds together the total number of days it would take to carry out all seven of these procedures sequentially, it is possible to construct a simple measure of how slowly—or fast—a country's bureaucracy moves.

The Twilight Of Christian Europe

Europeans are so post-Christian that they don’t even have a hostile view towards Christianity

By ROD DREHER

A Catholic bishop in England addresses a recent conference. 

Excerpt:

The recent analysis of the 2011 Census results appears to indicate that before the end of this decade Christianity – once the faith of the great majority of British people – will become the faith of a significant minority. If most English people no longer identify themselves as Christians it will surely be one of the most momentous changes in our history since missionaries sent by Pope Gregory arrived on the coast of Kent in the year 597 AD. However, I want to suggest today that this may not be an entirely negative development as it dispels any ambiguity and requires of Christians a greater clarity in both teaching and witness. As Catholics we speak of this as nothing less than a “new evangelisation”, a new proclamation of the Gospel in our time. It is “new” not because there is a new faith or a new Gospel but because we face a new and changed situation. It was surely with this in mind that Pope Benedict called for the “Year of Faith” as an invitation in the Pope Emeritus’s words to “rediscover the joy of believing and enthusiasm in communicating the faith” (PF n.7) and “to profess the faith in fullness and with a renewed conviction” (PF n.9). This is surely what is now needed and it is what this Northern Catholic Conference sets out to address.

The bishop speaks of the current moment as “the twilight of Christian England.” Who could possibly doubt him? Is it just me, though, or do you too cringe when he speaks of this epochal catastrophe for Christianity as possibly “not an entirely negative development”? I mean, I see what he’s getting at, but that phrasing strikes me as like finding something positive to say about the firebombing of Dresden because it hastened urban renewal.

If Big Brother is our guardian angel now, could he become Lucifer?

Who Can Check the Surveillance State?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail,” said Secretary of State Henry Stimson of his 1929 decision to shut down “The Black Chamber” that decoded the secret messages of foreign powers.

“This means war!” said FDR, after reading the intercepted instructions from Tokyo to its diplomats the night of Dec. 6, 1941. Roosevelt’s secretary of war? Henry Stimson.

Times change, and they change us.

The CIA was created in 1947; the National Security Agency in 1952, with its headquarters at Ft. Meade in Maryland. This writer’s late brother was stationed at Meade doing “photo interpretation” in the years the CIA’s Gary Powers, flying U-2s at 70,000 feet above Mother Russia, was providing the agency with some interesting photographs.

This last week, through security leaks, we learned that the NSA has access to the phone records of Verizon, Sprint and AT&T. Of every call made to, from or in the U.S., NSA can determine what phone the call came from, which phone it went to, and how long the conversation lasted.

While NSA cannot recapture the contents of calls, it can use this information to select phones to tap for future recording and listening.

Through its PRISM program, the NSA can acquire access, via servers such as Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft and AOL, to all emails sent, received and presumably deleted or spammed. And if the NSA can persuade a secret court that it has to know the contents of past, present or future emails, it can be accorded that right.