Untitled Document
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed,
and thus clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. —H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)
“Presidential adviser Karl Rove criticized a federal judge’s order
for an immediate end to the government’s warrantless surveillance program,
saying Wednesday such a program might have prevented the Sept. 11 terrorist
attacks,” reports the Associated
Press. “Rove said the government should be free to listen if al-Qaida
is calling someone within the U.S.”
Never mind the mountain of evidence demonstrating nine eleven was an
inside job, Rove expects us to believe the phantom al-Qaeda is so stupid, even
though it managed to have the U.S. military stand-down, that its operatives
would make traceable phone calls to its sleeper cells in the United States.
Of course, this is irrelevant, as the NSA has monitored international (and indeed
domestic) phone calls for decades. In effect, Bush’s Brain is simply adding
yet more spin to the neocon plan to erect a super-snoop apparatus in the United
States and make lame apologies for this system by draping the specter of al-Qaeda
on it. After all, who can complain about surrendering a few liberties when the
end result is nipping al-Qaeda in the bud?
Meanwhile, we learn that whistleblowing the details of the snoop apparatus
can be deadly. “Two whistleblowers—one in Italy, one in Greece—uncovered
a secret bugging system installed in cell phones around the world. Both met
with untimely ends. The resultant scandals have received little press in the
United States, despite the profound implications for American critics of the
Bush administration,” writes blogger Joseph
Cannon. “Last month, Italian telecommunications security expert Adamo
Bove either lept or was pushed from a freeway overpass; he left no note and
had no history of depression. Last year (March, 2005), Greek telecommunications
expert Costas Tsalikidis met with a similarly enigmatic end. Both had uncovered
American attempts to eavesdrop on government officials, anti-war activists,
and private businessmen.”
Telecom Italia, Bove revealed prior to his “suicide,” had installed
illegal spyware on Italy’s largest communications system. As well, Bove
“helped to uncover the unsettling relationship between SISMI chief Marco
Mancini and Telecom Italia head Giuliano Tavaroli.” SISMI (Servizio per
le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare) is the military intelligence agency
of Italy. In addition to proffering the absurd yellowcake forgery, snatched
up by the neocon “cherry-picking” operation (i.e., a factory devised
to manufacture lies) at work inside the Office of Special Plans in the lead-up
to the Iraq invasion, the proto-fascist SISMI, in collaboration with NATO, unleashed
Operation Gladio in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. According to General Gerardo
Serravalle, commander of Gladio during the 1970s, the idea was to blow up train
stations and engage in terrorism in order to “[f]ill the streets, creating
a situation of such tension as to require military intervention” (see
Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens: Fascism’s Resurgence from Hitler’s
Spymasters to Today’s Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists, p. 206).
Bove’s outing of Mancini and Tavaroli was enough to get him suicided.
As well, Costas Tsalikidis, an engineer for Vodaphone, Greece’s top telecommunications
firm, had discovered “an extraordinarily sophisticated piece of spyware”
installed on the Vodaphone network. “The Prime Minister and other top
officials were targeted, along with Greek military officers, anti-war activists,
various business figures,” writes Cannon. According to investigative journalists
Paolo Pontoniere and Jeffrey Klein, cited by Cannon, the Vodaphone “eavesdropping
was transmitted in real time via four antennae located near the U.S. embassy
in Athens, according to an 11-month Greek government investigation. Some of
these transmissions were sent to a phone in Laurel, Md., near America’s
National Security Agency.” For the crime of revealing this information,
Tsalikidis was found hanged in his apartment. His family does not accept the
official explanation of suicide.
“The NSA is now tapping into the heart of the nation’s telephone
network through direct access to key telecommunications switches that carry
many of America’s daily phone calls and e-mail messages,” writes
James Risen (State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration).
“Several government officials who know about the NSA operation have come
forward to talk about it because they are deeply troubled by it, and they believe
that by keeping silent they would become complicit in it. They strongly believe
that the president’s secret order is in violation of the Fourth Amendment
of the Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches, and some of them
believe that an investigation should be launched into the way the Bush administration
has turned the intelligence community’s most powerful tools against the
American people.”
Of course, this is nothing new, as the NSA has electronically snooped on Americans
for decades, with more than a little help from telecoms. “Even
before President Harry Truman established the NSA in a Cold War era directive
in 1952, government cryptologists jumped in the domestic spy hunt with Operation
Shamrock,” writes Earl
Ofari Hutchinson.
That was a super secret operation that forced private telegraphic companies
to turn over the telegraphic correspondence of Americans to the government.
The NSA kicked its spy campaign into high gear in the 1960s. The FBI demanded
that the NSA monitor antiwar activists, civil rights leaders, and drug peddlers.
The Senate Select Committee that investigated government domestic spying in
1976 pried open a tiny public window into the scope of NSA spying. But the
agency slammed the window shut fast when it refused to cough up documents
to the committee that would tell more about its surveillance of Americans.
The NSA claimed that disclosure would compromise national security. The few
feeble Congressional attempts over the years to probe NSA domestic spying
have gone nowhere. Even though rumors swirled that NSA eyes were riveted on
more than a few Americans, Congressional investigators showed no stomach to
fight the NSA’s entrenched code of silence.
So the question is, if the NSA has successfully maintained an “entrenched
code of silence” for all these years, why are we learning details of the
current program, supposedly unrivaled in its scope and application? Why is Rove
commenting on the program, raising the admittedly lame and facile specter of
Muslim cave dwellers (who, after all, may be using spyware cell phones) and
the insistence the NSA listen in on their calls, leading at least some of us
to conclude that if this is so, al-Qaeda is so clueless that a couple underpaid
detectives in Cleveland, Ohio, would be able to track them down and bust them?
Because the state wants you to know it is watching, listening, and
compiling a dossier, including the most mundane and pedestrian aspects of your
life.
In Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, posters of Big Brother, “so
contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move,” are everywhere,
sending a puissant and inescapable message—the state is all-knowing down
to seemingly meaningless minutia. In Bushzarro world, mirroring Orwell’s
imagined social dungeon, political thought crime renders one an enemy of the
state, or more specifically, a terrorist, a minion and fellow traveler (or,
as senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina characterizes it, a fifth columnist)
of al-Qaeda and the dark forces of the axis of never ending evil at odds with
our very way of life, our freedoms, as described and delineated by the state
and sold by the multinational corporations dominating our social, cultural,
and political existence.
The spyware in your Ericcsion cell phone is an extension of that corporate,
in essence fascist, domination and control.
__________________________
Read from Looking Glass News
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Check
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CENTCOM
Team Engages "Bloggers"
Pentagon
Trolls Blogosphere for "Actionable" Data
Pentagon
sets its sights on social networking websites
Justice
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Congress
may consider mandatory ISP snooping