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Friday, June 07, 2013

It's The Enitre Washington Establishment

The Ministry of Intelligence
Eerie and Frightening



It is not the IRS alone, it is not the NSA alone, it is the entire Government and establishment in Washington D.C. that has decided to ignore the wishes of the people and to institute a authoritarian regime founded on Intelligence Gathering, a Weaponized Society, and Economic Inequality.

Every politician in Congress and the administration is part of this, all of them. Everyone who will be elected in the future will be inducted into this vast conspiracy, and they will blindly follow in the name of national security.

In 2004, Josh Benson wrote about how the Government ignores the express wishes of the people:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0404.benson.html
Born Again
Where government's unpopular programs go to live.

By Josh Benson / 2004

When officials at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency--the Pentagon office that helped invent everything from the stealth bomber to the Internet--launched a "data mining" project to uncover terrorist plots, it was bound to cause consternation. It wasn't just the program's ominous name (Total Information Awareness), menacing logo (an all-seeing Masonic eye), or disreputable director (Iran-Contra conspirator John Poindexter). The proposed system would tap into commercial and government databases across the country, download every bit of personal information stored--credit card statements, medical records, travel plans, phone bills, grocery receipts--then scan through it all in search of "suspicious" activity. Designed to catch, say, someone flying from the Middle East to the Midwest and then buying a lot of fertilizer, it might finger a farmer vacationing in Jerusalem as easily as it did a terrorist building a truck bomb. Worse, the planned system would have virtually no oversight, no safeguards, and no privacy guidelines to protect the people being snooped on...

By February of last year, Congress had passed legislation reining in TIA. The administration, desperate to save the program, went into "high damage control," notes Dempsey. Pentagon officials formed showy "privacy advisory councils," testified before Congress extensively, changed the name of the program (to the more innocuous "Terrorism Information Awareness), and even fired Poindexter--but none of it ended the controversy. "No one wanted to defend what the Bush administration was doing," Dempsey says.
Last fall, Congress voted to close down the program for good; a House-Senate conference committee declared TIA "terminated." Privacy activists cheered, as did most Democrats and many Republicans. The New York Times announced, simply, "Surveillance Program Ends." Thus resolved, the issue disappeared.

But TIA did not. As Dempsey eventually learned, a program can survive even when the media, the public, and most of Congress wants it killed. It turns out that, while the language in the bill shutting down TIA was clear, a new line had been inserted during conference--no one knew by whom--allowing "certain processing, analysis, and collaboration tools" to continue. At the time, Dempsey didn't know what the new language meant.

But the intelligence establishment did. Thanks to the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, which had lobbied for the provision, TIA didn't die--it metastasized. As the AP reported in February, the new language simply outsourced many TIA programs to other intelligence offices and buried them in the so-called "black budget." What's more, today, several agencies are pursuing data mining projects independent of TIA, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department, the CIA, the Transportation Security Administration, and NASA. Airline passengers will soon get their first taste of the new technology once a system called CAPPS II goes online, which will sort through passengers' travel histories, rental car arrangements, methods of payment, and destinations to locate "high risk" flyers. And even with TIA ostensibly shut down, many of the private contractors who worked on the program can continue their research with few controls.
 You cannot kill this monster.

While we amuse ourselves with our electronic toys, those toys and devices track us and report on us to agencies that are outside the democratic state of this USA!
It is as if the Founding Fathers, after having fought the American Revolution, found that George III was elected the first president of the Union. Or the French found King Louis leading the Directorate.

We have as political parties Republicans and Democrats who are accomplices in the police state, and a Tea Party too compromised by racism and know-nothing-ism.

It is time for a new politics.
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