Our Keepers

C-Span Monday

Ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden speaks on the Banality Of Evil in the works of Hannah Arendt.

A waterboarding demonstration follows.


Our Keepers is a series devoted to the educated elite of the country who have been appointed to a position of authoritarian power to keep the rest of us safe. In essence, they are indeed their brothers' keepers.

They carry on the proud tradition of America. Our Founding Fathers had their version of Keepers, and they sat in Parliament and in the Palace. Our present day keepers carry on that proud tradition.

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Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Inside the "Star Trek" Inspired HQ of the NSA

In case you wonder how the Surveillance State spends the money which they take from us:


Inside the mind of NSA chief Gen Keith Alexander

A lavish Star Trek room he had built as part of his 'Information Dominance Center' is endlessly revealing
Glenn Greenwald
theguardian.com, Sunday 15 September 2013 08.14 EDT

It has been previously reported that the mentality of NSA chief Gen. Keith Alexander is captured by his motto "Collect it All". It's a get-everything approach he pioneered first when aimed at an enemy population in the middle of a war zone in Iraq, one he has now imported onto US soil, aimed at the domestic population and everyone else.

But a perhaps even more disturbing and revealing vignette into the spy chief's mind comes from a new Foreign Policy article describing what the journal calls his "all-out, barely-legal drive to build the ultimate spy machine". The article describes how even his NSA peers see him as a "cowboy" willing to play fast and loose with legal limits in order to construct a system of ubiquitous surveillance. But the personality driving all of this - not just Alexander's but much of Washington's - is perhaps best captured by this one passage, highlighted by PBS' News Hour in a post entitled: "NSA director modeled war room after Star Trek's Enterprise". The room was christened as part of the "Information Dominance Center":

"When he was running the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a 'whoosh' sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather 'captain's chair' in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.

"'Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard,' says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits." ...

 and

The Verge
http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/15/4732930/nsa-information-dominance-center-redesigned-as-starship-enterprise

...The data visualized and shown off at the Information Dominance Center seems to have been of varying usefulness. At one point, a former official recalls Alexander giving a briefing on how closely terrorists were connected via communications networks. "Later, we had a chance to review the information," he says. "It turns out that all [that] those guys were connected to were pizza shops." ...

Eisenhower was the last President to have the sense of self-assurance and knowledge to stand up to the Military-Industrial-Intelligence Complex.

Let us take back the country before it is too late.

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photos:  The Guardian

The Wages Of Corruption

News Daily
http://www.newsdaily.com/europe/9121990965c41c9fc98a43dc29e5dc67/brazil-looks-to-break-from-us-centric-internet

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil plans to divorce itself from the U.S.-centric Internet over Washington's widespread online spying, a move that many experts fear will be a potentially dangerous first step toward politically fracturing a global network built with minimal interference by governments.
President Dilma Rousseff has ordered a series of measures aimed at greater Brazilian online independence and security following revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency intercepted her communications, hacked into the state-owned Petrobras oil company's network and spied on Brazilians who entrusted their personal data to U.S. tech companies such as Facebook and Google.

The wages of corruption.

The insane need to collect all data and to destroy privacy, whether by law or by transgression or overstepping the law, is a characteristic of a corrupt people.

Brazil knows what it is doing.

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Democracy vs. Surveillance 1

1.0
Democracy and Surveillance are at odds.

1.1
Democracy seeks to have a society with fulfilled and integral individuals.

1.2
Surveillance society practices alienation.

1.3
In the present situation, the Surveillance hierarchy seeks to alienate an Individual from that Individual's Communication; i.e., to make the Expression of the individual mind a commodity which is open to scrutiny at any time.

1.4
In its essence, Surveillance creates a prison of the Inquisition, similar to Poe's The Pit and The Pendulum, wherein it is not the individual's body that is imprisoned and subject to torturous scrutiny, but the expressions and communications of the individual which are imprisoned and subject to inquisition.

1.5
Since one can never be sure whether one is under surveillance, it is safest to always "toe the line".


(Note to section 1
For most of history, human society's creativity has been bipolar, incorporating creative impulses in pairs: a thesis and its antithesis.

In this time of history, we see the unparalleled growth of Surveillance, which works to create a docility based on the possibility of always being under observation, and we see the growth of its antithesis, which is a great burst of creative individuality often fed by a desire to separate the creative artist from the drabness of docile sameness.)

Perfect Timing

 Hanaan's Diner: Two Members Of The TYBALTs

Just before the news broke of The Guardian's exposure of the NSA telephone call grab, I was at Hanaan's Diner, spouting off about Syria and how ridiculous the US policy was, and - by the way - thank heavens Russia was serious about not allowing a terrorist theme park to be built right next door to the Chechen Republic.

I was being taken to task for my outspoken support of Russia, whom many in my circle, the TYBALTs - The Young Buck At Lunch Together, the opposition to our mortal enemies, the ROMEOs - Retired Old Men Eating Out - still see as some sort of commie threat.
Jakubowski said that Putin was restoring the police state, and yadda-yadda-yadda. Thank goodness he did not mention "Pussy Riot".

Then Levine looked up from his Tablet, smiled, and shoved the Tab over, and we saw Glenn Greenwald's exposure of the Verizon-NSA hookup.

"Where's the police state now?" I said.

Jakubowski said "I'll be damned!", and plucked his iPhone from his pocket, and threw it across the room.

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Verizon

Can you hear me now?

We ask the government, can you hear us now?

Verizon has been turning over millions of daily calls to the NSA. The administration defends it. It is all part and parcel of the Patriot Act and the destruction of our liberties.

If Mr. Obama cannot get back on a true course, he and his administration are going to be lame duck for 3 years.

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Later:

Sorry, Mr. Obama. The Congress was the one who passed the Patriot Act, keeps on renewing it, and is right up to date on how our lives are invaded.

BBC:
Paul Adams BBC News, Washington

After years of allegations, lawsuits and sporadic, vaguely-worded warnings from members of Congress, finally there is a piece of hard evidence, a window into the reality of post-9/11 intelligence surveillance.

The breadth of this dragnet is breathtaking. The thought that the phone records of millions, this reporter included, have been collected on an order of the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a little creepy, to say the least.

Should we demand action to stop it? Some civil rights activists say absolutely.

Such behaviour, they argue, simply runs counter to the letter of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which says there has to be "probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized", before any of this can happen.

The reality is that since 9/11, the national security establishment and telecommunications firms, with the aid of Congress, have constructed a new surveillance environment.

We just haven't been told about it.

Congress, Ho!

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The Great Boston Bomb Scare of Aught-Seven ('07)

Before returning to 2007 in Boston, a few words about present day bombs in Boston:

Information is Power... that is why the FBI did not tell Boston authorities about Mr. Tsarnaev's trip to Dagestan: keep the locals dependent on the Feds. I know it sounds like a line from one of the Die Hard scripts (bless Bruce Willis), but it is the reality.

The Leviathan and Behemoth Anti-Terrorism Intelligence Agency we set up at now little expense after 9/11 as the Department of Homeland Security does not even do the one thing that it was really intended to do.
Remember back after 9/11 when it was said that a major problem was the Intel agencies not communicating? Well, $100 billion later and Mum's still the word.

It will never work as it is now conceptualized,  but I do not want to talk about that now.

I want to talk about the City of Boston and its security agencies and The Great Boston Bomb Scare of Aught-Seven (2007)

I had a post back in February of 2007 titled The Terror Of Frylock :



http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2007/02/terror-of-frylock.html

By now you must know that the Boston Security people arrested those responsible for:

and this was on an Ad Campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force

Frylock is the Fries guy. When asked to comment, he said " No Comment."




The Bomb Scare was based on an ad campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force, of which Frylock is a member, being the fry guy on the left in the picture above.
The Wikipedia entry says:

The 2007 Boston bomb scare occurred on Wednesday, January 31, 2007 after both the Boston Police Department and Boston Fire Department mistakenly identified battery-powered LED placards resembling the Mooninite characters of the Cartoon Network show Aqua Teen Hunger Force, as improvised explosive devices.^[1][2] Placed throughout Boston, Massachusetts and the surrounding cities of Cambridge and Somerville, these devices were part of a guerrilla marketing advertising campaign for Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, a film based on the animated television series Aqua Teen Hunger Force on Cartoon Network's late-night programming block, Adult Swim.^[2]

I do not mean to belittle or kvetch or insult anyone. I'm just reporting the facts.

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A Doctor's Life

 

http://gulfnews.com/news/world/pakistan/doctor-gets-33-years-in-bin-laden-dna-case-1.1027115

Islamabad: A Pakistani doctor accused of assisting the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in obtaining DNA samples of Osama Bin Laden has been convicted of anti-state activities and sentenced to 33 years in jail by a tribal court, officials said.

Dr Shakil Afridi was taken into custody by the military's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) two weeks after Osama Bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011 in a raid by US Navy Seals on his hideout in the garrison town of Abbottabad in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakthtunkhwa province.

The middle-aged doctor, from the Afridi tribe, was charged with conducting a fake vaccination campaign in Abbottabad a month before the raid to get DNA samples to confirm Bin Laden's presence in the compound where he had been reportedly living for years with his wives and children.

A fake vaccination campaign? When I remember other things done by intelligence forces - drug dealing to finance their activities comes to mind - I just hope the doctor was well paid for his services. It is hard to form an opinion or make a judgement when confronted with a complot of murderers and torturers at each others' throats.
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