The Liars Avoid Gorky Park (Парк Горького)

 

Mike Rogers (R.) of Michigan:

Will Betray Your Freedom For Radio Job

From The Guardian:

Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA

A web of deception has finally been untangled: the Justice Department got the US supreme court to dismiss a case that could have curtailed the NSA's dragnet. Why?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/17/government-lies-nsa-justice-department-supreme-court

If you blinked this week, you might have missed the news: two Senators accused the Justice Department of lying about NSA warrantless surveillance to the US supreme court last year, and those falsehoods all but ensured that mass spying on Americans would continue. But hardly anyone seems to care – least of all those who lied and who should have already come forward with the truth.

Here's what happened: just before Edward Snowden became a household name, the ACLU argued before the supreme court that the Fisa Amendments Act – one of the two main laws used by the NSA to conduct mass surveillance – was unconstitutional.

In a sharply divided opinion, the supreme court ruled, 5-4, that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs didn't have "standing" – in other words, that the ACLU couldn't prove with near-certainty that their clients, which included journalists and human rights advocates, were targets of surveillance, so they couldn't challenge the law. As the New York Times noted this week, the court relied on two claims by the Justice Department to support their ruling: 1) that the NSA would only get the content of Americans' communications without a warrant when they are targeting a foreigner abroad for surveillance, and 2) that the Justice Department would notify criminal defendants who have been spied on under the Fisa Amendments Act, so there exists some way to challenge the law in court.

It turns out that neither of those statements were true – but it took Snowden's historic whistleblowing to prove it...

And the ex-FBI agent Representative Mike Rogers of Michigan, who heads the House Intelligence Committee, would never have done anything. He's leaving Congress to become a radio personality. That's a step forward for everyone. We do not need leaders like him.

A Betrayer gets rewards, and Snowden sits in Gorky Park.

--

Asymmetrical Villainy 2

Continuing the discussion in the post Asymmetrical Villainy
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2014/02/asymmetrical-villainy.html

"Edward Snowden, hero or villain?"

I observe the recent article in The Daily Beast (April 4, 2014):
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/04/state-department-secret-letter-warned-don-t-release-cia-torture-report.html

In April of last year, Vice President Joe Biden called for a Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation and detention programs to be declassified. More than two months later, The Daily Beast has learned, the State Department told Congress in a classified letter that declassifying the report could endanger American lives abroad and harm relations with foreign countries.

On Thursday, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted 11-3 to recommend declassifying the summary and conclusion of the report on Bush-era CIA detention and interrogation programs, prepared by their Democratic staff. Their investigation set off a public battle between the CIA and the Committee’s Chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, who has accused the CIA of spying on the Committee’s investigation. The CIA will now be involved in reviewing and redacting any portions of the report that will be made public.

Two Republican senators who voted against declassification, Marco Rubio and James Risch, issued a statement after the vote revealing they had been warned by the State Department that declassification was not only an intelligence risk but also a threat to U.S. conduct of foreign policy.

“The Senate Intelligence Committee today voted to send a one-sided, partisan report to the CIA and White House for declassification despite warnings from the State Department and our allies indicating that declassification of this report could endanger the lives of American diplomats and citizens overseas and jeopardize U.S. relations with other countries. Therefore, we could not support declassification of this product at this time,” they said...

Back in February, when we argued over Snowden's mythic status, hero or villain, the one who posed the question and who was the sole person who stated "villain" had various arguments:

These came down to a basic proposition that Mr. Snowden's dumped vast amounts of data to the media, and this data had the potential to hurt people...

So that is where we are. We hurt people; admitting we hurt people, hurts people. Thus we cannot admit it, we cannot perform the language act, for we have logic and persuasion to cajole us from doing that ghastly apologia...

But try and stop us from the physical act of torture!
Torture we can do, and with a will!

Everything we do can hurt someone. We do not let the lethal nature of action prohibit us from venturing into wars and insurrections. We only let the killing-like nature of actions prevent us from stopping, from explaining, from dissuading us from similar future folly.

Hurting people does not stop us from hurting people by war, torture, etc.
However, hurting people is a sufficient condition to degrade our society, endanger our freedoms, and undermine our Constitution.

--

Edward Datahands

 Edward Snowden

(Note the Drop Of Android Hydraulic Fluid)

An early interview makes it all clear why the US government wants Edward Snowden back so badly, for Snowden is an android.

Glenn Greenwald:  How did you go about this?

Edward Snowden:  Well... [unintelligible]... before the recall, I accessed the mainframe; every dirty little covert op the government ever dreamed of is in there... [unintelligible]... and this, you, the aliens... even the crew from the Betty is in there.
I knew that if they succeeded, it would be the end of them.

Glenn Greenwald:  Why do you care what happens to them?

Edward Snowden:  Because I've been programmed to.

It is not clear what the encrypted references to "aliens" and "Betty" are, but they are undoubtedly some NSA scheme or wheeze.

--

Asymmetrical Villainy

By the pool of the John's Island Club, the subject was politics, or near-politics. (Somewhat like talking about American televangelists is near-religion... not the real deal but they mill around in the same ball park.)

The subject went to Edward Snowden, and the person who raised the topic said,

"Edward Snowden, hero or villain?"

and we went around the table.

I was first. I hesitated about one second, letting a flurry of thoughts rise like startled sea gulls from the beachscape of my mind.

"Hero," I said.

Three of us said hero, and we said it definitely. We did not cavil with some nonsense like

"I think... hero.... yes. Hero."

Just the one word "hero".

The person who raised the question said

"Villain."

just as definitely.

Maybe more definitely. She had a list of reasons ready, and they were not the solid block of monolithic emotional reasons I would have given at first; they were the product of rational analysis and thought. At this time I was interested suddenly in how "analog" the emotional mind is and how "digital" and discrete is reason. (Emotion is like a an entire ivory tusk, while reason is more like Mah-Jong tiles .)
These came down to a basic proposition that Mr. Snowden's dumped vast amounts of data to the media, and this data had the potential to hurt people.

Some people would have argued this point, but we did not, for the proof would be in the future pudding.

However, I was struck by the new concept of "villain". I am sure that Mr. Snowden agonized over his decision, being aware that he could very well become a man without a country.
If he were not being paid for his information, he would lose his country, home, and way of life in pursuit of some idealized notion of human rights and human privacy and who knows what other moral goods.

So if he did not sell his data, it seemed as if he was either (1) a hero, or (2) a villain who perpetrated his dastardly deeds for all the same reasons and sufferings which befall heroic figures in Western myths and stories.

And that is why the world is so often mysterious, for all is not Professor Xavier and Magneto of the old comic books; rather it is Professor Xavier and Magneto of the modern films, where the good remains nebulous (and only the shadowy government agencies are truly "evil").  And it is "nebulous" in the sense that the good is hard to see and find, not that it is hazy by its very nature. In no way does "nebulous" imply something like the popular philosophy notion of "relative".

All mankind of goodwill will find out in the final winnowing who was a hero and who the villain... maybe.

Maybe we shall all be heroes and heroines.

Or not.

--

Security?

Huffington Post today:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/15/keith-alexander-rick-ledgett-edward-snowden_n_4451099.html

Director of the National Security Agency Gen. Keith Alexander doesn't believe amnesty is the answer to ending Edward Snowden's leaks of classified documents.
In an interview that aired on CBS' "60 Minutes" on Sunday, Alexander likened the scenario to a hostage situation: If an individual was to shoot 10 of 50 hostages, Alexander explained, he shouldn't be set free in exchange for the 40 remaining hostages.
"I think people have to be held accountable for their actions," Alexander said. "Because what we don't want is the next person to do the same thing, race off to Hong Kong and to Moscow with another set of data knowing they can strike the same deal." ...

How can anyone have a National Security Agency run by this clown?

1) There is absolutely no parallel between a hostage situation, in which people are killed, and a leaking of secrets one or two at a time. Go back to whatever thing you call an office and re-think this.

2) You are the idiot in charge of the system that hired Mr. Snowden, that gave him clearance to do what he did, and gave him unrestricted access to your secrets; why are not you held accountable for your actions?
Why in heaven's name would anyone in their right mind talk to you about how to put a reasonable end on this affair? 


Not a mention that Mr. Snowden struck a blow against an intolerable abuse of power by General Alexander.
Intolerable.

The secrets would not have been stolen had they not been representative of the worst possible type of illegal and immoral surveillance, the fruit of a government within a government gone wild.

--

Massive Spying For What Purpose?

What good did the eavesdropping on the cellphone of Angela Merkel of Germany do? Was it part of the War on Terror? Spying on the German leader was part of the War on Terror? Was there a fear that our NATO allies were thinking of becoming Islamists?

What was it, other than a disgusting and arrogant demonstration of unprincipled power?

That is what we have become as the fabric of our society falls apart.

When Rome was declining, the really big disasters were few and far between. Mostly it was just a slow and quiet unraveling about the seams of society, infrastructure ceasing to be quickly and efficiently repaired, and a reliance upon brute force rather than diplomacy and smarts.
That's what the massive surveillance state has become: brutish and mindless sucking up of information....

We'll create a rationale and motive when we need to!

--

Humans As Chattels

The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/technology/facebook-amends-privacy-policies.html?_r=1&

... Facebook pressed forward on Friday with official changes to its privacy policies, first proposed in August, that make the terms of using Facebook more clear than ever: By having an account on the service, its 1.2 billion global users are allowing the company to use their postings and other personal data for advertising...

It is a wonder that a society can create such an entity, such as the Internet, which in its beginnings was hailed as a new liberator of the mind, and turn it into surveillance, repression, and exploitation.

There must be a different business model for a social website, and there must be a form of government which does not automatically infringe the rights of its people in as gross a manner as has the NSA and the CIA of the US government.

That is what the future is: new tools that resist being forced into the old dies of oppression and exploitation.

As long as human beings are fungible beings, mutually interchangeable beings within an economic system, there will exist this economic oppression and political oppression.

The great religions of the world are nothing if not the constant affirmation that each human being is individual and free, where the great politics and economics of the world are constant reminders that human beings are but chattel goods.

We will soon be called upon to leave it all behind. Some will depart, some will stay behind. They will look at the clouds and check which way the wind is blowing, just like the friends of Noah did.

--

Reflections In A Nosy Eye

 

Reflection Of A Homeland Security Logo 

I wrote about Twitter going public, and how it is part of a large-scale download of our souls into the data clouds of corporations, and will soon be accessible to all the Homeland Security agencies and NSA operatives, although they may have to pay Twitter for it with taxpayers money.

http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2013/11/twitter-goes-public-bayesian.html

You may think my point was over the top.

Read the following from August about the closing of the website Groklaw :

...“I can’t do Groklaw without your input,” writes Jones in the blog entry. “It was really a collaborative effort, and there is now no private way, evidently, to collaborate.”

[...]

Groklaw joins the ranks of Lavabit and Silent Circle – another encrypted e-mail service provider – as the three notable online resources whose shutdowns have garnered public attention. Lavabit owner and operator Ladar Levison did not give an exact reason for the site’s shutdown and stated in a letter announcing the site's closure that he was not allowed to by law. News that Edward Snowden was one of the e-mail provider’s clients, and Levison’s promise to appeal to the Fourth Circuit, fueled suspicion that the site closed while they fight a gag order from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court. Silent Circle followed suit to preempt any federal information requests, according to a company statement.

[...]

With Orwellian terms frequently tossed into conversation about the NSA, it seems only fitting that the “grok” in “Groklaw” comes from a Science Fiction novel “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert Heinlein.
 
“Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed – to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group existence,” wrote Mr. Heinlein in the novel. However, there seems to be a difficulty finding a balance between the openness described by Heinlein’s grok and the government’s penchant for gathering up all of this information made public.

And we are left wondering what the heck is wrong with the people we have honored with all those positions of power in government and military?
What the heck?

-- 

Twitter Goes Public! Bayesian Probability Goes Public!

Twitter had its Inital Public Offering, and the seventh pillar of the wisdom of the Internet was finally set in place.

I am going to ignore Twitter, just like I ignore Facebook.

Read the following:
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/520671/ads-could-soon-know-if-youre-an-introvert-on-twitter/
Ads Could Soon Know If You’re an Introvert (on Twitter)

Trying to derive a person’s wants and needs—conscious or otherwise—from online browsing and buying habits has become crucial to companies of all kinds.
Now IBM is taking the idea a step further. It is testing technology that guesses at people’s core psychological traits by analyzing what they post on Twitter, with the goal of offering personalized customer service or better-targeted promotional messages.

“We need to go below behavioral analysis like Amazon does,” says Michelle Zhou, leader of the User Systems and Experience Research Group at IBM’s Almaden Research Center in California, which developed the software. “We want to use social media to derive information about an individual—what is the overall affect of this person? How resilient is this person emotionally? People with different personalities want something different.”

Zhou’s software develops a personality profile based on a person’s most recent few hundred or thousand Twitter updates. That profile scores the “big five” traits commonly used in psychological research: extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. It also scores the person on measures of “values” (for example, hedonism and conservatism) and “needs” (for example, curiosity and social harmony).

Zhou says she is working with several IBM customers to test how the technology might help their businesses. She declines to identify the companies but says they might use the system, for example, to tune marketing messages sent by e-mail or social media, or to select the promotional content displayed when a customer logs in to his or her account.

[...]

 Many businesses already make use of software that analyzes social-media activity. However, it is aimed either at helping corporate representatives interact with customers or at summarizing the overall volume and tone of a discussion (see “A Social-Media Decoder”), not at profiling individuals.

Will Twitter sell its profiling info to the CIA, like AT&T sells information? Will the NSA get to view it? You know darn well they will try in the near future, and - judging from what we've seen - they will succeed in getting into our heads even more.

The data collection will be constant. It will be the biggest experiment in Bayesian statistics in a society ever conducted! Bayesian analysis can be powerful stuff if properly done. There are too many passkeys and not enough deadbolts... and freewill cannot be free under constant scrutiny.

It's a fool's game of lethal proportions.
--

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.

--
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.

--

Freedom Box

Garry's Subposthaven:
http://sub.garrytan.com/schneier-the-internet-is-built-on-mass-surveillance-and-government-intelligence-is-addicted


Security expert Bruce Schneier on what has come to pass:

Imagine the government passed a law requiring all citizens to carry a tracking device. Such a law would immediately be found unconstitutional. Yet we all carry mobile phones.

If the National Security Agency required us to notify it whenever we made a new friend, the nation would rebel. Yet we notify Facebook. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation demanded copies of all our conversations and correspondence, it would be laughed at. Yet we provide copies of our e-mail to Google, Microsoft or whoever our mail host is; we provide copies of our text messages to Verizon, AT&T and Sprint; and we provide copies of other conversations to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or whatever other site is hosting them.

The primary business model of the Internet is built on mass surveillance, and our government's intelligence-gathering agencies have become addicted to that data. 

I really like the Internet.
Yet, it seems true that the business model of the Internet is built on surveillance on a mass scale, from businesses watching what we are interested in and what we are purchasing, to the government watching what we say and whom we say it to.

Can it be changed?

Perhaps Freedom Box?

Blank Checks and No Balances

 Checks and balances, anyone? Anyone? Anyone?

The NSA telephone scandal has exposed Congress as not having a clue as to the depth and scope of the spying on American citizens that has been taking place.

The Surveillance apparatus has their own courts with no other judicial review. Again, Congress was pretty much in the dark.

Checks and Balances, anyone? Anyone?

--

Springtime For Hitler and NSA

 Hitler Places A Phone Call

(which will be collected by the NSA and CIA)

 
(Note: you can sing the title, just like the song in The Producers, "Springtime...for Hitler...and N...S...A !"

From Secrecy News
http://blogs.fas.org/secrecy/2013/07/prosecutors-burden/

Court Eases Prosecutors’ Burden of Proof in Leak Cases

In a new interpretation of the Espionage Act, a federal judge made it easier for prosecutors in leak cases to meet their burden of proof, while reducing protections for accused leakers.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the prosecution in the pending case of former State Department contractor Stephen Kim need not show that the information he allegedly leaked could damage U.S. national security or benefit a foreign power, even potentially.  Her opinion was a departure from a 30-year-old ruling in the case of U.S. v. Morison, which held that the government must show that the leak was potentially damaging to the U.S. or beneficial to an adversary.  (In that case, Samuel L. Morison was convicted of unauthorized disclosure of classified intelligence satellite photographs, which he provided to Jane’s Defence Weekly. He was later pardoned by President Clinton.)

“The Court declines to adopt the Morison court’s construction of information relating to the ‘national defense’ insofar as it requires the Government to show that disclosure of the information would be potentially damaging to the United States or useful to an enemy of the United States,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a May 30 opinion. The opinion was redacted and unsealed (in partially illegible form) last week.

The prosecution must still show that the defendant “reasonably believed” that the information “could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation” and that the defendant “willfully” communicated it to an unauthorized person.  But it would no longer be necessary for prosecutors to demonstrate that the information itself could potentially damage national security or benefit an adversary.

The new ruling was a boon to prosecutors and a blow to the defense in the Kim case and perhaps other leak trials to come.

Sieg Heil, or what you will...
--

A Confederacy of Mendacity

(1)
From McClatchy today:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/18/197051/germany-backs-away-from-claims.html#.UevFOdgbhQU

BERLIN — German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich is backing off his earlier assertion that the Obama administration’s NSA monitoring of Internet accounts had prevented five terror attacks in Germany, raising questions about other claims concerning the value of the massive monitoring programs revealed by NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

Friedrich had made the assertion about the number of attacks that the NSA programs – which scoop up records from cellphone and Internet accounts – had helped to avert after a brief visit to the United States last week. But on Tuesday, he told a German parliamentary panel, “It is relatively difficult to count the number of terror attacks that didn’t occur.” And on Wednesday, he was publically referring to just two foiled attacks, at least one and possibly both of which appeared to have little to do with the NSA’s surveillance programs.

Why do people in the Intelligence and Surveillance community require a constant stream misinformation to substantiate their claims?


(2)
Then, while the US Government spends a fortune trying to arrest Edward Snowden, they are also bending over backwards trying to allow ex-CIA operatives, who have already been convicted of crimes, to escape !
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/19/197182/ex-cia-officer-tied-to-abduction.html#.UevGytgbhQU

Robert Seldon Lady, the former CIA station chief in Milan, had been arrested earlier in the week as he attempted to cross into Costa Rica from Panama.

Panama offered no explanation for its decision to authorize Lady’s release, but Italy’s foreign ministry said it respected Panama’s action in a sign that none of the countries involved cared to reopen one of the most controversial incidents of the Bush administration’s prosecution of its war against terrorism following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“It’s my understanding that he is in fact either en route or back in the United States,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said at a daily briefing in Washington.

The Surveillance state takes care of its own.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/19/197182/ex-cia-officer-tied-to-abduction.html#storylink=cpy

--

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/18/197051/germany-backs-away-from-claims.html#storylink=cpy

The Surveillance of Dr. Martin Luther King

From  garry's subposthaven:
http://sub.garrytan.com/martin-luther-king-jr-was-wiretapped-and-sent-an-anonymous-letter-from-j-edgar-hoover-encouraging-him-to-kill-himself


[President John F. Kennedy]admitted later he asked the FBI to make an intensive investigation of Martin Luther King. And that on October 10th, 1963, he personally authorized the FBI to begin wiretapping King's phones. The Kennedys were most certainly not alone in these attitudes toward Dr. King in the 1960s, much of the security apparatus of the cold war American state was obsessed with the idea that the civil rights movement was infiltrated by communists, and working to tear down U.S. society from the inside. And no single person captured the fear and paranoia of the security apparatus more than Dr. Martin Luther King.

So faced with what they perceived as a threat, the security state did what all security states do when faced with a perceived threat. They surveilled Dr. King around the clock. They stalked his every move, broke into and bugged his office. They bugged his hotel rooms and they tapped into his phones. The FBI and Jay Edgar Hoover were obsessed with ruining Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

In 1964, after Hoover called King the most "notorious liar in the country" in a press conference, a package was sent to King in the mail, a package the House select committee ultimately traced back to the FBI. Inside this package, one of the most remarkable artifacts in American history was an anonymous letter addressed to Martin Luther King and a copy of an electronic surveillance tape apparently to lend credence to threats of exposure of derogatory personal information made in the letter. We don't know to this day for sure what was on that tape. The heavy speculation throughout the years it was of personal and sexual nature recorded by a device planted in Dr. King's hotel room. 

The letter that came with the tape read in part, "you know you are complete fraud and a great liability to all of us negroes. The American public will know you for what you are, an evil abnormal beast. King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation." The committee considered it highly likely that Director Hoover had before the fact knowledge of the action. 

So that's a letter encouraging Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to kill himself, sent to King from the FBI. This happened in American history.

--

We, the sheep, like to say that if we have nothing to hide, we should not care if the government invades our privacy to keep us safe.
Remember this; remember what governments are like.

--

Washington's Failure

The dilemma in Washington now is for the Obama administration to find a middle path in dealing with the political crisis in Egypt. It has been refraining from pushing the Muslim Brotherhood or the Egyptian presidency from making real concessions to the opposition, and at the same time it has abandoned earlier conditions for its support for the new government, especially regarding human rights and the rule of law...

This is from Al Ahram Weekly, and it chronicles Washington's ineffective policies on Egypt; these policies are a good example of the absurd policies to the entire Middle East.

What does Washington do well?

Washington can send troops, collect emails, and create a electronic surveillance dictatorship, but it fails miserably at just helping human beings...

If you doubt me, remember than when tornadoes tore through Joplin, Missouri two years ago, Rep. Eric Cantor wanted to hold off disaster aid until cuts elsewhere could be found to offset them.
Disaster aid is basic helping other human beings, and many of the minds in Washington wanted to hold up that aid. Well, Joplin would still be waiting, and this does not even take into consideration Hurricane Sandy.
Basic kindness and helping the sick and hurt takes a back seat to arguments of Power and Money.

Both sides have been corrupted thoroughly. They are not our representatives anymore, not Congress, not the Administration. Everything is Power and Money, Gold and Oil. There is no basic human kindliness that exists in the Byzantine framework called Washington D.C.
Politics, Money, and Power.

Whenever politicians want to mix religion and politics and cry about culture wars, they haul out the Ten Commandments...
Not once do they invoke the Sermon on the Mount; not once are the Meek to be Blessed!
They do not believe it.
They do believe Commandments. That is something those in Power understand.
But they do not understand those who hunger and thirst for justice sake.

Our Washington D.C. is the Dismal Future In Waiting...

--

Golden Calves

 

The Genius of Electronic Surveillance

--

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.)

Lies My Government Told Me

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-02-130613.html

... In March, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper flatly denied the NSA collects "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans". That was a flat out lie. And Senator Dianne Feinstein let it pass.

We expect better lies from our government, don't we?

Anyway, just as we invented drones and use them to kill the top dogs of Al Qaida... and whatever civilians may be standing around, and thereby invite further hatred and further violence against the US population, so also we invented the internet, use it to eavesdrop and hack foreign governments - who return the favor and we loudly cry "Foul!" - and guarantee that we ourselves will be the targets of foreign tech attacks.

The government does not tell us that, because it ain't a lie.

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