Too true to be real

The security-surveillance apparatus running amok

Glenn Greenwald points out that:

It really is the case that every new Terrorist incident reflexively produces a single-minded focus on one question: which rights should we take away now/which new powers should we give the Government? We never reach the point where we decide that we have already retracted enough rights. Further restrictions on rights seems to be the only reaction of which our political and media class is capable in the face of a new attack. The premise seems to be that if we keep limiting rights further and further, we'll eventually reach the magical point of Absolute Safety where there will be no more Terrorism. For so many reasons, that is an obvious myth, one that ensures that we'll reduce rights infinitely and with no discernible benefit. We're not the target of Terrorist attacks because we have too many rights; we're the target because of our own actions, ones that we never reconsider in light of new attacks because we're too busy figuring out which rights to erode next.

Boy, those cell phones are handy…

Christopher Soghoian writes:

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers' (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.

I find this report neither surprising nor alarming. What I do find surprising and alarming is that surveillance of this sort does not surprise or alarm me. It is, according to my experience of the world, a normal feature of our shared everyday life. Will Americans ever feel abandoned when they learn that Big Brother no longer watches over them?

Gore Vidal on the Gates arrest

Vidal characteristically believes the arrest to be significant. He wrote:

For those of us who had hoped that the Obama administration would present us with a rebirth of the old republic that was so rudely erased a few years ago by that team of judicial wreckers, Bush and Gonzales, which led, in turn, to a recent incident in Cambridge, Mass. that inspired a degree of alarm in many Americans. But what was most alarming was the plain fact that neither the president nor a "stupid" local policeman seemed to understand the rules of behavior in a new America, where we find ourselves marooned as well as guarded (is that the verb?) by armed police who have been instructed that they are indeed, once armed, the law and may not be criticized verbally or in any other way and are certainly not subject to any restrictions as to whom they arrest or otherwise torment.

This is rather worse than anyone might have predicted, even though the signs have been clear for some years that ours is now a proto-fascist nation and there appears to be no turning back; nor, indeed, much awareness on the part of our ever-alert media.

I have one nit to pick: Vidal's "ever-alert media" may well be aware of the authoritarian turn that has undermined the republic; but it is also likely the media as a whole supports the direction the country has taken. I say this because the only crimes the media refuses to cover in depth — read: sensationalize and turn into a spectacle — are those transgressions against civilization, the rule of law and good sense committed by Washington's insiders. The blame falls not just on Fox News, the New York Post, The Washington Times, etc. The fact that the media has this conformist attitude — this professional ethos which compels it to serve the American system as it exists — along with the related fact that the media's affliction is chronic, provides one explanation for the following:

Let us accept the facts staring us in the face — that demonstrably we are no longer a republic. We are no longer governed by laws, only by armed men and force. This is just like the days of Billy the Kid. You have an armed man going down a dusty street and that is authority. And it has come to this for us.

Knowing about this corruption, the depth of its roots and the effect it has had on America's political culture, a reasonable person would not then find it surprising at all that NORTHCOM has developed a plan to provide aid to the nation in the near-term if the United States were to suffer a swine flu pandemic, a program that would be consistent with the now common violations of the Posse Comitatus Act. Why would this hypothetical person find NORTHCOM's plans surprising when the mere fact that NORTHCOM exists is an affront to the rule of law? Surely NORTHCOM is not meant to protect the homeland from an external threat?

Anyway, I suppose it is extravagant to want the nation's public health institutions to implement a response to the latest pandemic…. After all, America's public health institutions lack the firepower, the boots on the ground and the prison facilities such a mission would require if it is to succeed….

Department of Defense spies on Americans in America

This effort is likely illegal, but not unexpected when considered in the light provided by the history made since 2001.

Democracy Now exposed the incident this morning:

Another secret program

Cheney's fingerprints are also on this one

The New York Times reports that the CIA created a post-9.11 counterterrorism program and that it had withheld information about the program from Congress. The Vice President allegedly ordered the CIA to keep Congress uninformed about the matter.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

This latest revelation directly follows an Inspector General's report which:

…underscored the central role of the former vice president's office in restricting to a small circle of officials knowledge of the National Security Agency's program of eavesdropping without warrants, a degree of secrecy that the report concluded had hurt the effectiveness of the counterterrorism surveillance effort.

It is unsurprising, then, that "Efforts [The Times made] to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful." Why would he wish to take ownership of these legally dubious and ineffective programs!

Ah, this may be one of those prison camps that don’t exist

As per Paul Craig Roberts:


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Prisons for the surplus population

It's a profitable growth industry

A recent CorpWatch report states that:

While the nation's economy flounders, business is booming for The GEO Group Inc., a private prison firm that is paid millions by the U.S. government to detain undocumented immigrants and other federal inmates. In the last year and a half, GEO announced plans to add a total of at least 3,925 new beds to immigration lockups in five locations. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency and the U.S. Marshals Service, which hire the company, will fill the beds with inmates awaiting court and deportation proceedings [links added].

GEO reported impressive quarterly earnings of $20 million on February 12, 2009, along with an annual income of $61 million for 2008 – up from $38 million the year before. But the company's share value is not the only thing that's growing. Behind the financial success and expansion of the for-profit prison firm, there are increasing charges of negligence, civil rights violations, abuse and even death.

Naturally circumstantial evidence of financial corruption has emerged:

The Tacoma lockup, site of the most recent GEO controversy, is located on top of a former toxic waste dump that borders coastal wetlands near the Port of Tacoma, Washington. In August 2008, the firm announced plans to expand its 1,030-bed Northwest Detention Center to 1,575 beds, "to help meet the increased demand for detention bed space by federal, state, and local government agencies around the country."

Just four months after GEO's announcement, ICE notified government contractors that the agency was looking for a contractor-owned and -operated detention facility. According to federal procurement data, the new facility should be capable of providing 1,575 beds — the same number GEO was set to build – to be completed no later than September 2009 — the same date GEO had set for the completion of its own construction project.

Lorie Dankers, ICE spokeswoman in Washington state, implied that the similarity in numbers and date was a coincidence. "I would never comment, nor have I in the past, on what GEO is doing and why they're doing it. That's a business decision that GEO made," said Dankers. "To insinuate that there was some kind of connection, or that they has [sic] some inside information as to the request, that would be incorrect."

Dankers added that ICE's request for more space is still in the "pre-solicitation" phase, meaning that there is no guarantee a contract will be offered, and the agency is simply requesting information from contractors to "guage [sic] interest."

"I don't have any information one way or the other as to what would happen," Dankers said. "I think often times, if I had to speculate, they see where there's a need. I think they're always looking for opportunities."

That GEO Group — they're real Merican go-getters!

Secret memos found

America's shadow government partially exposed

Articles recently published by ProPublica and TheRawStory give the world brief reports about these largely unknown and once wholly secret memos. They were authored by members of the first Bush administration. Although they remain unpublished still, what is known is that they contain the administration's reasons and conclusions regarding surveillance, executive power and prisoner treatment. Currently, President Obama has the decisive authority to make these secret documents available to the public. The new President has yet to make a public decision about these documents, however.

America — an ‘endemic surveillance society’

The land of the free and the home of the brave

That, unfortunately, is the current assessment of Privacy International (via Glenn Greenwald).

What is an endemic surveillance society? It is the most intrusive kind of modern society; the lowest ranking social kind in the Privacy International table. With respect to the United States, Privacy International uses the class to refer to a society with these characteristics [copied directly from the Privacy International source]:

• No right to privacy in constitution, though search and seizure protections exist in 4th Amendment; case law on government searches has considered new technology
  
• No comprehensive privacy law, many sectoral laws; though tort of privacy
  
• FTC continues to give inadequate attention to privacy issues, though issued self-regulating privacy guidelines on advertising in 2007
  
• State-level data breach legislation has proven to be useful in identifying faults in security
  
• REAL-ID and biometric identification programs continue to spread without adequate oversight, research, and funding structures
  
• Extensive data-sharing programs across federal government and with private sector
  
• Spreading use of CCTV
  
• Congress approved presidential program of spying on foreign communications over U.S. networks, e.g. Gmail, Hotmail, etc.; and now considering immunity for telephone companies, while government claims secrecy, thus barring any legal action
  
• No data retention law as yet, but equally no data protection law
  
• World leading in border surveillance, mandating trans-border data flows
  
• Weak protections of financial and medical privacy; plans spread for 'rings of steel' around cities to monitor movements of individuals
  
• Democratic safeguards tend to be strong but new Congress and political dynamics show that immigration and terrorism continue to leave politicians scared and without principle
  
• Lack of action on data breach legislation on the federal level while REAL-ID is still compelled upon states has shown that states can make informed decisions
  
• Recent news regarding FBI biometric database raises particular concerns as this could lead to the largest database of biometrics around the world that is not protected by strong privacy law
  

The original map and a discussion of the methods used in the study and the meaning of the map can be found here.

Chalmers Johnson looks at that other grand swindle

Chalmers Johnson recently discussed the similarities between the financial crisis that originated on Wall Street, with Washington's indispensible aid, and the awesome size of the aggregated budgets for America's empire. Johnson believes money spent on 'national security' to be "pure waste." He believes this because Americans are neither secure nor well-armed for all of the money spent on the security apparatus. Johnson's conclusion:

Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on present and future wars that have nothing to do with our national security is simply obscene. And yet Congress has been corrupted by the military-industrial complex into believing that, by voting for more defense spending, they are supplying "jobs" for the economy. In fact, they are only diverting scarce resources from the desperately needed rebuilding of the American infrastructure and other crucial spending necessities into utterly wasteful munitions. If we cannot cut back our longstanding, ever increasing military spending in a major way, then the bankruptcy of the United States is inevitable. As the current Wall Street meltdown has demonstrated, that is no longer an abstract possibility but a growing likelihood. We do not have much time left [emphasis added].

The Denver police

Defenders of the constitution…

It looks as though Denver's cops were envious of all the great publicity earned by the St. Paul cops!