More 1984...

POSTED BY: out2theblack
UPDATED: Friday, February 20, 2009 03:05
VIEWED: 855
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OUT2THEBLACK

Thursday, February 19, 2009 11:39 PM

http://justanothercoverup.com/?p=582

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull”

(George Orwell: 1984)

" What if this surveillance industrial complex was in possession of a database that was so large and so powerful that not only could it instantly process and retrieve the most minute or intimate aspects of a citizen’s lives but was also able to utilize extremely sophisticated artificial intelligence capabilities to actually predict likely patterns of future behavior ?

Such a huge database would be able to use cutting edge technology funded with taxpayer dollars and awarded to unaccountable private corporations largely through ‘business as usual’ no bid contracts to create the most invasive tool of oppression this country has ever seen. This database would rely on software that was capable of performing social network analysis based on block modeling technology to monitor all forms of electronic communications, all internet searches, all debit and credit card transactions, all travel arrangements, all library records, all bank activity and all telephone records. It would then be able to use the data to not only find links between persons who already know and interact with each other but to categorize each individual into a particular group that possess similar behavioral and purchasing habits. These groups could then be further divided into subgroups and further analyzed in order to determine under some loosely defined and largely unknown guidelines whether they could potentially represent a threat.

...While all of this may sound like some sort of futuristic dystopian nightmare straight out of Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report and “Precrime” it is very real and it goes by the name of Main Core. For example, if you are selling a bicycle and run an advertisement in your local newspaper and you happen to receive a call from a Muhammad who is interested in your bicycle and Muhammad happens to have certain friends who have relationships with an organization that is determined by some unknown criteria to be a potential terrorist organization then the call that you received from Muhammad would then in all likelihood place you in the database and subject to an increased level of scrutiny at best and at worst in jeopardy of being picked up and held indefinitely without any sort of judicial review."

RUE

Thursday, February 19, 2009 11:46 PM

Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power
Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate.
By Tim Shorrock

Editor's note: This article is part of a Salon investigative series on spying inside the United States by the Bush administration. Research support for the article was provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jul. 23, 2008 | The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.

While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.

Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA's working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.

The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi's and Conyers' offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses -- and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.

"If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration's attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don't know," says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.

"You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse," says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don't know [the extent of] what laws have been violated."

The parameters for an investigation were outlined in a seven-page memo, written after the former member of the Church Committee met for discussions with the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and other watchdog groups. Key issues to investigate, those involved say, would include the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance activities; the Central Intelligence Agency's use of extraordinary rendition and torture against terrorist suspects; and the U.S. government's extensive use of military assets -- including satellites, Pentagon intelligence agencies and U2 surveillance planes -- for a vast spying apparatus that could be used against the Ame

SERGEANTX

Thursday, February 19, 2009 11:59 PM

Hmmm...

The question is, what will Obama do about this and when?

SergeantX

"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock

RUE

Friday, February 20, 2009 12:21 AM

I think his plate's pretty full.

***************************************************************

Silence is consent.

SERGEANTX

Friday, February 20, 2009 12:31 AM

It shouldn't take all that much time to shut down these programs. I'm still hopeful he will, but every week that goes by is telling.

SergeantX

"Dream a little dream or you can live a little dream. I'd rather live it, cause dreamers always chase but never get it." Aesop Rock

FREMDFIRMA

Friday, February 20, 2009 2:04 AM

Holy shit, that guy's a dead man.

Fuck me, that's stuff I dance around even talking ABOUT here, but yeah, it's all true, every bit of it, the initial install was in mid-1985 down at Ft Meade, and teething problems kept it out of service till late 1986, but it's just been rolling merrily along every since, although in the early years it was not so very secure and almost a bit of a joke.

Remember me sayin there's things which might NOT be a good idea to address because of potentially cataclysmic social impact in a period when our economy and government is already unstable ?

Now you know what I was referring to.

And no, Conyers won't touch it with a ten foot pole, it was knowing about this in the first place that scared him off.

Bill Colby on the other hand, wasn't just done in with a convenient accident, he actually *engineered* it himself to prevent it from coming out if he began to mentally slip like the kennedy thing did with E. Howard Hunt, you see - and this is the secret he was protecting by engineering and cooperating with his own "boating accident".

This is worse than the crown jewels, it's far far worse, cause the notations within those files will implicate MANY ranking members of our own Gov in stuff that could spark outright street lynchings if the public ever finds out, in fact it's SO bad there's just no words for me to express it to you in terms you might comprehend.

I did say there were things in this world, just the knowing of can hurt you, right ?
*sigh*
That said, I am very torn on whether investigating this is even a good idea or not, for reasons I am unwilling to share.

I will say that I shall be quite surprised if that columnist lives out the next month, and given the detail of the information at hand, thus limiting his potential sources to no more than fourteen people, his source is without a doubt a dead man in far less than that.

If THIS one blows wide, ALL hell will break loose, I guarantee it.

And that ain't PN-talk neither, this is something even I helped cover over when necessary because of the potential damage which could be done here.

And am currently torn between the desire to wedge that door open wider, and find a nice deep freakin HOLE to hide in...

You really have no idea, pray you never do.

-Frem

It cannot be said enough, those who do not learn from history, are doomed to endlessly repeat it

DREAMTROVE

Friday, February 20, 2009 3:05 AM

The naive assumption by the author that this has been a republican plan which democrats try to thwart strains any credibility. The FISA court was created to make this legal, and Clinton's FISA expansions were set up to enable the same policies as Bush. Wake up, we live in a one party system. I could say more, but won't.