Sputnik — Judge Demands US Intelligence Agencies Reveal Details on Occupy Protest Spying

9/11 > Patriot Act > national security state > Department of Homeland Security > surveillance state > police state.

"Taking names."

“The message to people is don’t participate [in public dissent] because you may be considered a threat to the government or the corporate state,” Hetznecker said.

Sputnik International
Judge Demands US Intelligence Agencies Reveal Details on Occupy Protest Spying

Ryan Gallagher — The Little-Known Company That Enables Worldwide Mass Surveillance

Big Brother watch. Going way beyond George Orwell's 1984 by transforming the Internet into a panopticon. 

The Intercept
The Little-Known Company That Enables Worldwide Mass Surveillance
Ryan Gallagher

Nadezda Azhgikhina — The Kremlin’s War on Liberalism

This is really laughable in light of the US reaction to terrorism post 9/11, The Patriot Act effectively suspended constitutional liberties and civil rights of American. The police have been militarized and the nation has become a national security-total surveillance state.

s and President Bush declared to the world, "You are either with us or against us." The GWOT ensued, providing a recruiting tool insuring an increase in terrorists instead of destroying them. This increased paranoia in the US resulting in higher preference for security than liberty. 

America is no longer the free country it once was.

President Obama, who had promised transparency, has run one of the most secretive administrations in the history of the county, punishing whistleblowers and suppressing reportage. A number of whistleblowers have been incarcerated.

The press has become a propaganda organ of government led by the New York Time and Washington post. Reporters that get out of line are threaten with denial of access, a career-killer. 

Russia has not only suffered more from terrorism than the US in terms of casualties but it also has a geography that makes in much easier for terrorists to gain access to Russia. In addition, Russia has been in the NATO crosshairs since Putin threw out the gangsters that took over Russia in the Yeltsin years to the cheers of the West. Russia has much greater reason to institute a national security state-total surveillance state than the US, and there is no good evidence that Russia has outpaced the US in this endeavor.

Project Syndicate
The Kremlin’s War on Liberalism

Nadezda Azhgikhina | Vice President of the European Federation of Journalists in Russia

How is this for freedom of the press in the West?

Fortune
Russia Today TV Network Says Its U.K. Bank Accounts Will Be Closed Down
Geoffrey Smith

Sputnik International
Blocking RT Accounts 'Direct Attack on Freedom of Speech' and 'Will Backfire'

UK's Attack on RT's Accounts is a 'Basic Crackdown on Freedom of Speech'

RT Chief Vows to Keep Working in UK After Accounts Blocked

Reuters — Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for US intelligence

Yahoo last year secretly built a custom software program to scan all of its users emails for specific information at the behest of US intelligence officials, according to a report by Reuters.

The company complied with a classified US government directive, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said two former employees and a third person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a US Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's demand by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

Hey, if you weren't doing anything suspicious, no matter. Right?

The Telegraph
Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for US intelligence
Reuters

Chris Floyd — “Close Your Hearts to Pity”: a Security State Critic Embraces Total War

War to end all war. What could go wrong with that?

Counterpunch
“Close Your Hearts to Pity”: a Security State Critic Embraces Total War
Chris Floyd

Marcelo Ridenti — Dilma Rousseff impeachment: Brazil threatens to descend into a disguised police state

Capitalism has always been supported by an alliance between the ownership class and the security services. This is unnoticed when things are going well, but as conditions deteriorates the veil comes down and the iron fist becomes more and more visible.

The modern state is a trifecta of security, order and welfare. As welfare declines, then increased security is brought to bear to maintain "order," that is, the status quo of ownership. Adjustment is forced on "the little people," and security ensures compliance.

The has noticeably slipped in this direction since 9/ll, although it has in the making since the launch of the "war on drugs," and it was already in evidence during the Sixties and Seventies anti-war movement and demonstations. SDS was known to be infiltrated by the FBI, for example, which was meant more as intimidation than legitimate surveillance of an actual threat to national security.

nsnbc
Dilma Rousseff impeachment: Brazil threatens to descend into a disguised police state
Marcelo Ridenti | Professor of Sociology, Universidade Estadual de Campinas.

Joseph Fronczak — Allen Dulles and the Cold War Within the National Security State

After the CIA first set up detention centers at black sites overseas, the agent overseeing the program bluntly explained the logic of holding interrogations outside U.S. territory in an internal memorandum: doing so would allow the agency to conduct “certain activities which were not permitted by the United States government.”

The agent’s language is striking not only for its bluntness, but also for its assumption that moving offshore legitimized its behavior. Even more striking is the agent’s choice of words, which implied that the CIA existed somehow outside of “the United States government” and was empowered to operate outside its purview. But today, what is perhaps most striking about the memo is that it was written in 1951.

Its author was Allen Welsh Dulles, who became the CIA’s director two years after he wrote his memo on “Interrogation Techniques,” in which he went on to discuss “the possibilities of augmenting the usual interrogation methods by the use of drugs, hypnosis, shock, etc…” The ellipses are his; Dulles was an elliptical man and he is the titular devil in David Talbot’s new book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government.…

"A few bad apples" — at the very top. The story of constructing "he state within the state," "deep state," or "shadow government." I would call it "the rogue state." There seems to be little question who is really in charge.

In These Times
Allen Dulles and the Cold War Within the National Security State
Joseph Fronczak

Sputnik — US State Apparatus Using Crises Across Globe to Keep World on a Tight Rein

The US' totalitarian national-security state apparatus created during the Cold War in order to counter the Soviet Union is now doing whatever it takes to stay in power, by enflaming new crises across the world, Jacob G. Hornberger [American author and founder of The Future of Freedom Foundation] notes...

The American people should wake up and realize that they are "being had," Mr. Hornberger stressed. They should demand a dismantling of the US present totalitarian structure, including NATO and other dubious alliances.

"That would not only bring an end to the perpetual crisis and chaos, it would also provide the foundation of a peaceful, prosperous, harmonious, and free society," the author concluded.

What say, Bernie? We know what the rest of them say. Et tu, Bernie?
Sputnik
US State Apparatus Using Crises Across Globe to Keep World on a Tight Rein

Glenn Greenwald — Court Accepts DOJ’s ‘State Secrets’ Claim to Protect Shadowy Neocons: a New Low

Because national security.

The Intercept

Court Accepts DOJ’s ‘State Secrets’ Claim to Protect Shadowy Neocons: a New Low

Glenn Greenwald

Tomgram — Engelhardt, Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country?

This is not only a symptomatic piece. It is being reposted around the net on left, right and center blogs. It seems to have touched a vital point.

TomDispatch.com
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Is a New Political System Emerging in This Country?

Tom Engelhardt

Dara Lind — Why police officers often resort to lethal force as their first response

Why you are in mortal peril if a police officer thinks he is in mortal peril. As the fear factor rises, it doesn't take much.

VOX
Why police officers often resort to lethal force as their first response
Dara Lind

Also

Truthout | Op-Ed
A New Year's Resolution: Don't Call the Police
Mike Ludwig

digby — When fascism came to America ... it was wearing a black robe

“I think privacy is actually overvalued,” Judge Richard Posner, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, said during a conference about privacy and cybercrime in Washington, D.C., Thursday. 

“Much of what passes for the name of privacy is really just trying to conceal the disreputable parts of your conduct,” Posner added. “Privacy is mainly about trying to improve your social and business opportunities by concealing the sorts of bad activities that would cause other people not to want to deal with you.”…

“If the NSA wants to vacuum all the trillions of bits of information that are crawling through the electronic worldwide networks, I think that’s fine,” he said.

In the name of national security, U.S. lawmakers should give the NSA “carte blanche,” Posner added. “Privacy interests should really have very little weight when you’re talking about national security,” he said. “The world is in an extremely turbulent state—very dangerous.”

Hullabaloo
When fascism came to America ... it was wearing a black robe
digby

Zaid Jilani — The Truth About Who Is Really Responsible for Our Current Police and Prison State

The shameful complicity of Democratic leaders in creating our out-of-control, militarized police forces.

Remember when Democrats were accused of being "soft on crime"? Remember "law and order Democrats" as part of triangulation?

This is a story that begins when Bill Clinton embraced the law-and-order policies of his Republican predecessors.

The war on drugs morphed into a race war on non-whites, chiefly Blacks and Hispanics.

Clinton was a “New Democrat” – part of a new coalition of Democrats who believed that the liberalism represented by the New Deal and Great Society had run its course, and that Democrats must court Big Business and certain right-wing interest groups in order to forge a new party. 

Included in this policy shift were things like “welfare reform,” the North American Free Trade Agreement, and deregulation of the telecommunications and banking industries. But perhaps Clinton's earliest and most intense shifting of traditional Democratic Party liberalism was with respect to crime. This took the form of the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (later commonly known as the crime bill). To helm its passage, Clinton tapped none other than our current vice president, then Senator Joe Biden of Delaware.…

AlterNet

The Truth About Who Is Really Responsible for Our Current Police and Prison State
Zaid Jilani

Jordan Michael Smith — Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.

The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon.

More on the deep state.

Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in. 

How exactly has double government taken hold? And what can be done about it? Glennon spoke with Ideas from his office at Tufts’ Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. This interview has been condensed and edited.

The conclusion.

IDEAS: Do we have any hope of fixing the problem? 

GLENNON: The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.

The Boston Globe
Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.
Jordan Michael Smith

Ray McGovern — The Mystery of Ray McGovern’s Arrest

On Oct. 30, ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern was arrested for trying to attend a public speech by retired Gen. David Petraeus. McGovern had hoped to ask Petraeus a critical question during Q-and-A but was instead trundled off to jail, another sign of a growing hostility toward dissent, McGovern says.

Consortium News
The Mystery of Ray McGovern’s Arrest
Ray McGovern | former CIA analyst and anti-war activist

Don Quijones — The Deadly Threat of Non-Lethal Weapons

…non-lethal weapons represent a fast-growing multi-billion dollar business for military contractors. According to the report Non-Lethal Weapons: Technologies and Global Market 2012-2020, published by Homeland Security Research, the Non-Lethal Weapons (NLW) market is forecast to emerge as a key domain for asymmetric warfare and law enforcement technology providers: 

“Governments worldwide have undoubtedly understood the function of non-lethal weapons following lessons learned in Egypt, Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan. Unforeseen street riots and mass demonstrations over the last decade have revealed the loopholes in the security dogma of the 21st century.” 

“There is a growing demand from combatant commanders, law enforcement officers and political establishments for NLW capabilities. This demand is driven by the need to help them win the hearts and minds of the non-combatant population and prevent world outcry and media attention due to non-combatant casualties. As a result, many governments have entered into non-lethal weapons R&D and procurement dedicated to the full spectrum of public safety, law enforcement, crowd control and asymmetric warfare.“…

Besides the clear dangers they pose to human health, non-lethal weapons arguably pose an even graver threat to the basic notion of civil engagement that underpins any system of participatory democracy. The rights of assembly and peaceful protest are — and must remain — fundamental pillars of any self-respecting democracy (which obviously excludes Spain these days). However, the use of non-lethal weapons to police public demonstrations risks enshrining a collective punishment approach to public order policing which would, in turn, effectively mean the de-facto criminalisation of virtually all forms of political or social protest. 

While “non-lethal”, or better put “less lethal”, weapons may offer police forces and governments the enticing prospect of enhanced social control — especially at a time when economic and political forces are alienating both the lower and middle ranks of society — they would do well to remember the following cautionary words from the late John F Kennedy:

“Those who make peaceful protest impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

Raging Bull-Shit

The Deadly Threat of Non-Lethal Weapons

Don Quijones

Fascism, American-Style

It can't happen here?

“Unbeknownst to most Americans the United States is presently under thirty presidential declared states of emergency. They confer vast powers on the Executive Branch including the ability to financially incapacitate any person or organization in the United States, seize control of the nation’s communications infrastructure, mobilize military forces, expand the permissible size of the military without congressional authorization, and extend tours of duty without consent from service personnel. Declared states of emergency may also activate Presidential Emergency Action Documents and other continuity-of-government procedures which confer powers on the President, such as the unilateral suspension of habeas corpus—that appear fundamentally opposed to the American constitutional order. Although the National Emergencies Act, by its plain language, requires the Congress to vote every six months on whether a declared national emergency should continue, Congress has done only once in the nearly forty year history of the Act.”
— Patrick Thronson, Michigan Journal of Law (2013, Vol 46).

Counterpunch

Fascism, American-Style
John Stanto

The greatest crime of the twenty-first century so far was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Broadly conceived by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney immediately after 9/11, it initially lacked a coherent justification . But as Condoleezza Rice noted at the time, the tragedy brought “opportunities.” (People in fear can be persuaded to support things policy-makers long wanted, but couldn’t quite sell to the public.) 

First Bush and Cheney (and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Rice) made the decision to go to war. Then they sat down and carefully invented thereasons for their war. 

On Sept. 11, 2001 Bush asked his counterterrorism advisor Richard A. Clarke, who had warned him in early 2001 about an “immanent al-Qaeda threat” (warnings Clarke alleges Bush “ignored”) to produce a report blaming Iraq for the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. 

In his own account Clarke says: “I said, Mr. President. We’ve done this before.” (Meaning, we’ve explored the possibility of ties between Baghdad and al-Qaeda before.) “We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There is no connection.” 

But Clarke’s recollection of the event continues:

“He came back at me and said, ’Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report. It was a serious look. We got together all the FBI experts, all the CIA experts. We wrote the report. We sent the report out to CIA and found FBI and said, ‘Will you sign this report?’ They all cleared the report. And we sent it up to the president and it got bounced by the National Security Advisor or Deputy. It got bounced and sent back saying, ‘Wrong answer. … Do it again.’” 

Few policy decisions in modern history can rival the evil of that demand that the U.S. intelligence community deliberately contrive a false historical narrative, to justify a war that has destroyed a country and killed half a million people.

Counterpunch
The Gloating of the Neocons

Gary Leupp

Created under the guise of fighting terrorism, 'Sneak and Peek' now being used to spy on drug suspects, immigrants, rights group finds

Common Dreams
Police Using Controversial Patriot Act Authority for 'Everyday' Cases: Civil Liberties Group
Nadia Prupis, staff writer

Former CIA analyst and activist Ray McGovern was arrested as he attempted to attend an event in New York City featuring former CIA director and retired military general, David Petraeus. He was charged with resisting arrest, criminal trespass and disorderly conduct. 

At 92nd Street Y, which describes itself as a “world-class cultural and community center,” Petraeus was to appear with John Nagl, who recently wrote a book, Knife Fights about being an army tank commander in the Gulf War of 1991. Neoconservative commentator Max Boot was to join them as well. 

Activists from World Can’t Wait, the Granny Peace Brigade, Brooklyn for Peace and a chapter of Veterans for Peace called on people to protest. Some tickets, which cost $45 each, were bought so people could attend the event and potentially participate in a question and answer portion of the event. 

World Can’t Wait activist Stephanie Rugoff said a guard stopped McGovern. “Ray, you’re not going in,” the guard said. 

McGovern, who is 74 years-old, told the guards something to the effect that the Bill of Rights gave him the right to go into the event. McGovern had a ticket too. But the guards would not let him pass and soon New York police officers surrounded him. 

Richard Marini, also an activist with World Can’t Wait, approached the entrance to the 92nd Street Y Center and saw McGovern, who is 74-years-old, being apprehended.
According to Marini, his arms were twisted tightly behind his back and he was in immense pain while they were dragging him to the police car. He was squeezed into the back of a patrol car and taken to the 67th Street station. 

Rugoff heard him screaming. He was shouting about how they were hurting his shoulder. He asked the officers to stop twisting it so they did not aggravate his shoulder and possibly re-injure it. 

“I had a ticket as well,” Marini explained. “They recognized me as well and called me by my name, my first name. They seemed to know who people were.”

Common Dreams
Former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern Arrested While Trying to Attend David Petraeus Event
Kevin Gosztola, FireDogLake

For years, Americans relied on the mainstream U.S. news media for information; some folks were even convinced the MSM was “liberal.” But the current reality is that the major papers have become mouthpieces for the national security state while amassing a sorry record of deception, writes Greg Maybury.

Consortium News
Big Media Has Betrayed the People
Greg Maybury

Murtaza Hussain — The U.S. Government Is Suddenly Way, Way More Interested In Tracking Snail Mail

Just so you feel more safe and secure with your government on watch. We gotta protect our freedoms they hate, you know.

A report published yesterday by The New York Times showed an unexplained sixfold increase in the number of approved government requests to spy on the snail mail correspondence of American citizens in recent years.
Roughly 50,000 requests to spy on Postal Service metadata — the names, return addresses, and postmark locations on the outside of envelopes sent to a particular location or individual — were granted by the United States Postal Service in 2013 alone, The New York Times points out today. That’s up from an average of just 8,000 requests per year between 2001 and 2012. This increase happened with essentially no explanation as to why it was necessary, or with any added mechanisms to protect such a program from abuse….

The Intercept
The U.S. Government Is Suddenly Way, Way More Interested In Tracking Snail Mail
Murtaza Hussain

Gareth Porter — The Real Tonkin Gulf Deception Wasn't by Lyndon Johnson [It was McNamara]

For most of the last five decades, it has been assumed that the Tonkin Gulf incident was a deception by Lyndon Johnson to justify war in Vietnam. But the US bombing of North Vietnam on August 4, 1964, in retaliation for an alleged naval attack that never happened, was not a move by LBJ to pave the way for war in Vietnam. 

The real deception on that day was that Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara's misled LBJ by withholding from him the information that the US commander in the Gulf who had initially reported an attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on US warships had now expressed serious doubts about the initial report and was calling for a full investigation by daylight. That withholding of information from LBJ represented a brazen move to usurp the president's constitutional power of decision on the use of military force.

McNamara's deception is documented in the declassified files on the Tonkin Gulf episode in the Lyndon Johnson library, which this writer used to piece together the untold story of the Tonkin Gulf episode in a 2005 book on the US entry into war in Vietnam. It is a key element of a wider story of how the national security state, including both military and civilian officials, tried repeatedly to pressure LBJ to commit the United States to a wider war in Vietnam.…

Truthout
The Real Tonkin Gulf Deception Wasn't by Lyndon JohnsonGareth Porter

Tom Engelhardt — The Fourth Branch — The Rise to Power of the National Security State

As every schoolchild knows, there are three check-and-balance branches of the U.S. government: the executive, Congress, and the judiciary. That’s bedrock Americanism and the most basic high school civics material. Only one problem: it’s just not so.

During the Cold War years and far more strikingly in the twenty-first century, the U.S. government has evolved. It sprouted a fourth branch: the national security state, whose main characteristic may be an unquenchable urge to expand its power and reach. Admittedly, it still lacks certain formal prerogatives of governmental power.

Nonetheless, at a time when Congress and the presidency are in a check-and-balance ballet of inactivity that would have been unimaginable to Americans of earlier eras, the Fourth Branch is an ever more unchecked and unbalanced power center in Washington. Curtained off from accountability by a penumbra of secrecy, its leaders increasingly are making nitty-gritty policy decisions and largely doing what they want, a situation illuminated by a recent controversy over the possible release of a Senate report on CIA rendition and torture practices.…

Keep in mind again that we’re still only talking about the overwhelming sense of power of one of the 17 agencies that make up the Intelligence Community, which itself is but part of the far vaster national security state. Just one.…

The Totalitarian State is here as the contemporary Leviathan, the guarantor of "law and order" through extra-constitutional means. This could not happen without the consent of the president and President Obama has just expressed full confidence in CIA chief John Brennan.

TomDispatch
The Fourth Branch — The Rise to Power of the National Security State
Tom Engelhardt
Widely crossposted

See also Conor Friedersdorf, Does John Brennan Know Too Much for Obama to Fire Him?