1984: Thread

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Wed Oct 6 15:54:15 PDT 2021


Fucked more everyday, yet the masses still do not rise up...


Make Way For The Snitch State: The All-Seeing Fourth Branch Of Government

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/make_way_for_the_snitch_state_the_all_seeing_fourth_branch_of_government
https://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-America-War-American-People/dp/1590793099

https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/201409/all-eyes-you
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/militarization-domestic-surveillance-everyones-problem
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/04/07/dea-bulk-telephone-surveillance-operation/70808616/
https://nsa.gov1.info/partners/index.html
https://reason.com/2013/07/03/us-post-office-taking-pictures-of-all-ou/
https://news.yahoo.com/the-postal-service-is-running-a-running-a-covert-operations-program-that-monitors-americans-social-media-posts-160022919.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9595879/USPS-uses-facial-recognition-Clearview-AI-fake-identities-online-snoop-Americans.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jmaureenhenderson/2015/01/06/dystopia-digital-detoxes-and-how-black-mirror-helps-us-make-sense-of-the-apple-watch/
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/forget-credit-cards-now-you-can-pay-your-eyes-180955445/
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/13/rise-voiceprint-id-technology-privacy-campaigners-concerned
http://theweek.com/articles/453981/nsas-data-snooping-actually-effective
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/05/14/nsa-loves-the-nothing-burger-spying-reform-bill.html
http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/2014/04/17/culture/politics/a-brief-history-of-the-nsa.html
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/16/googles_secret_nsa_alliance_the_terrifying_deals_between_silicon_valley_and_the_security_state/
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-details-about-the-cias-deal-with-amazon/374632/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/robertlenzner/2013/09/23/attverizonsprint-are-paid-cash-by-nsa-for-your-private-communications/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/03/politics/dhs-partner-private-firms-surveil-suspected-domestic-terrorists/index.html
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2019/06/18/much-of-our-government-digital-surveillance-is-outsourced-to-private-companies/
https://www.salon.com/2013/06/10/digital_blackwater_meet_the_contractors_who_analyze_your_personal_data/
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/how-private-contractors-have-created-shadow-nsa/
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/style/the-season-of-the-snitch.html
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-02/singapore-passes-law-to-use-covid-tracing-for-criminal-probes
https://www.nytimes.com/privacy
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/19/opinion/location-tracking-cell-phone.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/opinion/capitol-attack-cellphone-data.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy-facial-recognition.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/29/technology/facebook-privacy-lawsuit-earnings.html



    “It is just when people are all engaged in snooping on themselves
and one another that they become anesthetized to the whole process. As
information itself becomes the largest business in the world, data
banks know more about individual people than the people do themselves.
The more the data banks record about each one of us, the less we
exist.”

    - Marshall McLuhan, From Cliche To Archetype

We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies
and techno-warriors.

This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading
everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring
everything we spend.

Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go,
and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded,
stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a
time and place of the government’s choosing.

This far-reaching surveillance has paved the way for an omnipresent,
militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that
came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional
referendum.

Indeed, long before the National Security Agency (NSA) became the
agency we loved to hate, the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Drug
Enforcement Administration were carrying out their own secret mass
surveillance on an unsuspecting populace.

Even agencies not traditionally associated with the intelligence
community are part of the government’s growing network of snitches and
spies.

Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to
the Treasury Department and every agency in between—now has its own
surveillance sector, authorized to spy on the American people. For
instance, the U.S. Postal Service, which has been photographing the
exterior of every piece of paper mail for the past 20 years, is also
spying on Americans’ texts, emails and social media posts. Headed up
by the Postal Service’s law enforcement division, the Internet Covert
Operations Program (iCOP) is reportedly using facial recognition
technology, combined with fake online identities, to ferret out
potential troublemakers with “inflammatory” posts. The agency claims
the online surveillance, which falls outside its conventional job
scope of processing and delivering paper mail, is necessary to help
postal workers avoid “potentially volatile situations.”

Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all
of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public
health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all
those in power. And that doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity
of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave,
until we have no more data left to mine.

It’s not just what we say, where we go and what we buy that is being tracked.

We’re being surveilled right down to our genes, thanks to a potent
combination of hardware, software and data collection that scans our
biometrics—our faces, irises, voices, genetics, even our gait—runs
them through computer programs that can break the data down into
unique “identifiers,” and then offers them up to the government and
its corporate allies for their respective uses.

All of those internet-connected gadgets we just have to have (Forbes
refers to them as “(data) pipelines to our intimate bodily
processes”)—the smart watches that can monitor our blood pressure and
the smart phones that let us pay for purchases with our fingerprints
and iris scans—are setting us up for a brave new world where there is
nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

For instance, imagine what the government could do (and is likely
already doing) with voiceprint technology, which has been likened to a
fingerprint. Described as “the next frontline in the battle against
overweening public surveillance,” the collection of voiceprints is a
booming industry for governments and businesses alike. As The Guardian
reports, “voice biometrics could be used to pinpoint the location of
individuals.”

We are now the unwitting victims of an interconnected, tightly woven,
technologically evolving web of real-time, warrantless, wall-to-wall
mass surveillance that makes the spy programs spawned by the USA
Patriot Act look like child’s play.

Fusion centers. See Something, Say Something. Red flag laws.
Behavioral threat assessments. Terror watch lists. Facial recognition.
Snitch tip lines. Biometric scanners. Pre-crime. DNA databases. Data
mining. Precognitive technology. Contact tracing apps.

These are all part and parcel of the widening surveillance dragnet
that the government has used and abused in order to extend its reach
and its power.

The COVID-19 pandemic has succeeded in acclimating us even further to
being monitored, tracked and reported for so-called deviant or
undesirable behavior.

Consequently, we now live in a society in which a person can be
accused of any number of crimes without knowing what exactly he has
done. He might be apprehended in the middle of the night by a roving
band of SWAT police. He might find himself on a no-fly list, unable to
travel for reasons undisclosed. He might have his phones or internet
tapped based upon a secret order handed down by a secret court, with
no recourse to discover why he was targeted.

This Kafkaesque nightmare has become America’s reality.

Despite the fact that its data snooping has been shown to be
ineffective at detecting, let alone stopping, any actual terror
attacks, the government continues to operate its domestic spying
programs largely in secret, carrying out warrantless mass surveillance
on hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone calls, emails, text
messages and the like.

The question of how to deal with government agencies and programs that
operate outside of the system of checks and balances established by
the Constitution forces us to contend with a deeply unsatisfactory and
dubious political “solution” to a problem that operates beyond the
reach of voters and politicians: how do you hold accountable a
government that lies, cheats, steals, sidesteps the law, and then
absolves itself of wrongdoing?

Certainly, the history and growth of the NSA tracks with the
government’s insatiable hunger for ever-great powers.

Since its official start in 1952, when President Harry S. Truman
issued a secret executive order establishing the NSA as the hub of the
government’s foreign intelligence activities, the agency—nicknamed “No
Such Agency”—has operated covertly, unaccountable to Congress all the
while using taxpayer dollars to fund its secret operations. It was
only when the agency ballooned to 90,000 employees in 1969, making it
the largest intelligence agency in the world with a significant
footprint outside Washington, DC, that it became more difficult to
deny its existence.

In the aftermath of Watergate in 1975, the Senate held meetings under
the Church Committee in order to determine exactly what sorts of
illicit activities the American intelligence apparatus was engaged in
under the direction of President Nixon, and how future violations of
the law could be stopped. It was the first time the NSA was exposed to
public scrutiny since its creation.

The investigation revealed a sophisticated operation whose
surveillance programs paid little heed to such things as the
Constitution. For instance, under Project SHAMROCK, the NSA spied on
telegrams to and from the U.S., as well as the correspondence of
American citizens. Moreover, as the Saturday Evening Post reports,
“Under Project MINARET, the NSA monitored the communications of civil
rights leaders and opponents of the Vietnam War, including targets
such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Mohammed Ali, Jane Fonda, and two
active U.S. Senators. The NSA had launched this program in 1967 to
monitor suspected terrorists and drug traffickers, but successive
presidents used it to track all manner of political dissidents.”

Senator Frank Church (D-Ida.), who served as the chairman of the
Select Committee on Intelligence that investigated the NSA, understood
only too well the dangers inherent in allowing the government to
overstep its authority in the name of national security. Church
recognized that such surveillance powers “at any time could be turned
around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy
left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone
conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place
to hide.”

Noting that the NSA could enable a dictator “to impose total tyranny”
upon an utterly defenseless American public, Church declared that he
did not “want to see this country ever go across the bridge” of
constitutional protection, congressional oversight and popular demand
for privacy. He avowed that “we,” implicating both Congress and its
constituency in this duty, “must see to it that this agency and all
agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under
proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is
the abyss from which there is no return.

The result was the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA), and the creation of the FISA Court, which was supposed to
oversee and correct how intelligence information is collected and
collated. The law requires that the NSA get clearance from the FISA
Court, a secret surveillance court, before it can carry out
surveillance on American citizens. Fast forward to the present day,
and the so-called solution to the problem of government entities
engaging in unjustified and illegal surveillance—the FISA Court—has
unwittingly become the enabler of such activities, rubberstamping
almost every warrant request submitted to it.

The 9/11 attacks served as a watershed moment in our nation’s history,
ushering in an era in which immoral and/or illegal government
activities such as surveillance, torture, strip searches, SWAT team
raids are sanctioned as part of the quest to keep us “safe.”

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush secretly authorized
the NSA to conduct warrantless surveillance on Americans’ phone calls
and emails. That wireless wiretap program was reportedly ended in 2007
after the New York Times reported on it, to mass indignation.

Nothing changed under Barack Obama. In fact, the violations worsened,
with the NSA authorized to secretly collect internet and telephone
data on millions of Americans, as well as on foreign governments.

It was only after whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013
that the American people fully understood the extent to which they had
been betrayed once again.

Even so, nothing really changed.

Since then, presidents, politicians, and court rulings have come and
gone, but none of them have done much to put an end to the
government’s “technotyranny.”

At every turn, we have been handicapped in our quest for transparency,
accountability and a representative democracy by an establishment
culture of secrecy: secret agencies, secret experiments, secret
military bases, secret surveillance, secret budgets, and secret court
rulings, all of which exist beyond our reach, operate outside our
knowledge, and do not answer to “we the people.”

Yet the surveillance sector is merely one small part of a shadowy
permanent government comprised of unelected bureaucrats who march in
lockstep with profit-driven corporations that actually runs
Washington, DC, and works to keep us under close watch and, thus,
under control. For example, Google openly works with the NSA, Amazon
has built a massive $600 million intelligence database for the CIA,
and the telecommunications industry is making a fat profit by spying
on us for the government.

Most recently, the Biden Administration indicated it may be open to
working with non-governmental firms in order to warrantlessly monitor
citizens online.

This would be nothing new, however. Vast quantities of the
government’s digital surveillance is already being outsourced to
private companies, who are far less restrained in how they harvest and
share our personal data.

In this way, Corporate America is making a hefty profit by aiding and
abetting the government in its militarized domestic surveillance
efforts.

Cue the dawning of what The Nation refers to as “the rise of a new
class in America: the cyberintelligence ruling class. These are the
people—often referred to as ‘intelligence professionals’—who do the
actual analytical and targeting work of the NSA and other agencies in
America’s secret government. Over the last [20] years, thousands of
former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left
their government posts and taken up senior positions at military
contractors, consultancies, law firms, and private-equity firms. In
their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government—often for
the same agencies they left. But this time, their mission is strictly
for-profit.”

The snitch culture has further empowered the Surveillance State.

As Ezra Marcus writes for the New York Times, “Throughout the past
year, American society responded to political upheaval and biological
peril by turning to an age-old tactic for keeping rule breakers in
check: tattling.”

This new era of snitch surveillance is the lovechild of the
government’s post-9/11 “See Something, Say Something” programs
combined with the self-righteousness of a politically correct,
technologically-wired age.

Marcus continues:

    “Technology, and our abiding love of it, is crucial to our current
moment of social surveillance. Snitching isn’t just a byproduct of
nosiness or fear; it’s a technological feature built into the digital
architecture of the pandemic era — specifically when it comes to
software designed for remote work and Covid-tracing… Contact tracing
apps … have started to be adapted for other uses, including criminal
probes by the Singaporean government. If that seems distinctly
worrying, it might be useful to remember that the world’s most
powerful technology companies, whose products you are likely using to
read this story, already use a business model of mass surveillance,
collecting and selling user information to advertisers at an
unfathomable scale. Our cellphones track us everywhere, and our
locations are bought and sold by data brokers at incredible, intimate
detail. Facial recognition software used by law enforcement trawls
Instagram selfies. Facebook harvests the biometric data of its users.
The whole ecosystem, more or less, runs on snitching.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the
American People, what we are dealing with today is not just a beast
that has outgrown its chains but a beast that will not be restrained.


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