1984: Thread

[grarpamp]

Kleptocracy: Governments of Liars, Thieves and Lawbreakers

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to
think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing
superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion
that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and
intolerable."--H. L. Mencken

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) continues to suck
the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which
the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the
citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who
steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow
madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

Think about it.

Almost every tyranny being perpetrated by the U.S. government against the
citizenry--purportedly to keep us safe and the nation secure--has come
about as a result of some threat manufactured in one way or another by our
own government.

Cyberwarfare. Terrorism. Bio-chemical attacks. The nuclear arms race.
Surveillance. The drug wars. Domestic extremism. The COVID-19 pandemic.

In almost every instance, the U.S. government (often spearheaded by the
FBI) has in its typical Machiavellian fashion sown the seeds of terror
domestically and internationally in order to expand its own totalitarian
powers.

Who is the [4]biggest black market buyer and stockpiler of cyberweapons
(weaponized malware that can be used to hack into computer systems, spy on
citizens, and destabilize vast computer networks)? The U.S. government.

Who is the [5]largest weapons manufacturer and exporter in the world, such
that they are literally arming the world? The U.S. government.

Which country has a [6]history of secretly testing out dangerous weapons
and technologies on its own citizens? The U.S. government.

Which country has [7]conducted secret experiments on an unsuspecting
populace--citizens and noncitizens alike--making healthy people sick by
spraying them with chemicals, injecting them with infectious diseases and
exposing them to airborne toxins? The U.S. government.

What country has a [8]pattern and practice of entrapment that involves
targeting vulnerable individuals, feeding them with the propaganda,
know-how and weapons intended to turn them into terrorists, and then
arresting them as part of an elaborately orchestrated counterterrorism
sting? The U.S. government.

Are you getting the picture yet?

The U.S. government isn't protecting us from terrorism.

The U.S. government is creating the terror. It is, in fact, the source of
the terror.

Consider that this very same government has taken every bit of technology
sold to us as being in our best interests--GPS devices, surveillance,
nonlethal weapons, etc.--and used it against us, to track, control and
trap us.

So why is the government doing this? Money, power and total domination.

We're not dealing with a government that exists to serve its people,
protect their liberties and ensure their happiness. Rather, these are the
diabolical machinations of a make-works program carried out on an epic
scale whose only purpose is to keep the powers-that-be permanently (and
profitably) employed.

Case in point: the FBI.

The government's henchmen have become the embodiment of how power, once
acquired, can be so easily corrupted and abused. Indeed, far from being
tough on crime, FBI agents are also among the nation's most notorious
lawbreakers.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues and
mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans' phone
records; using [9]intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are
critical of the government, or persuading impressionable individuals to
[10]plot acts of terror and then [11]entrapping them, the overall
impression of the nation's secret police force is that of a well-dressed
thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss' dirty work.

It's a diabolical plot with far-reaching consequences for every segment of
the population, no matter what one's political leanings.

As Rozina Ali writes for The New York Times Magazine, "The government's
approach to counterterrorism erodes constitutional protections for
everyone, by blurring the lines between speech and action and by
broadening the scope of who is classified as a threat."

This is not an agency that appears to understand, let alone respect, the
limits of the Constitution.

For instance, the FBI has been [12]secretly carrying out an entrapment
scheme in which it used a front company, ANOM, to sell purportedly
hack-proof phones to organized crime syndicates and then used those phones
to spy on them as they planned illegal drug shipments, plotted robberies
and put out contracts for killings using those boobytrapped phones.

All told, the FBI intercepted [13]27 million messages over the course of
18 months.

What this means is that the FBI was also illegally spying on individuals
using those encrypted phones who may not have been involved in any
criminal activity whatsoever.

Even [14]reading a newspaper article is now enough to get you flagged for
surveillance by the FBI. The agency served a subpoena on USA Today /
Gannett to provide the internet addresses and mobile phone information for
everyone who read a news story online on a particular day and time about
the deadly shooting of FBI agents.

This is the danger of allowing the government to carry out widespread
surveillance, sting and entrapment operations using dubious tactics that
sidestep the rule of law: "we the people" become suspects and potential
criminals, while government agents, empowered to fight crime using all
means at their disposal, become indistinguishable from the corrupt forces
they seek to vanquish.

To go after terrorists, they become terrorists. To go after drug
smugglers, they become drug smugglers. To go after thieves, they become
thieves.

It's hard to say whether we're dealing with a [15]kleptocracy (a
government ruled by thieves), a [16]kakistocracy (a government run by
unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to
the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of
American citizens), or if we've gone straight to an [17]idiocracy.

This certainly isn't a constitutional republic, however.

Some days, it feels like the government is running its own crime syndicate
complete with mob rule and mafia-style justice.

In addition to creating certain crimes in order to then "solve" them, the
FBI--the government's law enforcement agency--also gives certain
informants [18]permission to break the law, "including everything from
buying and selling illegal drugs to bribing government officials and
plotting robberies," in exchange for their cooperation on other fronts.

USA Today estimates that government agents have authorized criminals to
engage in as many as [19]15 crimes a day (5600 crimes a year). Some of
these informants are getting paid astronomical sums: one particularly
unsavory fellow, later arrested for attempting to run over a police
officer, was actually [20]paid $85,000 for his help laying the trap for an
entrapment scheme.

In addition to procedural misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal
activity, and damaging private property, the FBI's laundry list of crimes
against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation,
blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, and harassment.

For example, the Associated Press lodged a complaint with the Dept. of
Justice after learning that FBI agents [21]created a fake AP news story
and emailed it, along with a clickable link, to a bomb threat suspect in
order to implant tracking technology onto his computer and identify his
location. Lambasting the agency, AP attorney Karen Kaiser railed, "The FBI
may have intended this false story as a trap for only one person. However,
the individual could easily have reposted this story to social networks,
distributing to thousands of people, under our name, what was essentially
[22]a piece of government disinformation."

Then again, to those familiar with [23]COINTELPRO, an FBI program created
to "disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize" groups and individuals
the government considers politically objectionable, it should come as no
surprise that the agency has mastered the art of government
disinformation.

The FBI has been particularly criticized in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist
attacks for targeting vulnerable individuals and not only luring them into
fake terror plots but actually equipping them with the organization,
money, weapons and motivation to carry out the plots--entrapment--and then
jailing them for their so-called terrorist plotting. This is what the FBI
characterizes as "[24]forward leaning--preventative--prosecutions."

Another fallout from 9/11, National Security Letters, one of the many
[25]illicit powers authorized by the USA Patriot Act, allows the FBI to
secretly demand that banks, phone companies, and other businesses provide
them with customer information and not disclose the demands. An internal
audit of the agency found that the FBI practice of issuing tens of
thousands of NSLs every year for sensitive information such as phone and
financial records, often in non-emergency cases, is [26]riddled with
widespread violations.

The FBI's surveillance capabilities, on a par with the National Security
Agency, boast a [27]nasty collection of spy tools ranging from Stingray
devices that can track the location of cell phones to Triggerfish devices
which allow agents to eavesdrop on phone calls.

In one case, the FBI actually managed to [28]remotely reprogram a
"suspect's" wireless internet card so that it would send "real-time
cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI."

The FBI has also repeatedly sought to [29]expand its invasive hacking
powers to allow agents to hack into any computer, anywhere in the world.

Indeed, for years now, the U.S. government has been creating what one
intelligence insider referred to as a cyber-army capable of offensive
attacks. As part of this cyberweapons programs, government agencies such
as the NSA have been stockpiling all kinds of nasty malware, viruses and
hacking tools that can "[30]steal financial account passwords, turn an
iPhone into a listening device, or, in the case of Stuxnet, sabotage a
nuclear facility."

In fact, [31]the NSA was responsible for the threat posed by the
"WannaCry" or "Wanna Decryptor" malware worm which--as a result of hackers
accessing the government's arsenal--hijacked more than 57,000 computers
and crippled health care, communications infrastructure, logistics, and
government entities in more than 70 countries.

Mind you, the government was repeatedly warned about the dangers of using
criminal tactics to wage its own cyberwars. It was warned about the
consequences of blowback should its cyberweapons get into the wrong hands.

The government chose to ignore the warnings.

That's exactly how the 9/11 attacks unfolded.

First, the government helped to create the menace that was al-Qaida and
then, when bin Laden had left the nation reeling in shock (despite
[32]countless warnings that fell on tone-deaf ears), it demanded--and was
given--immense new powers in the form of the USA Patriot Act in order to
fight the very danger it had created.

This has become the shadow government's modus operandi regardless of which
party controls the White House: the government creates a menace--knowing
full well the ramifications such a danger might pose to the public--then
without ever owning up to the part it played in unleashing that particular
menace on an unsuspecting populace, it demands additional powers in order
to protect "we the people" from the threat.

Yet the powers-that-be don't really want us to feel safe.

They want us cowering and afraid and willing to relinquish every last one
of our freedoms in exchange for their phantom promises of security.

As a result, it's the American people who pay the price for the
government's insatiable greed and quest for power.

Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the United States is
ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state
but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation
that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable
for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is
one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a
mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant,
privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the
government to browbeat the people into compliance.

Somewhere over the course of the past 240-plus years, democracy has given
way to kleptocracy, and representative government has been rejected in
favor of rule by career politicians, corporations and thieves--individuals
and entities with little regard for the rights of American citizens.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the
government--establishing "we the people" as the masters and the government
as the servant--didn't happen overnight. It didn't happen because of one
particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that
began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by
politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to "divide and
conquer."

As I point out in my book [33]Battlefield America: The War on the American
People and in its fictional counterpart [34]The Erik Blair Diaries, our
freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.


4. https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/10/4319278/us-government-hacking-threatens-cybersecurity-former-officials-say
5. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/07/tomdispatch-dc-congress-defense-international-arms-business
6. http://www.businessinsider.com/military-government-secret-experiments-biological-chemical-weapons-2016-9
7. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41811750/ns/health-health_care/t/ugly-past-us-human-experiments-uncovered/#.VzCAwBUrKRs
8. https://theintercept.com/2015/03/16/howthefbicreatedaterrorist/
9. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/the-fbi-walks-a-perilous-_b_3447225.html
10. http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/06/william-norman-grigg/the-american-secret-police/
11. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/magazine/fbi-international-terrorism-informants.html
12. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/06/08/fbi-app-arrests-australia-crime/
13. https://www.activistpost.com/2021/06/sneaky-sneaky-fbi-created-company-that-sold-encrypted-devices-to-organized-crime-led-to-800-arrests-in-16-countries.html
14. https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/03/usa-today-subpeona-florida-shooting-491847
15. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-kleptocracy/2017/01/04/42b30d72-c78f-11e6-8bee-54e800ef2a63_story.html
16. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rick-finkelstein/kakistocracy-a-word-you-s_b_132417.html
17. http://time.com/4327424/idiocracy/
18. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/04/fbi-informant-crimes-report/2613305/
19. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/08/04/fbi-informant-crimes-report/2613305/
20. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment-fake-terror-plots
21. https://corpcommap.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/letter_103014.pdf
22. https://corpcommap.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/letter_103014.pdf
23. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/the-fbi-walks-a-perilous-_b_3447225.html
24. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment-fake-terror-plots
25. http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/03/06/fbi-ecretly-spying-on-google-users-company-reveals/
26. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/03/16/judge-rules-secret-fbi-letters-unconstitutional/
27. http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/08/fbi_wireless_intercept_and_tracking_team_files_reveal_new_information_on.html
28. http://www.wired.com/2013/04/verizon-rigmaiden-aircard/all/
29. https://www.ethicsintech.com/fbi-seeking-invasive-global-hacking-powers/
30. http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyberweapons-specialreport-idUSBRE9490EL20130510
31. https://theintercept.com/2017/05/12/the-nsas-lost-digital-weapon-is-helping-hijack-computers-around-the-world/
32. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-bush-white-house-was-deaf-to-9-11-warnings.html
33. https://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-America-War-American-People/dp/1590795229/
34. https://www.amazon.com/Erik-Blair-Diaries-Battlefield-Dead/dp/1954968027/