Post-September 11, NSA ‘enemies’ include us
Somewhere between Sept. 11 and today, the enemy morphed from a handful of terrorists to the American population at large, leaving us nowhere to run and no place to hide.
Within weeks of the attacks, the giant ears of the National Security Agency, always pointed outward toward potential enemies, turned inward on the American public itself. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, established 23 years before to ensure that only suspected foreign agents and terrorists were targeted by the NSA, would be bypassed. Telecom companies, required by law to keep the computerized phone records of their customers confidential unless presented with a warrant, would secretly turn them over in bulk to the NSA without ever asking for a warrant.
Around the country, in tall, windowless telecom company buildings known as switches, NSA technicians quietly began installing beam-splitters to redirect duplicate copies of all phone calls and email messages to secret rooms behind electronic cipher locks.
There, NSA software and hardware designed for “deep packet inspection” filtered through the billions of email messages looking for key names, words, phrases and addresses. The equipment also monitored phone conversations and even what pages people view on the Web — the porn sites they visit, the books they buy on Amazon, the social networks they interact with and the text messages they send and receive.
Because the information is collected in real time, attempting to delete history caches from a computer is useless.
At the NSA, thousands of analysts who once eavesdropped on troop movements of enemy soldiers in distant countries were now listening in on the bedroom conversations of innocent Americans in nearby states.
“We were told that we were to listen to all conversations that were intercepted, to include those of Americans,” Adrienne Kinne, a former NSA “voice interceptor,” told me. She was recalled to active duty after Sept. 11.
“Some of those conversations are personal,” she said. “Some even intimate. … I had a real problem with the fact that people were listening to it and that I was listening to it. … When I was on active duty in ’94 to ’98, we would never collect on an American.”
Despite his hollow campaign protests, President Barack Obama has greatly expanded what President George W. Bush began. And through amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Congress largely ratified the secret Bush program.
So much intercepted information is now being collected from “enemies” at home and abroad that, in order to store it all, the agency last year began constructing the ultimate monument to eavesdropping. Rising in a remote corner of Utah, the agency’s gargantuan data storage center will be 1 million square feet, cost nearly $2 billion and likely be capable of eventually holding more than a yottabyte of data — equal to about a septillion (1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
Read more: ttp://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62999.html#ixzz1Xm6j0XgI - Source: Politico - JAMES BAMFORD
Homeland Security new Blacklist Policy
September 8, 2011
A new report issued by Homeland Security Policy Institute, a "think and do tank", entitled "Counterterrorism Intelligence Law Enforcement Perspectives" calls for further centralization of the anti-terror apparatus inside the United States.
The changing, converging nature of threats faced today — especially those from terrorism, transnational crime and the use of technology to carry out criminal behavior — make it imperative that intelligence-led policing be integrated into the decentralized police structures and community policing principles of the United States.
The report lists a hierarchy of threats that include an overall "evolutionary shift" toward "a blended terror threat that unites foreign directed or inspired attacks with homegrown elements and operators."
This policy paper forms the new narrative that could justify the continuing infiltration and crackdown upon peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and even the questioning of American foreign policy and Homeland Security directives, whether on the street or in cyberspace.
The report opens with quotes from the two most ideologically repressive representatives of the Homeland Security initiative: John Ashcroft and Janet Napolitano. Both of their quotes speak to coordinating federal and local efforts in the "war on terror," which HSPI interpreted as "accepted wisdom that weaving together of national efforts at the local, state, and federal levels is critical to US counterterrorism."
The preface to the report suggests that the current status of intelligence gathering and local police work is in vast disarray, "there is a consensus that . . . intelligence capabilities are lacking, collection is haphazard, resources are underutilized, and the U.S. has a limited ability to develop anticipatory knowledge concerning future attacks, mitigate risks, or respond to emerging threats."
This statement is meant to obfuscate the fact that a vast counterintelligence apparatus has been in place for some time, which includes, but is not limited to:
- 72 Threat Assessment Fusion Centers
- Citizen spy network directly reporting to the above-mentioned Fusion Centers
- COINTELPRO-style infiltration, surveillance, and harassment of activist groups, even those promoting peace and anti-war.
- Social network and Internet surveillance including hackers and paid bloggers to infiltrate sites and/or disseminate propaganda.
- Identity databases, including biometrics, pre-crime detection, no-fly lists, no-buy lists.
From this faulty assessment of how taxpayer money has already been spent to create a massive prison system for both body and mind, the report presents its foundational findings via surveys that indicate the merging of terrorists foreign and domestic. This hierarchy reads as follows, and is supported by graphs and charts that indicate the responses from "intelligence unit commanders of the US' major metropolitan areas (who) continue to perceive terrorism as a real threat to the safety of their communities."
1. Homegrown / Domestic Terrorists
2. al-Qaeda / International Terrorists
3. Transnational Gangs / Organized Crime
4. Terror Support Groups
5. Drug Trafficking Organizations
6. Traditional Criminals
This hierarchy of perceived threats is then merged into an overall assessment of capabilities and intentions, which reveals that the twin concerns are first to "Spread Narrative" and second "Fundraising / Money Laundering." Here we can begin to see the future direction of Homeland Security counterterrorism operations: banking and the Internet.
This conclusion is supported by the rest of the document which cites the need for centralization, precisely because the "enemy" is decentralized:
Most likely AQAP due to their decentralized outreach capabilities and ability to recruit via social media campaigns (i.e. Inspire.)
Furthermore, the base of operations apparently has shifted from the sands of the Middle East to "using the United States as an environment for building support and raising recruits."
Strangely, the report goes on to refute the idea that the overall system is in disarray by citing evidence that there is already cohesion in information sharing regarding the threat landscape. Respondents overwhelmingly reported that they "Often" send and receive information to and from their local fusion center, while a majority indicated that they currently participate in the "reporting, tracking, and accessing" of the nationwide suspicious activity reporting initiative (NSI) which is nothing more than a catalog of citizen spy information fed predominantly from the private sector to law enforcement and upward to Homeland Security. Sharing is further solidified online through participation in the eGuardian system.
These local respondents also seem dangerously (or curiously) eager to sacrifice their autonomy, as they "placed greater importance on the information provided by federal authorities." Despite a cursory concern for privacy protection "the vast majority of respondents indicated that their departments would be willing to go beyond the sharing of information and share the sources from which the information originates (including confidential informants)." In short, whatever it takes, and by all means necessary.
Finally, it is clear that local law enforcement is comfortable with the new hierarchy dictated to them by the Federal apparatus. When asked to cite how they go about their intelligence gathering they "indicated that they turn primarily to federal officials or agencies for guidance" such as the FBI -- most often cited -- with DHS, the CIA, and military intelligence rounding out the agencies our local police wish to emulate in "structures and efforts."
In so doing, local police are seeking the currently unnamed intelligence "products" of such information-gathering efforts, which will be the subject of future inquiry.
And what was the #1 source listed for the gathering and sharing of this information? Information from citizens -- not federal agencies. The reason for this conclusion is cited at the end of the report which acknowledges a "time of increasing austerity" that implies might hamper the development and implementation of surveillance and data collection technology. But the citizens of a country remain a resource easily tapped. We should keep this firmly in mind as we look outward for signs of oppression. Are we willing to take equal responsibility for what America currently has become, and for the direction it is headed? We have been slated as "practioners" in the role of national security, and as the report's final statement makes clear:
How practitioners conceptualize and perceive of the threat is of vital importance, their perceptions affect which threats are detected and when. Furthermore, their perceptions represent an empirical guide for targeting the tools needed to develop anticipatory intelligence. Whether, and how well this is done depends on the perceptions of the practitioners themselves...
We encourage you to read the full 22-page PDF, which seems to provide the justification for the next phase of the control grid which will affect every American throughout the real and virtual landscape. Please comment below with your analysis and conclusions, as well as ideas for preserving our liberty during a time of heightened suspicion and paranoia that is now clearly re-directing its efforts onto American soil as the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches
Source: Activist Post - http://www.blacklistednews.com/New_Homeland_Security_Report_Sees_%22Evolutionary_Shift%22_in_Terror_Threat_/15622/0/0/0/Y/M.html
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