More than just a data center, the new National Security Agency facility now under construction in Utah could well be the hub of the Bush II administration’s dreamed for “total information awareness”, as envisioned by Vice Admiral John Poindexter back in 2002. A former Reagan national security advisor, Poindexter had been brought back into government to head up the Office of Information Awareness at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa. (See NYT story link below.)
At the time civil libertarians expressed concern.
“This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America,” said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, in a 2002 New York Times story. ”The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public.”
Congress rejected Poindexter’s program after a flurry of stories. But that hasn’t stopped the NSA and the corporate state. Recent articles have reported this new sprawling Utah facility will house massive computer capabilities that will make it possible - and completely probable - that the government will be tracking every single e-mail, phone call, Tweet, Facebook update, text message and financial transaction in the United States - independent of any Constitutional protections or guarantees.
In effect, the Constitution will be dead. And mind you, this is a completely bipartisan project against our citizen rights; conceived under a Republican administration and carried out by a Democratic administration.
It is amazing how this $2 billion project has been coming together with so little coverage in the mainstream press or citizen outrage. Scheduled to open in September of 2013, we will be entering a whole new world here in the United States. From that point on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights will be a fading facade providing an illusion of democracy; face saving pasties on the ugly corporate fascist state.
Combine this computer capability with things like the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA), which sailed through the House in late April and is now up for consideration in the Senate. CISPA is the successor to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that was defeated recently. CISPA brings corporations - like Google or Facebook - into the process of dredging up information on citizens. But the corporate state will not take no for an answer so the same old stuff (and worse) gets wrapped up in a new legislative proposal and sent back through congress.
Should CISPA be defeated in the Senate you can damn well bet some new (worse) proposal will pop up in the next session.
Combine Utah and CISPA with the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that congress passed and Obama eagerly signed into law, which extends military “battlefield” standards of justice to American citizens here in the United States including indefinite preventative detention and you have all the hardware, software and legal tools in place to crackdown and control the population.
(Note: Obama apologists will protest that Obama had no choice on NDAA; that a veto couldn’t be sustained and he issued a signing statement bemoaning the bill. But realize, Obama never opposed - and in fact called for - the battlefield justice provisions. His opposition was about some process issues that gave him less power than he wanted.)
A lot of things are quickly falling in place, folks. Important, fundamental changes that will alter our experience and freedoms in America are rolling up to the doorstep. You will not, of course, hear a whispered syllable of discussion, much less debate about any of this in the upcoming elections. The elections are a distraction - a juicy tender treat thrown to the public puppy to keep us distracted.
I know this is all pretty grim and scary stuff, but ignoring it is not the answer; it is not going away. The first step of any change is to become a radical - as in having radical acceptance of the truth; seeing and calling things as they are. Once that acceptance of the ugly truth is in place - naming the problem - then change can begin.
The following are some quick sources for getting up to speed on the NSA facility and other threats to our freedoms:
- To get a quick background on the current status of the Utah facility and quotes from whistle blowers in the intelligence community link to a good 3-minute video: http://www.brasschecktv.com/videos/offensive-technology-1/national-security-agency-utah-data-center.html
- Recent Wired Magazine article that really lays out the whole NSA Utah story and what kind of surveillance we will be under was recently featured in the Daily Call. Consider this quote from the story - “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1
- The Daily Call recently featured an excellent story on CISPA by Naomi Wolf. You can link to the story here: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/05/20125192059184697.html
- New York Times story from 2002 laying out the origins of the federal government’s targeting of civilian communications as envisioned in the Total Information Awareness program: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/politics/09COMP.html?pagewanted=all
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