In Latest Expose of Massive Police State Surveillance of Everyone, Many Liars' Pants on Fire

The same government and corporate honchos who run a secret secret police state are acting true to character, lying their heads off about the exposure in The Guardian of yet another “secret” NSA total surveillance program. (The NSA has numerous programs that vacuum up all the world's communications. This has been well-known, and documented, for decades in books and articles, yet for some reason this latest example is being treated as some kind of revelation.)

Two programs in particular, one that routes the data from Internet companies to the NSA, called Prism, the other that orders phone companies to turn over all their “metadata” on phone calls to the NSA, and not tell anyone about it, were revealed by a systems administrator at Booz, Allen Corp. (which just fired him) named Edward J. Snowden. [1]

Let's start with Obama's “intelligence czar,” the “Director of National Intelligence,” a lifelong apparatchik by the name of James R. Clapper, Jr. Just a few months ago, in March, he was asked a direct question in Congressional testimony by Senator Ron Wyden. Wyden asked the crooked Clapper if NSA was collecting data on Americans. Clapper lied through his teeth and said no. (It's been a known fact for years that the NSA does precisely that, and several former NSA employees have recently blown the whistle on such programs, which the Obama regime responded to by persecuting them, including William Binney, Thomas Drake, and several others.) Now three months later Clapper is proved a liar.

So does Congress demand his resignation? Impeach him? Naah! They mostly call for the scalp of Ed Snowden.

So what does Clapper do now? He goes out and tell more lies- this time with indignation. It's “reprehensible” what Snowden did. (It's admirable what Clapper and his secret police ilk do.) That's not a lie- that's Clapper's opinion. (Like the Nazis felt the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich was reprehensible.) Clapper claims finding out about this stuff “can render great damage to our intelligence capabilities” and moans about “the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities.”

NONSENSE. It doesn't affect in the slightest the NSA capability to keep right on stealing all the data that passes over the transmission networks they tap with the cooperation of the big U.S. telephone and Internet corporations. (3 billion phone records a day, according to 30 year NSA veteran William Binney, plus the ability to record chosen calls at will.- June 10 interview, democracynow.org)

The heads of the various Internet companies all came out almost simultaneously with the same lies, denying what the Prism documents clearly state- that the NSA has “direct access” to their systems. These liars are at Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Apple, and Microsoft (which has long built backdoors into its operating system software for the convenience of the NSA). Maybe they're just playing a secret wordplay game. Maybe they have their own covert definition of the words “direct access,” the way Obama has his own secret definition of “imminent threat” for the people he assassinates, or like his twin Bill Clinton had his own definition of “sex.” (And of “is,” for that matter- “it depends on what 'is' means” he said at one point when he was cornered during the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.)

Non-American power-insiders are lying too. After the Guardian exposed NSA's sharing of the massive daily data trove with its U.K. counterpart [see “UK gathering secret intelligence via covert NSA operation,” Guardian, June 7, 2013. ] British Foreign Secretary William Hague insisted that Britain's own NSA, called G.C.H.Q. (for Government Communications Headquarters) hadn't broken British law, and wasn't getting data on British citizens from the NSA- a flat, bald-faced lie he told Parliament in person. As anyone who has ever read a book about the NSA knows, there is a long-standing arrangement (going back decades) between the electronic secret police agencies of the English-speaking Angle-Saxon nations, the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand to spy on each others' citizens and then give each other the data, so that each can pretend to not be eavesdropping on its own citizens. He also made the slippery statement that “to intercept the content of any individual's communications in the U.K. requires a warrant signed personally by me.”

Clever, Hague. We're not talking about a single individual. We're talking about everybody, wholesale. Everybody's communications are seized and stored, every day. After they run the data through their software screens and find “persons of interest,” then they can always get a warrant to make it look nice and legal. (But legality is really besides the point. Police states all have laws, always, that grant the oppressors crushing power. Sure it's “legal,” mostly. Except for the “off the books” stuff.)

Hague also made the same kind of noises about “oversight” that U.S. politicians and apparatchiks have been making. So the fact that the swine at the top are “overseeing” our oppression is supposed to make us feel better, I suppose.

Hague's master, Prime Minister David Cameron, belched forth the same kind of rhetoric that U.S. politicians have been spewing: “I see every day the vital work they [referring to the secret police- aka “intelligence” agencies] do to keep us safe, but it is vital work that is done under a legal framework within the law [redundant, David] and subject to proper scrutiny by the intelligence and security committee.” Furthermore, “The intelligence services [i.e. secret police] operate within the law, within the law that we have laid down, and they are also subject to proper scrutiny by the intelligence and security committee of the House of Commons,” he repeated himself, for the hard of hearing, I guess.

Sounds like a case of methinks thou doth protest too much, to paraphrase the Bard.

Well, if that “oversight” is anything like the see no evil approach of the U.S. Congressional “Intelligence” Committees, that ain't exactly reassuring.

Finally, one mustn't overlook the biggest liar of all, Barack Hussein Obama, President of the U.S.A. He says- after doing everything in his power to suppress the knowledge of even the existence of the institutionalized and apparently permanent spying, including repression of leakers and soon, apparently, reporters- that he welcomes discussion of such police state omni-surveillance programs- a claim even the establishment NY Times finds hard to believe, as reflected in such headlines as “Debate on Secret Data Looks Unlikely, Partly Due to Secrecy” (June 11, 2013, p. A1) and the lead editorial the same day, “A Real Debate on Surveillance.” (Posted on the NYT website a day earlier.)

The editorial is dismissive of “blithe assurances that the government can be trusted,” an amazing statement for the quintessential Establishment newspaper, and the first two paragraphs say:

“For years, as the federal surveillance state grew into every corner of American society, the highest officials worked to pretend that it didn’t exist. Now that Americans are learning what really takes place behind locked doors, many officials claim they are eager to talk about it. 'That's a conversation that I welcome having' President Obama said on Saturday. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday that she was open to holding a public hearing on the subject now, a hearing next month, a hearing every month.

“This newfound interest in openness is a little hard to take seriously, not only because of the hypocrisy involved but because neither official seems to want to do more than talk about being open. If the president wants to have a meaningful discussion, he can order his intelligence directors to explain to the public precisely how the National Security Agency’s widespread collection of domestic telephone data works. Since there’s not much point in camouflaging the program anymore, it’s time for the public to get answers to some basic questions.

“So far, no one at the White House seems interested in a substantive public debate.” [2]

This is a welcome change from their credulous praise that followed Obama's cynical May 23rd speech at the "National Defense College," in which he once again played his game of rhetorical judo, throwing his opponents off-balance by saying "I'm on your side! I agree with you!"

For seven long years Obama has made sure to block the possibility of a “discussion,” getting lawsuits by the ACLU and others thrown out of court on “national security” grounds, and now he claims he “welcomes a discussion.” Oh really!

Speaking of Feinstein, she is such a pathetic stooge and shill for the secret police that she can't even get redacted versions of the secret “court” decisions “legalizing” this permanent NSA dragnet! [3] But she's a trooper; accepting her debased position in the power structure, she loyally yaps like a Chihuahua lapdog in defense of the power structure, now branding Snowden a “traitor.” (The traditional penalty for treason is death, by the way.) On her rounds on the Sunday morning political propaganda TV shows, she invoked the “World Trade Center.” Twelve years on, still milking that! Still using it as an excuse for every one of their crimes! Cunning of the CIA and FBI to deliberately allow the attack to go through. That's been paying political dividends for the system ever since!

Feinstein's political rise got a big boost from the fascist* assassin Dan White, who murdered San Francisco Mayor George Moscone (and Supervisor Harvey Milk). Feinstein immediately stepped into his shoes as Mayor, and she was off to the races. She's married to a so-called “investment banker” (finance capitalist parasite) and is thus filthy rich.

*By “fascist,” I mean violent right-winger.

1] By the way, the NY Times reported that the police came by Snowden's house in Hawaii last Wednesday, the same day the Guardian first published the story, and asked where he was. Snowden's identity wasn't publicly revealed by the Guardian until four days later on Sunday. That shows how hot and heavy they are about constantly spying on Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian commentator who broke the story and who is a persistent critic of Obama's crimes, and Laura Poitras, the documentary filmmaker who shot an interview in Hong Kong with Greenwald and Snowden on Sunday. She has been harassed by the U.S. for years, which seizes her computer and cellphone and etc. every time she crosses a U.S. border.

Or maybe the NSA merely checked its own treasure trove of stolen emails and phone calls and data logs and etc. etc. etc. The NY Times reports that the NSA started looking for the “leaker” on the same day the Guardian story came out, last Wednesday. Fighting terrorism, keeping America strong!

The specifics of the phone spying centers around a renewal of a 7 year old warrant by the FISA court under which Verizon is ordered to turn over all the metadata for its business phone customers. That would include cellphone location, numbers called from and to, length of calls. The NSA no doubt has similar court orders for all the telephone companies. Furthermore, the NSA does surreptitously capture all the voice content (and texts, and faxes) of phone calls, under separate “compartmented” programs, but is still pretending it doesn't. The U.S. media is going along with this ridiculous lie. The NSA also collects all your emails. Yes, yours. You really want this ruthless killer government to have all that?

2] One of the NYT's two resident reactionary columnists, David Brooks, contributed to the “discussion” with an op-ed opposite the editorial which in its entirety is a character assassination of Snowden. He repeatedly intones the word “betrayed” to describe Snowden's relationship to everyone and everything in his life, painting him as a social destroyer. It's a nasty, twisted hit-job from start to finish.

3] The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court- FISA court- isn't a real court, but a windowless room inside the Department of “Justice” edifice in Washington, D.C., inside which a rotating group of 11 reactionary judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (a series of rightists, Warren Burger, William Rehnquist, and now John Roberts Jr.) are on call to rubber-stamp warrant requests from the secret police agencies. There is no one there to contest the secret police warrant requests in the court. From its inception in 1979 through 2012, the “court” has granted about 34,000 secret spy warrants, while rejecting a grand total of 11. That's right, it says “no” once in about every 3,000 requests. (The Electronic Privacy Information Center has a table broken down by year, with a link to the Federation of American Scientists. The Federation website has copies of the annual reports to Congress on the numbers of applications submitted and granted, and rejected (usually none). A small number of applications are modified by the “court.” The warrants are for electronic surveillance and physical searches.

I tallied up the yearly totals and it's almost exactly 34,000, so I don't know why people still toss around numbers in the 20,000 range. That is an old, outdated total.

There are more applications granted than submitted in some years, which may be attributable to multiple warrants granted on a single application. Or maybe, like doting grandparents, the judges just like showering presents on the secret police.

For the first quarter century of its existence, the “court” didn't say “no” to the secret police even once.