Octafish
Octafish's JournalMan with the Secrets is the Most Powerful Human in History.
Gen. Keith Alexander has more power than any one person has held in US history...
...my source is Dr. Alfred W. McCoy, an academic who has chronicled the high crimes of the secret state . He was on TUC Radio:
Alfred W. McCoy
The Making of the US Surveillance State
In July 2013 an article appeared on line in TomDispatch that gave an up to date and chilling analysis of the unprecedented powers of the US Surveillance state. It’s author, University of Wisconsin, Madison, professor of history Alfred McCoy, credits Edward Snowden for having revealed today’s reality. And McCoy adds his perspective of the intriguing history that led up to this point - and he makes a few predictions as to what to expect in the near future. That article in TomDispatch caught the attention of radio host, writer and Middle East expert Jeff Blankfort who allows me to broadcast the highlights of his interview with Professor McCoy.
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http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175724/
http://history.wisc.edu/people/faculty/mccoy.htm
The 35 minute version is here: http://www.radio4all.net/index.php/program/69998
A387For a broadcast quality mp3 version click HERE
SOURCE with podcasts, links, etc: http://www.tucradio.org/new.html
Old stuff to many DUers. But, it's nice for those new to such things to learn. As for Gen. Alexander:
Gen. Alexander is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.
The Secret War
INFILTRATION. SABOTAGE. MAYHEM. FOR YEARS, FOUR-STAR GENERAL KEITH ALEXANDER HAS BEEN BUILDING A SECRET ARMY CAPABLE OF LAUNCHING DEVASTATING CYBERATTACKS. NOW IT’S READY TO UNLEASH HELL.
by James Bamford
Wired, June 12, 2013
EXCERPT...
This is the undisputed domain of General Keith Alexander, a man few even in Washington would likely recognize. Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign, or the depth of his secrecy. A four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the US Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army.
SNIP...
What’s good for Alexander is good for the fortunes of the cyber-industrial complex, a burgeoning sector made up of many of the same defense contractors who grew rich supplying the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With those conflicts now mostly in the rearview mirror, they are looking to Alexander as a kind of savior. After all, the US spends about $30 billion annually on cybersecurity goods and services.
In the past few years, the contractors have embarked on their own cyber building binge parallel to the construction boom at Fort Meade: General Dynamics opened a 28,000-square-foot facility near the NSA; SAIC cut the ribbon on its new seven-story Cyber Innovation Center; the giant CSC unveiled its Virtual Cyber Security Center. And at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, where former NSA director Mike McConnell was hired to lead the cyber effort, the company announced a “cyber-solutions network” that linked together nine cyber-focused facilities. Not to be outdone, Boeing built a new Cyber Engagement Center. Leaving nothing to chance, it also hired retired Army major general Barbara Fast, an old friend of Alexander’s, to run the operation. (She has since moved on.)
Defense contractors have been eager to prove that they understand Alexander’s worldview. “Our Raytheon cyberwarriors play offense and defense,” says one help-wanted site. Consulting and engineering firms such as Invertix and Parsons are among dozens posting online want ads for “computer network exploitation specialists.” And many other companies, some unidentified, are seeking computer and network attackers. “Firm is seeking computer network attack specialists for long-term government contract in King George County, VA,” one recent ad read. Another, from Sunera, a Tampa, Florida, company, said it was hunting for “attack and penetration consultants.”
One of the most secretive of these contractors is Endgame Systems, a startup backed by VCs including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Paladin Capital Group. Established in Atlanta in 2008, Endgame is transparently antitransparent. “We’ve been very careful not to have a public face on our company,” former vice president John M. Farrell wrote to a business associate in an email that appeared in a WikiLeaks dump. “We don’t ever want to see our name in a press release,” added founder Christopher Rouland. True to form, the company declined Wired’s interview requests.
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http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/general-keith-alexander-cyberwar/all/
A WMD Info-Bomb of infiltration, sabotage and mayhem targeting democracy. Disgusting, when wielded to suppress rather than to enlighten. The fact it also is being used to make money off war even more so.
As for the guy who held Gen. Alexander's job before he did, his name is Gen. Michael Hayden, who's now top man at Booz Allen Hamilton of the Carlyle Group. The architect behind Total Information Awareness is Adm. John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame.
Anyone remember when Congress was where war was declared?
It's too profitable for one person to decide.
http://metamorphosis.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=4152174
Heh heh heh.
He was right about the Iraq War boondoggle.
For all we know, Jimmy Carter's an enemy of the state because he doesn't believe "money trumps peace."
And if he is, I stand with him. I ain't no BFEE fascist.
White House withholds thousands of documents from Senate CIA probe, despite vows of help
BY JONATHAN S. LANDAY, ALI WATKINS AND MARISA TAYLOR
McClatchy Washington BureauMarch 12, 2014
WASHINGTON — The White House has been withholding for five years more than 9,000 top-secret documents sought by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for its investigation into the now-defunct CIA detention and interrogation program, even though President Barack Obama hasn’t exercised a claim of executive privilege.
In contrast to public assertions that it supports the committee’s work, the White House has ignored or rejected offers in multiple meetings and in letters to find ways for the committee to review the records, a McClatchy investigation has found.
The significance of the materials couldn’t be learned. But the administration’s refusal to turn them over or to agree to any compromise raises questions about what they would reveal about the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons.
The dispute indicates that the White House is more involved than it has acknowledged in the unprecedented power struggle between the committee and the CIA, which has triggered charges that the agency searched the panel’s computers without authorization and has led to requests to the Justice Department for criminal investigations of CIA personnel and Senate aides.
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http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/12/221033/despite-vows-of-help-white-house.html
No President should fear public scrutiny of his program.
For from that scrutiny comes understanding; and from that understanding comes support or opposition. And both are necessary. I am not asking your newspapers to support the Administration, but I am asking your help in the tremendous task of informing and alerting the American people. For I have complete confidence in the response and dedication of our citizens whenever they are fully informed. - President John F. Kennedy, from an address to newspaper publishers.
SOURCE: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/American-Newspaper-Publishers-Association_19610427.aspx
Certainly miss statesmen like Acton and JFK who appreciated the importance of openness, public scrutiny, review and accountability for Democracy.
POLITICAL USES OF ECHELON AND UKUSA
EXCERPT...
Several incidents of domestic spying involving ECHELON have emerged from the secrecy of the UKUSA relationship. What these brief glimpses inside the intelligence world reveal is that, despite the best of intentions by elected representatives, presidents and prime ministers, the temptation to use ECHELON as a tool of political advancement and repression proves too strong.
Former Canadian spy Mike Frost recounts how former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher made a request in February 1983 to have two ministers from her own government monitored when she suspected them of disloyalty.
In an effort to avoid the legal difficulties involved with domestic spying on high-level governmental officials, the GCHQ liaison in Ottawa made a request to CSE for them to conduct the three-week-long surveillance mission at British taxpayer expense. Frost’s CSE boss, Frank Bowman, traveled to London to do the job himself. After the mission was over, Bowman was instructed to hand over the tapes to a GCHQ official at head office.
Using the UKUSA alliance as legal cover is seductively easy.
As Spyworld co-author Michel Gratton puts it:
"The Thatcher episode certainly shows that GCHQ, like NSA, found ways to put itself above the law and did not hesitate to get directly involved in helping a specific politician for her personal political benefit…
"[T]he decision to proceed with the London caper was probably not put forward for approval to many people up the bureaucratic ladder. It was something CSE figured they would get away with easily, so checking with the higher-ups would only complicate things unnecessarily."
Frost also told of how he was asked in 1975 to spy on an unlikely target: Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s wife, Margaret Trudeau.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) Security service division was concerned that the Prime Minister’s wife was buying and using marijuana, so they contacted the CSE to do the dirty work. Months of surveillance in cooperation with the Security Service turned up nothing of note. Frost was concerned that there were political motivations behind the RCMP’s request:
"She was in no way suspected of espionage. Why was the RCMP so adamant about this? Were they trying to get at Pierre Trudeau for some reason or just protect him? Or were they working under orders from their political masters?"
The NSA frequently gets into the political spying act as well. Nixon presidential aide John Ehrlichman revealed in his published memoirs, Witness to Power: The Nixon Years, that Henry Kissinger used the NSA to intercept the messages of then Secretary of State William P. Rogers, which Kissinger used to convince President Nixon of Rogers’ incompetence.
Kissinger also found himself on the receiving end of the NSA’s global net. Word of Kissinger’s secret diplomatic dealings with foreign governments would reach the ears of other Nixon administration officials, incensing Kissinger.
As former NSA Deputy Director William Colby pointed out:
"Kissinger would get sore as hell…because he wanted to keep it politically secret until it was ready to launch."
However, elected representatives have also become targets of spying by the intelligence agencies. In 1988, Margaret Newsham, a former Lockheed software manager who was responsible for a dozen VAX computers that powered the ECHELON computers at Menwith Hill, came forth with the stunning revelation that she had actually heard the NSA’s real-time interception of phone conversations involving South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond.
Newsham was fired from Lockheed after she filed a whistle-blower lawsuit alleging that the company was engaged in flagrant waste and abuse. After a top-secret meeting in April 1988 with then Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Louis Stokes, Capitol Hill staffers familiar with the meeting leaked the story to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. While Sen.
Thurmond was reluctant to pressure for a thorough investigation into the matter, his office revealed at the time that it had previously received reports that the Senator was a target of the NSA. After the news reports, an investigation into the matter discovered that there were no controls or questioning over who could enter target names into the Menwith Hill system.
The NSA, under orders from the Reagan Administration, also targeted Maryland Congressman Michael Barnes. Phone calls he placed to Nicaraguan officials were intercepted and recorded, including a conversation he had with the Foreign Minister of Nicaragua, protesting the implementation of martial law in that country. Barnes found out about the NSA’s spying after White House officials leaked transcripts of his conversations to reporters.
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http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/echelon/echelon_2.htm
Thanks, Kurovski. This is serious, longterm, and most un-democratic. IMFO, it's why the Bankster/Warmonger class gets away with mass murder.
Online Covert Action
Critically, the “targets” for this deceit and reputation-destruction extend far beyond the customary roster of normal spycraft: hostile nations and their leaders, military agencies, and intelligence services. In fact, the discussion of many of these techniques occurs in the context of using them in lieu of “traditional law enforcement” against people suspected (but not charged or convicted) of ordinary crimes or, more broadly still, “hacktivism”, meaning those who use online protest activity for political ends.
The title page of one of these documents reflects the agency’s own awareness that it is “pushing the boundaries” by using “cyber offensive” techniques against people who have nothing to do with terrorism or national security threats, and indeed, centrally involves law enforcement agents who investigate ordinary crimes:
What an interesting web the police state builds to practice tradecraft and deceive or whatever the rich use to get richer and make wars forever.
"Hacktivism" is what I call "Democracy."
GCHQ describes the purpose of JTRIG in starkly clear terms:
“using online techniques to make something happen in the real or cyber world,” including “information ops (influence or disruption).”
The same NSA that unconstitutionally spies on Americans also gets to propagandize Americans.
You can't get more Orwell than that.
Online Propaganda - Invisible Tool of Secret Government
How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations
By Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept, 24 Feb 2014
One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.
Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”
SNIP...
Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums. Here is one illustrative list of tactics from the latest GCHQ document we’re publishing today:
SNIP...
No matter your views on Anonymous, “hacktivists” or garden-variety criminals, it is not difficult to see how dangerous it is to have secret government agencies being able to target any individuals they want – who have never been charged with, let alone convicted of, any crimes – with these sorts of online, deception-based tactics of reputation destruction and disruption. There is a strong argument to make, as Jay Leiderman demonstrated in the Guardian in the context of the Paypal 14 hacktivist persecution, that the “denial of service” tactics used by hacktivists result in (at most) trivial damage (far less than the cyber-warfare tactics favored by the US and UK) and are far more akin to the type of political protest protected by the First Amendment.
CONTINUED w/links, sources, details...
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/
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