Surveillance Blowback: The Making of the U.S. Surveillance State, 1898-2020

[Octafish]

9. The Intelligence-Industrial Complex

The intelligence-industrial complex

Joseph Kishore
WSWS.org 15 July 2013

An important aspect of the spying operations that have been exposed over the past month by National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden is the collusion of giant telecommunications and technology companies with the Obama administration and US intelligence agencies in the systematic violation of democratic rights.

SNIP...

PRISM itself is only part of an even more expansive program, in which the NSA taps directly into the “Internet backbone”—the system of fiber optic cables through which most telecommunications and Internet communications pass. These cables are run and controlled by large corporations, including the same telecommunications giants that hand over data on phone records, as well as companies such as 3 Communications and CenturyLink. In this way, the NSA can monitor in real time much of the world’s Internet traffic and reroute it for permanent storage.

Bloomberg News reported last month that “thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with US national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified information.” In exchange for their secret collaboration with the government, the companies often receive documents guaranteeing immunity for their actions.

The programs cited by Bloomberg are diverse and far-reaching. They include an agreement with Microsoft to inform the NSA of bugs in its operating systems before they are publicly released—giving the agency an opportunity to exploit the information to infiltrate computers in the US and abroad. McAfee, which makes Internet security software and is a subsidiary of Intel, also partners with intelligence agencies on a regular basis.

The corporate-intelligence collaboration is global. Over the weekend, newspapers in Australia reported on a partnership between US spy agencies and Telstra, the largest telecommunications company in Australia, to hand over data to the US government. Telstra controls the bulk of the Internet backbone in Australia and routes much of the communications traffic from Asia.

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http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/15/pers-j15.html

Seeing how these private intel companies probably privatize the best of the take, too, makes clear how the very rich keep getting richer and the rest of us not only poorer, but catalogued.

(Read in Greg Allman singing on "Whipping Post&quot : Sometimes I feel like an attention whore. Then I remember why I do it.

Gen. Clapper is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.