Man with the Secrets is the Most Powerful Human in History.

[Octafish]

8. How NSA Surveillance Fits Into a Long History of American Global Political Strategy

by Alfred W. McCoy
Mother Jones on Fri. January 24, 2014 12:05 PM PDT

EXCERPT...

A Dream as Old as Ancient Rome

In the Obama years, the first signs have appeared that NSA surveillance will use the information gathered to traffic in scandal, much as Hoover's FBI once did. In September 2013, the New York Times reported that the NSA has, since 2010, applied sophisticated software to create "social network diagrams…, unlock as many secrets about individuals as possible…, and pick up sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist's office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner."

Through the expenditure of $250 million annually under its Sigint Enabling Project, the NSA has stealthily penetrated all encryption designed to protect privacy. "In the future, superpowers will be made or broken based on the strength of their cryptanalytic programs," reads a 2007 NSA document. "It is the price of admission for the US to maintain unrestricted access to and use of cyberspace."

By collecting knowledge—routine, intimate, or scandalous—about foreign leaders, imperial proconsuls from ancient Rome to modern America have gained both the intelligence and aura of authority necessary for dominion over alien societies. The importance, and challenge, of controlling these local elites cannot be overstated. During its pacification of the Philippines after 1898, for instance, the US colonial regime subdued contentious Filipino leaders via pervasive policing that swept up both political intelligence and personal scandal. And that, of course, was just what J. Edgar Hoover was doing in Washington during the 1950s and 1960s.

Indeed, the mighty British Empire, like all empires, was a global tapestry woven out of political ties to local leaders or "subordinate elites"—from Malay sultans and Indian maharajas to Gulf sheiks and West African tribal chiefs. As historian Ronald Robinson once observed, the British Empire spread around the globe for two centuries through the collaboration of these local leaders and then unraveled, in just two decades, when that collaboration turned to "non-cooperation." After rapid decolonization during the 1960s transformed half-a-dozen European empires into 100 new nations, their national leaders soon found themselves the subordinate elites of a spreading American global imperium. Washington suddenly needed the sort of private information that could keep such figures in line.

CONTINUED...

http://m.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/nsa-surveillance-history-global-political-strategy-domestic-spying?page=2

PS: Read your excerpt, "None Dare Call It Treason." You are a remarkable scholar, Onyx Collie.