Palast - The Spies Who Shag Us [Bushco's private-sector KGB

[Vitruvius]

<sub-headline> The Times and USA Today have Missed the Bigger Story -- Again

by Greg Palast

I know your shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news. This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.

The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company, formed , called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts. Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and they've since expanded their ops at an explosive rate.

They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint. <SNIP>

I first ran across ChoicePoint in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc. And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply assuaged by the man the company elected.

And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope(s) to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States …linked to all the other information held by CP (ChoicePoint)" from medical to voting records. And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI. <SNIP>

And it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).

MORE at http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/06/05/con06189.html

[Peace Patriot]

1. As usual, Palast sees the bigger picture. On Enron's theft of $9 billion

from the state of Calif, he uncovered the meeting of Ken Lay, other Bushites and Schwarzenegger way back in May '01, to plan the takeover of Calif in order to ensure that Calif would never get its money back from Bush-Cheney's biggest donor, Enron. Davis got blamed for the loss of the money and consequent budget woes; they got a highly unusual "recall" ballot with 125 candidates on it and only one superstar actor; etc. etc.

And Palast called this one as well. I remember his pre-election article--he estimated that one million black voters had been purged from the voting rolls nationwide, using these data-mining and other techniques. That led me to reports of why prisons are located in underpopulated, white, rural areas. The prisoners--a high percentage of which are urban blacks--lose the right to vote, yet are STILL counted for purposes of Congressional representation--counted by the white rural community! The black prisoners (and others) are just counted bodies that ADD to the white rural clout in Congress, and to government aid, way out of proportion to their real numbers. Further, laws like "three strikes" and urban black poverty (lack of cash for lawyers) push the numbers of black voters who are removed from voter rolls by conviction for relatively minor (or, in my opinion, non-) crimes (drug possession, prostitution, etc.).

Anyway, thanks, Greg--for that heads up and enlightenment! We have systematic, nationwide racism in our ELECTION SYSTEM, as well as Bushite corporations now counting all the votes with 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code and virtually no audit/recount controls.

We can't really do anything about the former--or about domestic spying, or about any injustice--until we take care of the rigged voting machines. If you want your country back, join with others to....

Throw Diebold, ES&S and all election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

[mrdmk]

2. They are taking tax payers money while making the Constitution of the U.S.

WORTHLESS:nuke:

[The Backlash Cometh]

3. Has Choicepoint ever faced any repercussions for this obvious

election fraud? At least in the way of loss of credibility and loss of contracts?

[iconoclastNYC]

4. It's too bad that our leaders are clueless.

We really need a Fascism Prevention Act of 2006.

[PATRICK]

5. Adding the small one

to the BIG one. The big one is Palast's merciless probe into the workings of the wider net. But the Dems already dropped the ball on the Senate spying and eavesdropping into the e-mails by their colleagues across the hall. They hardly got the message much less reacted effectively against it. Now they are totally spied on all the time- like the rest of us.

The same in 2004. With a legion of lawyers and possession of the GOP playbook to a large extent they were incapable of stopping vote suppression and the other stuff. The e-voting fraud was and still is for the most part both invisible and non-vocalized. Now we see, logically, that this is a small sample of the total dictatorship descending easily over humanity like a new suit of clothes.

And if they want to nuke anyone, including us, or do anything at all, including planned enslavement and genocide(that barely covers the slaughter of all humans regardless of race color and creed but not social social standing) they have shown the total capacity to commit any act in the open they so desire. "They", being the top of the pyramid, now or in the blighted future.

Who needs a conspiracy "theory" now? No one. The reality of a vast and everlasting crime is simply upon us.