RAG RADIO / Thorne Dreyer : Jim Hightower Brings the Lowdown on 'Poopgate' and 'Tinkle-Down' Economics

Texas populist gadfly Jim Hightower at the studios of KOOP-FM in Austin, Texas, September 13, 2013. Photos by Roger Baker / The Rag Blog.

Rag Radio podcast:
Famed Texas populist commentator
and political gadfly, Jim Hightower

In 30 years, we’ve gone from Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down’ to the Koch Brothers’ ‘tinkle down’ economics. We are resurrecting the robber barons and imposing a plutocracy over our democracy.

By Thorne Dreyer / The Rag Blog / September 26, 2013

Texas populist writer, commentator, and political gadfly Jim Hightower was our guest on Rag Radio, Friday, September 13, 2013.

Rag Radio with Thorne Dreyer is a weekly syndicated radio program recorded at the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, a cooperatively-run all-volunteer community radio station in Austin, Texas.

Listen to or download the podcast of our September 13 interview with Jim Hightower here:


Texas progressive populist writer, public speaker, humorist, radio commentator, and political gadfly Jim Hightower was twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner and is a former editor of the Texas Observer.

He is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books including Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow; Thieves In High Places: They've Stolen Our Country And It's Time To Take It Back; If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates; and There's Nothing In the Middle Of the Road But Yellow Stripes and Dead Armadillos.

Jim Hightower broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried on more than 150 commercial and public stations, on the web, and on Radio for Peace International. He publishes a populist political newsletter, The Hightower Lowdown, which now has more than 135,000 subscribers, is the fastest growing political publication in America, and has received both the Alternative Press Award and the Independent Press Association Award for best national newsletter. His newspaper column is distributed nationally by Creators Syndicate.

'Tinkle-down' economics

Jim Hightower told the Rag Radio audience that “we have a greater share of our wealth going to the tiniest portion of our people than any time in the last century.”

“In 30 years,” he said, “we’ve gone from Ronald Reagan’s ‘trickle-down’ to the Koch Brothers’ ‘tinkle down’ economics.” According to Jim, “We are resurrecting the robber barons and imposing a plutocracy over our democracy.”

“This is a structural change,” he says. “this isn’t a recession, this isn’t a technical glitch in the system. Thie is deliberate. We’ve enthroned the corporate powers to rewrite the rules.”

And we have a Congress “that is so ideological that they don’t care. And so many of them really don’t know regular workaday people. They’re millionaires, most of them,” he said. “You’ve got both parties that are tied to the corporate money.”

Thanks to gerrymandering and the dominance of big money in electoral politics, the politicians “rig the system so that they keep getting elected.” The Republicans, who “have voted 40 times to repeal Obamacare," play to a “Republican tea party fringe that doesn’t represent 10 percent of the American people.”

They “ignore the real problems” like “joblessness and rampant underemployment,” and “play games with these phony political issues.”

Hightower faulted the corporate-run media. (“A reporter used to be a working stiff. They worked in rumpled clothes, went home to a working class neighborhood, drank at a bar named Joe.”)

We do have some strong progressive media, he said, citing the country’s numerous independent community radio stations, many of which air Hightower's commentary -- with special praise for Austin’s KOOP and Rag Radio -- and the Texas Observer. “And we’ve got voices like Rachel Maddow and Paul Krugman,” he said.

Texas pols -- and 'Poopgate'

On the show, Jim talked about the recent “flapdoodle” in the Texas legislature over abortion and women’s health that drew thousands of activists to the Texas Capitol and was highlighted by State Sen. Wendy Davis’ remarkable filibuster.

“It’s about abortion,” Jim said, “but it really is about power. Mostly men, wanting to go back to ‘Father Knows Best’ years, the 1950s, before women got uppity...” In this case, the dramatic citizen activism “defeated the Republican leadership and embarrassed them. And, quite honestly, frightened them.”

“It was a hoot,” Jim says, “to hear Rick Perry say, ‘It was a mob. Mob rule! Mob rule!' And (Lt. Gov. David) Dewhurst saying, ‘Socialists, socialists!’ One representatives even said we had terrorists in the Capitol.”

Jim wrote about the events at the Capitol in the Hightower Lowdown: “If you’ve never seen a pack of pompous state legislators fall into a panic, you’ve missed a scene of truly uproarious low comedy.”

And then there was ”Poopgate!”

According to Hightower, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst (“he’s such a prissy guy anyway, a multi-millionaire public servant who doesn’t like the public...) got spooked by all the women in the State Capitol building.

Dewhurst “had heard that they were going to bring tampons and other ‘feminine projectiles’ into the Senate chamber, to toss down on the floor,” Jim says. So he had the state troopers search ladies’ purses at the Capitol entrances and confiscate anything resembling a tampon.

And then, as if that wasn't enough, “Dewhurst claimed that they had also confiscated some 19 jars of feces and urine.” But, when pressed by the media, he couldn’t come up with any evidence. So the reporters asked the troopers at the Capitol gates, and they didn’t have a clue what Dewhurst was talking about. “They said, No, that they hadn’t seen any excrement -- except what was in the Lt. Governor’s memo!”

“It’s just astonishing,” Jim said. “The extremism that is loose. And they seem to think that this is leadership.” But, “not only the women who were there, but just people of good will recognize that and think, maybe we can do something. Because there was such a force there that can’t be denied.”

“Throughout our history, we’ve had to do a little screaming, and confrontation, and rebelling -- when the skids are greased and the system is rigged against people. Because that’s what happened that night.”

Whether or not Wendy Davis runs for governor, Hightower believes that real change is in the works for Texas politics. The long-dormant state Democratic Party is alive and kicking, he says, under the “vigorous and vibrant” leadership of new party chair Gilberto Hinojosa, who is committed to returning the party to grassroots organizing.

The Texas Democrats “got way too cozy with the lobbyists and with the money,” Jim says. “We had people sitting in the office down by the Capitol, just talking to each other.” Now the party has 20 organizers working in the field.

Concerning efforts at voter suppression, Hightower asked, “Why don’t Republicans want people to vote?” “We should make it an issue,” he said, “that these bozos are trying to keep people from voting in the United States of America!”

From left, Rag Radio host Thorne Dreyer, populist commentator Jim Hightower, and Rag Radio's Tracey Schulz.

Corporate trade scams and NSA eavesdropping

One issue that raises Hightower’s hackles is the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (a secretive and very controversial “nuclearized and supersized NAFTA” that would involve 11 nations, including China and Japan). “It’s not about free trade,” Jim Says. “It’s a corporate coup d’etat. Against us… It’s about enthroning corporate power.”

Jim says there’s strong opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership that's being organized by Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a "wonderful project that's been battling these issues for years." “We’ve defeated 10 of these kind of trade scams just in the last decade,” Jim says. “So people really will make a difference.”

“You know, Lyndon Johnson said, ‘You can’t make chicken salad out of chicken manure.' So, the more people know about this thing, the more that they’re smelling that manure.”

Jim is also enraged about the NSA’s massive eavesdropping program. “This is not just another entity that’s poking into our personal privacy and lives... this is a comprehensive violation of at least the first and fourth amendments, and possibly the fifth and sixth as well. And a violation of the privacy laws of the United States.”

“It’s one thing to use spooks to go chase down terrorists, which we certainly want them to do, but to then decide that the entire 330 million people of the United States of America are suspects, that’s another thing altogether.”

“There are 3 billion phone calls made in the United States every day. They get them all... These are not metadata, as they call them, these are profiles. They’re little pieces of us. And they draw a picture.”

They are “using these super-supercomputers, and using this fog of fear that was generated by the powers that be, using 9-ll, to take away our core rights.”

“Snowden, to me, has done a tremendous public service by revealing all this,” Jim said.

Also read "Jim Hightower and the 'Populist Moment'" on The Rag Blog from April 11, 2012, and listen to our earlier Rag Radio interview with Jim Hightower here.


Rag Radio is hosted and produced by Rag Blog editor Thorne Dreyer; Tracey Schulz is the show's engineer and co-producer.

Rag Radio has aired since September 2009 on KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas. Rag Radio is broadcast live every Friday from 2-3 p.m. (CDT) on KOOP and is rebroadcast on Sundays at 10 a.m. (EDT) on WFTE, 90.3-FM in Mt. Cobb, PA, and 105.7-FM in Scranton, PA. Rag Radio is now also aired on KPFT-HD3 90.1 -- Pacifica radio in Houston -- on Wednesdays at 1 p.m.

The show is streamed live on the web and, after broadcast, all Rag Radio shows are posted as podcasts at the Internet Archive.

Rag Radio is produced in association with The Rag Blog, a progressive Internet newsmagazine, and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation.

Rag Radio can be contacted at ragradio@koop.org.

[Thorne Dreyer, a pioneering Sixties underground journalist, edits The Rag Blog, hosts Rag Radio, and is a director of the New Journalism Project. Dreyer was an editor of The Rag in Austin and Space City! in Houston, was on the editorial collective of Liberation News Service (LNS) in New York, was general manager of Pacifica's KPFT-FM in Houston, and was a correspondent for the early Texas Monthly magazine. Dreyer can be contacted at editor@theragblog.com. Read more articles by and about Thorne Dreyer on The Rag Blog.]

Coming up on Rag Radio:
THIS FRIDAY, September 27, 2013: In their first father/daughter interview, newsman Dan Rather and Austin-based environmentalist Robin Rather.
Friday, October 4, 2013: Novelist Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross, set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

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Tom Hayden : Secrecy Protests Split American Elites

Image from ElectronicFrontierFoundation / Flickr.

Protests against secrecy
drive elites into debate

A virtual empire composed of distant and interconnected private and public elites contradicts representative democracy as virtually all Americans understand it.

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / July 29, 2013

Concerned citizens need to crack open the covers of C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite [1956] as the curtains are being ripped back from the new Surveillance State by whistleblowers, investigative reporters, and civil liberties lawyers.

Mills' classic book needs revision in light of the expanded use of technology but his survey of power is unrivaled to this day.

According to Mills' detailed research, the power elite was composed of the military and corporate hierarchies in combination with the executive branch of the state. Congress, he concluded, was relegated to the "middle levels" of power, except for the cooptation of the top leadership of both parties when needed to ratify executive decisions.

We saw this revealed in the extraordinary approval of the Wall Street bailout in 2008. We have seen the role of the elite on the Libya war, the cyber-attacks on Iran, the Long War's counterterrorism policy, and the implementation of the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force [AUMF].

It has been revealed that a secret and virtually parallel constitution has been written by the FISA Court in order to "legalize" this expanding power of the elite to obtain Big Data on the lives of ordinary citizens. The result, according to the New York Times' Eric Lichtblau is "almost a parallel supreme court." [NYT, July 6].

It is further revealed that the secret surveillance court known as FISA has been shaped by right-wing U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts. The FISA appointees therefore are "more likely to defer to government arguments that domestic spying programs are necessary." [Charles Savage, NYT, July 26]

In terms of the global economy, the secret negotiations of pro-corporate "trade" agreements with Europe and the Pacific Rim would complete the design of "the new world order" established largely beyond the reach of local, state, and congressional officials, not to mention unions and human rights groups [except for official "democracy promotion" programs aimed at Cuba, Venezuela, etc.].

A virtual empire composed of distant and interconnected private and public elites contradicts representative democracy as virtually all Americans understand it. Participatory democracy, as envisioned by John Dewey, Mills and the 1962 Port Huron Statement of SDS is contained, suppressed or, as during the 60s movements and today's Occupy struggle, appears occasionally as an oppositional uprising on the streets, the Internet, or the defiant actions of whistleblowers.

Thankfully, participatory democracy, even while sidelined, prevents total control by the power elite and at times causes contagious chain reactions. The state is the Titanic, public opposition the iceberg.

Opposition has been rising from the margins. Only 28 percent of Americans think Afghanistan is a war worth fighting, a percentage that likely will continue to drop, in nothing less than a public withdrawal from the official agenda. Nor is there popular support for U.S. intervention in Egypt or going to war with Iran. Popular opposition to the drone war is on the rise too.

The more the public learns about Big Brother obtaining Big Data, the more the public is troubled. What Mills called civil society, and which he hoped would become a live "democracy of publics," continues to boil up like a populist geyser.

But this opposition can only rise and flame out, unless the big institutions -- the Congress, courts, mainstream journalism -- are moved and divided in response to the simmerings. One of Mills' blind spots, since he wrote in the mid-50s, was the role that a "new Left" might play in challenging those institutions, since the Left in the 50s had been crushed by McCarthyism at home and Khrushev's revelations about the Soviet Union's internal repression.

At the first stirrings of protest by what Mills called "the young intelligencia" -- the Cuban revolution, the Aldermaston anti-nuclear marches, the black student sit-in movement -- Mills dashed off an enthusiastic "Letter to the New Left"... Then he died of a heart attack in 1962, one month before the Port Huron conference.

What we discovered in the Sixties, and what remains true today, is that effective grassroots protest can influence the institutions of power where those institutions depend on public support or consent. Differences between the "inside" and "outside" tend to blur when the outsiders become strong enough and enough insiders accept the need for reform.

This is what accounts for the remarkable 205-217 protest vote in the Republican-controlled House this week against the National Security Agency's secret collection of private phone call data. The battle was between the bipartisan Congressional establishment, backing the Obama/NSA program, and dissident House members from the libertarian Right and the civil liberties Liberals. The same fight may continue on the Senate floor if Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden teams up with Tea Party Sen. Rand Paul.

In part the drama was simply staged. Republican leader John Boehner surely could have rounded up the few votes needed to spike the NSA program. An identical scenario played out during the House debate on the Libyan war in 2011, when a near-majority voted to impose the War Powers Act against the will of the national security elite.

In both cases, the House establishment led by Boehner had no choice but to let their dissident members vent, in response to their district's public opinion, before blowing the whistle and herding most of them them back to business as usual.

While the drama last week illustrated Mills' thesis that the Congress has declined to a "middle level" of power, it also was a sign of how suspicion and critical public opinion can make it difficult for the power elite to secure its position.

When a constitutional crisis in the Sixties divided the executive and legislative branches, conservative intellectuals like Harvard's Samuel Huntington were condemning the "excess of democracy." Not long after, Lewis Powell wrote his famous memo outlining a secret strategy to reestablish corporate power over the state in the face of popular movement.

Here is a brief list of what had happened as a result of those "democratic excesses" (read: social movements taking matters into our own hands):

• The U.S. was defeated embarrassingly in the Indochina wars;
• Richard Nixon was driven from office for unconstitutional schemes to shut down whistleblowers [Ellsberg-Russo], jail anti-war and anti-racism "conspirators" (Chicago Eight, Harrisburg and Gainesville anti-war trials, Black Panther trials in New York and New Haven, etc.).
• Most important for today's crisis, the Congress passed the War Powers Resolution to rein in the imperial presidency, and held extensive hearings on domestic spying and counterintelligence operations by the CIA and FBI.

As a result of those protests and hearings led by Sen. Frank Church, in which the NSA's spying on 75,000 Americans was revealed, the present Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] was written and the Congressional intelligence committees were created. As "reforms."

After a significant run of some 40 years, in which vast conservative countermovements arose to block the progress of the Sixties (leading to the Reagan, Nixon, and Bush-Cheney eras), those 1975 reforms have run their course and need to be sent back to Congress for repairs.

Already the Congressional leadership is scheming quietly to placate the current opposition with reformist tinkering. Superficial reform, however, is unlikely to placate an opposition which now stretches from Congress to The New York Times and FOX News to the passionate supporters of Pfc. Bradley Manning.

While most of the public holds a Washington-centric picture of the unfolding conflict, it is important to realize that the underlying cause of the rift has been the skeptical resistance of many Americans, whether expressed in public opinion surveys or persistent grassroots protest.

If one looks at the electoral map, the chief Congressional opponents of the new surveillance state are from either progressive constituencies (Senators Wyden and Merkley from Oregon, Udall from Colorado, Conyers from Michigan, Nadler from Brooklyn, Sanders and Welch from Vermont, or from libertarian Tea Party enclaves where the John Birch Society once considered Dwight Eisenhower a communist and today believe that Obama is far worse).

Mills was prescient on one further point: that the power elite would attempt to globalize. Even at the height of the Cold War, Mills predicted a bureaucratic "convergence" between the two superpowers resulting in a bipolar dominance over other nations or blocs. The policy result of this convergence would become known as "detente," and was opposedby the Non-Aligned bloc of the Third World.

Detente eventually collapsed under pressure from those on the Right who demanded "rollback." But the "convergence" agenda may be reappearing between Obama's America and Putin's Russia, as illustrated in the quandary over the status of Edward Snowden.

Obama is threatening to derail the planned September summit with the Russians if Snowden is given protection in Moscow. Putin, angered by the U.S. role in Syria and Iran, is moving towards rapprochement with China but is clearly uncomfortable with giving protection to Snowden if it means a crisis with the US.

By contrast, at least three countries in the Third World -- Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Bolivia -- are offering refuge to Snowden despite threats from the State Department, and Ecuador already is protecting Julian Assange in its London consulate.

Since Obama is unlikely to back down, the question is whether Putin will embrace Snowden instead of additional "convergence" with the U.S. To Putin's left are Russians who want him to stand up for Russian sovereignty. And to Obama's right, of course, the entire Republican Party opposes "convergence"with Moscow and is hoping to undermine Obama's proposed nuclear arms agreement.

It's complicated. But the best map of power relations remains the one charted by Mills in 1956. The power elite can be divided in its quest for a new world order. Social and revolutionary movements contribute to causing those divisions. Unity between the outside movements and the more moderate elements of the elite can lead to significant shifts of power and policy, at least for a time.

One presidential election or one Supreme Court appointment can make a critical difference. So can contradictory populist movements of the Right and Left, when and if they unite. The revolts initiated by either anarchists and libertarians, or both, lead to crisis and reform, sometimes to the disappointment of the original catalysts. We are in such a time.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Tom Hayden : Is Obama Really in Control?

This plane carrying Bolivian President Evo Morales was forced to land in Vienna despite Obama's earlier comment that he "wouldn't scramble jets against a 29 year old hacker." Photo by Andres Gutierrez / AP.

Refs being 'worked'?
Does Obama control the State?

The executive branch has aided in the unaccountable growth of a Frankenstein-like Leviathan which now is beyond the control of its own makers, operating outside the levers of democratic oversight and control

By Tom Hayden / The Rag Blog / July 18, 2013

It seemed weird, off-handed, President Obama's comment that he "wouldn't scramble jets against a 29 year old hacker," just two days before the U.S. forced down a Bolivian plane carrying Evo Morales on the suspicion that Edward Snowden was smuggled aboard. Diplomatic hell broke loose, with Brazil, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and others all accusing the U.S. of violating their sovereignty.

With all the talk of Big Data, it's hard to believe that Snowden couldn't be detected enroute from the Moscow transit lounge to the departure gate for a Bolivian airliner. That aside, one wonders what if any was the connection between Obama's remark and the forcedown which subsequently happened.

Obama presumably was trying to squelch rumblings coming from within the national security state. After all, if some of the U.S. hardliners want Julian Assange, Snowden, and their ilk executed, or tried for treason before being executed, the same types might contemplate a Special Operation to render Snowden off a foreign airliner.

As for Evo Morales, I was told by a U.S. ambassador during the Clinton administration that he was a "very bad guy" who had tried to kill American diplomats, a good example of our intelligence demented..

The problem revealed by the incident is not a new one, and not for this president alone. Can we be confident that the president controls the permanent executive branch, especially the "intelligence" apparatus? Or is it not possible that key elements of the apparatus have been fabricating intelligence, pulling strings, "working the refs," boxing in the White House, asking forgiveness rather than permission, whatever one calls it, and running a foreign policy of their own?

If anyone is shocked by this, it's all happened before. Several presidents were threatened with blackmail by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover who ran what one U.S. senator called a "Gestapo-operation." John and Robert Kennedy had to go around their own generals and conspire with the Soviets to cool down the Cuban missile crisis when it was at the brink.

JFK circumvented the generals and CIA by fudging an agreement in Laos. Richard Nixon and the China Lobby foiled Lyndon Johnson's election-year plan for peace talks by getting the Saigon generals to hold out until after the election. Jimmy Carter was forced to keep diplomacy with Cuba secret from his own State Department negotiators in the late Seventies. Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars documents how generals Petraeus and McChrystal tried to trap the president into a "forever war."

And before all of them, President Eisenhower warned that, "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." [1961]

And now this: starting with the Bush era, the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court [FISA] has morphed into a de facto parallel Supreme Court writing and implementing a virtual constitution for the War on Terrorism era. This secret court, appointed in its entirety by the right-wing Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, has approved 1,800 surveillance orders during the past year alone, while rejecting none.

There is no adversary proceeding in this new equivalent of a Star Chamber. There are virtually no public findings. The FISA court has ruled, in secret proceedings, that the vacuuming up of "meta data" on many millions of citizens is a "special needs" exception to the Fourth Amendment ban on state searches and seizures without a warrant.

Some of the secret court's opinions are said to be nearly 100 pages in length, issued without adversarial proceedings and virtually beyond appeal. Just because Obama is a constitutional lawyer doesn't mean that he's devoted detailed attention to this runaway construction of a new constitution -- until something like the Snowden revelations force his attention.

"It has quietly become almost a parallel Supreme Court," according to Eric Lichtblau in The New York Times [July 7], providing a veritable new constitutional framework for every agency engaged in activities under the umbrella of "national security." A similar extra-constitutional project has been underway for decades to rewrite the rules of private marketplace governance in the era of corporate globalization.

Both thrusts, toward privatization and intelligence wars, represent a gradual movement towards a new legal framework for Empire which minimizes or circumvents democratic processes. The NSA plus the WTO are the "new world order" that George Bush I mused about.

Obama, who is responsible for this mushroom cloud of secrecy, seems occasionally to cry for help at his recognition that it's spiralling out of control. Since 2012, Obama has officially "welcomed" public conversation, debate, and Congressional drafting of a "new legal architecture" in order to "rein in" his growing imperial presidency and those which are likely to follow.

His inability to implement meaningful change, however, is a remarkable illustration of the limits of the presidency. There is no sign either of Congressional willingness to re-draft the 1973 War Powers Act to cover drones, secret wars like Libya, or the growth of executive-branch cyberwar. The federal courts are complicit in the private rewriting of the Fourth Amendment and the democratic guarantees of the Constitution.

It is not only the shadow of secrecy over democracy, but the apparent grip of secret forces in the executive branch over public policy. Last week the U.S. supported a military coup in Egypt in express violation of Congressional funding restrictions, and without public hearings. Last month, the President reiterated his five-year old pledge to close Guantanamo, get detainees off life-threatening hunger strikes, and repatriate many who already are cleared for release.

As of now, those straightforward orders have not been carried out. Someone is blocking them.

A secret coup hasn't fully happened yet, and may not, given the nature of American pluralism. But the executive branch has aided in the unaccountable growth of a Frankenstein-like Leviathan which now is beyond the control of its own makers, operating outside the levers of democratic oversight and control.

Obama's occasional comments welcoming a "conversation" may be seen as muted alarms. If he cannot "rein in" the new Imperial Presidency, a populist protest could be slowly building toward either an insurgency presidential campaign, an uprising, or both.

[Tom Hayden is a former California state senator and leader of Sixties peace, justice, and environmental movements. He currently teaches at Pitzer College in Los Angeles. His latest book is The Long Sixties. Hayden is director of the Peace and Justice Resource center and editor of The Peace Exchange Bulletin. Read more of Tom Hayden's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Russell : Big Brother in the Data Mines

Cover of the first Signet Classics edition of George Orwell's 1984. Image from Vintage Paperback Archive.

We're talking yottabytes here:  
Big Brother in the data mines

We’ve been living for some time in the world set out in Moore’s Law, which predicts that computing power will double every two years, a proposition that obviously has mathematical limits we have yet to reach.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / June 27, 2013

One of the television talking heads really hurt my feelings in a report the other night on Edward Snowden, the traitorous hero or heroic traitor who leaked the existence of PRISM, wholesale collection of data from the servers of various major players on the Internet. Not once but twice, he demanded to know how a 29-year-old high school dropout could become a computer jock for the National Security Agency with a top-secret clearance?

I was once an 18-year-old high school dropout who was a computer jock for the NSA (USAF branch) with a top-secret clearance. In the three years I worked up to my elbows in top secret intelligence, I can remember two items the leaking of which would have landed the news on the front pages along with the leaker in the pokey.

We were all told regularly and often what the consequences of revealing classified information would be. Would I have done that? I like to think I would if the public interest in the information clearly outweighed my own safety, but that circumstance never came up, so I can’t know. Before you spit your coffee on the keyboard, remember that the very oath every military person takes involves putting the interests of the country above your own.

Spying on the retail level has been part of war on this continent at least since the pueblos pulled off a sneak attack that sent the Spanish colonists all the way back to El Paso del Norte, licking their wounds.

Spying on the wholesale level awaited technology, not intent. Governments had always tried to gin up networks of informers, some of which became famous in history and did the job for a period of time. Scholars estimate that one in seven East Germans informed for the Stasi on some level. People, over time, seem to revert to their own values over those imposed by government, and so become less reliable as informers. People lack the discipline of computers.

During WWII, Bletchley Park began to move warfare into the digital age. Communication had for some time been by wire and by broadcast, and so intelligence became a contest between code makers and code breakers in, as the computer geeks say, real time.

One obvious method of code breaking is to archive and collate vast numbers of messages and look for patterns. This became possible by entrusting analysis to Alan Turing’s mathematics, which became the Allies’ ACE (“Automatic Computing Engine") in the hole.

Once the algorithms were written, the issue became how to capture and store mountains of communication data. We’ve been living for some time in the world set out in Moore’s Law, which predicts that computing power will double every two years, a proposition that obviously has mathematical limits we have yet to reach.

By the time the calendar turned over the date that gives the title to George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984, the technology was possible for Big Brother to be watching us. When the date whizzed by with no more notice than Y2K, some of us wondered whether the American people, like Winston Smith, had learned to love Big Brother?

Image from The Matrix.

Apparently, not all people share amorous attachment to the government, since the sales of Orwell’s novel have spiked with the revelations about PRISM.

Back to the Okie teenager who got his top-secret clearance in 1965. We learned our trade on computers that stored data in kilobytes. When we moved to intelligence, we were dealing with megabytes. There were rumors about gigabytes, like the computer in my home on which I compose this column. Today’s NSA is storing data in yottabytes. That is, a septillion bytes.

We are told PRISM collects “metadata,” not identifiable to individuals or even organizations. Numbers called to and from, length of call. Not content. Not even who made the call.

Excuse me, but how would it help catch terrorists if it could not be focused on individuals or organizations? Back when I did this, just about everything we had in the computer was from communications intercepts and aircraft sorties. Collating that told us all kinds of useful things about our adversaries.

The question how many data points it takes to focus on an individual is not one of opinion but one of mathematics, and the number of data points is directly related to the level of certainty we demand. In the case of cell phone metadata, there’s some evidence that a mere four hits on the same number can identify 95% of individuals.

Because published studies in scientific journals are limited, that could be wrong, but the fact remains that the question is not one of opinion, but of mathematics.

By cross-referencing telephone and Internet metadata with bank records, which are already in electronic form and do not require a search warrant to access, the NSA can discover things about you that your parents may not know.

We are told that the metadata can be accessed from the desktop computer of any analyst who has the proper clearance. You know, like the one I had at age 18? Let’s not give Big Brother too much credit for having his attention focused on us, but let’s not pretend that it’s impossible or that the right hand always knows what the left hand is doing when thousands of people have access to yottabytes of data.

Big Brother does not care about you, but he cared enough about Martin Luther King, Jr., to bug his motel room, a laughably primitive method. He cared enough about the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement to insert double agents, which is also kind of labor intensive and old fashioned.

If the United States is data mining on this level, what do you think China and Russia are doing? China in particular has pulled off some hacks into corporate databases that left me scratching my head.

This is not an argument to shut down PRISM, assuming that would be possible given the resources already invested in storage. Consider these words like a weather report, since, after all, the databases being mined were already in corporate hands before the government touched them. I’m unclear that maximizing shareholder value is a less dangerous imperative than maintaining a government in power.

“You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Government Lies and Secrecy Destroy Credibility

Whistleblower Edward Snowden. Image from MGN Online.

Government lies and
secrecy destroy credibility

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / June 20, 2013

When a high government official blatantly lies in testimony before Congress, it is rare that we learn of the lie as quickly as we did this past week. Sometimes, such misconduct takes decades to be revealed.

But thanks to whistleblower Edward Snowden, who once worked for the CIA and was, until recently, a civilian employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, a National Security Agency (NSA) private contractor, we now know of the lie.

In March, James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, boldly and knowingly lied in response to Sen. Ron Wyden’s question, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Clapper replied “No.”

When Snowden released proof of vast electronic spying on all Americans who use telephones and the internet, Clapper’s lie became obvious. However, President Obama has made no move to oust Clapper for his lie or take other corrective action.

Actually, Clapper’s demeanor during and immediately after the lie made me suspicious from the beginning -- his rapid eye-blinking and nervous extended spot-rubbing of a spot on his bald head are behaviors that have been identified by some psychological research as indications of lying.

But I did not know until the Guardian published Glenn Greenwald’s essay on his interview with Snowden that my suspicions were confirmed. Even more remarkable to me is that Clapper knew he would be asked Wyden’s question the day before he testified, and still he lied.

Now, Greenwald and Rep. Loretta Sanchez, who has been briefed in a classified meeting about the extent of the National Security Agency’s electronic spying on Americans, have both confirmed that what has been revealed so far by Snowden is just the “tip of the iceberg” regarding NSA’s domestic electronic spying.

The Washington Post has now reported that actual phone conversations have been listened to, and emails have been read, all without specific judicial approval. Sen. John Tester, a member of the Homeland Security Committee, has said that he was not aware of the electronic spying that Snowden revealed.

Ever since this story broke, we have been bombarded by columns and essays from various pundits and arguments by electronic spying supporters that the real problem is the character, personality, and motivation of Edward Snowden. Thanks to political columnist Juan Cole, we have a list of ways Snowden will be smeared in order to discredit him with the public.

Snowden will be labeled a traitor and a defector (for going to Hong Kong); his mental health will be questioned; it will be claimed that he didn’t understand the spying program he revealed; his accusations will be called untrue; charges Snowden did not make will be labeled incorrect (attack by misdirection or a “red herring”); claims will be made that the spying is legal (which can’t be confirmed because the courts will not allow anyone standing to sue); minor parts of the allegations may be acknowledged to divert attention from the major intrusion on Americans’ lives; it will be claimed that Snowden has given aid and comfort to terrorists; and since this is a democracy we can always have a debate about the spying (although meaningful debate is impossible with regard to a secret program).

Already, every one of Cole’s points have been used by some writer or politician to attack Snowden.

Similar propaganda was directed at Bradley Manning, Julian Assange (a conduit of whistleblowing information through Wikileaks), and most other whistleblowers and reporters who have revealed unsavory, if not illegal, secret government actions.

Perhaps the most thorough personal attack on Snowden, bearing out Cole’s prognostications, was by New York Times columnist and PBS NewsHour commentator David Brooks. What seems to bother Brooks more than the real or imagined events of Snowden’s life, is that Snowden has no respect for authority or loyalty to authority.

Brooks seems to believe that such respect and loyalty are bestowed on government like a divine right of kings, mainly because respect and loyalty are essential for a democratic society to function properly. Brooks doesn’t believe that respect and loyalty must be earned by the government, just as it must be by individuals.

When members of Congress don’t know the extent of our government’s activities, especially those activities that appear to violate our constitutional rights, the system of checks and balances has failed, and trust in our government is nearly impossible for many Americans. But when the source of our distrust comes by way of whistleblowers, the American public seems confused. Even so, a Reuter’s poll shows that more Americans approve of Snowden’s actions than disapprove.

From my limited personal experience with whistleblowing, I have concluded that the institutional culture of large organizations in both the private and public spheres is not to make waves and to protect colleagues, as well as higher-ups. This trait is so ingrained that there is often little chance that anything will be done about wrong-doing that is reported within an organization. Worse, the wrong-doing will not become known by the public.

Bradley Manning seemed to know what I have figured out from my limited experience with corrupt authority -- the only way to get the information about U.S. atrocities to the people of the U.S. is to bypass the military and the politicians entirely.

Without Manning’s actions, we would not know how eager those with their fingers on the triggers were to kill innocent Iraqi civilians and members of the news media. We would not know how we were conducting the Middle East wars. We would not know our government’s policies and practices nearly as well as we know them now.

Manning has admitted to what he did, but the government wants to convict him of aiding the enemy -- treason. The charge would be true if the American public were the enemy. Article Three, Section Three, of the U.S. Constitution, appears to require collaboration with an actual wartime enemy of the United States (though the Supreme Court has yet to clarify this matter).

Manning released his information to the media, and it was published by such notable news purveyors as The New York Times and The Washington Post. In truth, the government was embarrassed by Manning’s disclosures and had to explain itself, which it has not been able to do successfully.

Manning’s disclosures could be termed "treason-by-embarrassment." No enemy received a tactical or strategic advantage by seeing video of the intentional murder of innocents by Americans. If al-Qaeda got some propaganda value from the release, it is of little more value than the entire immoral Afghanistan-Iraq-Pakistan-Yemen-Somalia debacle we call our War on Terror.

During Clapper’s hearing, Sen. Diane Feinstein sat silent as Clapper lied, and she has defended him since by attacking Snowden, as have many other members of Congress and the administration. Even serial liar Dick Cheney has weighed in on the electronic spying. Cheney’s position is that if elected officials in Congress and the administration approved the actions, we should trust that they are appropriate and legal. No surprise there.

But Clapper’s perjury, the propaganda attack on Snowden and the other whistleblowers, and the continuing cover-up by the administration and the Congress make it difficult to trust the government. It has little credibility, which is unfortunately true of most governments that prefer keeping the people in the dark about what the government is really doing.

Congress has oversight responsibilities, but its members would rather look into made-up scandals to hurt political opponents than keep tabs on policies that can harm the country and its people, and violate the Constitution. Most Americans have good reason to believe that the Fourth Amendment protects us from governments that engage in secret, unaccountable searches and seizures:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

And the American people assume that they are protected further by the Fifth Amendment, which provides in pertinent part: “No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

When the government engages in massive electronic spying on its citizens on a scale that rivals or exceeds the abandoned Total Information Awareness program adopted after 9/11, the liberty we have accepted as our birthright has been taken from us without due process. All three branches of government -- legislative, administrative, and judicial -- have worked together to keep us from finding out how much our rights have been abused by keeping the information secret.

As Glenn Greenwald has written,

...the Obama DOJ has repeatedly thwarted efforts by the ACLU, EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] and others to obtain judicial rulings on their legality and constitutionality by invoking procedural claims of secrecy, immunity and standing. If Democrats are so sure these spying programs are legal, why has the Obama DOJ been so eager to block courts from adjudicating that question?

One of the most troubling aspects of what has happened to us over the last nearly twelve years, is that we have acquiesced to this violation of basic rights, largely out of fear of another terrorist attack under the mistaken belief that only by diminishing our rights can we be safe.

Benjamin Franklin’s statement made in the Revolutionary period seems apt for this situation: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

But when none of the three branches of our government will allow us even to seek a remedy for apparent rights violations, perhaps it is unfair to use Franklin’s words to suggest that “we the people” have acquiesced to our loss of liberty.

Once again, the ACLU is attempting to obtain a court ruling on the constitutionality of NSA’s electronic spying. Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU deputy legal director, had this to say about the lawsuit the ACLU filed last week:

This dragnet program is surely one of the largest surveillance efforts ever launched by a democratic government against its own citizens. It is the equivalent of requiring every American to file a daily report with the government of every location they visited, every person they talked to on the phone, the time of each call, and the length of every conversation. The program goes far beyond even the permissive limits set by the Patriot Act and represents a gross infringement of the freedom of association and the right to privacy.

Along with many Americans, I am worried about another terrorist attack in the U.S. But unlike New York Times columnists Tom Friedman and Bill Keller, I don’t find the NSA’s activities “well-regulated” when data mining has allowed the government to access anyone’s phone conversations or email communication without obtaining a warrant from an appropriate court -- even the almost-always-obliging FISA court.

And I suggest that the government’s electronic spying is different from commercial data-gathering: there is a difference between having a corporation’s computer, using an algorithm, determine our buying interests and showing us an advertisement for a product we may be interested in buying, and allowing the NSA to read our emails and listen to our phone conversations based on its access to data it acquires directly from the servers of Yahoo, Google, and other internet sources without participation by those companies.

This activity is an unprecedented breach of our constitutional rights to privacy and freedom of speech.

It is time we elected people to office who will put a stop to such activity, or our government will never again be trusted, or be worthy of our trust. A government that fights accountability at every turn cannot be trusted.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Jack A. Smith : Big Brother's Getting Bigger

Another sign of the times. Image from City Limits.
Our civil liberties under attack:
Big Brother's getting even bigger

Abuses of civil liberties are taking place with increasing frequency, but the public outcry has mainly been muted, an enticement for the authorities to go even further.

By Jack A. Smith / The Rag Blog / April 18, 2012

Government surveillance and attacks on the privacy of American citizens were bad enough under the Bush regime but they are getting even worse during the Obama years.

In addition to his retaining President George W. Bush's many excesses, such as the Patriot Act, new information about the erosion of civil liberties emerges repeatedly during the era of President Barack Obama from the federal government, the courts, and various police forces.

The Supreme Court added judicial insult to personal injury April 2 when it ruled 5-4 that jail officials may strip-search anyone arrested for any offense, even a trifle, as they are being incarcerated, even if they are awaiting a hearing or trial. The four ultraconservative judges were joined by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy.

According to the ACLU's Steven R. Shapiro, the "decision jeopardizes the privacy rights of millions of people who are arrested each year and brought to jail, often for minor offenses. Being forced to strip naked is a humiliating experience that no one should have to endure absent reasonable suspicion."

A day before the strip-search outrage, the New York Times reported that

law enforcement tracking of cellphones... has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show... One police training manual describes cellphones as "the virtual biographer of our daily activities," providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.

Other abuses of civil liberties are taking place with increasing frequency, but the public outcry has mainly been muted, an enticement for the authorities to go even further. On March 23, the American Civil Liberties Union reported:

The Obama administration has extended the time the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) can collect and hold on to records on U.S. citizens and residents from 180 days to five years, even where those people have no suspected ties to terrorism. The new NCTC guidelines, which were approved by Attorney General Eric Holder, will give the intelligence community much broader access to information about Americans retained in various government databases...

Authorizing the "temporary" retention of non-terrorism-related citizens and resident information for five years essentially removes the restraint against wholesale collection of our personal information by the government, and puts all Americans at risk of unjustified scrutiny. Such unfettered collection risks reviving the Bush administration's Total Information Awareness program, which Congress killed in 2003.

The news, evidently, was underwhelming. Tom Engelhardt wrote April 4:

For most Americans, it was just life as we've known it since September 11, 2001, since we scared ourselves to death and accepted that just about anything goes, as long as it supposedly involves protecting us from terrorists. Basic information or misinformation, possibly about you, is to be stored away for five years -- or until some other attorney general and director of national intelligence thinks it's even more practical and effective to keep you on file for 10 years, 20 years, or until death do us part -- and it hardly made a ripple.

A week earlier, new information was uncovered about Washington's clandestine interpretation of the Patriot Act. Most Americans are only aware of the public version of the Bush Administration's perfidious law passed by Congress in a virtual panic soon after 9/11. But the White House and leaders of Congress and the Justice department have a secret understanding of the Patriot Act's wider purposes and uses.

Alex Abdo of the ACLU's National Security Project revealed March 16:

The government has just officially confirmed what we've long suspected: there are secret Justice Department opinions about the Patriot Act's Section 215, which allows the government to get secret orders from a special surveillance court (the FISA Court) requiring Internet service providers and other companies to turn over "any tangible things." Just exactly what the government thinks that phrase means remains to be seen, but there are indications that their take on it is very broad.

Late last night we received the first batch of documents from the government in response to our Freedom of Information Act request for any files on its legal interpretation of Section 215. The release coincided with the latest in a string of strong warnings from two senators about how the government has secretly interpreted the law. According to them both, the interpretation would shock not just ordinary Americans, but even their fellow lawmakers not on the intelligence committees.

Although we're still reviewing the documents, we're not holding our breath for any meaningful explanation from the government about its secret take on the Patriot Act.

The Senators involved were not identified, but they were Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), both of whom went public about the secret Patriot Act last May. Wyden declared at the time: “When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the Patriot Act, they will be stunned and they will be angry.” Udall echoed, “Americans would be alarmed if they knew how this law is being carried out.”

The Obama Administration has not sought to mitigate much less abandon the Patriot Act. Indeed, in the 10 ½ years since the act was passed the law has only become stronger, paving the way for other laws assaulting civil liberties and increasing government surveillance.

Three months ago, for example, Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) containing a sweeping worldwide indefinite detention law allowing the U.S. military to jail foreigners and U.S. citizens without charge or trial.

Just last month, Wired magazine revealed details about how the National Security Agency "is quietly building the largest spy center in the country in Bluffdale, Utah."

Investigative reporter James Bamford wrote that the NSA established listening posts throughout the U.S. to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within America or overseas. The Utah surveillance center will contain enormous databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency. The NSA previously denied domestic spying was taking place.

In his article Bamford quoted a former NSA official who "held his thumb and forefinger close together" and said: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

The Associated Press has been dogging the New York City police department for several months to uncover its domestic spying activities. On March 23 it reported that "Undercover NYPD officers attended meetings of liberal political organizations [for years] and kept intelligence files on activists who planned protests around the country, according to interviews and documents that show how police have used counterterrorism tactics to monitor even lawful activities." Some of these snooping activities took place far from New York -- in New Orleans in one case.

Commenting on the new guidelines allowing Washington "to retain your private information for five years," the satirical Ironic Times commented March 26: "If you're guilty of no crimes, never owed money, don't have a name similar to that of someone who has been in trouble or owed money and there are absolutely no computer glitches in the government's ancient computer system during the next five years, then you have nothing to worry about."

The American people, of course, have a lot to worry about since both ruling political parties are united in favor of deeper penetration into the private lives and political interests of U.S. citizens. The only recourse for the people is much intensified activism on behalf of civil liberties.

[Jack A. Smith was editor of the Guardian -- for decades the nation's preeminent leftist newsweekly -- that closed shop in 1992. Smith now edits the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter, where this article was also posted. Read more articles by Jack A. Smith on The Rag Blog.]

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Darth Vader Redux : Cheney and the CIA's 'Executive Assassination Ring'

President George W. Bush and George J. Tenet, then director of the CIA, meet at the agency headquarters in 2001, the year the secret program began. Photo by Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP / Washington Post.
Dick Cheney and the CIA:
The hits just keep on coming

By mcjoan / July 14, 2009

CIA linked to Bhutto's murder? Video Below.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the secret CIA program Dick Cheney ordered kept from Congress was aimed at capturing and killing al Qaeda members.

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn't become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it.

In 2001, the CIA also examined the subject of targeted assassinations of al Qaeda leaders, according to three former intelligence officials. It appears that those discussions tapered off within six months. It isn't clear whether they were an early part of the CIA initiative that Mr. Panetta stopped.

Those discussions must have "tapered off" when Cheney decided that it was more important to start torturing detainees to get false intelligence to justify an invasion of Iraq. And then of course, the actual invasion of Iraq, which pretty much ended any real effort to fight al Qaeda--the enemy actually responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

This report contradicts other reporting that the program was "an 'on-again, off-again' attempt to create a new intelligence capability and said it was related to the collection of information on suspected terrorists that was instituted after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks." If true, it goes far beyond intelligence collection. It also circles us back to the speculation that arose when the story first broke that the program might be related to Sy Hersh's allegations of an "executive assassination ring" that reported to Cheney.

That's one possibility, but it raises more questions, as Zachary Roth details. Would the reaction of Panetta and the Democrats be warranted by this program?

Perhaps most importantly, a program, launched immediately after September 11 to capture or kill top al Qeada operatives just doesn't seem sufficiently radioactive to have provoked the kerfuffle it has. To be sure, Congress outlawed targeted CIA assassinations in the 1970s in response to the excesses of 50s and 60s, and the issue played a key role in the move during the same period to give Congress greater powers to oversee the agency. And if the program allowed CIA to act without the consent or knowledge of liaison services in the countries where the targets were located, that's obviously a big deal.

Still, the US military has openly been trying to get Osama Bin Laden and other top Qaeda leaders "dead or alive" since shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Would CIA involvement in that effort be so explosive that it would not only need to be kept from Congress in the first place, but would also have been shut down by Panetta as soon as he learned about it?

By the same token, it was Democratic lawmakers who brought the issue into the news last week by complaining that they had for years been kept in the dark on the unidentified program. Would they have chosen to initiate that spat when it seems to allow them to be portrayed as opposing an effort to hunt down al Qaeda terrorists?

Or, was it something else entirely? TIME says maybe domestic spying:

[T]wo former ranking CIA officials have told TIME that there's another equally plausible possibility: The program could have required the Agency to spy on Americans. Domestic surveillance is outside the CIA's purview -– it's usually the FBI's job –- and it's easy to see why Cheney would have wanted to keep it from Congress.

Both officials say they were never told what was in the program, and that they're only making calculated guesses. But their theory gibes with other reports, quoting ex-CIA officials, that say the program had to do with intelligence collection, not assassinations.

"People may want this to be about hit squads bumping off shady Saudis in Geneva, but that's very unlikely," says one official. "More likely, it was a plan to spy on some suspicious American citizens or organizations, without telling the FBI."

The IGs' report released last week demonstrated that there was a greater CIA involvement in the NSA warrantless wiretapping scheme than was previously known, but did it go beyond threat assessments to its own spying program? You couldn't put it past either the CIA or Cheney.

Source / Daily Kos

CIA linked to Bhutto's murder?



Thanks to Carl Davidson / The Rag Blog

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Obama Administration Will Continue Massive Secret Budgetary Outlays

“The Black Hole” NSA headquarters, Ft. Meade, Maryland.
Big Increases for Intelligence and Pentagon “Black” Programs in 2010
By Tom Burghardt / May 13, 2009

Continuing along the dark path marked out by his predecessors in the Oval Office, President Barack Obama’s Defense and Intelligence budget for Fiscal Year 2010 will greatly expand the reach of unaccountable agencies–and the corporate grifters whom they serve.

According to Aviation Week, “the Pentagon’s ‘black’ operations, including the intelligence budgets nested inside it, are roughly equal in magnitude to the entire defense budgets of the UK, France or Japan, and 10 per cent of the total.”

Yes, you read that correctly. The “black” or secret portions of the budget are almost as large as the entire defense outlays of America’s allies, hardly slouches when it comes to feeding their own militarist beasts. The U.S. Air Force alone intends to spend approximately $12 billion on “black” programs in 2010 or 36 percent of its entire research and development budget. Aviation Week reveals:

Black-world procurement remains dominated by the single line item that used to be called “Selected Activities,” resident in the USAF’s “other procurement” section. This year’s number stands just above $16 billion. In inflation-adjusted terms, that’s 240 per cent more than it was ten years ago.

On the operations side, secret spending has risen 8 percent over last year, to just over $15 billion–equivalent to more than a third of Air Force operating costs.

What does it all go for? In simple terms, we don’t know. It is apparent that much if not all of the intelligence community is funded through the black budget: for example, an $850 million USAF line item is clearly linked to reconnaissance satellites. But even so, the numbers are startling–and get more so year by year. (Bill Sweetman, “Black budget blows by $50 billion mark,” Aviation Week, May 7, 2009)

How’s that for change! The Register gives a break down of the numbers for added emphasis:

1) Mainstream US armed forces $490bn-odd

2) UK armed forces $60bn

3) Chinese armed forces $58bn

4) French armed forces $54bn

5) “Black” US forces $50bn+

6) Japanese Self-Defence forces $44bn

While the American government refuses to disclose the CIA or NSA’s budget, “both the Agency and other non-military spooks do get money of their own. Some of this is spent on military or quasi-military activities,” The Register reports.

Toss in the world-wide deployment of CIA and U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) paramilitary operatives hidden among a welter of Special Access Programs (SAPs) classified above top secret and pretty soon we’re talking real money!

One such program may have been Dick Cheney’s “executive assassination ring” disclosed by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh during a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota in March.

And should pesky investigators from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) have the temerity to probe said “executive assassination ring,” or other DoD “black” programs well, their Inspector General’s had better think again!

According to the whistleblowing security and intelligence website Cryptome, a May 8, 2009 letter from Susan Ragland, GAO Director of Financial Management and Assurance to Diane Watson (D-CA), Chairwoman of the House Committee on Government Management, Organization and Procurement, lays down the law in no uncertain terms to Congress.

Ms. Ragland wrote: “the IG Act authorizes the heads of six agencies to prohibit their respective IGs from carrying out or completing an audit or investigation, or from issuing any subpoena if the head determines that such prohibition is necessary to prevent either the disclosure of certain sensitive information or significant harm to certain national interests.”

Neat, isn’t it! Under statutory authority granted the Executive Branch by congressional grifters, Congress amended the IG Act “to establish the Department of Defense (DOD) IG and placed the IG under the authority, direction, and control of the Secretary of Defense with respect to audits or investigations or the issuance of subpoenas that require access to certain information.”

What information may be withheld from public scrutiny? Ms. Ragland informs us: “Specifically, the Secretary of Defense may prohibit the DOD IG from initiating, carrying out, or completing such audits or investigations or from issuing a subpoena if the Secretary determines that the prohibition is necessary to preserve the national security interests of the United States.” (emphasis added)

The same restrictions to the IG Act that apply to the Defense Department are similarly operative for the Departments of the Treasury, Homeland Security, Justice, the U.S. Postal Service (!), the Federal Reserve Board, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Talk about veritable mountains of dirty laundry–and “black” programs–that can be hidden here!

Space-Based Spies

Among the items nestled within the dark arms of Pentagon war planners is a program called “Imagery Satellite Way Ahead,” a joint effort between “the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense designed to revamp the nation’s constellation of spy satellites,” Congressional Quarterly reports.

As Antifascist Calling revealed in several investigative pieces in June, October and November 2008, America’s fleet of military spy satellites are flown by the secretive National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

According to the agency’s own description, “The NRO is a joint organization engaged in the research and development, acquisition, launch and operation of overhead reconnaissance systems necessary to meet the needs of the Intelligence Community and of the Department of Defense. The NRO conducts other activities as directed by the Secretary of Defense and/or the Director of National Intelligence.”

As investigative journalist Tim Shorrock revealed in his essential book, Spies for Hire, some ninety-five percent of NRO employees are contractors working for defense and security firms. Indeed, as Shorrock disclosed, “with an estimated $8 billion annual budget, the largest in the IC, contractors control about $7 billion worth of business at the NRO, giving the spy satellite industry the distinction of being the most privatized part of the Intelligence Community.”

While the Office’s website is short on information, some of the “other activities” alluded to by NRO spooks include the Department of Homeland Security’s National Applications Office (NAO).

As I wrote in October, the NAO will coordinate how domestic law enforcement and “disaster relief” agencies such as FEMA use satellite imagery (IMINT) generated by spy satellites. But based on the available evidence, hard to come by since these programs are classified above top secret, the technological power of these military assets are truly terrifying–and toxic for a democracy.

DHS describes the National Applications Office as “the executive agent to facilitate the use of intelligence community technological assets for civil, homeland security and law enforcement purposes.” As Congressional Quarterly reveals, the “classified plan would include new, redesigned ‘electro-optical’ satellites, which collect data from across the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as the expanded use of commercial satellite imagery. Although the cost is secret, most estimates place it in the multibillion-dollar range.”

How these redesigned assets will be deployed hasn’t been announced. The more pertinent issue is whether or not DHS, reputedly a civilian agency but one which answers to the militarized Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), will position these assets to illegally spy on Americans. The available evidence is they will.

DHS avers that “homeland security and law enforcement will also benefit from access to Intelligence Community capabilities.” With Pentagon “black” programs already costing taxpayers tens of billions of dollars the question remains, with NAO as the “principal interface” between American spooks, DHS bureaucrats and law enforcement, who will oversee NAO’s “more robust access to needed remote sensing information to appropriate customers”?

Certainly not Congress. Investigative journalist Siobhan Gorman writing in The Wall Street Journal documented last year, that despite a highly-critical June 2008 study by the Congressional Research Service (CRS), Congress partially-funded the program “in a little debated $634 billion spending measure.”

Indeed, a fully-operational NAO now provides federal, state and local officials “with extensive access to spy-satellite imagery–but no eavesdropping–to assist with emergency response and other domestic-security needs, such as identifying where ports or border areas are vulnerable to terrorism.” But as CRS investigators wrote:

Members of Congress and outside groups have raised concerns that using satellites for law enforcement purposes may infringe on the privacy and Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. persons. Other commentators have questioned whether the proposed surveillance will violate the Posse Comitatus Act or other restrictions on military involvement in civilian law enforcement, or would otherwise exceed the statutory mandates of the agencies involved. (Richard A. Best Jr. and Jennifer K. Elsea, “Satellite Surveillance: Domestic Issues,” Congressional Research Service, June 27, 2008)

While these serious civil liberties’ issues have apparently been swept under the carpet, huge funding outlays by Congress for Pentagon’s “black” budget operations indicate that President Obama’s promises of “change” in how “government does business” is so much hot-air meant to placate the rubes.

Driven by a Corporatist Agenda

Wholesale spying by the American government on its citizens as numerous investigators have uncovered, is aided and abetted by a host of well-heeled corporate grifters in the defense, intelligence and security industries. These powerful, and influential, private players in the Military-Industrial-Security Complex are largely unaccountable; it can be said that America’s intelligence and security needs are driven by firms that benefit directly from the Pentagon’s penchant for secrecy.

Federal Computer Week reported in April that the program to revamp America’s spy satellites “has the backing of the Obama administration, and the program is expected to win congressional approval, according to a senior intelligence official.”

The same anonymous “senior official” told the publication, “given the backing of the Defense Department, ODNI and the Obama administration, lawmakers are expected to approve the plan.” And as with other “black” programs, the cost is classified but is expected to run into the billions; a veritable windfall for enterprising defense corporations.

The electro-optical satellite modernization program involves building new satellites that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) would operate and expanding the use of imagery from commercial providers, according to a statement the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released April 7. Under the plan, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency would continue to integrate imagery products for government customers. (Ben Bain, “Spy satellite tally could increase,” Federal Computer Week, April 8, 2009)

While no decision has been reached on the “acquisition approach for the program,” ODNI and NRO “would oversee the acquisition strategy for the new government-built satellites and a contract would likely be awarded within months.”

In a toss-off statement to justify the enormous outlay of taxpayer dollars for the new initiative, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, said last month, “When it comes to supporting our military forces and the safety of Americans, we cannot afford any gaps in collection.” Or perhaps “any gaps in collection” on Americans. As Tim Shorrock revealed,

The plans to increase domestic spying are estimated to be worth billions of dollars in new business for the intelligence contractors. The market potential was on display in October at GEOINT 2007, the annual conference sponsored by the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation (USGIF), a non-profit organization funded by the largest contractors for the NGA. During the conference, which took place in October at the spacious Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center in downtown San Antonio, many companies were displaying spying and surveillance tools that had been used in Afghanistan and Iraq and were now being re-branded for potential domestic use. (”Domestic Spying, Inc.,” CorpWatch, November 27, 2007)

Indeed, according to Shorrock when the NAO program was conceived in 2005, former ODNI director Michael McConnell “turned to Booz Allen Hamilton of McLean, Virginia–one of the largest contractors in the spy business. The company was tasked with studying how intelligence from spy satellites and photoreconnaissance planes could be better used domestically to track potential threats to security within the U.S.”

Tellingly, McConnell was a senior vice president with the spooky firm for a decade. Booz Allen Hamilton was acquired by the private equity firm The Carlyle Group in a 2008 deal worth $2.54 billion. In addition to Booz Allen Hamilton, other giant defense and security corporations involved in running Homeland Security’s National Applications Office include the scandal-tainted British firm BAE Systems, ManTech, Boeing and L-3 Communications.

Among the firms in the running to land ODNI/NRO new spy satellite contracts are: BAE, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. All of these corporations according to the Project on Government Oversight’s (POGO) Federal Contractor Mismanagement Database (FCMD) have “histories of misconduct such as contract fraud and environmental, ethics, and labor violations.”

Unsurprisingly, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE and Northrop Grumman lead the pack in “total instances of misconduct” as well as fines levied by the federal government for abusive practices and outright fraud.

Conclusion

Unaccountable federal agencies and corporations will continue the capitalist “security” grift, particularly when it comes to “black” programs run by the Department of Defense and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Despite a documented history of serious ethical and constitutional breeches, these programs will persist and expand well into the future. While the Obama administration has said it favors government transparency, it has continued to employ the opaque methods of its predecessors.

From the use of the state secrets privilege to conceal driftnet surveillance of Americans, to its refusal to launch an investigation–and prosecution–of Bush regime torture enablers and war criminals, the “change” administration instead, has delivered “more of the same.”

[Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, his articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily and Pacific Free Press. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press.]

Source / Dissident Voice

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