This page has been archived and commenting is disabled.
5 Surprising Facts About Spying In America
Here are 5 surprising facts about spying in America.
We understand if some of this sounds far-fetched. But take a look for yourself, and see if you can disprove these claims.
1: Cheney and Rumsfeld Pushed for Warrantless Wiretaps in the '70s
Dick
Cheney, Donald Rumseld and other government officials who held high
positions in the George W. Bush administration pushed for wiretaps
without approval by a judge ... in the 1970s.
2: Massive Spying on Americans Began Before 9/11
You know about the government's massive program of spying on Americans which has been justified as a necessary response to 9/11?
Whistleblowers from major telecommunications companies have testified that the program began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here).
3: U.S. and Allied Intelligence Heard the 9/11 Hijackers Plans from Their Own Mouths
The 9/11 hijackers were largely unknown prior to that horrible event, right?
Actually, U.S. and allied intelligence services heard a lot from the hijackers' own mouths prior to 9/11:
- An
FBI informant hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000.
Specifically, investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered
that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two
hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the
informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown
location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking
maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House. As the New
York Times notes:
Senator
Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of
covering up evidence . . ..The accusation stems from the
Federal Bureau of Investigation's refusal to allow investigators for a
Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to
interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers.
- According to Le Monde, the intelligence services of America's close ally France and of other governments had infiltrated the highest levels of Al-Qaeda's camps, and actually listened to the hijackers' debates about which airlines' planes should be hijacked, and allied intelligence services also intercepted phone conversations between Al-Qaeda members regarding the attacks
- According to journalist Christopher Ketcham, America's close ally Israel tracked the hijackers' every move prior to the attacks, and sent agents to film the attack on the World Trade Centers
- The National Security Agency and the FBI were each independently listening in on the phone calls between the supposed mastermind of the attacks and the lead hijacker. Indeed, the FBI built its own antenna in Madagascar specifically to listen in on the mastermind's phone calls
- According to various sources, on the day before 9/11, the mastermind told
the lead hijacker "tomorrow is zero hour" and gave final approval for
the attacks. The NSA intercepted the message that day and the FBI was
likely also monitoring the mastermind's phone calls
- Shortly before 9/11, the NSA also intercepted multiple phone calls to the United States from Bin Laden's chief of operations
- The CIA and the NSA had been intercepting phone calls by the hijackers for years (see also this)
- According to the Sunday Herald, two days before 9/11, Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her "In two days, you're going to hear big news and you're not going to hear from me for a while.” U.S. officials later told CNN
that “in recent years they've been able to monitor some of bin Laden's
telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time
was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and
sometimes recorded." Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors,
NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking
to his stepmother.
- And according to CBS News,
at 9:53 a.m on 9/11, just 15 minutes after the hijacked plane had hit
the Pentagon, "the National Security Agency, which monitors
communications worldwide, intercepted a phone call from one of Osama bin
Laden's operatives in Afghanistan to a phone number in the former
Soviet Republic of Georgia", and secretary of Defense Rumsfeld learned
about the intercepted phone call in real-time (if the NSA monitored and transcribed phone calls in real-time on 9/11, that implies that it did so in the months leading up to 9/11 as well)
4: The Spying Program Has Not Been Narrowly Tailored to Keeping Americans Safe
We would all hope that the spying program has been tightly focused on protecting Americans from terrorists.
However, as I noted in 2008:
- The NSA spied on U.N. diplomats in their deliberations on the Iraq war
(so that the U.S. could figure out which countries were against the
war and their reasons, to gain an advantage in twisting arms and
selling the war)
- The government has been spying on journalists from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other publications for years
As one writer puts it:
"If
we know of illegal administration spying on journalists and other
non-suspects, and we know of pre-9/11 surveillance, then we for all
intents and purposes know that these are not programs designed to fight
some foreign terrorists threat."
Indeed,
the government and its contractors seem to have spent most of their
time spying on antiwar protesters, environmentalists and other
non-dangerous people. See this and this.
(Of
course, the fact that the spying program began before 9/11, and that
9/11 wasn't stopped even though intelligence heard from the hijackers
themselves, is also instructive. And see below).
5: The Spying Program Isn't Just Used for Listening ... It Also Is Used to Track Americans and Predict Behavior
As I noted in 2008, it's not just spying, but also tracking and predicting what American citizens will do:
As a new article
by investigative reporter Christopher Ketcham reveals, a governmental
unit operating in secret and with no oversight whatsoever is gathering
massive amounts of data on every American
and running artificial intelligence software to predict each
American's behavior, including "what the target will do, where the
target will go, who it will turn to for help".The same governmental unit is responsible for suspending
the Constitution and implementing martial law in the event that
anything is deemed by the White House in its sole discretion to
constitute a threat to the United States. (this is formally known as implementing "Continuity of Government" plans).As
Ketcham's article makes clear, these same folks and their predecessors
have been been busy dreaming up plans to imprison countless
"trouble-making" Americans without trial in case of any real or imagined
emergency. What kind of Americans? Ketcham describes it this way:"dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protestors, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people."
Do
we want the same small group of folks who have the power to suspend
the Constitution, implement martial law, and imprison normal citizens
to also be gathering
information on all Americans and running AI programs to be able to
predict where American citizens will go for help and what they will do
in case of an emergency? Don't we want the government to -- um, I
don't know -- help us in case of an emergency?Bear in mind that the Pentagon is also running an AI program to see how people will react to propaganda and to government-inflicted terror. The program is called Sentient World Simulation:
"U.S defense, intel and homeland security officials are constructing a
parallel world, on a computer, which the agencies will use to test propaganda messages and military strategies.Called
the Sentient World Simulation, the program uses AI routines based upon
the psychological theories of Marty Seligman, among others. (Seligman
introduced the theory of 'learned helplessness' in the 1960s, after
shocking beagles until they cowered, urinating, on the bottom of their
cages.)Yank a country's water supply. Stage a military coup. SWS will tell you what happens next.
The sim will feature an AR avatar for each person in the real world, based upon data collected about us from government records and the internet."
The
continuity of government folks' AI program and the Pentagon's AI
program may or may not be linked, but they both indicate massive spying
and artificial intelligence in order to manipulate the American public,
to concentrate power, to take away the liberties and freedoms of
average Americans, and -- worst of all -- to induce chaos in order to achieve these ends.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said that web-based artificial intelligence can predict where people will go. See this and this.
ABC News Fast Company, Gizmodo and many other sources report that computer programs are being used to "predict" who will commit a crime.
Indeed, as noted by Boston University's Journal of Science and Technology Law, Fox News, the Daily Telegraph
and other sources, the Department of Homeland Security is developing an
airport scanner to be able to read people's minds and predict
terrorist behavior.
Neuroscientists at UCLA say
they can predict - using brain scanning - people's behavior better
than the people themselves can. And Northwestern University announced in July that scientists can read people's brain waves to detect terrorism. See also this and this.
I am all for stopping real terrorists. But given that protest is now considered "low-level terrorism" (see this, this, this and this), this could be used for very repressive purposes.
In other words, spying may gradually be morphing into the Orwellian concept of "pre-crime".
»
- advertisements -
Tyler.
Seriously, this has to be one of the worst posts I have seen on the site. This is Hufffington Post, Art Bell level of tripe.
I really like the open discussion, mostly contrarian voices, but this is just ignorant crap that does nothing but denegrate your site. The posts on the site, for the most part, are thoughtful and challenge the status quo, but, they usually back up their conclusions with real facts, not just "black helicopter" conjecture.
I'm disappointed. Your site is better than this.
with all due respect, I don't think Tyler needs someone weighing in on their own opinion of how "good or "bad" they "think" the content of his website is.
Are you Dick Cheney by any chance ?
Just wait til ZH gets to the real good stuff: we are ancestors of space aliens.
where's the black helicopters...this is all factual stuff, you don't think NSA spies on Americans without warrants or oversight? but they do and there are lots of telecom employees that keep saying so...you may think they never do anything bad with this data, but they do do it, do have facts saying otherwise?
So... You are saying that the information is incorrect? Or that the presentation lacks subtlety?
What I am saying is that this is an atypical Washington blog post. He did a good job on the BP oil spill (reflective of Matt Simmons view), but this appears to be a semi-disinfo piece. By that I mean that he provides significant backup to the view that spying on individuals occurred on a regular basis prior to 911 (it did) and notes that 911 provides a rational for the continued spying.
However, the 911 narrative he provides is simply inaccurate (purposely?) and continues to posit that Arabs (exclusively) in a cave were capable of a complex event such as 911 and continues to harp on a solely Islamist meme, when the evidence, taken in context, presents a very different narrative. I don't believe that the various intelligence services were merely bystanders and simply "let it happen". The facts simply don't support that. Thus, the use of the valid spy information from the public domain is used to support the false narrative of the exclusive Islamist 911 narrative. Disinfo at its best. Focus on true information to disinform those by having them accept the false narrative as part of the overall presentation of information.
This is the kind of crap that Rush Limbaugh and Michael Savage do (about 50% disinfo) on a regular basis to make certain the rubes remain confused) and the main reason why I have shut off the radio rather than listen to his claptrap.
The bottom line is that if you come to the table with the correct information, you can see through the disinfo- if you don't and rely on the entire assemablage of information, the disinformation that they want you to incorporate into your analysis is set even as the other information (which is not as damaging because it is already in the public domain) is used to have you accept the disinfo as real.
IMO the taped conversations of Bin Laden and other terrorists who were used by the intelligence agencies was probably used after editing to bolster their case for attacking the Taliban, Al Qaida, and any others they would want to attack. This is probably the credible evidence that they supplied to convince the President, Congress, and other countries. What they didn't expose was their dealings and conversations implicating the various intelligenc agencies. Such credible evidence would explain the unified support of the war against terrorism (AlQaida). After all we need an enemy to replace communism. The buildings were brought down with explosives and the planes flying into them was the cover.
Yes, I thought the same thing. It bends the narative to what most people are thinking, but it still misleads... Kind of like the slow slogging of turning the Iraq War narrative from WMD to "spreading democracy," people just accepted this, never really questioning what took place in the begining (after which it has been proven that all was started as a lie).
9/11 was NOT about incompetence.
There's a lot of questions about whether planes in fact were involved:
http://www.septemberclues.info/
When you can control what people see, then you can make people see just about anything...
I was actually addressing Mr. Voodoo, but your answer would probably parallel his (her?).
Everyone has an agenda. I found the BP/GoM articles to be laden with hyperbole, but I could pick out the parts that were pertinent. Same with this article.
I still can't pick out anything useful from Limbaugh, however...
Analysis bad.
Narrative tripe.
Focus on negative issue to deflect reality and reestablish government meme using spying as strawman.
65% Disinfo.
you're criticism of this post is so full of contrarian facts, I don't know where to begin
I did a FOIA request with the FBI and it was denied. At least the IRS honors those requests with a "master file".
Imagine the worst. You pay big bucks for a contract with ATT or Verizon, and can generally expect that they will profile you and hand the information over to DHS. Read Boston T. Party's "One Nation Under Surveillance" or visit "Free State Wyoming" forum.
Krag,
I sure hope you sent a letter of thanks to Ralph Nader for FOIA. Alternately, you could have just voted for him in 2008 and this would all be over by now...whoops.
@GeorgeW: These spy-op posts are starting to frighten me. Mostly because I can't find anything to support totally discounting them.
Oh, and that extra-bright light hanging in the sky directly over your house at night: that's not the star of Bethlehem.
Regards
The makings of a hit movie. Guy who owes nobody anything, of Lebanese ancestry, wears a rumpled $100 suit becomes President of the United States. Sure felt great voting for him.
That sounds like a great idea. Unfortunately you know how that feature would have to end: a la motorcade and grassy knolls...
Congratz on decsion: you tried, anyway.
Regards
Anatomy of a false flag attack.
http://deadlinelive.info/2010/09/21/fbi-guided-and-funded-attack-to-unseat-chicago-mayor/
I guess Rahm is going to run for mayor of Chicago.
Everyone abandoning ship Obama - doomed Presidency.
"Everyone abandoning ship Obama - doomed Presidency."
Totally disagree,90% Mission Accomplished.
Please shut the nitrous tank down. For your own good.
We're fuckin' doomed.
Feds would like there to be no privacy in public places
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/09/public-privacy/#ixzz10GwocAiu
We Americans are so naive.
Our wallets,Passports, and all credit cards data strips info can be read as you walk down the street.
Your CompuKer.(we won't even go there).
Your home phones, personal convo's can be picked up from 23 miles up, you and I have NO privacy at all. Our cell phones are a hotline anytime they want (on/off).
The Brits even less, they now have retinal scanners that read their citizens retinas, and record them as they walk down the street.
Up to 4-6' away. No ain't dat some shite?.
At last, someone who gets it. We are NOT free and we have NO privacy. PS: Even Your Printer is coded. They know all.
I've already announced I'm a suspect. I didn't want TARP, stimulus, Obamacare or FinReg. I don't want Cap n Tax, illegal amnesty or an American apology tour. I want smaller government, less bureaucracy, end the FED, strong employment, a stable dollar and I believe in god. According to DHS and Barama, I'm a terrorist.
Except for that pathetic, childish, medieval bit about "believing in God", I'm with you.
and you'll vote for a Repub that will give you just as much freedom as warantless wiretap W did...I don't think they see you as a suspect but a supporter
dig,
You are not alone..............of course DHS had to eat crow real fast on that blurb.
But as a lifetime member of the NRA, the GOA,the TSRA,and being against everything you put up and more, I am with you.This admin has done not ONE thing I agree with, not ONE thing.
Newsflash re-education camps would do me no good, so I won't be attending Mao's classes.
The way I see it, it's a badge of Honor, as ALL the Founders are in the same category.........they were Traitors then, and are still considered extremists today.
Me too. I offered mild criticism of Team O's handling of the economy on Huffpo.
I tried to post a critique of my (ADM/CFR bought and paid for) senator dicky durbin on huffho. Never showed up. Another showed up at first, and then they figured out i spelled a bad word in reverse, and they pulled that post too. When that happens(1/2 the time) i send a personal message to the censor.
(Hey G.W., did they talk about WTC7 on any of those wire taps?)
interview with jesse ventura where he talks of cia spys in state governments...
http://www.disinfo.com/2010/03/disinformation®-interviews-jesse-ventura/
Able Danger
exactly
Samual Adams
American Idol starts back up soon, doesn't it?
Yea, me too. The more I know the less I want to know.
I hope the marijuana engineers keep increasing it's potency because, the more I know...
Yes George but the dow is over 10,000 and my house is still worth something. LOLOLOLOL
And the Weed plantation in your attick is turning quite a profit also right? :)
I say let's go back to the early 60s when Captain Peter "Wrong Way" Peachfuzz was made head of Army Intelligence on Rocky & Bullwinkle.
To which Bullwinkle said, Dontcha think that's a contradiction of words?
So when will they be attaching P300 electrodes to our scalps?
You haven't discovered your implants yet?
just put you thumb in your ass and press as hard as you can. That's the first reset button you just pressed.
Now use the same thumb and try to stick it as far in your mouth untill you want to put and start jerking off.
That will disable the implants for about 1 hour.
you can do this every hour. GOOD LUCK!
Bzzzzzt!
Well... here's a solution. Let's outsource our spying to China. They are already here and doing a great job stealing American secrets and it will be far cheaper. Bingo, the great American sellout.
Sadly, I trust China more than my own government - at least China would first have to travel 20000 km before fucking me over, for the government its just a short commute.
Wait! India would be better. They would need to invest in spy equipment which they would purchase from us, then we could take a royalty on their sales of the data to interested parties!
And we'd get to staff the Customer Service call centers!
Too often the issue of domestic spying gets 'poohed poohed' as conspiracy theory nonsense....but it is a very real and ongoing problem. It hasn't been that long ago that a major wireless telephone company (to remain nameless in this entry) admitted publicly that they were so overwhelmed with FBI requests to "ping' the phones of customers ....(the ping allows the Feds to determine location of the phone)....that they created an entire application to allow the FBI it's own access. Big Brother is truly watching..
I can validate most of what you posted.
The "ping" is a routine network ping, the cellular network has the last cell the device was in, but narrowing it down to 10 meters needs the phone to send data to the tower (the reply). This technique is espescially effective on subjects that are moving however usage has diminshed over time with smartphones and E911 where the phone is in near constant contact with the network (even more granular movements tracked).
All telecommunications over tier I providers (ATT, Sprint, L3, etc), specifically with voice services have a "black box" on their network for the NSA (typically at regional network aggregation points). Basically a snort box that listens to everything on the wire, parse it and report. The truely intrusive parts that do a hat dance on your rights are unfortuntely very effective in prosecuting crime, so the likelihood of Patriot Act being repealed is zilch.
If you are going to commit a serious crime, do not carry a cell phone.
If it's an Ericsson exchange it will have a "lawful interception" interface built right in! (I wish I had a way to get the access codes to that sucker - it would help my insider trading tremendously).
If the network uses Ericsson DSLAM's and routers, all the IP packages are tagged with a hash value updated in such a way that the endpoints and the network path can be worked out from the collected traffic.
It sux to be us.