National Security Agency has been reeling from leaks showing massive warrantless surveillance programs capturing communications for every American. These disclosures have further shown that officials like National Intelligence Director John Clapper committed perjury before Congress, though the White House and Congress have protected him from any charge in America’s Animal Farm system. Now, NSA director General Keith Alexander has indicated that he has a solution. With the public saying that it is more afraid of the government than terrorists and NSA workers balking at participating in such authoritarian programs, Alexander wants to replace the workers with machines. Machines don’t leak. Indeed, they have no sympathy or morals at all. They are perfect. That would leave citizens as simply the objects rather than the objectors for surveillance. So, the Obama Administration has finally found the barrier to the creation of the perfect government: the citizens themselves.
With Democrats now joining Republicans in attacking privacy and civil liberties, the only unpredictable element left for the government is people. Without pesky people, government will run far more smoothly. It appears citizens are to be monitored not listened to in the new American political system. Presumably, with an automated system of warrantless surveillance and the courts allowing the Administration to classify evidence to dismiss challenges, Alexander will simply outsource constitutional complaints to India where customer service will ask them to call back later.
Alexander is quoted as saying that he wants to reduce human administrators by 90 percent to be replaced by machines. What he sees as the “problem” is not the false statements by Obama, Clapper, or our leaders. It is those troublesome humans with their nagging consciences and individual will. He explained that his new machine operators
“cuts down number of system administrators. That would address vulnerabilities. It would also address the number of system administrators we have, not fast enough, but we plan to reduce the number of system administrators by 90 percent to make networks more defensible and secure . . . At the end of the day it’s about people and trust and I think we can get that almost perfect but we can’t solve that issue.”
The vulnerability is the involvement of humans. The government will finally create the perfect automatons to do such work without question or complaint. Congress will then be able to continue to mislead the public without fear of contradiction and continue to expand the burgeoning security apparatus that is pouring billions into the pockets of contractors and companies and agencies.
It is also another wonderful example of the open hypocrisy on display in our government. On the even of declaring, “Whistleblower Day” Congress and the White House are moving to make whistleblowers impossible. Machines don’t blow whistles. They don’t speak to reporters. They carry out any abusive or unconstitutional act that you ask of them. In other words, problem solved.
GIGO
ap,
Great link to another disturbing story.
“Obama is creating an outside advisory panel to review U.S. surveillance powers. He did not say who would be on that panel but over the past week, the president met secretly with technology business leaders, some of whom cooperated with the government surveillance and were unhappy to see their companies named in leaked government documents. ”
from: http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/08/09/us/politics/ap-us-nsa-surveillance.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&ref=news
Speaking as one of the chickens in the yard, I can’t tell you how encouraged I am to learn that Obama will appoint foxes to protect my interests.
It does appear that President Obama can’t lie fast enough to get ahead of the truth…
Well, this made me think of an Irish Poem:
NSA Wet Work
The NSA had some bad leaks,
Which to fix, called for extreme techniques!
The CPU chips?
“Maybe Ditropan drips. . .
And the main frames? “Depends”, said the geeks.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
I thought there would be @ least one Rage Against the Machine fan here w/ a link to their metal sound.
bigfatmike 1, August 9, 2013 at 2:32 pm
How small does the group breaking the law have to be before we can properly call it a coup d’état or at least an attempted coup?
==========================
Eventually it boils down to one … “the king” (who can do no wrong).
Machines don’t blow whistles. They don’t speak to reporters. They carry out any abusive or unconstitutional act that you ask of them.
But they can be hacked.
Love the Huff Post headline:
“NSA LOOPHOLE THE SIZE OF AMERICA” (links to the Ball/Ackerman Guardian article)
—–
Apple, Google and AT&T meet Obama to discuss NSA surveillance concerns
Silicon Valley companies concerned at effect on business as revelations over US government spying spread more widely
by Juliette Garside
Friday 9 August 2013 12.37 EDT
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/09/nsa-surveillance-apple-google-obama
“For the record, these companies are not only complicit in violating the rights of the world’s citizens; they are also implicated in the Administrations other abuses of international law: namely rendition, detention without trial, enhanced interrogation (er, torture) and the disposition matrix, otherwise known as remote killing via drones…”
Of course, none of that is as troubling to these Corporate’s (sic) as a hit to their bottom line.” (comment to the aforementioned article, see link above)
Comments from Snowden, via Glenn Greenwald:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/09/lavabit-shutdown-snowden-silicon-valley
Snowden, who told me today that he found Lavabit’s stand “inspiring”, added:
“Ladar Levison and his team suspended the operations of their 10 year old business rather than violate the Constitutional rights of their roughly 400,000 users. The President, Congress, and the Courts have forgotten that the costs of bad policy are always borne by ordinary citizens, and it is our job to remind them that there are limits to what we will pay.
“America cannot succeed as a country where individuals like Mr. Levison have to relocate their businesses abroad to be successful. Employees and leaders at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple, and the rest of our internet titans must ask themselves why they aren’t fighting for our interests the same way small businesses are. The defense they have offered to this point is that they were compelled by laws they do not agree with, but one day of downtime for the coalition of their services could achieve what a hundred Lavabits could not.
“When Congress returns to session in September, let us take note of whether the internet industry’s statements and lobbyists – which were invisible in the lead-up to the Conyers-Amash vote – emerge on the side of the Free Internet or the NSA and its Intelligence Committees in Congress.”
“NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens’ emails and phone calls
Exclusive: Spy agency has secret backdoor permission to search databases for individual Americans’ communications
James Ball and Spencer Ackerman
theguardian.com, Friday 9 August 2013 12.08 EDT
Detail of Section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets.
The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.
The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian that the law provides the NSA with a loophole potentially allowing “warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans”.
The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs.
The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets, who must be non-US citizens and outside the US at the point of collection.”
“Obama to announce surveillance transparency measureshttp://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/09/obama-to-announce-surveillance-transparency-measures/
(CNN) – President Barack Obama is set to announce new measures on Friday to “increase transparency and restore public trust” in government surveillance programs, an administration official tells CNN Chief White House Correspondent Jessica Yellin.”
Glenn Greenwald:
“My favorite quote of the month – from the NYT’s Jim Risen:”
“We wouldn’t be having this discussion if it wasn’t for [Snowden]. . . .That’s the thing I don’t understand about the climate in Washington these days, is that people want to have debates on television elsewhere, but then you want to throw the people who start the debates in jail.”
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/greenwald-and-nyts-james-risen-completely-deflate-jeffrey-toobins-tortured-logic-on-nsa-snowden/
@ Anonymously Yours 1, August 9, 2013 at 11:51 am & anonymously posted 1, August 9, 2013 at 12:03 pm /& at 12:08 pm; Gene H.; Blouise
1, August 9, 2013 at 11:10 am ~
Ditto…ditto…ditto…ditto. Great Carlin post!
James. James Clapper.
Bloiuse, Hopefully the pendulum is swinging. Every generation needs a Church Commission. Google can go through your gmail but google can’t imprison you.
NSA loophole allows warrantless search for US citizens’ emails and phone callsExclusive: Spy agency has secret backdoor permission to search databases for individual Americans’ communications
James Ball and Spencer Ackerman
theguardian.com,
Friday 9 August 2013 12.08 EDT
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/09/nsa-loophole-warrantless-searches-email-calls
Excerpt;
The National Security Agency has a secret backdoor into its vast databases under a legal authority enabling it to search for US citizens’ email and phone calls without a warrant, according to a top-secret document passed to the Guardian by Edward Snowden.
The previously undisclosed rule change allows NSA operatives to hunt for individual Americans’ communications using their name or other identifying information. Senator Ron Wyden told the Guardian the NSA’s authorities provide loopholes that allow “warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans”.
The authority, approved in 2011, appears to contrast with repeated assurances from Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials to both Congress and the American public that the privacy of US citizens is protected from the NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs.
How small does the group breaking the law have to be before we can properly call it a coup d’état or at least an attempted coup?
ap,
I keep picking up a sense from one liners appearing randomly in different news sources, that the underlings, the worker bees, are starting to balk at the assignments they are being asked/told to fulfill. They are questioning the legality at least and perhaps, in some cases, the morality.
Trouble in the ranks creates fear in the command structure. Threatening loss of job through “mechanization” is one desperate response … I suspect we will be hearing more desperate suggestions.
All in all, I think the Intelligence Service has lost control of the narrative and they know it.
The danger is real.
When I originally posted a link to this story on another thread, I said this was such a bad idea I didn’t know where to begin. It appears our host captured the essence of it legally and sociologically. I would like to add this: there is no such thing as perfect computer security for any networked device. This kind of intelligence schema is a bad idea for many of the same reasons electronic computerized voting is a bad idea. Computer security is largely an illusion. Say your objective isn’t to steal data, but to falsify it. A machine doesn’t have the intelligence or intuition to deal with that scenario if the data is inserted in such a way as to avoid pattern detection. Say someone is killed based on such falsified intelligence. The buck stops where? Nowhere. It was “machine error”. Removing responsibility is often the equivalent of removing accountability and a lack of accountability is part of what is driving this country in to being a full blown fascist police state.
This is a prime example of why the NSA needs to be put back on the leash and a short leash at that.
The age of abiotic intelligence is more likely behind us than it is ahead of us.
You would think that since the military NSA gathers so much intelligence that it would be a lot smarter than it is.
And it’s imperative that they stop the leaks. If good Americans (and there are many) knew the full truth about what the NSA, CIA and other “partners” are doing? “The ‘walls’ would come a tumblin’ down”…
I’ll say it again:
These are dangerous times.
(And I so hope that some of these sociopaths are afraid. They should be.)