July 3, 2011
Last week, the White House released its National Strategy for Counterterrorism, a macabre document that places a premium on "public safety" over civil liberties and constitutional rights.
Indeed, "hope and change" huckster Barack Obama had the temerity to assert that the President "bears no greater responsibility than ensuring the safety and security of the American people."
Pity that others, including CIA "black site" prisoners tortured to death to "keep us safe" (some 100 at last count) aren't extended the same courtesy as The Washington Post reported last week.
As Secrecy News editor Steven Aftergood correctly points out, the claim that the President "has no greater responsibility than 'protecting the American people' is a paternalistic invention that is historically unfounded and potentially damaging to the political heritage of the nation."
Aftergood avers, "the presidential oath of office that is prescribed by the U.S. Constitution (Art. II, sect. 1) makes it clear that the President's supreme responsibility is to '...preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.' There is no mention of public safety. It is the constitutional order that the President is sworn to protect, even if doing so entails risks to the safety and security of the American people."
But as our former republic slips ever-closer towards corporate dictatorship, Obama's mendacious twaddle about "protecting the American people," serves only to obscure, and reinforce, the inescapable fact that it's a rigged game.
Rest assured, "what happens in Vegas," Baghdad, Kabul or Manama--from driftnet spying to political-inspired witchhunts to illegal detention--won't, and hasn't, "stayed in Vegas."
Cyber Here, Cyber There, Cyber-Surveillance Everywhere
Last month, researcher Barrett Brown and the OpMetalGear network lifted the lid on a new U.S. Government-sponsored cyber-surveillance project, Romas/COIN, now Odyssey, a multiyear, multimillion dollar enterprise currently run by defense and security giant Northrop Grumman.
With some $10.8 billion in revenue largely derived from contracts with the Defense Department, Northrop Grumman was No. 2 on the Washington Technology 2011 Top 100 List of Prime Federal Contractors.
"For at least two years," Brown writes, "the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once."
Information on this shadowy program was derived by scrutinizing hundreds of the more than 70,000 HBGary emails leaked onto the web by the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous.
Brown uncovered evidence that the "top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr--the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients."
Readers will recall that Barr claimed he could exploit social media to gather information about WikiLeaks supporters in a bid to destroy that organization. Earlier this year, Barr told the Financial Times he had used scraping techniques and had infiltrated WikiLeaks supporter Anonymous, in part by using IRC, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.
Security Grifters Partner-Up on Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Project
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