Is It Time to Look at What's Really Been Going On Yet?

In the June 27 issue of Counterpunch, indispensable political thinker William Blum republished parts of an essay he wrote in the year 2000. Titled “The Inalienable Right to Snoop? Eavesdropping on the Planet,” the piece reminds us that PRISM, the National Security Agency’s omnivorous mechanism for worldwide data mining and the mapping of human social networks, is a direct descendant of the pre-911 NSA system called ECHELON, launched in the 1970s. By the late Nineties, it had become clear to the Europeans that ECHELON was largely preoccupied with stealing trade secrets from European companies, and passing them on to favored American enterprises. German wind power technology wound up under patent to American rivals. French Airbus lost big contracts to U.S. outfits. [...] 9/11 was still years away, but the U.S. was already treating the whole planet as if it were occupied by enemy peoples.

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The capitalist imperial state is the political expression of the monopoly capitalist class, whose ambition is to dominate and profit from every aspect of human existence. Far from thriving on competition, the greatest fear of the capitalist is a world in which the game is not rigged in his favor. The state’s job is to ensure that the fix is always in. Governments controlled by capitalists are obligated to subvert, literally, the entirety of the rest of the planet.

Therefore, it should surprise no one that the United States spies on the citizens, governments and businesses of every nation on earth, including the home population, which is potentially the most dangerous population of all, if for no other reason than proximity.

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If U.S. rulers really believed Muslim jihadists posed a serious threat to American empire, Washington would not be in its fourth decade of arming and financing the jihadists, who serve as both foot soldiers and pretexts for U.S. militarism and fascism.

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The global surveillance regime is a creature of a moribund empire that not only cannot compete, but refuses to countenance the very idea of fair competition and the rule of law. Osama bin Laden was always a sideshow on the road to American global dictatorship.

  Glen Ford

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Calling All Whistleblowers

Remember in 2003, when Congress defunded the decidedly creepy Total Information Awareness program? It didn't die; it just changed names and split into many smaller programs.

  The Atlantic

As we knew it would.

There's much more we don't know, and often what we know is obsolete. We know quite a bit about the NSA's ECHELON program from a 2000 European investigation, and about the DHS's plans for Total Information Awareness from 2002, but much less about how these programs have evolved. We can make inferences about the NSA's Utah facility based on the theoretical amount of data from various sources, the cost of computation, and the power requirements from the facility, but those are rough guesses at best. For a lot of this, we're completely in the dark.

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Knowing how the government spies on us is important. Not only because so much of it is illegal -- or, to be as charitable as possible, based on novel interpretations of the law -- but because we have a right to know. Democracy requires an informed citizenry in order to function properly, and transparency and accountability are essential parts of that. That means knowing what our government is doing to us, in our name. That means knowing that the government is operating within the constraints of the law. Otherwise, we're living in a police state.

I’m willing to claim that we are already otherwise.

We need whistle-blowers.

Go to the article for a thorough explication of that need in, this country, right now....but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.