Having watched a recruitment video from GCHQ the British intelligence listening post that has been passing information to the American National Security Agency about British citizens internet use, phone calls and all manner of private communications under the various programmes they run like the now world famous top-secret Prism, I am gratified that my assessment of the sort of people employed there was, even though I do say it myself, absolutely spot on.
The stereotype spooks I have imagined to populate some of my more lurid posts in the past all pop up at one point or another in the film. This was, as happenstance would have it - the second time today I have heard someone say they are very intelligent, or as part of a masonic secret lodge they feel they share the collective intelligence of the whole intelligence community, it figures I suppose when you put it like that.
The stereotype spooks I have imagined to populate some of my more lurid posts in the past all pop up at one point or another in the film. This was, as happenstance would have it - the second time today I have heard someone say they are very intelligent, or as part of a masonic secret lodge they feel they share the collective intelligence of the whole intelligence community, it figures I suppose when you put it like that.
But who in America is GCHQ really servicing? It's an open question I think.
If like me you have taken an interest in the real life spy drama of Edward Snowden... that international man of mystery you may be interested to hear about a more subdued ex-NSA whistle blower about whom there is more below
Is Edward in Havana? Is he in Russia? Who really knows the answers?...
Well, not me anyway.
But good luck to him wherever he is. Edward has been constructed in the infotainment media as an entirely new kind of outsourced hero/villain.
This has been a good move for workers in the propaganda trade in general and the corporate media in particular. Fortunately for the mass appeal of this movie Edward is rather more photogenic than Osama bin Laden the last media fugitive and therefore far better for the ongoing adventure where he deftly evades the low browed zombies of Big Brother's secret police.
This has been a good move for workers in the propaganda trade in general and the corporate media in particular. Fortunately for the mass appeal of this movie Edward is rather more photogenic than Osama bin Laden the last media fugitive and therefore far better for the ongoing adventure where he deftly evades the low browed zombies of Big Brother's secret police.
Bravo I say, well done Ed!
This state of affairs is not of course in any sense normal. Edward Snowden has become an overnight celebrity and the toast of a world absolutely sick to the back teeth of being bullied and dictated to by America and its hanger-on NATO banker-led, vainglorious statelets like the UK. So as an icon of a global Washington Up-Yours Movement so to speak, Edward Snowden has captured the imagination of generations brought up on James Bond films and the Man From UNCLE.
It's a jolly good ripping yarn this Snowden thing. It exercises the moral outrage of patriots and malcontents alike, but as we settle down to the developing plot we should not lose sight of the fact that this isn't exactly uncharted territory here, similar things have happened before but without this high level celeb-hype.
For example, there was the RAND Corporation original whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg whose 1971 revelations in his explosive Pentagon Papers was to damage the Kennedy administration, the Johnson administration and of course the incumbent Nixon gang. Nobody on Capitol Hill escaped with completely clean hands in decisons relating to the US adventures in Vietnam and beyond.
It was the match that lit the fuse of what would become the Watergate scandal, and it was all about US imperialism in south east Asia. No lessons were learned from this at all it seems.
It was the match that lit the fuse of what would become the Watergate scandal, and it was all about US imperialism in south east Asia. No lessons were learned from this at all it seems.
Without going into the fascinating detail of The Pentagon Papers which I read as a young man at the time and which as an anti-Vietnam War activist and already by then a veteran of the CND and the Grosvenor Square riot at the US embassy in London in 1968, my politcal baptism of fire was already old hat
In a previous post I wrote way back in the mists of the Y360 Era in 2007, I posted a blog called My Pet Scapegoat, a play on the title of the book George W Bush was reading to young children at a Sarasota Florida school My Pet Goat on that fateful morning of 11 September 2001. If anyone is interested that post is preserved here:-
According to revelations made four days ago on RT News... Barack Obama and the entire political and legal establishment of the United States may be in a similar position today to that of Bush on 9/11? That is what Russ Tice NSA whistleblower and regular guy says anyway......I wonder what you think about this interview?
Interesting & important info, your writing it top notch Aaron, truly Gail (artsgard) Bilyard
ReplyDeleteThanks Gail you are clearly very tolerant of typos and grammatical faux pas, I appreciate your comment very much :-)
DeleteYou wrote: "But good luck to him wherever he is. Edward has been constructed in the infotainment media as an entirely new kind of outsourced hero/villain."
ReplyDeleteWell put, AA!
It is safe to say Edward Snowden is indeed both entertainment for the media and an inevitable figure in the friction between an "open society" and the extreme reach of the NSA and its corporate water-carriers. The revolving-door between Washington and Wall Street is just one entry way into this "Hotel California" where one may check out but never actually leave short of setting up house-keeping on a receding ice floe near Greenland. Will he ever be caught? And how much damage has he done compared to the benefit of an open society? (1) I doubt it. (2) I doubt we'll ever know for sure.
It may turn out that the intelligence community is as big and unregulated by this government as the Goldman Sachs/AIG/bankster crowd who were bailed out for their follies by the US taxpayer.
Has "Too big to fail" now become "too big to stop"?
This fellow Russ Tice on RT aside, even Jimmy Carter, no wild eyed radical, recently said that American democracy is no longer applicable thanks to all this blanket intelligence gathering!
Just as a personal aside: To see someone like Russell Tice on Moscow based RT talking about Orwellian Police States in the USA is both ironic and disturbing. Were that suc ha man could be dismissed simply as a crank anymore!
On the one hand, Russia under Putin now seems to deal with serious political challenges by dragging them into a public court and convicting them of something felonious to prevent them from running against his authoritarian party.
Not at all nice, not how the game is played in a parliamentry system. But i have to say this is better than firing squads, gulag networks and "psychiatric wards" for political dissidents.
We may not have gone that far over here in the West, but "The Patriot Act" and the CIA black-ops sites and the giant NSA intelligence gathering HQ now going up in the Utah desert--bigger than ten football fields I have heard---hardly makes one feel that the intelligence-industrial complex is under control.
These details indicate that the USA (and any cooperating NATO governments with such a like network) have passed through a Looking Glass where we may well be more like our former Warsaw Pact adversaries than could be believed before 9/11.
We don't agree on all matters here but I must say your central thrust of things going from bad to worse on open government has now gone mainstream.
Thanks for your comprehensive response here Doug. It would indeed appear as if the intelligence-industrial complex as you so aptly describe it... is out of the control of the political minimalists in national state governments who have outsourced the national security industry to privateers. It seems to me that this only makes sense when there is no meaningful nation state left for anyone to seriously defend.
ReplyDeleteTransnational corporatism has outsourced governance, so I suppose it is entirely consistent that the security and intelligence apparatus of this virtual empire is hived off too.
What for me is a more dubious claim though is that this data collecting serves any meaningful purpose at all, because while somebody might be reading my diary someone else is definitely reading theirs. The endpoint is a data overload through mass surveillance is atrophy....I think the Big Brother PSYOP is a quite interesting one, but like them all it is ultimately predictable, transparent and amateurish.... its predecessors in this country include most famously Operation Starfish during the Second World War .
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Starfish sites were large scale night-time decoys created during The Blitz to simulate burning British cities. The aim was to divert night bombers from their intended targets and to drop their ordnance over the countryside. The sites were an extension of Colonel John Turner's decoy programme for airfields and factories (code named "Q" Sites). Following the bombing, and near destruction, of Coventry in November 1940, Turner was tasked with creating decoys for 7 major cities."
There is something about Edward Snowden that makes me think of such contrived deceptions as these I'm not sure why but, history is liberally littered with them, or so it seems to me anyway Doug.
Thanks Aaron, (and Doug) for your perceptive analysis of the situation. It’s sometimes hard to piece it all together, especially when every one in the media is spewing out the same old 'national security risk' rhetoric. The bit I find most worrying, both here and in the US is the erosion of democracy and increase in power and control given to the unelected, I don’t know who runs America, or who orders the surveillance but I believe in this country it’s the unelected officials of Whitehall who really call the shots and I’m pretty sure it’s the same in America. The question ‘is the NSA blackmailing Obama’ would explain an awful lot……………and right on que, the news is now saying that Snowden claims Britain is running an internet monitoring station from the middle east. No surprises there then.
ReplyDelete