The US Should Have Told Americans They Were Being Surveilled Right from The Start
After all the brouhaha and media sensationalism surrounding the NSA’s spy-on-all-and-everything operations the United States government has finally come out with its true stand: Mission Accomplished, Thank God It is Now Finally All Out and in the Open; Mission Accomplished! And in all this Director of National Intelligence (DNI) James Clapper has one, one and only regret: We should have told the American public they were being surveilled right from the start. He says that if they’d just announced it publicly after 9/11 “most Americans would probably have supported it.”
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Clapper said:
“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I will. Had we been transparent about this from the outset right after 9/11—which is the genesis of the 215 program—and said both to the American people and to their elected representatives, we need to cover this gap, we need to make sure this never happens to us again, so here is what we are going to set up, here is how it’s going to work, and why we have to do it, and here are the safeguards… We wouldn’t have had the problem we had,” Clapper said.
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“I don’t think it would be of any greater concern to most Americans than fingerprints. Well people kind of accept that because they know about it. But had we been transparent about it and say here’s one more thing we have to do as citizens for the common good, just like we have to go to airports two hours early and take our shoes off, all the other things we do for the common good, this is one more thing.”
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You know what? Here is what: The Director of US Police State Intelligence Operations is absolutely right! Considering the parasitic and maggot-like US representatives in Congress, considering the partial and complicit US Federal Courts, considering the corporatist and government-driven US media, considering our lala-land’s apathetic and too-busy-to-think majority, our government’s gestapo-modeled intelligence operatives should have told the public right from the start and been done with it:
Welcome to Panopticon State USA, where we the rulers watch and listen to everything you do, everything you say, everything you write, and everything you think, everywhere.
They are right. They should have had this all out in the open right from the start, rather than resorting to complicated and costly script-writing efforts. After all, they have for decades watched Americans submit to their police state practices unquestioningly and willingly. Haven’t they?
It’s been almost two decades since our medical and personal privacy has been officially nullified and overridden by our government under The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996.The HIPAA rules provide a wide variety of circumstances under which medical information can be disclosed for law enforcement-related purposes without explicitly requiring a warrant. In other words, law enforcement is entitled to your records simply by asserting that you are a suspect or the victim of a crime.
So what! So what that we are required to submit to all disclosures of our personal and health records by our doctors and hospitals?! They didn’t have to make that a secret. They just said this is our rule (call it a law), and that was that.
Same goes for our financial data. The privacy of our financial records was overridden decades ago- and this was done without resorting to any secrecy; out in the open:
In the debate over the PATRIOT Act and other broad surveillance measures, the Bank Secrecy Act should be thought of as a 30-year experiment in subverting the Fourth Amendment. The experiment has imposed tremendous costs on individual privacy and the economy (even before 9/11, the banking industry was estimating compliance costs of $10 billion a year), with few tangible results in stopping crime and even fewer in preventing terrorism.
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Financial surveillance has been massively expanded during the last 30 years…The Treasury Department’s BSA regulations required banks, subject to some exemptions, to file a currency transaction report on every cash transfer of $10,000 or more. In the 1990s, the department established FinCEN, which expanded the regulations to require that banks file “suspicious activity reports” on all transactions of $5,000 or more if they have “no apparent lawful purpose or are not the sort in which the particular customer would normally be expected to engage.” Banks are forbidden to notify customers about the reports. “
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The ownership of our health, personal and financial information has not been limited to our Federal police operators. States have been claiming and receiving their share as well. After all, what is good for the goose is good for the gander!
States such as Texas say your info is our info to hold and to sell:
The state doesn’t just make money off you when you register your car; it’s also making money off your personal information. In 2012 they made $2.1 million to be exact. Here’s how it works: The Tax Collector’s office in your county helps the state out by collecting your information and your money. Once you’re in the Texas DMV database your information can be sorted by where you live or what you drive; and it’s that information that’s up for grabs.
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The State of Florida DMV makes millions of dollars from legally selling personal information. And catch this: they sell everyone’s information except for police officers and judges.
According to a recent report, the Department of Motor Vehicles in Florida has been selling names, addresses and dates of birth to companies in return for a promise that they not to harass anyone. Among the firms that allegedly pay for information many consider confidential are Lexis Nexis and Shadow Soft. The only people who are exempt from the sale of their personal information are judges and police officers.
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There are dozens of examples I could site of how our government has been violating our privacy, gathering our personal data, and spying on us for a long time. Not only that, the operators of our police state have been doing all this openly, and, thanks to their extended tentacles in Congress and the Courts, self-servingly legally.
This brings me back to DNI Clapper’s recent statement. The guy is right. Look at the lack of outrage by 99% of our police state inhabitants. Take notice of our maggot-colony in Congress. Check out our cohunes-less judges occupying the Courts. The government should have made this all open and transparent right after 9/11. They should have come out with it right from the start. Our police state should have declared our state a Panopticon State years ago.
A few weeks ago I preempted DNI Clapper. I wrote and published an article saying exactly that: The Entire Snowden NSA Cache Exposed Once and for All
Now we all know: NSA spies on everyone via every piece of hardware, every bit of software, every network, every ISP, every news outlet, every game, every cartoon, possibly through every poop hole. The hidden code in the Snowden-Greenwald Mockery appears to be one objective; one message: Be Afraid, people, be very Afraid. You are watched every second of every minute, and everywhere. You live in a Panopticon State, so watch out (all the time) and behave accordingly.
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Well, now, finally, they are doing it. They are making it official. Maybe it took a long-cut and tedious scripted play to get there, but at least they are now there: Mission accomplished! Welcome to our Panopticon Police State!
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Sibel Edmonds is the Publisher & Editor of Boiling Frogs Post and the author of the Memoir Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story. She is the recipient of the 2006 PEN Newman’s Own First Amendment Award for her “commitment to preserving the free flow of information in the United States in a time of growing international isolation and increasing government secrecy” Ms. Edmonds has a MA in Public Policy and International Commerce from George Mason University, a BA in Criminal Justice and Psychology from George Washington University.
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