Matrixology: The true and final goal of the Surveillance State

by Jon Rappoport

May 12, 2015

NoMoreFakeNews.com

“If you or I had a pot full of money and set out to help a community become more prosperous and self-sufficient, we could find a way. When big government steps in with its money, the objective is different—it’s to appear to help, while actually demeaning and reducing everything in sight…

“Ever wonder why so many law-enforcement types, government bureaucrats, and corporate worker bees are control freaks? Do you think it’s just the result of their job training? Think again. There is a selection process. The plan is for the new society to be run by massive numbers of little control freaks.

“…Predicting the future, based on current trends, leads us to some horrendous conclusions about the dystopia toward which we’re heading. But there is an upside. We can view the conflicts and the polarities with greater clarity. We can see, for example, what freedom means in a much deeper way. We can become more fierce defenders of that freedom. We can see what the stakes are. This view gives us power, if we want to take it.

“…Mind control is ultimately about inducing the sacrifice of freedom and power. And thus manufacturing a prison planet. People who register a blank look when the subject is their own freedom and power should understand that they are already operating under some form of conditioning. There is a paved-over spot in their consciousness, in their energy, in their desire, in their ambition.

“That’s right, ambition. In this case, the desire and motivation to do something big and important with their freedom, instead of just lying down and surrendering.” — (The Underground, Jon Rappoport)

The Surveillance State aims to profile every human in the United States. This profile will include a psych eval.

The eval, plus psychological tests will be mandatory for all government employees, including public school and college teachers, counselors, and wall-to-wall bureaucrats.

The objective? To qualify those people to judge the rest of us.

In other words, they will be the Normals, and we will be viewed as the Freaks.

These new government arbiters will also be selected on the basis of their feeling like put-upon victims.

Given new powers, they will have a field day.

I’m talking about a cultural revolution that turns things inside out and reverses vectors.

It’s already happening, of course, but the intensity is expanding.

Here is the view from the top: install “the underclass” as the officials who will run and police day-to-day society.

Make a list of every real or imagined victim group you can think of. From these groups, the millions of clerks and bureaucrats who operate the levers of intrusive public life will be chosen.

They are the natural allies of big government.

“Never had a chance to wreak revenge on the people who are holding you down? Come see us for an interview. We may have a position for you. We’ll give you a test, put that together with a profile we’ve already assembled on you, and voila…you could be working in an office tomorrow, collecting a paycheck, receiving benefits, and dropping the hammer on anyone who has an independent or errant thought in his head…”

Big government wants to make more people poor and dependent, yes. But beyond that, the plan is to “rescue” them and give them power in government jobs.

“Look, we’ve assembled psych evals on 300 million Americans. Here are the ones we’ve identified as troublesome. Guess what? They’re the folks who don’t like you. But now you’re working for us, the government. So we’re setting you loose. Go after them, find a reason to harass them, block them from getting ahead…”

Make no mistake about it, there are ways to make poor nations, from which immigrants are flooding into the US, far more prosperous—just as there are ways to make poor communities inside the US prosper. But those ways are verboten. Instead, big government, despite its pronouncements, is intent on exacerbating poverty and dependence.

Gradually, the difference between receiving government benefits and having a government job will be completely erased.

Freedom of the individual? Never heard of freedom or the individual.

The Bureaucratic Society is shaping up before our eyes.

The Surveillance State is the framework within which this goal can be accomplished, by the use of psych profiles and evals, which are filters deployed to separate the “put-upon people who thirst for power” from everyone else.

If you think all this is too crazy to be true, go to publicintelligence.net and read the report, Identity Dominance: The US Military’s Biometric War in Afghanistan. The program involves securing extensive background information, including “threat potential,” on every single human in the country. Every single human.

With a shift of target, such a program could be transferred back home to the US, where it would mesh with NSA operations to achieve the same goal.

Have another look at the 1974 film, The Parallax View. Reporter Joe Frady infiltrates The Parallax Corporation, which carries out assassinations on contract. Frady has to pass a series of psychological tests to win a job as a killer for hire. He has to present himself as a violent man with an axe to grind.

His recruiter, Jack Younger, spins Frady the following sales pitch: “Your tests suggest that you have remarkable talents…has it ever crossed your mind that it’s everybody else’s problem that they don’t get along with you?…the very quality that gets you into trouble makes you potentially invaluable…your aggressiveness.”

Imagine the same kind of build-up used on 30 million prospective petty bureaucrats:

“We want you to be a little angry. You deserve to be resentful. We consider that a plus. It makes you better at your job. You’ll have an edge. All the people who see you as a loser? They’re the freaks. This is your chance to work for the government and put them in their place. This isn’t the old government. This is new. This is a revolution. The people who were on the outside are now inside. You’re one of ours. We know how valuable you are…”

Translation: “We engineered society to create millions of people stuck in material and psychological poverty. Dependent. You’re one of those. Now we need employees to run this wall-to-wall welfare state and corral the ‘independent ones.’ We’ve let you soak in misery and suffering for a while, and now we think you’re ready to make other people follow the hundred thousand rules and regs we’ve set up…”

Surveillance is coming at us from all angles. Chips, drones, TSA checkpoints, smart meters, back-doored electronic products, video cameras, spying home appliances; our phone calls and emails and keystrokes and product purchases are recorded.

The government and its allied corporations will know whatever they want to know about us.

What then?

What happens when all nations are blanketed from stem to stern with surveillance?

Smart meters give us one clue. Public utilities, acting on government orders, will be able to allot electricity in amounts and at times it wishes to. This is leading to an overarching plan for energy distribution to the entire population.

Claiming shortages and limited options, governments will essentially be redistributing wealth, in the form of energy, under a collectivist model.

National health insurance plans (such as Obamacare) offer another clue. Such plans have no logistical chance of operating unless every citizen is assigned a medical ID package, which is a de facto identity card. In the medical arena, this means cradle-to-grave tracking.

Surveillance inevitably leads to: placing every individual under systems of control. It isn’t just “we’re watching you” or “we’re stamping out dissent.” It’s “we’re directing your participation in life.”

As a security analyst in the private sector once told me, “When you can see what every employee is doing, when you have it all at your fingertips, you naturally move on to thinking about how you can control those patterns and flows of movement and activity. It’s irresistible. You look at your employees as pieces on a board. The only question is, what game do you want to play with them?”

Every such apparatus is ruled, from the top, by Central Planners. When it’s an entire nation, upper-echelon technocrats revel in the idea of blueprinting, mapping, charting, and regulating the flows of all goods and services and people, “for the common good.”

Water, food, medicine, land use, transportation—they all become items of a networked system that chooses who gets what and when, and who can travel where, and under what conditions.

This is the wet dream of technocrats. They believe they are saving the world, while playing a fascinating game of multidimensional chess.

As new technologies are discovered and come on line, the planners decide how they will be utilized and for whose benefit.

In order to implement such a far-reaching objective, with minimal resistance from the global population, manufactured crises are unleashed which persuade the masses that the planet is under threat and needs “the wise ones” to rescue it and us.

We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We see (planned) drought and famine. We are told about desperate shortages and a frying Earth. We are presented with phony epidemics that are falsely promoted as scourges.

The only response, we are led to believe, is more humane control over the population.

On top of that, we are fed an unending stream of propaganda aimed at convincing us that “the great good for the greatest number” is the only acceptable principle of existence. All prior systems of belief are outmoded. We know better now. We must be good and kind and generous to everyone at all times.

Under this quasi-religious banner, which has great emotional appeal, appears The Plan. Our leaders allocate and withhold on the basis of their greater knowledge. We comply. We willingly comply, because we are enlisted in a universal army of altruistic concern.

This is a classic bait and switch. We are taught to believe that service for the greater good is an unchallengeable goal and credo. And then, later, we find out it has been hijacked to institute more power over us, in every way.

The coordinated and networked surveillance of Earth and its people is fed into algorithms that spit out solutions. This much food will go here; that much water will go there; here there will be medical care; there medical care will be severely rationed. These people will be permitted to travel. Those people will be confined to their cities and towns.

Every essential of life—managed with on-off switches, and the consequences will play out.

An incredibly complex system of interlocking decisions will be hailed as messianic.

Surveillance; planning; control.

The surveillance is expanded, not because we are constantly under threat and must be protected from terrorists, but because we can then be labeled and entered onto 10 billion squares of the game board, to be moved around or held in place.

This is the vision.

It isn’t ours. It never was. But we are not consulted.

Instead we are made witness to watershed events: the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center; the 2001 assault on the Trade Center and the Pentagon. These ops paralleled the unleashing of better and more far-ranging methods of surveillance.

We are profiled down to the threads on our clothing and DNA in our cells. But what is our profile of the technocrats and their bosses?

They are divorced from human life. They live in a vacuum. They take pleasure from that vacuum.

In 1982, I interviewed Bill Perry, who had just left his job as PR chief at Lawrence Livermore Labs, where scientists design nuclear weapons. Perry had been given the kind of job PR people long for. But one day, when he passed the desk of a researcher and listened to his complaints about budget limitations, Perry said, “Listen, America already has the means to blow up the whole planet eight times. What more do you need?”

The researcher looked up at him with a genuinely puzzled expression. He said, “You don’t understand, Bill. This is a problem in physics.”

In the same detached sense, the technocrats who want to calculate and direct our future, move by move, minute by minute, see us as components of a complex and very interesting problem.

Yes, they indeed expect to exercise power and control. But they also live in an abstraction. They deal their answers from that realm. They exercise cool passion. They see, for example, that not every single twitch of thought of every person on earth is yet mapped, so they want to finish constructing the means by which they can chart those “missing elements.” They want to complete the formula.

They view their research as a wholly natural implication of the mathematics they can manipulate. They swim in technology and they want to extend its architecture. To abandon the program would be tantamount to denying their own intelligence. They climb the mountain because it is there.

They do perceive that one factor does not fit their algorithms: the free individual. It’s the wild card. Therefore, they are compelled to analyze freedom and break it down into DNA functions and brain processes. They assume, because they must, that the free individual is an illusory idea that flows from some older configuration of synaptic transmission, at a time in our evolution when we needed it. But now, they suppose, the engineering of human activity and thought has superseded such quaint notions. Now we all can be tracked, traced, and studied on a different and wider scale. Now we can be seen for what we really are: a hive.

Therefore, we must be instructed, within tight limits, about our various functions.

I’m reminded of a statement attributed to Nobel Laureate, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi:

“In my search for the secret of life, I have ended up with atoms and electrons, which have no life at all. Somewhere along the line, life has run through my fingers. So, in my old age, I am retracing my steps…”

Today’s technocrats will admit no such disappointment or existential crisis. They flourish with great optimism as they design the future world and its single society. If they run out of pieces of their puzzle to study, they’ll try to track the motion of every atom and electron and quark in the universe. They’ll delight in it.

Knowing all this, we know the terms of the war we are in.

The Central Planners have an equation: “free=uncontrolled=dangerous.”

By the gross terms of that equation, they lump us in with thugs and murderers and terrorists. They even see the normal functioning of the brain as a threat, as an intrinsically defective process, and they have long since decided that organ must be corrected with drugs and other remedies.

We, on the other hand, must assert, in every way possible, that freedom is real and inviolable, and we must back that up with our actions.

When individual freedom is no longer discussed in great depth by people who should know better, when it is left to wither on the vine, many programs and structures are built to take its place. When freedom is not understood beyond a superficial level, the question, WHAT IS FREEDOM FOR, goes begging.

Of all the criticisms of our education system, this one should be primary. Thomas Jefferson envisioned public education purely as a way to teach children what being a citizen in a Republic meant—because, until the Constitution was enacted, there had never been an experiment in freedom on such a scale. It was a new premise.

Several years ago, in one of our greatest cities, Chicago, people were scrambling to ensure that, during a teacher’s strike, schools could remain open as baby-sitting warehouses for half-days. That is how far the system has sunk.

Technocrats contemplate changing the game of life so that it essentially becomes synthetic. Natural was just a way-station. To really exercise control, it’s necessary to remake humans from top to bottom. Then you know exactly what you are dealing with, because you made it, you invented it.

As Aldous Huxley wrote, “’Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines!’ The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. ‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history’.”

Yes, because you made the twins in hatcheries and the machines in factories.

Technocrats are their own brand of problem solvers. Solving the problem of Planet Earth, as they see it, requires human constants, as many as possible, and the fewest possible human variables.

Therefore, re-engineer the brain. Reconfigure the nervous system. Insert preferred images directly into the brain.

That’s what these useful (high-IQ) idiots are working on these days. That’s where they’re going.

That gives us a wider picture of what freedom really means and will mean in the coming years. It’s to our benefit to know that.

When I write about individual power, as I frequently do, this is part of what I’m referring to. The coming years. The coming struggle.

When I write about imagination, despite the fact that most people don’t have a clue about their own imagination, this is what I’m talking about, in part: the individual inventing new strategies to protect and expand freedom.

The wild card is: us.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.

Unanswered questions for ex-CIA officer Edward Snowden

by Jon Rappoport

March 18, 2015

NoMoreFakeNews.com

Now that the documentary, Citizen Four, has been released, and now that it has won an Oscar, it’s time to revisit unanswered questions, which I raised soon after Snowden’s identity was revealed to the world. (Spygate archive here)

This is not an article about the value of the documents Edward Snowden took from the NSA. I leave those judgments to others.

This article is about Snowden himself and his back-story.

So far, I see no reporter who has directly asked Snowden even faintly challenging questions about his background.

I find that quite odd. And the number of people who don’t find it odd makes the situation even odder.

If a man came to me, stating he was an ex-CIA officer who had taken a huge cache of vital documents from the other major spying agency in the US, the NSA, I would want to know a great deal about him.

I wouldn’t care that he was an engaging young man who appeared to be committing a heroic act on behalf of freedom. I wouldn’t care, because I know that people who work for intelligence agencies are prepared to lie. They are trained to lie. They believe in lying. This is basic knowledge that any reasonable reporter would have.

Yet, in Snowden’s case, an exception has been made. Why?

As soon as you see a photo of Snowden for the first time, you realize he’s the perfect image of the techie’s counter-spy: young, thin, bespectacled, “vulnerable.”

You have to wonder: if he’d been 60, balding, fat, with a constant sheen of nervous perspiration on his chubby cheeks, would he have grabbed so much positive attention from the get-go? Would reporters have refrained from grilling him about his back-story?

Within a day of Snowden’s identity being revealed, details of that story appeared in the press.

Upon reading the story, a number of questions sprang to mind. To my knowledge, none of them have been satisfactorily answered, or even posed by journalists who have had direct access to Snowden.

Why do potential or possible holes in Snowden’s back-story matter? Because holes always matter. They can lead to unexpected discoveries; they can reveal that a person is more than he says he is, different than he says he is.

In 2003, at age 19, without a high school diploma, Snowden enlists in the Army. He begins a training program to join the Special Forces. The sequence here is fuzzy. At what point after enlistment can a new soldier start this training program? Does he need to demonstrate some exceptional ability before Special Forces puts him in that program?

Snowden breaks both legs in a training exercise. He’s discharged from the Army. Is that automatic? How about healing and then resuming Army service?

If Snowden was accepted in the Special Forces training program because he had special computer skills, then why discharge him simply because he broke both legs?

Circa 2003 (?), Snowden gets a job as a security guard for an NSA facility at the University of Maryland. He specifically wanted to work for NSA? It was just a generic job opening he found out about?

Also in 2003 (?), Snowden shifts jobs. He’s now in the CIA, in IT. He has no high school diploma. He’s a young computer genius?

What kind of work does he do for the CIA until, in 2007…

He is sent to Geneva. He’s only 23 years old. The CIA gives him diplomatic cover there. Diplomatic cover is serious status. Snowden is put in charge of maintaining computer-network security. A major job. Obviously, he has access to a wide range of classified documents. Sound a little odd? He’s just a kid. Maybe he has his GED by now. Otherwise, he still doesn’t have a high school diploma.

Snowden reportedly says that during this period, in Geneva, one of the incidents that really sours him on the CIA is the “turning of a Swiss banker.” One night, CIA guys get a banker drunk, encourage him to drive home, the banker gets busted, the CIA guys help him out of that jam, and then with that bond formed, they eventually get the banker to reveal deep banking secrets to the Agency.

Snowden is this naïve? He doesn’t know by now that the CIA does this sort of thing all the time? He’s shocked? He “didn’t sign up for this?”

Furthermore, if this banker story is true, and if Snowden is the source for it, why did he reveal it? All sorts of people should be able to do a little digging and figure out who the Swiss banker is—thus blowing the banker’s cover and exposing him. Was that Snowden’s intention?

In 2009, Snowden leaves the CIA.

It should noted here that Snowden claimed he could do very heavy damage to the entire US intelligence community in 2008, but decided to wait because he thought Obama, just coming into the Presidency, might make good changes.

After two years with the CIA in Geneva, Snowden really had the capability to “take down most of the US intelligence network,” or a major chunk of it? He had that much access to classified data?

Snowden goes on to work for two private defense contractors, Dell and Booze Allen Hamilton. In this latter job, Snowden is assigned to work at the NSA.

He’s an outsider, but he claims to have access to so much sensitive NSA data that he can take down the whole US intelligence network in a single day. Really?

How many people work in highly classified jobs for the NSA? Here is one man, Snowden, who is working for Booz Allen, an outside NSA contractor, and he can get access to, and copy, documents that expose the spying collaboration between NSA and the biggest tech companies in the world—and he can get away with it.

If so, then NSA is a sieve leaking out of all holes. Because that means a whole lot of other, higher-level NSA employees can likewise steal these documents. Many, many other people can copy them and take them. Are we to believe this?

“Let’s see. Who’s coming to work for us here at NSA today? Oh, new whiz kid. Ed Snowden. Outside contractor. Twenty-nine years old. No high school diploma. Has a GED. He worked for the CIA and quit. Hmm. The CIA. They don’t like us and we don’t like them. Why did Snowden quit the CIA? Oh, never mind, who cares? No problem.

“Tell you what. Let’s give this kid access to our most sensitive data. Sure. Why not? Everything. Let Snowden see it all. Sure. What the hell. I’m feeling charitable. He seems like a nice kid.”

Sometimes cognitive dissonance, which used to be called contradiction, rings a gong so loud it knocks you off your chair.

Let’s see. NSA is the most awesome spying agency ever devised in this world. If you cross the street in Podunk, Anywhere, USA, to buy an ice cream soda, on a Tuesday afternoon in July, they can know.

They know if you sit at the counter and drink that soda or take it and move to the only table in the store. They know if you lick the foam from the top of the glass with your tongue or pick the foam with your straw and then lick it.

But this agency, with all its vast power and its dollars…with the brightest, sharpest minds in the business…

Can’t protect its own data from outright theft. Can’t lock up its own store. They overlooked their own security systems. Never set them up right in the first place. Forgot to.

And they can’t track one of their own, a man who came to work every day, a man who made up a story about needing treatment in Hong Kong for epilepsy and then skipped the country.

Just can’t find him.

Can’t find him in Hong Kong, where he does a sit-down video interview with Glenn Greenwald and Poitras and MacAskill. Can’t track the reporters to Snowden’s hotel.

Can’t find that place where Snowden’s staying.

No. Can’t find him or spy on his communications while he’s in Hong Kong. Can’t figure out he’s booked a flight to Russia.

Can’t intercept him at the airport before he leaves for Russia. Too difficult.

And this man, this employee, is walking around with three or four laptops that contain the keys to all the secret spying knowledge in the known cosmos.

Can’t locate those laptops. The most brilliant technical minds of this or any other generation can find a computer in Outer Mongolia in the middle of a blizzard, but these walking-around computers in Hong Kong are somehow beyond reach.

And before this man, Snowden, this employee, skipped Hawaii, he was able to access the layout of entire US intelligence networks. Yes. He was able to use a thumb drive.

He walked into work with a thumb drive, plugged in, and stole…everything. He stole enough to “take down the entire US intelligence network in a single afternoon.”

Not only that, but anyone who worked at this super-agency as a systems-analyst supervisor, or higher, could have done the same thing. Could have stolen the keys to the kingdom.

This is why NSA geniuses with IQs over 180 decided, in the midst of the Snowden affair, that they needed to draft “tighter rules and procedures” for their employees. Right.

A few thousand pieces of internal security they hadn’t realized they needed before would be put in place.

This is, let me remind you again, the most secretive spying agency in the world. The richest spying agency. The smartest spying agency.

But somehow, over the years, they’d overlooked their own security. They’d left lots of doors open.

But now, yes now, having been made aware of this vulnerability, the Agency would make corrections.

Sure.

Should we believe the NSA is this weak and bumbling, when it comes to protecting its data, when it comes to tracking down one of its own who has stolen the farm? Or should we entertain the possibility that Snowden didn’t really steal all that information himself? Did someone at the CIA give it to him? Was this a long-term CIA op?

Yes, strange possibilities. But the world of intelligence is strange. It’s designed that way.

May 20, 2013: Snowden arrives in Hong Kong from Hawaii. He’s just taken medical leave from the NSA. This is not troubling to his employer, despite the fact that, as AFP reports, Snowden worked briefly at the US Embassy in New Delhi (2010) and abruptly left India, citing medical problems on that occasion as well.

Both times, Snowden didn’t seek medical help in the country in which he was employed.

June 1, 2013: Three reporters connected with The Guardian—Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, and Laura Poitras—fly from New York to Hong Kong, and begin their week-long interview of Snowden. If this raises red flags, it doesn’t lead to intercepting Snowden.

June 5, 2013: The Guardian publishes its first article containing NSA leaks. The next three days see more NSA revelations, but there is no mention of Snowden.

June 9: The Guardian goes public about Snowden for the first time. According to Reuters, the NSA started an “urgent search” for Snowden several days before June 9—perhaps as early as June 1.

June 10: Snowden checks out of his hotel, but remains in Hong Kong. The US intelligence apparatus still can’t find him.

June 12: The South China Post publishes an interview with Snowden, who says he’ll stay in Hong Kong until he’s told he has to go. The NSA still can’t find him.

June 14: The UK Home Office orders airlines to deny passage to Snowden, if he tries to come to the UK.

June 20, 21: The Guardian publishes more top-secret documents from the Snowden cache.

June 23: Free and unencumbered, Snowden flies to Moscow with Wikileaks’ Sarah Harrison.

During this entire period (May 20-June23), the NSA, and other agencies of the US government, have been unable to locate Snowden?

They’ve been unable to get hold of, or disable, his famous four laptops, which presumably contain all the documents he took from the NSA. Instead, Snowden transfers the documents to Greenwald and Poitras in Hong Kong, hides out successfully, and makes his flight to Moscow.

In past articles, based on all these questions and oddities and paradoxes, I’ve spelled out alternative scenarios about who Snowden might be, and what’s really going on here. For this piece, in the wake of Citizen Four, I just want to refresh the questions, the unanswered questions about Snowden and the NSA.

And point out that no reporters who have had direct access to Snowden have pressed these questions.

He’s been given a free pass.

“Well, why should we wrangle with Snowden? He handed us the documents? Why should we look a gift horse in the mouth?”

Because in the spying game, things are not what they seem. In the spying game, ops are layered. They have multiple purposes. Cover stories. These ops conceal their bottom lines.

Snowden worked for the CIA. He was a spy. And at certain levels, the CIA and the NSA hate each other. They compete for federal money, for status, for prestige.

The NSA doesn’t just spy on private citizens. The NSA spies on politicians and bankers and corporate CEOs, and those people know it and they don’t like it, and they want to relieve themselves of that burden and that threat. They want to curb the power of the NSA as it applies to them.

They would welcome, as perhaps the CIA would, putting a crimp in NSA’s spying capabilities, limiting those capabilities in some way, at least giving NSA pause for thought about risking further exposure beyond Snowden’s disclosures.

For these and other reasons, the back-story of Edward Snowden is more than an academic pursuit, and the unanswered questions are of more than passing interest.

Educated privacy advocates who spend a great of their time commenting on security issues may not want to disturb the image of Snowden; and they certainly don’t want to be called conspiracy nuts re their view of who Snowden might be; but reporters shouldn’t care about that. Reporters should vet their sources as thoroughly as possible.

That’s SOP. Only this time, from all available information, it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen when Greenwald, Poitras, and MacAskill met Snowden. It didn’t happen after Snowden gave them his cache of NSA data. And it isn’t happening now.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.

Explosive: Australia, ‘better slave than dead’

by Jon Rappoport

July 30, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

Remember the name “Pine Gap.” It lies at the heart of this story.

I’ve always thought Australians were more blunt and forthright than Americans. I don’t know if that’s true, but the current debate about total surveillance in the Land Down Under is cutting to the bone.

The government wants to tax the Australian people so it can use giant telecoms to collect wall to wall “metadata” on them. (Pay us so we can spy on you.)

The Age newspaper reports on an Australian senate inquiry into the plan (see “Internet ‘tax’ may fund new spy laws”):

“ASIO [the national security service of Australia] chief David Irvine told the inquiry last week that increased data retention powers were needed to tackle terrorism and that ‘the public should not be concerned that there’s going to be gross misuse’ of them.

”’For the life of me I cannot understand why it is correct for all your privacy to be invaded for a commercial purpose, and not for me to do so to save your life,” he [Irvine] said.

Blunt. That’s what I’m talking about. Notice Irvine’s use of “me”. He’s personally going to save Australia.

And Irvine assumes no one in Australia cares about corporations profiling them seven ways from Sunday, in order to sell them products, and therefore, why not let the government invade their lives?

American politicians rarely let the cat out of the bag in that way. Primped by PR minions, they circle vaguely around a point, and spout empty generalities until everyone falls asleep.

Not this man Irvine. He lets loose. He may as well have been saying, “You morons have already surrendered yourselves to corporations, so let me come in and finish the job.”

Infowars.com reports on another gem dropped at the senate inquiry: “One so called Liberal senator, Ian MacDonald, agreed, saying that he would ‘rather be alive and lack privacy than dead with my privacy intact’.”

Terrific. Come right out with it. Better a slave than dead. ‘Yes, we’re going take away your privacy and freedom, but you’ll still be breathing.’

In an US senate committee room, you’d hear something like this instead: “We’ve introduced very specific algorithms that ensure privacy protections are handled with sensitive concerns for all citizens, in accordance with our long-standing American traditions…”

Former NSA attorney Stewart Baker, a visiting meddler from the US, testified to the Australian Senate in language he would never use in America. He said the war against terror was being obstructed by ”an unholy alliance of business and privacy activists.”

Obviously, Baker was there to help expand American-Australian sharing of spy-data. NSA sniffs a new data-mining program anywhere in the world, and they want in on it.

But there is more. Much more.

Richard Tanter provides context in his article, “The US Military Presence in Australia.” (The Asia-Pacific Journal, Nov. 11, 2013)

“Australia is now more deeply embedded strategically and militarily in US global military planning, especially in Asia, than ever before…[there is an] integration of Australian military forces organizationally and technologically with US forces, and a rapid and extensive expansion of an American military presence in Australia itself.”

“…[An] Australian government mantra, usually from the Defence Minister, has been that ‘There are no US bases in this country.’… This is…in fact a complete misrepresentation of strategic reality, which is in fact one of fundamental and inherent asymmetrical cooperation between the United States and Australia.”

Tanter goes on to describe, in detail, a number of military bases in Australia which are “joint access” for the US and Australia.

The glittering crown jewel is Pine Gap.

“The Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap outside Alice Springs remains the most important US intelligence base outside the US itself.”

Underline that statement.

In addition to monitoring movements of missiles in Russia and China, and detecting missile launches, “Pine Gap, and the wider US global signals intelligence system of which it is a part, now integrates surveillance and monitoring of global internet and email traffic and mobile telephone use.”

Corollary: without Pine Gap, the NSA has no existing way to spy on the world.

“Pine Gap undoubtedly has a major role in providing signals intelligence in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“This has now extended to US counter-terrorism operations, including the provision of data facilitating drone strike targeting in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen in close to real time.”

Thus, Australia, whether it likes it or not, is playing a major role in US drone attacks.

“Since May 2013, the role of Pine Gap’s principal, signals intelligence gathering and processing role has returned to the world’s front pages courtesy of the extraordinarily courageous whistle blowing by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.”

Snowden revealed that Pine Gap is one primary base from which the now-infamous NSA PRISM spying program operates.

Pine Gap is absolutely crucial to US military and intelligence agendas around the world.

It a vital link in NSA’s world spying operation.

Tanter remarks that, since Pine Gap is used to collate data directing US drone killing-strikes, the Australian government is legally culpable in those killings.

Suppose, in Australia, a significant political movement arose, with the objective of shutting down Pine Gap or severely limiting its functions. I don’t mean some protestors on the streets now and then. I mean a large, visible, continuing social and political force.

Now we have the bottom-line reason the Australian government, with heavy-handed encouragement from the US, wants to increase, vastly, spying on all its citizens: no such political movement must be allowed to grow.

The embrace between the Pentagon, the NSA, and the Australian government is one of the greatest priorities of US leadership.

Therefore, Australia must go along.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Surveillance State: covert revolution

by Jon Rappoport

July 4, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

“If you or I had a pot full of money and set out to help a community become more prosperous and self-sufficient, we could find a way. When big government steps in with its money, the objective is different—it’s to appear to help, while actually demeaning and reducing everything in sight…

“Ever wonder why so many law-enforcement types, government bureaucrats, and corporate worker bees are control freaks? Do you think it’s just the result of their job training? Think again. There is a selection process. These people are chosen up front, because psych evals identify them as ‘right’ for the work they’ll do. The plan is for the new society to be run by the pod people.” — Jon Rappoport, The Underground

The Surveillance State aims to profile every human in the United States. This profile will include a psych eval.

The eval, plus psychological tests will be mandatory for all government employees, including public school and college teachers, counselors, and wall-to-wall bureaucrats.

The objective? To qualify those people to judge the rest of us.

In other words, they will be the Normals, and we will be viewed as the Freaks.

These new government arbiters will also be selected on the basis of their feeling like put-upon victims.

Given new powers, they will have a field day.

I’m talking about a cultural revolution that turns things inside out and reverses vectors.

It’s already happening, of course, but the intensity is expanding.

Here is the view from the top: install “the underclass” as the officials who will run and police day-to-day society.

Make a list of every real or imagined victim group you can think of. From these groups, the millions of clerks and bureaucrats who operate the levers of intrusive public life will be chosen.

They are the natural allies of big government.

“Never had a chance to wreak revenge on the people who are holding you down? Come see us for an interview. We may have a position for you. We’ll give you a test, put that together with a profile we’ve already assembled on you, and voila…you could be working in an office tomorrow, collecting a paycheck, receiving benefits, and dropping the hammer on anyone who has an independent or errant thought in his head…”

Big government wants to make more and people poor and dependent, yes. But beyond that, the plan is to “rescue” them and give them power in government jobs.

“Look, we’ve assembled psych evals on 300 million Americans. Here are the ones we’ve identified as troublesome. Guess what? They’re the folks who don’t like you. But now you’re working for us, the government. So we’re setting you loose. Go after them, find a reason to harass them, block them from getting ahead…”

Make no mistake about it, there are ways to make poor nations, from which immigrants are flooding into the US, far more prosperous—just as there are ways to make poor communities inside the US prosper. But those ways are verboten. Instead, big government, despite its pronouncements, is intent on exacerbating poverty and dependence.

Gradually, the difference between receiving government benefits and having a government job will be completely erased.

Freedom of the individual? Never heard of freedom or the individual.

The Bureaucratic Society is shaping up before our eyes.

The Surveillance State is the framework within which this goal can be accomplished, by the use of psych profiles and evals, which are filters used to separate the “put-upon people who thirst for power” from everyone else.

If you think all this is too crazy to be true, go to publicintelligence.net and read the report, “Identity Dominance: The US Military’s Biometric War in Afghanistan.” The program involves securing extensive background information, including “threat potential,” on every single human in the country.

With a shift of target, such a program could be transferred back home to the US, where it would mesh with NSA operations to achieve the same goal.

Have another look at the 1974 film, The Parallax View. Reporter Joe Frady infiltrates The Parallax Corporation, which carries out assassinations on contract. Frady has to pass a series of psychological tests to win a job as a killer for hire. He has to present himself as a violent man with an axe to grind.

His recruiter, Jack Younger, spins Frady the following sales pitch: “Your tests suggest that you have remarkable talents…has it ever crossed your mind that it’s everybody else’s problem that they don’t get along with you?…the very quality that gets you into trouble makes you potentially invaluable…your aggressiveness.”

Imagine the same kind of build-up used on 30 million prospective petty bureaucrats:

“We want you to be a little angry. You deserve to be resentful. We consider that a plus. It makes you better at your job. You’ll have an edge. All the people who see you as a loser? They’re the freaks. This is your chance to work for the government and put them in their place. This isn’t the old government. This is new. This is a revolution. The people who were on the outside are now inside. You’re one of ours. We know how valuable you are…”

Translation: “We engineered society to create millions of people stuck in material and psychological poverty. Dependent. You’re one of those. Now we need employees to run this wall-to-wall welfare state and corral the ‘independent ones.’ We’ve let you soak in misery and suffering for a while, and now we think you’re ready to make other people follow the hundred thousand rules and regs we’ve set up…”

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Snowden, Brian Williams: staged amateur night for suckers

by Jon Rappoport

May 30, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

You could call it a completely incompetent interview, but Brian Williams is supposed to be incompetent. That’s his job.

Don’t take a Snowden comment and drill down into it. Don’t connect dots. Don’t delve into Snowden’s history. Don’t ask serious questions about the NSA.

Just make the interview seem important. That’s all that counts. Give the impression that the interview is an Event.

When Snowden suddenly told Williams he was trained as a spy, he wasn’t just an analyst, when he said he’d worked under false names at false jobs he didn’t really have, for the CIA, NSA, and DIA…that’s a show-stopper.

Hold everything. “Really, Ed? What did you do? What kind of thing? You worked for the DIA? Never heard that before. When? Why haven’t you said you were a spy before? Why hasn’t Greenwald mentioned this? Does the New York Times know this? The Washington Post? When you took that last systems-analyst job for NSA in Hawaii, as a contractor for Booz Allen, you’d already been a deep-cover spy for NSA? What exactly was your job at NSA in Hawaii, Ed?”

And that’s just for starters.

Once you open up that subject, who knows where it might lead?

And how about this: “Okay, Ed, we’ve heard you took anywhere from 20,000 to 1.7 million NSA documents. What’s the real number? I’m asking this, in part, because at the rate those documents are being released, by your press friends, we’ll all be long dead before the full cache is made public.”

And then: “Let’s talk turkey here, Ed, about NSA internal security. This is the biggest, richest, most brilliant spy agency in the world. And yet we’re supposed to believe they overlooked one little thing in their structure: they just forgot to secure their own data. Oops. They just forgot. All these years. Therefore, as you’ve said on several occasions, any employee of the Agency with ordinary access could stroll in and steal the farm. Really? Is that what you’re selling?”

“As a follow-up, how did you take all those documents? We’ve heard the magic secret was: you had a thumb drive; other employees gave you their passwords; you were ‘special,’ so you had access to everything; you were doing systems checks. So what was it? How did you pull it off? You took so many documents from different categories of stored data. The NSA had no compartmentalization?”

“Early press reports cited your experience in Geneva working for the CIA as a crisis point in your odyssey. You learned that several CIA people there turned a Swiss banker. They got him drunk one night, encouraged him to drive home, he was arrested on the road, and these CIA guys rescued him from his problem. From that point on, they were able to get him to pass along confidential banking data to them. And this soured you on the CIA. This shocked you. Really? Are you serious? This upset you? You were working for the CIA. You knew what they do. The banker incident was nothing. This sounds like a made-up tale of an agent’s disillusionment with his own people—a piece of a legend.”

“Another thing that doesn’t add up: your time in Hong Kong. According to press reports, and Greenwald’s account, it was touch and go for you there. You’re in a hotel, you’re walking the streets, you’re meeting with Greenwald and Poitras…but during those few weeks the entire spying and surveillance apparatus of the US government just can’t find you. And they can’t cover the airport well enough, when you fly out of there, to snatch you up. All this is very fishy, Ed. Something else is going on here, Ed. What is it?”

“And oh yes. Your days in the military. You state you applied for a position in Special Forces, and during your preliminary training, you broke both legs and they let you go. I understand that Special Forces program involved taking tests for ‘vocational possibilities.’ I assume this would have let your superiors know you were a computer prodigy. Wouldn’t Special Forces have drooled to employ a prodigy? In which case, why did they let you go when you broke your legs? Did you need your legs to work on a computer?”

This is called digging. But of course, that isn’t Brian Williams’ job. He’s the All-American newsboy on a bike riding through a Disney neighborhood tossing papers on porches.

Digging in this way isn’t any mainstream reporter’s job. The official narrative won’t permit it. The sanitized Snowden story is only about: is he a patriot or a traitor?

Whereas, in real life, there are enough doubts and inconsistencies about Snowden and the NSA to wonder: was the whole thing, the whole deal, the whole theft of documents an op?

A planned operation?

For example, was Snowden still working for the CIA when CIA people GAVE him those NSA documents to walk off with? Was this part of a turf war between the CIA and the NSA? Was this the kind of spy Snowden was/is?

Did CIA people appeal to his patriotism to convince him that this op would be a noble enterprise?

Were these few CIA people patriots themselves, working off the books?

Was the theft of NSA documents part of a much larger plan to let the American people know they are being spied on, 24/7? To enforce the power and effectiveness of the Surveillance State? Because, when you think about it, the population needs to know they’re being spied on. That’s the biggest priority. Then they tailor their own thoughts and words and actions voluntarily. That’s what makes the Surveillance State work.

Of course, the American people don’t consider all these potential elements of the Snowden affair. (More on the various potential elements of the Snowden affair can be found here under the #Spygate heading on my blog (top right hand side link).)

Although they watch spy movies and television shows, they don’t believe, when push comes to shove, that intelligence operations have layers and false trails and cover stories and limited hangouts.

They don’t believe that deception can run that deep. They don’t stop to realize that all spies are trained to lie.

Lying convincingly is the number-one requisite for a spy. Lie to enemies, lie to friends, lie to the press, lie to other agencies of government.

If a spy doesn’t wake up every day thinking about what lies he’ll tell from breakfast to dinner, he’s a dud. A washout. A danger to himself and others.

Spies live in a labyrinth of deceit. It takes a certain kind of personality to thrive in that atmosphere.

Is Ed Snowden a spy?

Here’s a typical response to that question: “I don’t care what he is. The NSA documents are now out there in full view. That’s good. What difference does it make who Snowden is? Now we can have a public debate about the Surveillance State.”

Really? How is that “public debate” going? Have you seen any serious cutbacks in the power of the NSA? Has the limited-hangout discussion about whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor reined in the power of the NSA?

You never know what’s at the bottom of a story until you get there. There is always the chance you’ll discover something far more crippling to the powers-that-be than what’s on the surface, or what’s in the middle.

The surface of a desert might show you thousands of shards of pottery. Below that, you find a town. You keep going and you come to a lost city…

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Are black-budget ops creating new meta-crimes?

by Jon Rappoport

April 10, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

The Surveillance State has created an apparatus whose implications are staggering. It’s a different world now. And sometimes it takes a writer of fiction to flesh out the larger landscape.

Brad Thor’s novel, Black List, posits the existence of a monster corporation, ATS, that stands along side the NSA in collecting information on every move we make. ATS’ intelligence-gathering capability is unmatched anywhere in the world.

On pages 117-118 of Black List, Thor makes a stunning inference that, on reflection, is as obvious as the fingers on your hand:

“For years ATS had been using its technological superiority to conduct massive insider trading. Since the early 1980s, the company had spied on anyone and everyone in the financial world. They listened in on phone calls, intercepted faxes, and evolved right along with the technology, hacking internal computer networks and e-mail accounts. They created mountains of ‘black dollars’ for themselves, which they washed through various programs they were running under secret contract, far from the prying eyes of financial regulators.

“Those black dollars were invested into hard assets around the world, as well as in the stock market, through sham, offshore corporations. They also funneled the money into reams of promising R&D projects, which eventually would be turned around and sold to the Pentagon or the CIA.

“In short, ATS had created its own license to print money and had assured itself a place beyond examination or reproach.”

In real life, whether the prime criminal source is one monster corporation or a consortium of companies, or elite banks, or the NSA itself, the outcome would be the same.

It would be as Thor describes it.

We think about total surveillance as being directed at private citizens, but the capability has unlimited payoffs when it targets financial markets and the people who have intimate knowledge of them.

“Total security awareness” programs of surveillance are ideal spying ops in the financial arena, designed to suck up millions of bits of inside information, then utilizing them to make investments and suck up billions (trillions?) of dollars.

It gives new meaning to “the rich get richer.”

Taking the overall scheme to another level, consider this: those same heavy hitters who have unfettered access to financial information can also choose, at opportune moments, to expose certain scandals and crimes (not their own, of course).

In this way, they can, at their whim, cripple governments, banks, and corporations. They can cripple investment houses, insurance companies, and hedge funds. Or, alternatively, they can merely blackmail these organizations.

We think we know how scandals are exposed by the press, but actually we don’t. Tips are given to people who give them to other people. Usually, the first clue that starts the ball rolling comes from a source who remains in the shadows.

What we are talking about here is the creation and managing of realities on all sides, including the choice of when and where and how to provide a glimpse of a crime or scandal.

It’s likely that the probe Ron Paul had been pushing—audit the Federal Reserve—has already been done by those who control unlimited global surveillance. They already know far more than any Congressional investigation will uncover. If they know the deepest truths, they can use them to blackmail, manipulate, and control the Fed itself.

The information matrix can be tapped into and plumbed, and it can also be used to dispense choice clusters of data that end up constituting the media reality of painted pictures which, every day, tell billions of people “what’s news.”

In this global-surveillance world, we need to ask new questions and think along different lines now.

For example, how long before the mortgage-derivative crisis hit did the Masters of Surveillance know, from spying on bank records, that insupportable debt was accumulating at a lethal pace? What did they do with that information?

When did they know that at least a trillion dollars was missing from Pentagon accounting books (as Donald Rumsfeld eventually publicly admitted on September 10, 2001), and what did they do with that information?

Did they discover where billions of dollars, in cash, shipped to post-war Iraq, disappeared to?

When did they know the details of the Libor rate-fixing scandal? Press reports indicate that Barclays was trying to rig interest rates as early as January 2005.

Have they tracked, in detail, the men responsible for recruiting hired mercenaries and terrorists, who eventually wound up in Syria pretending to be an authentic rebel force?

Have they discovered the truth about how close or how far away Iran is from producing a nuclear weapon?

Have they collected detailed accounts of the most private plans of Bilderberg, CFR, and Trilateral Commission leaders?

For global surveillance kings, what we think of as the future is, in many respects the present and the past.

It’s a new world. These overseers of universal information-detection can enter and probe the most secret caches of data, collect, collate, cross reference, and assemble them into vital bottom-lines. By comparison, an operation like Wikileaks is an old Model-T Ford puttering down a country road, and Julian Assange, reviled as a terrorist, is a mere piker.

Previously, we thought we needed to look over the shoulders of the men who were committing major crimes out of public view. But now, if we want to be up to date, we also have to factor in the men who are spying on those criminals, who are gathering up those secrets and using them to commit their own brand of meta-crime.

And in the financial arena, that means we think of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan as perpetrators, yes, but we also think about the men who already know everything about GS and Morgan, and are using this knowledge to steal sums that might make GS and Morgan blush with envy.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free emails at www.nomorefakenews.com