Category Archives: Spygate

Obama: one if by land, two if by sea, three if by metadata

Obama: one if by land, two if by sea, three if by metadata

by Jon Rappoport

January 18, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

In his Friday speech, Obama ignored the essence of the FISA Court, the secret body that’s rubber-stamped warrants to do surveillance for the past 35 years.

Most of these requests for warrants come from NSA and the FBI, and only government attorneys may appear before the Court, none of whose decisions are made public. Therefore, the Court is a de facto piece of the Executive Branch, and as such its existence violates the separation of powers principle of the Constitution.

One of Snowden’s documents revealed that FISA had approved a blanket warrant requiring Verizon to make available, to NSA, records of all daily phone calls in its system.

No, President Obama said nothing about this. Instead, he led off his speech on the NSA and national security with these words:

“At the dawn of our Republic, a small, secret surveillance committee, born out of the Sons of Liberty, was established in Boston. And the group’s members included Paul Revere. At night, they would patrol the streets, reporting back any signs that the British were preparing raids against America’s early patriots.”

Paul Revere as a metaphor for NSA spying.

Yes, it’s not widely known that Paul was a Peeping Tom. He had a mental disorder. He was compulsively sneaking into houses of the colonists in Boston and watching them read by candlelight.

Paul also hung around local meat markets swatting flies and eavesdropping on conversations.

He loitered in saloons, stood outside churches on Sundays to pick up juicy bits of gossip, steamed open letters, and quizzed blacksmiths on what their customers were jabbering about. He stole recipes for Thanksgiving dinner from Indians.

If only he’d had 30,000 employees working for him, he could have blanketed the 13 colonies.

The NSA is spying on 300 million innocent Americans. There is that difference between it and the midnight ride of Paul Revere. Just a small point.

Who’s writing the President’s speeches? Is he trying to make the coronated leader of the free world look as ridiculous as possible? And is Obama even reading the words before he steps to the podium?

“Hey, Cody, this piece about Paul Revere? I know we don’t teach history anymore in this country, but you took it way too far. It doesn’t even make sense. Oh, what the hell, who’ll notice it?”

This weekend, you’ll see pundits on the news talk shows debating whether the President proposed significant enough changes in NSA spying methods. Did he go far enough? On the other side: can American still protect itself against terror attacks?

This is the puppet presentation, framing the conversation in the wrong terms and then taking off from there to see who’s more right.

It’s like mounting a discussion on whether $700 trillion or $800 trillion should be the debt ceiling of the US government.

The Matrix Revealed

Here’s a reasonable takeaway from Obama’s speech: politicians lie, and they don’t learn how the moment they’re elected to office for the first time, because that doesn’t give them a long enough lead-in to be good at it.

They ARE liars. They know how to do it, from way back. They’re practiced. Gaining political office is just another opportunity to ply their trade.

It’s a step up. Instead of merely lying as the owner of an oil company or a baseball team, or as a lawyer in an office, or as a community organizer on the street, they can now do it on a larger stage.

Many of them feel they’re born to politics. And that’s why. They lie, and they lie about lying, and what they lie about when, for example, they move into the Oval Office is much more important.

“I thought I was telling whoppers back in Chicago (Little Rock, Whittier, Crawford), but this is really something. Now I’m not just saying black is white, I’m saying it’s glowingly, blindingly white.”

The news talk show I’d like to see this weekend would pose the following question: how would you compare, say, a king claiming God has given him a divine right to rule vs. President Obama saying we have nothing to worry about in this, the Surveillance State?

It’s important to know the ultimate rationalization politicians give themselves when they’re lying about everything all the time. It is:

“The people, the public are animals, biological machines, and they roam the countryside, and they’re very, very dangerous, and they must be controlled. They’re operating on faulty programming, and the only solution is giving them new and better programming. Meanwhile, we have to lie to them, to keep them reasonably pacified.”

Welcome to Democracy. First, for about five minutes, as the ink was drying on the freshly signed Constitution, there was a Republic. Then, men began asking, “How can I twist this thing and lie all the time?” Democracy was the consequence.

In order to make Democracy stick, we have the Surveillance State, and presidents who give it cover.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th 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

Obama speech: Miller Lite commercial: less filling, tastes great

Obama speech: Miller Lite commercial: less filling, tastes great

by Jon Rappoport

January 17, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

Obama just made a Miller Lite speech, to calm fears that NSA spying is a bother and a problem. Not so. All is well.

He’ll cut down the NSA practice of spying on people connected to people connected to people of interest. The three layers will become only two.

This is great, except that NSA is already spying on everybody. Three, two, 16? What difference does it make?

For the “tastes great” part, the President reminded us that NSA snoops are just regular folks. They’re our “friends and neighbors,” he said.

I know. That’s the point. There are cold-eyed androids among us.

For the “less filling,” Obama proposed that the all-encompassing metadata of NSA-captured phone calls shouldn’t be held by the government. That’s bad. Instead, the phone companies themselves should hold it, and then let the government look at it.

Whew. What a relief.

We all know NSA will do whatever it wants to, in order to keep spying on us. Trim their capability a little over here, they’ll go over there and do the same thing from another vector.

That’s what the Surveillance State is all about.

Obama also jammed in a sideswipe at Snowden, just to keep the traitor narrative alive. And to let us know stealing State secrets is a heinous crime.

You see, the State can steal our information, but we can’t steal its information. That’s the basic principle.

But to quote our leader from an earlier speech(es), “We’re all in this together.”

I guess it depends on what the meaning of “together” is.

NSA won’t bother parsing that. They’ll just keep on watching and compiling and collating. Being Peeping Tom Central is in their blood. “To keep us safe.”

As the pollsters go to the phones and gauge public reaction to Obama’s speech, I have a suggestion. Ask, “Do you believe the President was being forthright and honest?” And then ask, “Okay now, do you REALLY believe he was being forthright and honest?”

The Matrix Revealed

And if NSA wants to repair its public image, I have more suggestions. Since you boys are spying on everybody all the time, release the following information to the press:

Conversations involving politicians, at all levels, on the subject of hookers and underage sex targets;

Elite pedophile rings;

Communications (military, intelligence, DOJ, State Dept., White House) re what really happened in Benghazi, what really happened in the Fast&Furious Op;

Brokerage house/banker/billionaire manipulation of the stock market;

Behind the scenes lies among the high-echelon execs at Monsanto.

Just for starters.

Obviously, you have all this info. Release it now. Prove you’re on our side.

What? All those people aren’t your targets?

We are?

Oh.

Gotta go. My refrigerator just told me the toaster said I put hemp butter on my toast this morning. It’s an indicator I could have two tons of pot in my garage.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th 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 and the final purpose of the Surveillance State

by Jon Rappoport

January 16, 2014

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I’ve written much about Edward Snowden, his back-story, and the questions that surround him (full archive here). But here, I want to discuss the aftermath, because no matter how you view Snowden and what he has done, he is now being used as a symbol.

Take a hero who has broken through the veil of secrecy, who’s stolen the golden eggs from the goose’s eyrie, who’s escaped…

And put him through the meat grinder of the press.

Raise him up, put him down, praise him, excoriate him, threaten him, isolate him, adore him, and sooner or later he begins to fade from view.

His profile, his public persona has been chopped up so many different ways into so many disparate pieces that, eventually, the symbol of him no longer carries any real force.

Meanwhile, the NSA and the Surveillance State continue on. They weather the storm. Despite the exploding scandal and the fall-out, and even though certain modes of collecting information may be reduced, new strategies emerge.

Therefore, the Surveillance State becomes even more powerful than it was.

Snowden rocked the boat, but the boat has been repaired. It sails on with even greater assurance.

And regardless of how the public responds to Snowden and the NSA, it is only a partial response, because the true aims of the Surveillance State are a mystery to most people.

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 require every citizen to be 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 them.

We watch (and fight in) wars and more wars, each one exacerbated and even invented. We see (planned) 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 humane and 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 on to 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.

The Matrix Revealed

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.

Exit From the Matrix

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, Alfred Szent-Giorgi: “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 electromagnetic interventions.

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. But if freedom seems like a weak response to the Surveillance State and its goals, remember this: all the State power I’ve been enumerating is organized to curtail freedom, stop it, end it, make it obsolete. That enormous effort wouldn’t be necessary if freedom were merely a passing fancy. It isn’t. It’s an eternal force.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th 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

The 36 mysterious days of Edward Snowden

The 36 mysterious days of Edward Snowden

by Jon Rappoport

January 15, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

First, a comment about the number of documents Snowden took from the NSA. Estimates have ranged from 20,000 to 1.2 million. Snowden explicitly stated he had vetted all of them, to make sure their release would aid transparency, his goal, rather than harm individuals.

Whether the number is 20,000 or 1.2 million, it’s impossible to accept that Snowden carefully perused each doc. If you want to test this out, go to your local library and read 20,000 pages of anything. Never mind making notes. Just get to the end of it.

All right, let’s move on to the timeline of Snowden’s mysterious 36 days and explore what it means for the NSA, the smartest, largest, richest spy agency in the world. (The source for this timeline is The Guardian.)

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 now 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.

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.

The Matrix Revealed

You can attribute all this, if you want to, to the sheer incompetence and stupidity of the entire US intelligence community.

There are other possibilities, if you take into account the fact that all intelligence personnel are trained to lie and deceive. It’s their staple.

Perhaps the NSA was aware of Snowden, as he was taking the documents, and they embedded a host of false trails and lies in his cache.

Perhaps some greater and more damaging revelations about the NSA were on the verge of exploding, and Snowden’s leaks functioned to conceal much deeper harm to NSA.

Perhaps the CIA, Snowden’s former employer, was still his employer, in their ongoing turf war with the NSA. And the CIA helped protect Snowden between May 20 and June 23, when he flew to Moscow.

In any case, believing that the NSA and other US intelligence operatives were unable to find Snowden in Hong Kong is like trying to eat metal.

It just doesn’t go down.

Snowden’s mysterious 36 days of freedom, as well as other elements of Snowden’s questionable bio, which I’ve covered in previous articles (see [ref1], [ref2], [ref3], [ref4], [ref5], [ref6], [ref7], and [ref8]), suggests the NSA-Snowden saga is more than it seems to be.

And don’t forget, despite the uproar about Snowden’s revelations, so far the NSA and the Surveillance State remain fully functional. The NSA’s reputation may have taken a large hit, but their work goes on unabated.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th 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

NSA at work: Do you have a secret “social profile?”

NSA at work: Do you have a secret “social profile?”

By Jon Rappoport

October 2, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

Do you know a grape grower in France? An activist in England?

NSA may have built an extensive social profile on you.

The NY Times reports (9/28): “NSA Gathers Data on Social Connections of US Citizens.”.

It’s a long piece, and it’s pinned to the idea that the NSA can track US residents who are connected to “foreign citizens of interest.”

Presumably this means the foreign citizens are suspected terrorists. Well, not necessarily. No.

As is often the case with the NY Times, the real nuggets are buried down deep in the story. So I’ve dug them out and assembled them more cogently. In other words, I’ve re-edited the Times piece to make things clearer. You’re welcome.

Do NSA’s foreign targets have to be suspected terrorists? To get on the radar, qualifications “could include anything from ties to terrorism, weapons proliferation or international drug smuggling to…[being] foreign politicians, business figures or activists.”

Boom.

Get the picture? NSA is spying on foreign politicians, business people, and activists. That’s a broad population. And of course, activists could be stumping for a wide variety of causes, including the right to privacy from snoopers.

By implication, that means NSA could shape a social profile of any American with serious or casual ties to these politicians, business people, and activists. So much for believing NSA would only target Americans with connections to foreign terror suspects. That’s a fairy tale for the masses.

Next topic: When the NSA shapes a social profile of an American, how far can they go? What can they access? How much of that person’s life can they invade?

Well, emails and phone records, right? Sure. Is that it? Not by a long shot.

“…bank codes, insurance information, Facebook profile, passenger manifests, voter registration rolls and GPS location information [where you are right now], as well as proprietary records and unspecified tax data.”

The NSA states they have a profile template of “164 relationship types…using queries like ‘travelsWith, hasFather, sentForumMessage, employs.’”

Translation: NSA builds a social profile of a person by spying to obtain info on 164 categories of activity, behavior, and status of that target.

How do you like it?

You could be an acquaintance of a businessman in France. The NSA has targeted him, and they’ve come across you in the process—so they access all the data and records mentioned above, to come at you on 164 vectors.

To put the cherry on the cake, your “phone and email logs…allow [NSA] analysts to…acquire clues to religious or political affiliations…regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office, late-night messages to an extramarital partner…”

Blackmail, anyone?

The Matrix Revealed

Yes, you say, this is horrible, but NSA’s spying activity only covers a relatively few Americans. Wrong. Let’s go to another quote from the Times article:

An NSA program called Mainway “in 2011 was taking in 700 million phone records per day. In August 2011, it began receiving an additional 1.1 billion cellphone records daily from an unnamed American service provider under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, which allows for the collection of the data of Americans if at least one end of the communication is believed to be foreign…”

And that’s not enough. No. “…the agency [NSA] is pouring money and manpower into creating a metadata repository capable of taking in 20 billion ‘record events’ daily and making them available to NSA analysts within 60 minutes.”

One subject the Times article didn’t cover: what happens when the NSA assembles a profile on an American who has casual ties to, say, a European businessman? Are they going to stop there? What about that American’s social connections here in the US? The American knows the cousin of a lawyer who’s speaking out against government surveillance. That cousin knows the mother of a child who was suspended from school for displaying the picture of a gun on his computer…

Obviously, NSA wants the ability to spy on everybody all the time.

But don’t worry. Keith Alexander, the head of NSA, assures us that everything the Agency is doing is legal, above-board, and necessary to keep us safe.

By “safe,” he means: NSA will spy on us 24/7 so the information can be used to create one huge system of tracking and control. Control of life. Regulated life. Algorithms that determine the shape of the dystopia we are entering.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMIcTiOG4UU&w=560&h=315]

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. 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

Rappoport replies to a Salon.com charge that he’s a conspiracist

Rappoport replies to a Salon.com charge that he’s a conspiracist

by Jon Rappoport

August 30, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

I just became aware that, this past June, Salon.com ran a story headlined, “Here come the Edward Snowden truthers.” The author, Alex Seitz-Wald (twitter), took several writers to task, including me, for doubting Snowden’s story.

Seitz-Wald wrote: “Why would these people find it easier to believe Snowden is an [sic] CIA plant than a whistle-blower? Conspiracists are reflexively skeptical of the ‘official narrative,’ even when it should confirm their worldview. Snowden should be a victory for them, but because the mainstream media and the government are corroborating much of what Snowden leaked, the mainstream account immediately becomes suspicious.”

Salon.com is now considering whether to publish this article.

Let’s see. Seitz-Wald claims I would doubt any mainstream account, right? Well, he’s absolutely on the money. I do. Like clockwork. I get up in the morning, I do 70,000 pushups, check my screen, read a “mainstream account” (of anything), and the pleasure of doubt moves right in. I pour milk on my doubt, a few strawberries, and that’s breakfast.

I doubt medical news, political news, economic news, energy news, military news, intelligence-agency news, and news about media. And that’s just for starters.

Am I a conspiracy theorist if I believe Ed Snowden’s leaks are important, but have serious doubts about his account of events leading up to his enormous data-grab at the NSA?

Let’s look at what Snowden told Glenn Greenwald about his background.

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

If he was accepted in the program because he had special computer skills (why else?), then why discharge him simply because he was put into two casts?

“Listen, Ed, we’ve come to the conclusion that, although you’re a computer genius, your broken legs will, from this point on, destroy your unique talent. You’re fired.”

Snowden next joins the CIA, in IT. He has no high school diploma.
In 2007, the Agency sends Snowden to Geneva. He’s only 23 years old. The CIA gives him diplomatic cover there. Serious status. He’s put in charge of maintaining computer-network security. Major job. Obviously, he has access to significant classified documents. Sound a little odd? Maybe he has his GED by now. Otherwise, he still doesn’t have a high school diploma.

Snowden 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, and then with that bond formed, they eventually convince the banker to reveal deep secrets to the Agency.

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

In 2009, Snowden leaves the CIA. Why? Presumably because he’s disillusioned. It should be noted 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 virtuous policy changes.

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

In 2009, Snowden leaves the CIA and moves into the private sector. He works for two defense contractors, Dell and then Booz Allen Hamilton. In this latter job, Snowden is assigned to work at the NSA.

By virtue of his 2013 hack, he claims to have grabbed so much sensitive NSA data that he can take down the whole US intelligence network in a single day. Really? In a single day?

How did he execute the hacks? According to press reports (and this isn’t necessarily Snowden’s version), the magic wand was a thumb-drive. Snowden waltzed into work with one, plugged in, and stole the farm and the Holy Grail and the kitchen sink.

Snowden’s claim of theft, by whatever method, is problematic, dubious, and suspect. Why do people insist on treating the NSA, on the one hand, as the most awesome, talented, resource-rich spying agency in the world and, on the other hand, as an astonishing bunch of morons who just happened to forget to develop their own useful internal security?

The NSA’s business is to intrude, spy, hack, tap, get into everybody’s system, yes? Right? But protecting themselves from the same kind of treatment is just too much to ask.

They never compartmentalized their own data to prevent somebody from climbing the ladder all the way to the top. They considered, but never made it mandatory to have two analysts sign off on every trip into classified areas.

They never got around to installing myriad checks and counter-checks, devised by their in-house geniuses, to prevent employee theft.

This is like saying, in the heyday of the Mafia, a junior hitman from New York could fly to Vegas and sign off on papers making him the owner of ten casinos and hotels on the Strip.

It’s like saying a radio man on a nuclear submarine could launch missiles by throwing a few switches.

“Yes, Mr. President, he bypassed our procedures and took out 24 islands in the Pacific before we could stop him. Well, we didn’t exactly stop him. He jumped into a lifeboat and paddled to shore before we knew what happened. But I swear, we’re going to fix this so it’ll never occur again.”

Or: “Yes, Mr. President, it turns out that the most dangerous weapon we face in the eternal war against terrorism is the thumb-drive. Who knew? Snowden made off with our most sensitive data. We forgot to make our systems secure. I think there was a meeting about it nine years ago, but I was on a plane home to my cousin’s nephew’s birthday party.”

The Matrix Revealed

Keep in mind that the very essence of being an intelligence officer is lying. Lying then, lying now, lying later. If you don’t get this, you know nothing about that world.

Given this fact, and given how unlikely it is that the NSA never installed extremely tight internal security, there is a strong chance that Snowden didn’t steal the farm. That’s not the way it happened.

Looking for a clue about how Snowden really operated, the most obvious place to start would be his former employer, the CIA. Would you rather start with his high school gym teacher or Putin?

I picked the CIA, an agency that has been at war with the NSA for a very long time. To boil it down, the agencies battle over federal funds, and the CIA has been losing. Why? Because intelligence-gathering has shifted from human vacuum cleaners to electronic ones. And there, the NSA is king.

Wired Magazine, June 2013 issue. James Bamford, author of three books on the NSA, states:

“In April, as part of its 2014 budget request, the Pentagon [under which the NSA is organized] asked Congress for $4.7 billion for increased ‘cyberspace operations,’ nearly $1 billion more than the 2013 allocation. At the same time, budgets for the CIA and other intelligence agencies were cut by almost the same amount, $4.4 billion. A portion of the money going to…[NSA] will be used to create 13 cyberattack teams.”

That means spying-money. Far more for NSA, far less for CIA.

Turf war.

So I propose this: Snowden didn’t steal the crown-jewels of information, they were given to him by CIA people who had accumulated them, carefully, over a long period of time, to put a hole in the mid-section of the agency they hate: the NSA. Snowden wasn’t capable of penetrating the NSA’s security, which was not a sieve. It was very, very good.

The CIA, of course, couldn’t be seen as the leaker. They needed a guy. They needed a guy who could appear to be from the NSA, to make things look worse for the NSA and to shield the CIA.

They had Ed Snowden. He had worked for the CIA in Geneva, in a high-level position, overseeing computer-systems security.

Somewhere in his CIA past, Ed meets a fellow CIA employee who sits down with him and says, “You know, Ed, things have gone too damn far. The NSA is spying on everybody all the time. I can show you proof. They’ve gone beyond the point of trying to catch terrorists. They’re doing something else. They’re expanding a Surveillance State, which can only lead to one thing: the destruction of America, what America stands for, what America is supposed to be. The NSA isn’t like us, Ed. We go after terrorists for real. Whereas NSA goes after everybody. We have to stop it. We need a guy…and there are those of us who think you might be that guy…”

During the course of this one disingenuous conversation, the CIA is killing 20 innocent civilians in a faraway land with drones, but that’s, ahem, beside the point.

Ed says, “Tell me more. I’m intrigued.”

After a series of chats, it gets serious. Eventually, Ed buys in.

And what Snowden’s theoretical CIA handler said, in his completely cynical self-serving way, is true. The Surveillance State isn’t about catching terrorists.

Or perhaps the handler is really a patriot inside the system. He and a few others want to wound and expose the NSA for good reasons.

Either way, Snowden takes the assignment.

I think my hypothesis is far more believable than the one in which the NSA has no clue about how to protect itself from an analyst at Booz Allen who shows up for work in Hawaii with a thumb-drive.

Unfortunately, the press and public are conditioned to look at disruptions in the body politic as one-move chess games. The hero (or villain) executes a single powerful play and then all hell breaks loose.

Intelligence work doesn’t operate that way. It never has. It’s about prelude, lead-in, middle strategy, end-move, cover story, false trail, and limited hangout.

No, the people who simultaneously accept the NSA as miracle-genius and mushhead-buffoon at its own trade are the conspiracists. They just happen to agree with the theme of mainstream press reporting.

Exit From the Matrix

Ask yourself this. Has any significant television anchor or Sunday-morning newstalk-host, with an NSA representative on camera, ever asked why we should swallow such an absurd genius-buffoon contradiction about the NSA? Has he asked the question with any degree of heat, and has he followed up, and has he stuck to his guns to press the issue further and further to a resolution or a meltdown?

No. And why not? Because those media stars know how far they can go, before the kind of official access they need to keep their jobs would evaporate in a wind of ill-will. To put it another way, they’re cowards.

Imagine, if by some miracle, David Gregory had NSA mob boss Keith Alexander in the chair on Meet the Press, and said, “Look General Alexander, we’re going to sit here until you explain to me exactly how your Agency can spy on untold numbers of people, utilizing the best minds in the business, and yet fail to secure your own temple against a single intruder who spies on you. I’m not looking for a facile gloss-over here. You’re budget is billions and billions of dollars. So let’s go. Buckle up…”

Just for starters. It’s my firm belief that the whole Snowden affair could then have unraveled in a much different way.

For another even greater miracle, suppose Alexander finally, after heavy grilling, finally jumped out of his chair and said, “Okay, you want the story? Here it is. It wasn’t our fault. We’re not bumblers. We have security that would make an ant squirm to get through, and even he wouldn’t make it past first base. Somebody with far more skill than Snowden penetrated us, and it’s a heavy blow, and we’re working on it!”

Then, all bets would be off.

The question readers will raise, of course, is: if Snowden was operating as an agent, as I suggest, does it matter? He took the files he took. The answer to that question is a subject for another story, but, yes, it does matter.

I’m fully aware that many people can’t and won’t separate a good deed from the doer, because they’re committed to believing, in a brain-addled fashion, that the two must harmonize. They would would prefer this sort of proposition: If JFK really, as some say, wanted to get us out of the horror called the Vietnam war early on, then he couldn’t have cheated on his wife a few thousand times.

Good luck. The world doesn’t always cooperate with such a puerile view. And, by the way, perhaps Snowden is a kind of hero, but with a significantly different twist.

So, if what I’m discussing in this piece is evidence that I’m a conspiracist, as Seitz-Wald claims, and the dubious statements Snowden has made are all resolvable, and the NSA really is an exceedingly brilliant but feeble-minded monster, so be it.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. 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

The UN has a new member: the NSA

The UN has a new member: the NSA

by Jon Rappoort

August 25, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

The NSA joined the UN in 2012. But they didn’t go through the usual process. Instead, they hacked in and began bugging UN teleconferences at its New York headquarters.

Der Spiegel, based on another Snowden leak, reports, quoting an NSA document: “The data traffic gives us internal video conferencing of the United Nations (yay!)”

We’re not just talking about General Assembly meetings. NSA had to crack code to get in. Presumably, these were smaller, more private sessions.

Der Speigel also mentions that NSA has been spying on the EU delegation in New York, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Commission), and 80 embassies and consulates around the world.

At this point, I’d normally write something like, “So who hasn’t the NSA been spying on? You, in your home?” But we already know the Agency is collecting information on all of us.

This is how federal agencies operate. Based on technology at their disposal and budget dollars, they’ll extend their “mandate” as far as they possibly can. Breaking the law is as important to them as running a red light is to a cop in pursuit of a bank robber.

NSA is supposed to collect information on behalf of “national security.” This now means “all data on everybody all the time.”

Because their true mission, aligned with that of the federal government, is control.

If the FDA had enough funding, they would track every item of food sold in America from farm to store to customer to digestion to elimination, just because they could. ATF would list and track every weapon from the North Pole to Tierra del Fuego. The Dept. of the Interior would label and analyze every inch of soil in America.

The technicians in these agencies would be thrilled to carry out such tasks. Give them an objective, tell them you want a system, and they’ll go to it like bloodhounds.

When government officials use the word “freedom,” they’re really saying, “You know, that old fairy tale people used to amuse themselves with.” We have our own clash of civilizations right here at home. It’s between, on the one side, government and its enabling partners, and on the other side, those of us who still know freedom actually means something. That clash isn’t going away.

The Matrix Revealed

That’s why you’ll find the following statement in a DOD training manual titled, Extremism, just exposed by Judicial Watch:

“In US history, there are many examples of extremist ideologies and movements. The colonists who sought to free themselves from British rule and the Confederate states who sought to secede from the Northern states are just two examples.”

Well, I guess that settles that. The colonists were just a bunch of extremist crazies. No connection to us now. A fringe group of haters. For some reason, they didn’t like the British.

One of the crazy colonists penned this quote. You can understand why the federal government of today prefers to think of him and his ilk as extremists:

“When the representative body have lost the confidence of their constituents, when they have notoriously made sale of their most valuable rights, when they have assumed to themselves powers which the people never put into their hands, then indeed their continuing in office becomes dangerous to the state, and calls for an exercise of the power of dissolution.” (Thomas Jefferson, 1774)

What would a less extremist mind produce? Something like this: “It is the sworn duty of the government to protect its citizens. In this regard, smashing the walls of privacy in every facet of life is essential. A protected citizen is a known citizen. If he errs, he can be corrected, through persuasion, peer pressure, threat, harassment, arrest and prosecution. A citizen who takes a dim view of government power is a potential terrorist. He is dangerous to the collective. He must be stopped.”

Yes, that’s a much more balanced and modern view. A person writing that statement would be given a pass by the government.

Actually, on a scale of venality, the NSA snooping on the UN ranks fairly low. I just wish the NSA would publish every word of what they’ve picked up. Then we would see what an infernal organization is headquartered in New York. Spying on one organic farmer in California is far worse than spying on the whole UN.

Finally, it shouldn’t escape your attention that the NSA is an agency formed under the Pentagon. That means the military is spying on everybody in America. The fact that the Pentagon is a section of the Dept. of Defense, which itself is under the control of White House merely indicates the President is doing nothing to stop the military.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. 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, vaccines, androids, Snowden, control systems

Surveillance, vaccines, androids, Snowden, control systems

by Jon Rappoport

August 12, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

Every political system, when applied, wears out, because the people using the system make it more and more mechanical, less and less conscious.

The Constitution was a noble attempt to explicitly limit systems by eroding the power of centralized authority. That document was mainly about enforcing less structure. Its brilliance, naturally, has been lost on government.

Could you find a larger, more inclusive system than the modern Surveillance State? The hunger to develop structure is what android-like humans possess in abundance. They impose structure and live off it, like junk food.

Triggering these systems thinkers (androids) happens by giving them a problem—preferably one that appears to need an endless number of solutions.

For example, how to share everyone’s medical data with hundreds of agencies, achieving “smooth interface.”

For example: solving threats to national security.

Also known as: institutionalized paranoia.

There is never enough of it to go around, so enemies have to be invented. They don’t need names. They don’t even need to be specified. They just need to be asserted.

The same sort of strategy is employed in the medical arena. Take, for instance, childhood diseases. Once baseline nutrition became part and parcel of Western societies, at least for a significant number of citizens, these diseases ceased being a widespread problem. Children got sick; they recovered; their immune systems became stronger in the process.

But that lowered the “disease threat.” Not good for the medical cartel. They had re-invent these illnesses as enemies. They also had to sell a solution. Vaccines.

Suddenly, the typical childhood diseases were devouring monsters. No respectable parent would allow his/her child to contract them. No, that would be cruel beyond the telling of it. Parents had to vaccinate their kids.

A nationwide system of promoting and giving vaccines needed to be created. The FDA had to be enlisted, to make sure no competent studies were done to assess the dangers of the vaccines, especially when dealt in combinations, when given frequently.

You can be sure national vaccine-surveillance programs will expand. A database to keep track of who is vaccinated and who isn’t will become a normal feature of Obamacare. And myriad pressures will be brought to bear on parents who refuse vaccines for their children.

The overall template of the Surveillance State is based on the premise that everyone is a potential threat and danger to the herd. Why bother searching for particular offenders? Spy on everybody and then apply profiling algorithms to filter out and ID the likely enemies. Ten thousand enemies, 100,000, a million, 20 million? Accomplished in the blink of an eye.

At some point, a system will be developed that identifies people who use the word “individual” with frequency. That will become a marker for “threat.”

Fifty years up the road, perhaps sooner, people will receive a survey form: “It’s come to our attention that you don’t belong to any groups we’re aware of. Is this true? Please specify your reasons for abstaining. Sign up for one of our educational programs…”

Tighten the political Matrix.

The Matrix Revealed

As we speak, DARPA, the tech branch of the Pentagon, is developing mass mind control strategies. Using brain imaging, researchers are attempting to isolate neurological markers that indicate people are following a narrative or objecting to it. (Activist Post, 7/29/13, “Secret DARPA Mind Control Project Revealed: Leaked Document”)

DARPA asks: why is a given propaganda-psyop-story working, or why isn’t it working? Key words and phrases are being used as correlatives.

What words trigger passive acceptance of government narratives and media news reports and sales campaigns?

Here’s an example I’m sure DARPA is interested in at this very moment: the Edward Snowden narrative. What’s working to convince the American he’s a traitor? What isn’t working? What aspects of the narrative that paint him as a hero are successful? Why?

At this level of research, truth and ethics are irrelevant. It’s all about “magnetic attraction and repulsion” to a narrative.

No one in Congress is voicing strong objections to the DARPA research. Why? Because our legislators are acutely aware that they’re selling their own narratives to the American people. That’s their basic job.

It’s all about story line. And in case there is any misunderstanding, we’re not talking about complex plots. No, the attention span of the public is incapable of registering subtlety. Narrative must be simple and obvious, even to a person with four or five active brain cells to rub together.

What happens when you put together the awesome resources of the Surveillance State with advanced research on narratives? You get an even larger system—by which preplanned events can be launched, secretly, made to appear random, and analyzed beforehand to predict public response.

“Last year, we were able to predict the response with 56% accuracy. This year, we’re up to 61%. Our goal, the holy grail, is 98%.”

You’ll get this kind of craziness. Bet on it: “Hey, I want you to meet Bob. Bob, come on over. Bob works for the government. He has a fantastic job. He predicts public reaction to events before they happen. Wow. Isn’t that something. Bob knows how we’re going to feel before we do. Ha-ha. Great.”

And Bob will be a very popular guy.

“Gee, Bob, that job sounds terrific. Interesting. I wish I could get up in the morning knowing I was going to do work like that. I wouldn’t need so many cups of coffee to start my engine. By the way, what qualifications does a guy have to have?”

“A PhD helps. But let me tell you about our historical research on the Snowden affair. It’s all about figuring out what played well with the public. Lots of polls were done at the time. The country was sort of split over whether to call him a hero or a villain. We tracked 40,000 media reports from the period, and we isolated the significant factors. Turns out Snowden was young, he wore glasses, and he appeared vulnerable. Those were the keys that made people like him. So the next time we have a defector, we’re going to have to have an older guy, fatter face, tough expression. We also analyzed Snowden’s voice, the pitch, the frequency, the rhythms. They worked against the government narrative. To assemble a majority who believes a defector is a traitor, you need his voice to be in the frequency range of…well, I can’t say. It’s classified. But we have the exact parameters…”

Exit From the Matrix

How do you think media anchors are sold? Listen carefully to Dianne Sawyer and Brian Williams. The hills and valleys. The pauses. The characteristics of the flow of speech. The “factual” tones, with underlying traces of sympathetic reverberation.

We’re talking about a bubble, inside which narrative is floated and used to sell a product. Who buys? Who doesn’t? What system of prediction will work?

That assignment—answering those questions—engages humans in great numbers. We already have a fairly vast culture in America made up of private citizens who assess products and share their observations, on a number of levels. They’re transfixed by the “values” of competing electronic gear, cars, clothes.

In other words, millions of people are in the bubble because they want to be. They want to be profiled and sliced and diced, and they want to add their own assessments about what sells and, especially, why. They want to profile themselves.

They’re audience. As Marshall McLuhan put it, “Audience is actor.” Audiences want in on the action. They don’t care about ethical, political, or psychological implications.

They’d gladly assess their own reactions to the Snowden affair, based purely on the factors that sold Snowden as white hat or black hat. Nothing to do with whether he did the right thing or not. He’s a product that was peddled—because, to them, everything is a product.

So the only fascination comes with analyzing the effectiveness of the sale. How was it done? What succeeded? What didn’t? “Right or wrong” only figure in to the degree they’re marketing elements—no more important than whether he had a beard or blonde hair or smiled or didn’t smile or wore a tie.

We’re looking at a kind of Mobius Strip or Escher drawing that feeds back into itself.

It’s a basic fun-house consumerist nightmare. People are thoroughly acclimated to being inside that universe. Events are judged on the basis of how they’re effective or ineffective as marketing devices.

In this state of mind, people tend to perceive reality on the basis of what they think other people are perceiving.

“Actually, I don’t feel anything. I only infer what other people are feeling, so I can understand marketing better.”

This is voluntary self-induced mind control. People happily digging themselves a deeper hole in consensus reality.

I’m waiting for this kind of Facebook post: “Hi. I’m Jonas Hoover. Below, you’ll see a complete inventory of every product I own, with footnotes on method of purchase in each case. My voting record for the past twelve years is also included, along with my job history, college transcripts, tax returns, and a further link to audio recordings of 2000 phone conversations I’ve had over past five years. Feel free to contact me for more information, if you are a profiling agency. I’m seeking employment in the surveillance field…”

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. 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

Using fake names on Facebook, Surveillance State, androids

Using fake names on Facebook, the Surveillance State, androids

By Jon Rappoport

July 23, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

File this one in the ever-burgeoning category of: how insane can legislators get?

Congress is now debating an update to the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

Turns out it’s already a misdemeanor to “exceed authorized use” of a computer, but the DOJ wants to make it a felony.

Of course, what does “exceeds authorized use” mean? Well, it means, for instance, an employee sending emails to pals while he’s at the office—because his employer has a rule against that.

In other words, the feds want to back up employers’ rules and turn them into felonies. Splendid.

“Yeah, you remember Jack, don’t you? Used to work here? One day he made an online reservation at the Wynn in Vegas, and now he’s in jail. Life is tough, keep your eyes straight ahead and don’t mess with the boss.”

“And Betty? She ordered three lipsticks on a slow Thursday and she’s now upstate. I hear the shrinks got hold of her. Dosing her with an anti-psychotic. Hope she has three live brain cells to rub together when she gets out.”

Then there’s the Facebook issue. The company, originally bankrolled by a CIA front, has a rule against users setting up accounts with fake names. Does the DOJ want to go after Facebook users who break the rules?

The Surveillance State, aided by Facebook, wants to know who you are at all times. They want you to be your name and no other name.

It’s a technical issue, see? It’s a lot easier to spy on you if you’re Mary Jones all the time when you’re online. As opposed to Mary Jones and Dragon Lady and HiHat and Ben Franklin and The Beast From 40 Fathoms…

The joke is, most people lead lives that are fictional already. The NSA and its allied partners spy on those lives.

Here’s the same thing from another angle. John Smith, citizen, follows the straight and narrow. He, like every other John Smith, is a target of the Surveillance State. He hasn’t committed any crimes. He isn’t a threat. But that doesn’t matter. He’s there. He’s a unit. Therefore, he’s on the radar.

But John Smith is a fiction. He’s a convenient, solid, average, normal persona/role in the stage play called Society cooked up by the Real John Smith, who is hiding. Inside himself. You rarely see him. Once in a blue moon, he pokes his head out and says something off-key. Then he retreats behind his facade.

There are millions and John Smiths, and the NSA is spying on all of them. The fake ones. The fictions.

What if every John Smith invented six or seven new personae?

“Sir, are you pretending to be somebody else?”

“Yes, and the pretending is now more intense. It’s ongoing.”

“But you see, sir, that introduces confusion, when we spy on you.”

“I used to believe I was a John Smith android forever. Wow, was I kidding myself. I used to go to one church service on Sunday. Now I go to three different churches. And I’m also an atheist.”

“Excuse me?”

“I campaigned for Democrats only. Now I campaign for Democrats, Republican, Libertarians, Communists, and Anarchists. Of course I don’t vote for anyone. I’m exploring monarchy as well. I think the divine right of kings could make a comeback.”

“But who do you actually worship?”

“The NSA, of course. And the CIA and DIA, Interpol, MI-5, the old GRU, and the Chinese Secret Service.”

“Sir, we have you on the record talking to about eight different wives.”

“Only eight? I must have misplaced a couple.”

The Matrix Revealed

Some people will assume I mean they should actually marry a dozen women. Those people are the literalists. They always go for the lowest-common-denominator reading. They think if they have a little fun, do a little acting, a little pretending, it might infect their minds. It might take them over. They’re the John Smiths. They live inside walls of fear.

Reality is one fiction among a limitless number of possible realities.

The basic problem with Reality is that’s it’s only one.

Any baby can teach you that. Play with the kid in just one way, over and over, and he’ll develop an itch he can’t scratch. He’ll cry and go off on you. Play with him a hundred different ways and he’ll gurgle and laugh and wriggle and decide coming into this life was a good idea after all.

Every kid needs an uncle and an aunt and a few cousins and a brother or sister. Parents tend to repeat themselves. Their repertoire wears thin. The kid needs a boost, a change, a different face, a new joke, a shift of rhythm.

People who can make you laugh take you out. They take you out of the one, forever, exhausting IS. Reality is the fiction of one and only one IS.

There are two types of laughs. One blows up reality. The other, which is the android laugh, comes across like a tranquilized mule with a hernia.

The NSA is super-serious about the one persona that is supposed to be the super-serious you. That’s what they’re spying on.

The internet thrives on anonymity. This causes a lot of nonsense and crap to surface. That’s the price we pay. But the Surveillance State doesn’t want anonymity. It wants “just the facts.”

It wants to scare people into being their android-selves and nothing more, nothing else. It wants The One Reality. If they can make that happen, they win. Afterward, it really doesn’t matter what people do.

I remember watching the very first episode of the original CSI. At the murder scene, the techs were going over an apartment, collecting evidence, bagging it. Then we were back in the lab. More analysis.

I thought, are they kidding? They believe people want to watch this stuff?

Well, people did. They wanted to watch the lab, the fine-tuning of hair, blood, DNA. The categorization, the tracking, the accessing of the data banks.

The first cousin to Surveillance.

You want to talk about operant conditioning? The whole CSI franchise is one giant psyop. For more than a decade. Getting people used to ubiquitous looking and spying and tracking, on behalf of justice.

That’s what NSA wants to be. That’s how NSA wants the public to view it.

Super-serious-android-NSA spying on super-serious-android-us. In the one and only Reality. That’s the op.

Exit From the Matrix

So…step back and calculate our chances if we continue to live in the one and only Reality and try to fight them from that position.

Of course, entering and inventing other realities takes imagination. That’s the catch. It always was.

Ever since the first elite priest class on Earth cooked up some crazy spiritual Ponzi scheme to suck in the rubes, imagination has been the nemesis of the State.

Paraphrasing Grouch Marx: “In the 1930s, you could make a movie in which a woman fell down a flight of stairs, and people would laugh. But eventually it couldn’t be a movie. It had to be a real woman falling down a real flight of stairs.”

People are trained like dogs to appreciate and accept only one IS. The “real” IS. They convince themselves this is a good idea. These people are unconscious allies of the Surveillance State.

What’s that? People are into all sorts of multiple virtual realities? Yes, for a while, but they keep coming back to believing in The One and Only Just-the-Facts Reality. If they actually wanted new realities, they’d be cooking them up themselves, they wouldn’t be dreaming inside somebody else’s.

In light of all of the above, the universe of propaganda becomes more vivid. Its aim is reduction. Reduction of the way we see ourselves. We’re given bound images of human beings as citizens living in a walled fortress, where our every thought and action needs to be boiled down and made transparent, so our leaders can make threat assessments.

This is the fiction we’re being fed. Over and over.

“It’s not asking too much, is it? It’s too hard to seek out and find terrorists. We need to collect everything on everybody, and then with suitable algorithms established, we can select out the dangerous ones.

“In fact, it’s better if we consider everybody dangerous and track and limit their movements. That works.”

Yes, the NSA is looking at you. They’re looking at you as if you’re an android. Well, naturally. They’re androids. Wherever they look, they see androids.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMIcTiOG4UU&w=560&h=315]

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. 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

NSA: genius spying eye or bumbling idiot?

NSA: genius spying eye, or bumbling idiot: can’t have it both ways

by Jon Rappoport

June 20, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

People want to elevate Ed Snowden and his revelations to mythological status. Be my guest. I’ll write the dinner speech and lay out the silverware. It’ll be fun.

I won’t bother recapping all the holes and questions in Snowden’s back-story. I’ve done it several times already. (see the Spygate section on this blog).

Instead, I’ll focus on one point. What is the NSA?

Are they the geniuses who spy on everybody all the time, who can read the labels on the clothes in your closet?

Or are they just another bunch of tired government morons who can’t find their asses with both hands?

In his latest mea culpa, which rings about as true as a late-night infomercial, General Keith Alexander, the NSA director, said the Agency had given too much power to individual analysts:

NSA had allowed analysts to climb through the towers of Agency data without any checks whatsoever. Alexander will correct this gaping Grand Canyon flaw, and stop future thieves, by requiring two analysts to sign off before anyone can penetrate highly classified areas.

Two, two, not one.

Never seriously considered doing that before. Never implemented it. Never deployed security-stops within the body of secrets. Never compartmentalized those secrets. No.

Never.

But…the NSA can spy on everybody everywhere all the time. They’re that good and that smart and that specific and that devious and that clever.

Pardon me for bursting a few bubbles, but it’s very hard to have it both ways.

This isn’t like a brilliant absent-minded professor failing to put on matching socks in the morning. It’s like Margaret Mead not knowing where Samoa is.

Two possible conclusions. Either NSA has been conning us all along, pretending to spy on whatever moves when they really can’t find the moon on a clear night, or…

NSA really does have lockdown knockout internal security chopped up into small segments, each of which requires some serious disclosure before entry. And entries are reviewed swiftly and accurately.

Dumb as a rock or smart as a whip.

If it’s smart as a whip, Snowden didn’t waltz into work with a thumb drive and steal the farm. Never happened. Somebody else did, over a period of time, and then handed him the documents as part of an operation.

I’ve spelled out that scenario and thesis before.

The NSA built a Tower of Babel piercing the sky and then they forgot that one lowly employee could hold a mirror up to it and capture it all? I’ll take that question for 400, Alex. Send all the other contestants home. They’re wrapped up in a dream.

I’m basically a typist with a computer, and yet I could sketch out the parameters of a system that would partition off and protect NSA data far better than what those NSA boys have designed…if we believe their bumbling-fumbling story.

But why on earth believe it?

Beats me.

The Matrix Revealed

Far more likely: NSA has quite good internal security. Snowden didn’t stroll into work and steal the holy grail. He would have been caught.

Nevertheless, is it a good thing that NSA is coming under fire? Of course.

Will this result in significant reining in of the Agency and the overall Surveillance State?

The answer to that question rests on the practice of redundancy. NSA and its related partners have been cooking multiple ways of spying for a long, long time. This isn’t just because everybody wants to feast on the money pie.

It’s also because if one light goes out three more lights are going on.

If some piece of the FISA court is hamstrung, if one back door is closed off, there are other ways of accomplishing the same objectives.

If intercepting satellite transmissions doesn’t work as well anymore, they can use submarines and cut into cables. If the submarines are too expensive, they can lay in splitters in tech-company offices. If that avenue is partially blocked, they can dream up another way in.

These guys may be crazy criminals, but they aren’t stupid.

Which is my whole point.

Exit From the Matrix

And by the way, they’re from the intelligence community. In case you’ve forgotten, that means they’re required to lie to the press, public, and other parts of the government. They have special machines that tally up the numbers of lies employees tell. If the employees don’t reach their monthly quotas, they’re dumped into universities and think-tanks, where the requirements are slightly less stringent.

So when NSA people say, “Gee, we forgot to install any sort of reasonable internal security,” what makes you think they’re not simply padding their monthly falsehood-numbers?

You feel better by helping old ladies cross the street. They feel better by getting over. Over and over.

While I’m at it, here is another indicator that the “surveillance community” isn’t suffering too badly from Snowden’s disclosures and will come out smelling like a rose. Take a look at Booz Allen Hamilton’s stock chart.

In the early autumn of 2012, the stock price was riding at about 19. In September, it dove suddenly to 12, and then began a long march back to 18, which it achieved in the spring of 2013. During the initial Snowden crisis, it dipped to 17, but at the latest close it sits at 18.79.

Well-managed manipulation, no problem.

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. 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