Senator Al Franken: from SNL spoofer to State surveillance hawk

by Jon Rappoport

June 11, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

Al used to be a funny guy. Now, he’s not.

Make no mistake about it, if Bush were president at the moment, Little Al would be attacking him mercilessly.

But with Obama in the White House, Al sings a different tune.

The NSA spying is A-OK. No problem.

“I can assure you, this is not about spying on the American people.”

Thanks, Al.

“There are certain things that are appropriate for me to know that are not appropriate for the bad guys to know.”

Al, you see, has been briefed. He’s bought into those “high-level” briefings. He now resides in a rarefied elite atmosphere. If Senator Al says NSA is good, it must be.

If you believe him, I’ve got condos for sale on Jupiter.

Al even thinks it’s appropriate for the Justice Dept. to investigate Ed Snowden, the NSA leaker. Well sure, Al’s Mr. Establishment these days, and Snowden defected.

Al used to have a bullshit detector. Now, bullshit is detecting him as an easy mark.

Who in his right mind would believe a bunch of CIA and NSA guys sitting in a room explaining and justifying their own spying programs?

Is there any chance these cold-fish bureaucrats would do a mea culpa? They’re looking for more budget dollars. They’re looking to avoid any possible criticisms of their plots and operations. They’re professionals paid to lie.

So they’re going to paint the war on terror in the most dire terms possible. They’re going to tell stories and make it up. They’re going to give gullible and grasping senators the impression they’re privy to real insider material.

They’re going to say, “Now you’re in the Club. You know secrets. You know the truth the public must be protected from, because the public would be frightened. But you guys, you senators, you can handle the truth…”

Al’s sitting there in the room, and he poised half-way between buying what the intell boys are selling and knowing he wants to protect his president and his party.

It’s a sucker’s game. Al has gone for it. Willingly.

On SNL, Al, as Stuart Smalley, the pathetic rainbow self-help psycho, used to look in the mirror and say, “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”

Well, now Al IS Stuart Smalley, but with a new tough-guy exterior. He’s a little man of steel, protecting the nation from the bad guys. He’s on the inside, with the big boys. And they like him.

So, Stuart, I’ve written a thing for you about surveillance of citizens that falls in line with your New Age sentiments. I hope it helps you in the days ahead:

It’s wonderful to be spied on: I feel like a real citizen.

I tell you, this is great. Why be anonymous when you can attract the attention of the government? It’s a dream come true. They care. They really do.

Everyone deserves to be noticed.

If I start to do something that isn’t normal, I can stop and say to myself: “Would the government, watching me, approve of this?” And then an answer will come.

“No, don’t do that.”

We’re all movie stars now because we’re being watched. Don’t blow your nose and then look at the Kleenex in a restaurant.

We’re comedians, too, all of us, because government employees are watching us and laughing. We’re entertaining them. We’re funny. We’re a hit.

We’re all happy. That’s the main thing. The right people are watching us, and we can feel safe. That’s why we have the Department of Homeland Security. They do whatever it takes. If it snows an inch in North Dakota in July, they’ll send agents to the scene, to find out what’s going on. They’ll make sure the snow plows are working.

The new test for a good citizen is: he accepts being spied on.

There should be a special app you can tap to confess your sins and misdeeds. What you say goes right into a government file. I think a lot of people would like that.

Broadcast it on television, too. People will line up to have their chance. We’ve got C-Span. But we need C-NSA. Go before the cameras and spill your guts. It’s good for the soul.

“Last night, I was on the phone with my cousin, and I said I was sick and tired of my ex-wife badgering me about our divorce settlement. That was wrong. I shouldn’t have demeaned my ex to my cousin. I want to go on the record and apologize to my family, friends, and co-workers. I will seek counseling. I want a better world.”

“I bought a toy gun for my son last year. How foolish of me! What was I thinking? Toy guns are a gateway drug. Last night, I took the family out into the back yard and we burned the gun in a garbage can. I feel a lot better now. Thank you, C-NSA. I fervently hope my son’s brain isn’t permanently warped. Time will tell. In the meantime, we’ve enrolled him in a three-year training seminar: Reprogramming the Young Mind, Post-Trauma.”

But you know, as much as we try to correct our mistakes, we aren’t perfect. And that’s where the government comes in. My only concern is there isn’t enough surveillance.

That’s why I’ve built a frame for a small video camera. The camera is mounted in the frame, which I wear around my neck and shoulders. Wherever I go, whatever I do or say, the camera is looking at me and recording.

Every day, I email the video file to NSA. I hope others will adopt this practice. If government is helping us, we should help it. We’re all in this together.

There isn’t any “us versus them.” That’s an illusion fostered by those who wish to divide us. United we stand in the New Age.

Surveillance is an initiation. Some people can’t make the grade. They go negative. They feel compelled to criticize the government. Courage, as Hemingway wrote, is grace under pressure. This is how heroes are forged.

We can all be heroes by assisting the government. It wants us to do well. It wants us to succeed. It likes us.

I don’t hear any poor people objecting to being spied on. They’re too busy trying to eke out a living. Why should we, who can afford the time to consider this issue, separate ourselves from the poor? In a drug store, on a bus, in a car, walking down the street, in an office, in our homes, let’s celebrate the safety that comes with knowing we are watched.

Try smiling for no reason at all. Let employees of the NSA know you’re happy to have them there with you. Occasionally, flash them the peace sign. You might even try talking to them.

Ask them if they’re having a good time. Say, “I hope you’re doing well. It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood.” Or, “How’s the family? Would you like a hot meal? If you let me know where you are, I might know someone who lives nearby. They can bring it to you. Do you like pot roast?”

I’m having shirts monogrammed with the NSA seal below the pocket.

I do have one suggestion, vague as it must be, since I don’t posses knowledge about the various forms surveillance takes:

Feedback. I believe earnest citizens would like to see and hear what the NSA hears and sees of them.

How wonderful it would be to awaken in the morning to a packet of surveillance on one’s self.

There you are, crossing the street, entering a cafe, talking on the phone, as you appear to NSA (by whom I mean, of course, all the agencies who watch over us).

We could thus begin a kind of dialogue with our watchers. Back and forth, back and forth; who knows where it would lead?

I call it open secrecy, a paradox to be sure, but just the type that would crack the egg of a combative society as it transforms itself into a higher evolutionary substance.

Some day, perhaps we could even watch the NSA watching us.

Then, truly, we would breathe together. Made new in collective consciousness.

How do you like that, Stuart? Isn’t it an illustration of self-help, self-improvement, as we seek to love being spied on?

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 29^th 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

Did someone help Ed Snowden punch a hole in the NSA?

by Jon Rappoport

June 11, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

Ed Snowden, NSA leaker. Honest man. Doing what was right. Bravo.

That still doesn’t preclude the possibility that, unknown to him, he was managed by people to put him the right place to expose NSA secrets.

Snowden’s exposure of NSA was a righteous act, because that agency is a RICO criminal. But that doesn’t mean we have the whole story.

How many people work in classified jobs for the NSA? And here is one man, Snowden, who is working for Booz Allen, an outside contractor, but is assigned to NSA, 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 NSA employees can likewise steal these documents. Many, many other people can copy them and take them. Poof.

If the NSA is not a sieve, it’s quite correct to suspect Snowden, a relatively low-level man, was guided and helped.

Does that diminish what Snowden accomplished? No. But it casts it in a different light.

Or you can believe a scenario like this:

“Mr. Snowden, I’m closing up now for the day. Do you need anything before I go?”

“No thanks, Sarah, I’ll be staying late tonight.”

NSA isn’t a little community bank or a liquor store. We aren’t talking about an employee with a printer and a file folder to hold top-secret pieces of paper he carries in a briefcase out of the office on his way home.

If there are people who arranged Snowden’s access to NSA secrets, without him knowing it, they’ll be obscured by the maze of partisan political squabbling and Congressional idiots holding hearings.

Between these morons and the press, the public will be treated, night and day, to the following: Can Snowden be extradited back here? Is he a terrorist? Should those giant tech companies have agreed to supply the government with information on private citizens? If so, how much information? Etc., etc. Diversions. False trails.

To understand who might have been behind Snowden, we first need to understand the real reach of the Surveillance State.

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.

At his site, www.BradThor.com, the author lists some of the open-source material he discovered that formed the basis for Black List. The material, as well as the novel, is worth reading.

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 [substitute NSA] 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.”

(For more, click here.)

In real life, whether the prime criminal source is one monster corporation or the NSA itself, the outcome would be the same.

Total surveillance 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 grab millions of bits of inside information, and then utilize 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 (NSA) who have unfettered access to financial information can also choose, at opportune moments, to expose certain scandals and crimes.

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.

It’s likely that the probe Ron Paul has 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.

Corruption on top of corruption.

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 admitted on 9/10/2001), and what did they do with that information?

Did they discover precisely where the trillion dollars went? 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 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.

Therefore….when looking for who might have helped Ed Snowden punch a hole in NSA, we should think about who the NSA has been spying on. Not the little guy, not the medium-sized guy, but a very big guy. Perhaps a Goldman Sachs or a JP Morgan.

At the highest levels of criminal power, the players don’t always agree. It’s not always a smooth conspiracy. There is fierce in-fighting as well.

Goldman Sachs, Chase, and Morgan consider trillion-dollar trading markets their own private golden-egg farm. They run it, they own it, they manipulate it for their own ends.

If NSA has been looking over their shoulders for the past 30 years, discovering all their knowledge, and operating a meta invasion, siphoning off enormous profits, NSA would rate as Enemy Number One.

And would need to be torpedoed.

Enter Ed Snowden.

Looking elsewhere, consider this. Snowden worked for the CIA. He was pushed up the ranks quickly, from an IT position in the US to a posting in Geneva, under diplomatic cover, to run security on the CIA’s computer systems there.

Then, Snowden quit the CIA and eventually ended up at Booz Allen, a private contractor. He was assigned to NSA, where he stole the secrets and exposed the NSA.

The CIA and NSA have a long contentious relationship. The major issue is, who is king of US intelligence? We’re talking about an internal war.

Snowden could have been the CIA’s man at NSA, where certain CIA players helped him access files he wouldn’t have been able to tap otherwise.

You can bet your bottom dollar that NSA analysts are looking into this possibility right now.

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 29^th 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 leaker: are there serious cracks in Ed Snowden’s story?

By Jon Rappoport

June 10, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

First, I’m not doubting the documents Ed Snowden has brought forward. I’m not doubting the illegal reach of the NSA in spying on Americans and the world.

But as to how this recent revelation happened, and whether Ed Snowden’s history holds up…I have questions.

Could Snowden have been given extraordinary access to classified info as part of a larger scheme? Could he be a) an honest man and yet b) a guy who was set up to do what he’s doing now?

If b) is true, then Snowden fits the bill perfectly. He wants to do what he’s doing. He isn’t lying about that. He means what he says.

Okay. Let’s look at his history as reported by The Guardian.

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? Just asking.

If he 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?

In 2007, Snowden is sent to Geneva. He’s only 23 years old. The CIA gives him diplomatic cover there. He’s put in charge of maintaining computer-network security. Major job. Obviously, he has access to a very wide range of classified documents. Sound a little odd? Again, just asking. He’s just a kid. 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, 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?”

In 2009, Snowden leaves the CIA. Why? Presumably because he’s disillusioned. 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 the whole US intelligence network, or a major chunk of it? He had that much access to classified data?

Anyway, in 2009, Snowden leaves the CIA and goes to work for a private defense contractor. Apparently, by this time, he knows all about the phony US war in Iraq, and yet he chooses to work for a sector that relentlessly promotes such wars. Go figure.

This defense contractor (unnamed) assigns him to work at an NSA facility in Japan. Surely, Snowden understands what the NSA is. He knows it’s a key part of the whole military-intelligence network, the network he opposes.

But he takes the job anyway. Perhaps he’s doing it so he can obtain further access to classified data, in advance of blowing a big whistle. Perhaps.

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

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

These are red flags. They raise questions. Serious ones.

If The Guardian, which has such close access to Snowden, wants to explore these questions, they might come up with some interesting answers.

Again, I’m not doubting that the documents Snowden has brought forward are real. I have to assume they are. I certainly don’t doubt the reach and the power and the criminality of the NSA.

Although I’m sure someone will write me and say I’m defending the NSA. I’M NOT.

But if Snowden was maneuvered, in his career, without his knowing it, to arrive at just this point, then we have a whole new story. We have a story about unknown forces who wanted this exposure to occur.

Who would these forces be? I could make lots of guesses. But they would just be guesses.

Perhaps all the anomalies in the career of Ed Snowden can be explained with sensible answers. I realize that. But until they are, I put the questions forward. And leave them there.

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 29^th 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