Over the decades, the maintenance of power and class privileges by
corporate, financial and political elites have relied on covert and
overt forms of violence, oftentimes in unspoken arrangements with
transnational criminal networks (the global drug trade) or
intelligence-connected far-right terrorists: the minions who staffed and
profited from Operations Condor and Gladio come to mind.

Once
viewed as the proverbial "tip" of the imperial spear that advanced
elitist dreams of "full-spectrum dominance," the "plausibly deniable"
puppeteering which formerly characterized such projects now take place
in full-daylight with nary a peep from bought-off guardians of our
ersatz democratic order, or a public narcotized by tawdry spectacles: Kony 2012 or American Idol, take your pick!

Mixing
intellectual and moral squalor in equal measure with the latest
high-tech gizmos on offer from Silicon Valley or Chengdu, the general
societal drift towards data totalitarianism, once a hallmark of police states everywhere, is the backdrop where "too big to fail" is code for "too important to jail"!

With
the current global economic crisis, brought on in no small part by
private and public actors resorting to various frauds and market
manipulations which reward privileged insiders, we have reached a social
endpoint that analyst Michel Chossudovsky has accurately described
as the "criminalization of the state," that is, the historical juncture
where "war criminals legitimately occupy positions of authority, which
enable them to decide 'who are the criminals', when in fact they are the
criminals."

It should hardly surprise us then that American
"hero," Staff Sergeant Robert Bales, accused of murdering 17 innocent
Afghan civilians, including 9 children and then burning their bodies,
joined the Army after the 9/11 attacks not out of a sense of patriotic
"duty," but because he was a thief and swindler who went on the lam to
avoid accounting for his crimes.

Indeed, ABC News
reported that Bales "enlisted in the U.S. Army at the same time he was
trying to avoid answering allegations he defrauded an elderly Ohio
couple of their life savings in a stock fraud."

Meanwhile Bales'
attorney John Henry Browne told CBS News that his client has "no memory"
of the massacre and that it was "too early" to determine "what factors"
may have led to the "incident."

Some hero.

Keeping Us 'Safe'

However,
there are powerful institutional forces at work today which have
extremely long--and exceedingly deep--memories, able to catalog and
store everything we do electronically, "criminal evidence, ready for use
in a trial," or, more in keeping with the preferences of our Hope and
Change™ administration, a one-way ticket to indefinite military detention for dissident Americans in the event of a "national security emergency" as a recent White House Executive Order threatened.

"In an Electronic Police State," Cryptohippie
averred, "every surveillance camera recording, every email you send,
every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you
write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping... are all
criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a
long, long time. Whoever holds this evidence can make you look very,
very bad whenever they care enough to do so. You can be prosecuted
whenever they feel like it--the evidence is already in their database."

In stark contrast to feckless promises to undo the egregious constitutional violations of the Bush regime, The New York Times
reported that the "Obama administration is moving to relax restrictions
on how counterterrorism analysts may access, store and search
information about Americans gathered by government agencies for purposes
other than national security threats."

On March 22, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder signed-off on new guidelines
for the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) that "will lengthen to
five years--from 180 days--the center's ability to retain private
information about Americans when there is no suspicion that they are
tied to terrorism," investigative journalist Charlie Savage wrote.

"The guidelines," the Times
disclosed, "are also expected to result in the center making more
copies of entire databases and 'data-mining them'--using complex
algorithms to search for patterns that could indicate a threat--than it
currently does."

We're told that the relaxation of existing
guidelines "grew out of reviews launched after the failure to connect
the dots about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called underwear
bomber, before his Dec. 25, 2009, attempt to bomb a Detroit-bound
airliner."

"'There is a genuine operational need to try to get us
into a position where we can make the maximum use of the information
the government already has to protect people,' said Robert S. Litt, the
general counsel in the office of the Director of National Intelligence,
which oversees the National Counterterrorism Center," the Times reported.

However, as Antifascist Calling disclosed in previous reports on the Abdulmutallab affair (see here, here, here and here)
former NCTC Director Michael E. Leiter made a startling admission
during hearings before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental
Affairs Committee shortly after the incident.

During those
hearings intelligence officials acknowledged that the secret state
knowingly allows "watch-listed" individuals, including terrorists, to
enter the country in order "to track their movements and activities."

Leiter
told congressional grifters: "I will tell you, that when people come to
the country and they are on the watch list, it is because we have
generally made the choice that we want them here in the country for some
reason or another."

As I wrote at the time: "An alternative
explanation fully in line with well-documented inaction, or worse, by
U.S. security agencies prior to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks
and now, Christmas Day's aborted airline bombing, offers clear evidence
that a ruthless 'choice' which facilitates the murder of American
citizens are cynical pretexts in a wider game: advancing imperialism's
geostrategic goals abroad and attacks on democratic rights at home."

Commenting
on the ramp-up of new surveillance powers grabbed by the Obama
administration, Michael German, a former FBI investigator now with the
ACLU's legislative office warned
that "the 'temporary' retention of nonterrorism-related citizen and
resident information for five years essentially removes the restraint
against wholesale collection of our personal information by the
government, and puts all Americans at risk of unjustified scrutiny."

Anonymous administration officials who spoke to The Washington Post
tried to assure us that "a number different agencies looked at these
[guidelines] to try to make sure that everyone was comfortable that we
had the correct balance here between the information sharing that was
needed to protect the country and protections for people's privacy and
civil liberties."

However, as journalist Marcy Wheeler pointed out
"oversight" of the secret state's surveillance activities are being
handled by the ODNI's Civil Liberties Protection Officer, Alexander
Joel, a Bush appointee who was so "concerned" about protecting our
privacy that he found no civil liberties violations when he reviewed
NSA's illegal warrantless wiretapping programs.

Joel, a former attorney with the CIA's Office of General Counsel, told The Wall Street Journal that public fears about NSA's driftnet spying activities were "overblown."

"Although
you might have concerns about what might potentially be going on, those
potentials are not actually being realized and if you could see what
was going on, you would be reassured just like everyone else," Joel
said.

Despite Joel's soothing bromides spoon-fed to compliant
media, Michael German warned that "such unfettered collection risks
reviving the Bush administration's Total Information Awareness program,
which Congress killed in 2003."

Documents obtained by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
through the Freedom of Information Act revealed that TIA aimed "to give
law enforcement access to private data without suspicion of wrongdoing
or a warrant."

EPIC learned that "The project called for the
development of 'revolutionary technology for ultra-large all-source
information repositories,' which would contain information from multiple
sources to create a 'virtual, centralized, grand database.' This
database would be populated by transaction data contained in current
databases such as financial records, medical records, communication
records, and travel records as well as new sources of information. Also
fed into the database would be intelligence data."

Although
Congress allegedly "killed" TIA in 2003 when it closed the Pentagon
office, we now know from multiple investigations by journalists and from
the government's own internal reports, Total Information Awareness
never went away but rather, was hidden behind impenetrable layers of
above top secret Special Access Programs and code-name protected
projects, most of which are controlled by the National Security Agency.

'A Turnkey Totalitarian State'

The secret state's "virtual, centralized, grand database" will shortly come on line.

As investigative journalist James Bamford recently reported in Wired Magazine,
"new pioneers" are taking up residence in the small Utah town of
Bluffdale, home to the largest sect of renegade Mormon polygamists: the
National Security Agency's Utah Data Center.

"A project of
immense secrecy," Bamford wrote, "it is the final piece in a complex
puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept,
decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications
as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and
undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The
heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in
September 2013."

Wired
disclosed that all manner of communications will flow into Bluffdale's
"near-bottomless databases" including "the complete contents of private
emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of
personal data trails--parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore
purchases, and other digital 'pocket litter'."

Additionally, one
top NSA official involved with the program told Bamford that the agency
"made an enormous breakthrough several years ago in its ability to
cryptanalyze, or break, unfathomably complex encryption systems employed
by not only governments around the world but also many average computer
users in the US. The upshot, according to this official: 'Everybody's a
target; everybody with communication is a target'."

"For the
first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon
administration--the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US
and its citizens," Bamford averred. "It has established listening posts
throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email
messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or
overseas."

Since the dawn of the Cold War, the National Security
Agency operated outside its charter, illegally spying on the
communications of dissident Americans. In a companion piece for Wired, Bamford detailed how NSA denied that it was eavesdropping on Americans.

"For
example," Bamford wrote, "NSA can intercept millions of domestic
communications and store them in a data center like Bluffdale and still
be able to say it has not 'intercepted' any domestic communications.
This is because of its definition of the word. 'Intercept,' in NSA's
lexicon, only takes place when the communications are 'processed' 'into
an intelligible form intended for human inspection,' not as they pass
through NSA listening posts and transferred to data warehouses."

NSA
mendacity aside, "for decades," Bamford informed us, "the agency
secretly hid from Congress the fact that it was copying, without a
warrant, virtually every telegram traveling through the United States, a
program known as Project Shamrock.
Then it hid from Congress the fact that it was illegally targeting the
phone calls of anti-war protesters during the Vietnam War, known as Project Minaret."

But as we learned when The New York Times
disclosed some aspects of the Bush regime's Stellar Wind program, the
NSA was caught red-handed illegally spying on tens of thousands of
Americans without benefit of a warrant and did so with the full
cooperation of America's giant telecom firms and internet service
providers who were then immunized by Congress under provisions of 2008's
despicable FISA Amendments Act (FAA).

Even
as Congress granted retroactive immunity to telecoms and ISPs, and
politicians, including President Obama, scrambled to downplay serious
violations to individual political and privacy rights, the enormous
reach of these programs are still misunderstood by the public.

William
Binney, a former NSA official who was a senior "crypto-mathematician
largely responsible for automating the agency's worldwide eavesdropping
network," went on the record with Wired and denounced NSA's giant domestic eavesdropping machine.

Binney
explained "that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the
nation's cable landing stations--the more than two dozen sites on the
periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had
taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its
eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time
was all that was allowed under US law."

"Instead," Binney told Wired,
the agency "chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points
throughout the country--large, windowless buildings known as
switches--thus gaining access to not just international communications
but also to most of the domestic traffic flowing through the US. The
network of intercept stations goes far beyond the single room in an
AT&T building in San Francisco exposed by a whistle-blower in 2006.
'I think there's 10 to 20 of them,' Binney says. 'That's not just San
Francisco; they have them in the middle of the country and also on the
East Coast'."

Readers will recall that back in 2006, former
AT&T technician Marc Klein blew the lid off the technical details of
Stellar Wind, disclosing internal AT&T documents on how the firm
gave NSA free-reign to install ultra-secret Narus machines. Those
devices split communications as they flowed into AT&T's "secret
rooms" and diverted all internet traffic into NSA's bottomless maw.

Klein, the author of Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine
said that the program "was just the tip of an eavesdropping iceberg"
which is not only targeted at suspected "terrorists" but rather is "an
untargeted, massive vacuum cleaner sweeping up millions of peoples'
communications every second automatically."

Narus, an Israeli
firm founded by retired members of the IDF's secretive Unit 8200, now
owned by The Boeing Corporation, and Verint, now Comverse Infosys,
another Israeli firm, were close partners alongside NSA in these illegal
projects; one more facet of the U.S. and Israel's "special
relationship."

The former official turned whistleblower told Wired
that "Stellar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and
included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the
inspection of domestic email."

"At the outset the program
recorded 320 million calls a day," Bamford wrote, "which represented
about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency's worldwide
intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney--who has
maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years
ago--the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually
powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct 'deep
packet inspection,' examining Internet traffic as it passes through the
10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light."

"Once a name
is entered into the Narus database," Binney said, "all phone calls and
other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to
the NSA's recorders."

"'Anybody you want, route to a recorder,'
Binney says. 'If your number's in there? Routed and gets recorded.' He
adds, 'The Narus device allows you to take it all.' And when Bluffdale
is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and
analysis."

Chillingly, Binney "held his thumb and forefinger
close together" and told Bamford: "'We are that far from a turnkey
totalitarian state'."

Main Core

During World War II, the Roosevelt administration issued Executive Order 9066
which granted the military carte blanche to circumvent the
constitutional rights of some 120,000 Japanese-American citizens and led
to their mass incarceration in remote, far-flung camps surrounded by
barbed wire and armed guards.

Will history repeat, this time under the rubric of America's endless "War on Terror"?

In 2008, investigative journalists Christopher Ketchum reported in the now-defunct Radar Magazine and Tim Shorrock, writing in Salon, provided details on a frightening "Continuity of Government" database known as Main Core.

According
to Ketchum, a senior government official told him that "there exists a
database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial
reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be
incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies
of the state' almost instantaneously."

That official and other sources told Radar
that "the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core.
One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed
in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national
emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened
surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even
detention."

For his part, Shorrock revealed that several
government officials with above top secret security clearances told him
that "Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast
amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank
and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by
the FBI, the CIA and other agencies."

"One former intelligence
official," Shorrock reported, "described Main Core as 'an emergency
internal security database system' designed for use by the military in
the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or
the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the
fact that it contains 'copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item
of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the
other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community'."

It now
appears that Main Core, or some other code-word protected iteration of
the secret state's administrative detention database will in all
likelihood soon reside at Bluffdale.

While conservative and
liberal supporters of the Bush and Obama administrations have derided
these reports as the lunatic ravings of "conspiracy theorists," analysts
such as Peter Dale Scott have made clear
that a decade after the 9/11 attacks, "some aspects of COG remain in
effect. COG plans are still authorized by a proclamation of emergency
that has been extended each year by presidential authority, most
recently by President Obama in September 2009. COG plans are also the
probable source for the 1000-page Patriot Act presented to Congress five
days after 9/11, and also for the Department of Homeland Security's
Project Endgame--a ten-year plan, initiated in September 2001, to expand
detention camps, at a cost of $400 million in Fiscal Year 2007 alone."

"At the same time," Scott wrote, "we have seen the implementation of the plans outlined by [Miami Herald
journalist Alfonso] Chardy in 1987: the warrantless detentions that
Oliver North had planned for in Rex 1984, the warrantless eavesdropping
that is their logical counterpart, and the militarization of the
domestic United States under a new military command, NORTHCOM. Through
NORTHCOM the U.S. Army now is engaged with local enforcement to control
America, in the same way that through CENTCOM it is engaged with local
enforcement to control Afghanistan and Iraq."

Indeed, as the Associated Press
recently disclosed in their multipart investigation into illegal spying
by the New York Police Department (NYPD), undercover officers "attended
meetings of liberal political organizations and kept intelligence files
on activists who planned protests around the U.S., according to
interviews and documents that show how police have used counterterrorism
tactics to monitor even lawful activities."

A 2008 intelligence report
obtained by AP revealed "how, in the name of fighting terrorism, law
enforcement agencies around the country have scrutinized groups that
legally oppose government policies."

"The FBI for instance,"
investigative journalists Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo averred, "has
collected information on anti-war demonstrators. The Maryland state
police infiltrated meetings of anti-death penalty groups. Missouri
counterterrorism analysts suggested that support for Republican Rep. Ron
Paul might indicate support for violent militias--an assertion for
which state officials later apologized. And Texas officials urged
authorities to monitor lobbying efforts by pro Muslim-groups."

"The
April 2008 memo offers an unusually candid view of how political
monitoring fit into the NYPD's larger, post-9/11 intelligence mission.
As the AP has reported previously, [David] Cohen's unit has transformed
the NYPD into one of the most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies
in the United States, one that infiltrated Muslim student groups,
monitored their websites and used informants as listening posts inside
mosques."

Nor should we forget how the Pentagon's own domestic
intelligence unit, the Counterintelligence Field Activity or CIFA,
routinely monitored antiwar activists and other dissidents.

As Antifascist Calling
previously reported, multiple news reports beginning in late 2005
revealed that CIFA with 400 full-time DoD workers and 900 "outsourced"
contractor employees and a classified budget, had been authorized to
track "potential terrorist threats" against DoD through reports known as
Threat and Local Observation Notices (TALON).

Although that
office was shuttered in 2008, its domestic security functions were
transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency's Defense
Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center and the TALON database
along with future "threat reports" would now be funneled to an FBI
database known as "Guardian."

However, as SourceWatch
noted, "in accordance with intelligence oversight requirements," even
though CIFA was closed down, DoD "will maintain a record copy of the
collected data." In other words TALON reports, including data illegally
collected on antiwar activists, will continue to exist somewhere deep in
the bowels of the Defense Department, more likely than not in a
Bluffdale database administered by NSA.

When President Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)
into law on December 31, he did more than simply facilitate
multibillion dollar Pentagon boondoggles for the current fiscal year; he
set the stage for what journalist Christopher Ketchum called "The Last
Roundup," and what James Bamford's source denounced as our approaching
"turnkey totalitarian state."

We need not speculate as to when an American police state will be fully functional, it already is.


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