STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
Surveillance State? Washington Post Explains It … Not!
By Staff News & Analysis - December 05, 2013

NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show … The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable. The records feed a vast database that stores information about the locations of at least hundreds of millions of devices, according to the officials and the documents, which were provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. New projects created to analyze that data have provided the intelligence community with what amounts to a mass surveillance tool. The NSA does not target Americans' location data by design, but the agency acquires a substantial amount of information on the whereabouts of domestic cellphones "incidentally," a legal term that connotes a foreseeable but not deliberate result. – Washington Post

Dominant Social Theme: We have launched a vast Surveillance State whose main attributes are antipathy, malice, death and destruction. But don't take it personally.

Free-Market Analysis: Thanks, Washington Post, for explaining what's really going on. But have you? Really?

Hmm. We recall Operation Mockingbird, a CIA operation that even Wikipedia – that black hole of disinformation – admits was in force in the 20th century.

Of course, we are not supposed to believe it exists today, or that top Intel agents routinely masquerade as journalists. Didn't Anderson Cooper train as a CIA agent in his youth? Silly boy. Or how about that New York Times reporter that was unmasked as a US Intel asset a few years back?

No, we are not supposed to think for an instant that Western media properties are in cahoots with globalists and routinely provide information that reflects favorably on all sorts of internationalist government programs and treaties.

Of course, we should ever keep in mind what Edward Griffin has so eloquently reported – that the Soviet Union was partially set up with Wall Street money. The Cold War, then, was a kind of hoax.

Thesis … antithesis … synthesis.

In fact, the Cold War was surely intended to create a more authoritarian West. War, after all – hypothetical or not – is the health of the state. World War II militarized the Western world. The Cold War (whether or not it eventually got out of control) sustained and expanded that militarization.

As for Project Mockingbird, the Cold War was merely a justification for its real nature, which was to ensure that government was properly feted by Time-Life and that globalist inventions were given a deference they never deserved.

And now we come to this article in the Washington Post, a prime exponent of Project Mockingbird in the 20th century. No doubt the Post is no longer in cahoots with the CIA, yet this article certainly makes it appear as if it is.

Here's more:

One senior collection manager, speaking on the condition of anonymity but with permission from the NSA, said "we are getting vast volumes" of location data from around the world by tapping into the cables that connect mobile networks globally and that serve U.S. cellphones as well as foreign ones.

Additionally, data are often collected from the tens of millions of Americans who travel abroad with their cellphones every year. In scale, scope and potential impact on privacy, the efforts to collect and analyze location data may be unsurpassed among the NSA surveillance programs that have been disclosed since June.

Analysts can find cellphones anywhere in the world, retrace their movements and expose hidden relationships among the people using them. (Graphic: How the NSA is tracking people right now) U.S. officials said the programs that collect and analyze location data are lawful and intended strictly to develop intelligence about foreign targets.

Robert Litt, general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA, said "there is no element of the intelligence community that under any authority is intentionally collecting bulk cellphone location information about cellphones in the United States."

The NSA has no reason to suspect that the movements of the overwhelming majority of cellphone users would be relevant to national security. Rather, it collects locations in bulk because its most powerful analytic tools — known collectively as CO-TRAVELER — allow it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.

Still, location data, especially when aggregated over time, is widely regarded among privacy advocates as uniquely sensitive. Sophisticated mathematical tech­niques enable NSA analysts to map cellphone owners' relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths.

Cellphones broadcast their locations even when they are not being used to place a call or send a text message. CO-TRAVELER and related tools require the methodical collection and storage of location data on what amounts to a planetary scale.

The government is tracking people from afar into confidential business meetings or personal visits to medical facilities, hotel rooms, private homes and other traditionally protected spaces. "One of the key components of location data, and why it's so sensitive, is that the laws of physics don't let you keep it private," said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union.

People who value their privacy can encrypt their e-mails and disguise their online identities, but "the only way to hide your location is to disconnect from our modern communication system and live in a cave."

Okay, this is a longish article but we'll stop there to make a caveat. As we understand it, it's the government – especially the US, British and Israeli governments – that have pressured industry into making every cell phone a Trojan Horse.

Let us restate. The Washington Post has written an incredibly long and intricate article about the inescapability of surveillance without ever dealing in its text with the reality that the West's most powerful governments have cold-bloodedly inflicted this misery on their citizens.

It takes a lot of organization to intimidate every single company in the Western world into secretly betraying the privacy of their customers. But Western Intel apparently did just that.

See here, from a NNEDV fact sheet:

Cell Phones: Location Tracking & Sharing – How Does the Technology Work?

There are many ways a cell (aka mobile) phone's location can be tracked or shared.

• All U.S. cell phones are required to have some type of location-based technology to enable an emergency dispatch centers to find a 911 caller's real-time location and number. Thus, geographic location tracking capabilities have been integrated into all U.S. cell phones, as well as several international ones.

• Phone carriers tend to use one of two methods to find a mobile phone's location in their network: some cell phones contain Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers that connect with GPS satellites to provide the cell phone's location. Cell phones without a GPS device send signals to nearby network cell towers, and use that information to triangulate the cell phone's location.

• Additionally, some cell phones, are designed to be able to connect to the Internet via a cellular broadband network and/or via Wi-Fi network (aka a local wireless Internet access point). If a cell phone connects via a Wi-Fi network, that connection can also disclose more or less precise information about a cell phone's location depending upon how the Internet Service Provider provides the wireless Internet connection.

• Some cell phones also keep a temporary file of nearby cell phone towers and Wi-Fi hotspots (places that offer local wireless Internet access), to potentially make the cell phone user's connectivity more efficient.

Just to make sure you didn't miss it, we'll repeat the salient fact: "All U.S. cell phones are required to have some type of location-based technology to enable an emergency dispatch center to find a 911 caller's real-time location and number. Thus, geographic location tracking capabilities have been integrated into all U.S. cell phones, as well as several international ones."

So, you see, you don't have to go live in a cave. You simply have to figure out who carried out an intergenerational plan to bug every single electronic device you own – and then politely (or not) ask them to stop.

The Washington Post apparently wants us to believe the Surveillance Society is a kind of natural disaster. But it's not. Nor is the strange saga of Edward Snowden an entirely natural occurrence. If you read this Post article carefully, you'll notice a number of dominant social themes cleverly wrapped through the text.

  • The NSA is incredibly sophisticated and probably has a record of even your most intimate secrets.
  • Responsible civil servants at the NSA and elsewhere apparently spend most of their waking hours worrying that US citizens may be subject to unintended privacy breaches. These officials are moving heaven and Earth to make sure the super-secret, super-necessary anti-terrorism programs that the NSA has put in place function in a lawful manner, protecting US citizens while "getting" the bad guys.
  • If there were no terrorists determined to undermine the West's freedom and prosperity, the NSA's freedom-sapping measures would not be necessary.

Let's desconstruct these memes one at a time.

First of all, the collection of data amassed by the NSA probably is quite vast. But the idea that they can winnow through it efficiently much less access it in a timely fashion is probably nonsense. They want people to think that, though. They obviously want people to be incredibly intimidated. You, by the way. Not terrorists. YOU.

Second, we don't believe for a minute that anyone in Western Intel cares a hoot about national security or the citizens that their illegal and nonsensical actions are supposed to "protect." Western Intel agencies are globalist facilities intended like Rome's long-ago Praetorian Guard to protect the status quo of the ruling class. The sole function of Western Intel and its various militarized black ops units is to nurture and expand the globalism of the banking class.

Finally, there IS no war on terror, or certainly not the kind that the mainstream media occasionally reports on. Al Qaeda was a creation of the CIA. Osama bin Laden was at one point apparently a CIA asset. There are plenty of unanswered questions about 9/11 – too many to give credence to the current story, which not even mainstream politicians believe anymore, let alone the 9/11 Commission members and staff who have all but disavowed it.

So we return to points that we have made previously. The saga of Edward Snowden – credible or not – has allowed the global elites to publicize the vast surveillance state they've built. They DO want you to appreciate how vast and powerful the Surveillance State has become. They DO want you to appreciate how concerned Surveillance State officials are that no laws are broken and no confidences breached.

After Thoughts

And finally, they want you to understand that none of this would be necessary if we didn't live in such dangerous times.

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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