US Society Is "The Prisoner"

People compare the NSA domestic spying program to the novel "1984." But that society is a bleak place. A more accurate comparison would be the British TV show "The Prisoner."


There is lots of pomp and music, a mirage of constant celebration.

Most everyone appears content and happy because they have meekly acquiesced.

We have the illusion of democracy but no matter who is elected nothing much ever changes.

We are numbers and not free men. We all have 10 digit government issued numbers without which we cannot work, cash checks, or basically exist.

We may have the illusion of freedom but every waking moment is controlled by the government, our employers, the banks.

And we are watched. All the time. It is for our own good, we are told. National security. We are instructed to be happy we are under constant surveillance.

But,....

Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away.

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Computers and Domestic Spying

The US government's All Seeing Eye.

The big difference between J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, East Germany's Stasi, and 2013's NSA is the modern ability of computers. In the old days dossiers and wiretaps required human eyes and ears. The Stasi is estimated to have employed one-sixth of East Germany's population as informants. Information was stored on paper, even the most interesting wiretaps were transcribed to paper. There was a limit to how much data government could acquire.

Nowadays the information nearly unlimited. Your grocery store records everything you buy and analyses the data to predict what you will want to buy in the future. Amazon does the same thing with your reading material. MasterCard compiles your entire shopping history. Google records every single search you've done. Your ISP knows what websites you visited and how long you've been there. GPS allows your car to know everywhere you drove and your smart phone to know where you have been. Your phone also knows who you've talked to and for how long.

Then there is Twitter and Facebook where people voluntarily spy on themselves, informing those corporations of every intimate detail of their lives. The kind of information that would cause Hoover to orgasm repeatedly.

Did you notice the pattern here? The government initiated none of this datamining. Corporations did it all. They do it to sell you shit or to sell that information to other corporations intending to sell shit to you. Or, as is the case with car and phone GPS chips, they do it just because they can on the off chance the data will become valuable someday. All of this personal information about you and me is being mined and collated by corporations for their own very selfish interests. Sears doesn't care if you are a terrorist, they just want to help you find the perfect pressure cooker for your bomb building needs.

For government apparatchiks who believe it is their sworn duty to keep tabs on everything every American is doing lest somebody somewhere does something naughty, all this corporate information collection is better than Nirvana. They grab the data, usually not even bothering to pay for it, and build fancy search algorithms that even the corporations never dreamed of.

Of course there are hole in the data. Cash transactions are hidden as are people who use low-tech phones. In the end 99.9999999999% of the data is useless. Still, the government gathers it and studies it. And because so much is useless they gather more and more information about Americans. They hope somewhere in all that worthless dust there will be a few specks of gold.

And the price is, at any given moment your government knows more about you than you do yourself. But so do the businesses you use. Privacy is a joke. If you buy your condoms with a credit card MasterCard knows how often you have sex. Verizon knows who you are probably sleeping with. And Walgreens knows if you have missed your period. What corporations know the government can know too.

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Spies and Agent Provocateurs

The US federal government has a long history of domestic spying. While some of the targets have been legitimate - the Mafia, Nazis, Communists, jihadists, and the KKK - most of the targets have committed only one crime, not acquiescing to political orthodoxy.

Most of the spying has been done by the FBI but in recent years a whole alphabet soup of agencies (including the NSA, DIA, NRO, OICI, CIA) have been created and tasked with spying. Lots of that involved domestic spying for the simple reason it is easier and cheaper.

Military Spying

Current and planned military drone bases inside the United States.

The Defense Intelligence Agency has been caught several times spying on Americans. There have certainly been other occasions when they were never caught. When the DIA in 2007 was discovered spying on Americans opposed to the Iraq War such as the Quakers. They shut down the program (called TALON) only to quietly reopen it under a different acronym (FICOR). The program compiles data of individuals, domestic and foreign, who are suspected of being disloyal to US war policy.

The Pentagon has scores of domestic surveillance drone bases. The bases are officially for training but they can and do "accidentally" collect intelligence on US residents. Since the Pentagon routinely lies about its domestic drone activities it is likely commanders are not very resistant to the urge to watch over people they don't like.

The CIA
Like the military, the CIA is forbidden by law to spy on American soil. Like the military, they ignore the law whenever they feel like it. The CIA has secretly tested drugs on Americans (Project MK-ULTRA). Born out the fear the Soviets were ahead of the US in brainwashing technology, the CIA began a decade long program of selecting unwitting people at random to test mind altering drugs on them. The only thing that came of it was to convert LSD from a minor therapeutic medicine to wide spread street drug.

Operation Chaos, whimsically named after the bad guys from the TV show Get Smart, ended up creating the men who committed Watergate. For a long time the CIA was jealous of the FBI's right to spy on Americans so they formed their own domestic program. During the Vietnam War, President Johnson tasked the CIA with spying on anti-war activists. They did everything but targeted assassinations although there are many people who believe it was the CIA domestic program that murdered President Kennedy.

The CIA is still at it. It was revealed in 2011 that the CIA recruited the New York Police Department to do a joint, and totally illegal, spying operation that probably has a cute code name that is still top secret.

FBI
The granddaddy of domestic spying agencies. The FBI has been spying on American citizens since the J. Edgar Hoover days. Hoover wiretapped every president from FDR to Richard Nixon. He began wiretapping the Supreme Court in the mid-1930's. The FBI spied on civil rights organizations, student and anti-war groups during the Vietnam War, and anyone ever vaguely suspected of being friendly to communism.

But the FBI didn't just spy. Their CONINTELPRO program went out of its way to defame people they didn't like. Actress Jean Seberg supported the civil rights movement. That led Hoover to conclude that she must be a "sex pervert." The FBI fabricated rumors about her and harassed her until she committed suicide. The program's criminal activity was revealed in 1971 and a decade later Ronald Reagan issued a executive order legalizing their crimes.

The programs, under other names, continue to this day.

Agent Provocateurs

The biggest problem all these agencies have is that there just isn't enough terrorist plot to justify their budgets. They have resorted to fomenting the plots they uncover. We may never know how many terrorist plots are just FBI fabrications. Stories abound of people being led by FBI informants into committing crimes, sometimes doing all the work for the suspects. Other times the informants just make up shit to justify their pay.

The Occupy movement was replete with agent provocateurs sent in by the FBI with the specific goal of committing crimes to discredit the citizen protesters.

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American Police State: Spynation

Of course the government is spying on me. I'm not outraged only because outrage requires a certain degree of surprise and I've know about government spying for a long time. I hate it. I'm angry about it. Livid really. And I have been since before I was born.

Defeating Datamining
First a little proof that the NSA practices useless voyeurism. Datamining looks at lots of information looking for key words or phrases. The way to defeat it is to communicate in a simple code. If you use the word "baby" instead of "bomb," for example, then the NSA would have to filter through billions of parenthood chatter trying to find a terrorist plot.

Why They Spy
The point of NSA spying is exactly the same as the reason the Stasi spied on East Germans. We millions of common folk are out here doing shit the government doesn't know about and that terrifies small minded career bureaucrats like NSA director James Clapper. They always say they are looking for "enemies of the state," but the fact is they consider every citizen a potential enemy.

Who Runs the NSA
James Clapper has been a Peeping Tom all his life. He worked his way up the ranks in the military spying on people. Not feet on the ground, James Bond type spying, but the high tech equivalent of the creepy neighbor with a telescope spying. Clapper is also a particularly bad spy. He screwed the pooch on Iraq WMD and the Libyan Civil War. He got caught lying to Congress (Lying is expected, getting caught is dumb.). Looking through his career it is impossible to find anything he has done right except getting promotions which suggests he has devoted considerable effort to spying on his bosses like that other American Peeping Tom, J. Edgar Hoover.

The Hoover Legacy
The bureaucratic propensity to spy on Americans was developed and perfected by FBI legend J. Edgar Hoover. Copying techniques from Felix Dzerzhinsky in Soviet Russia and Heinrich Himmler in Nazi Germany, Hoover build dossiers on millions of Americans from presidents, leaders of Congress, and the Supreme Court to everyday Americans, teachers and workers. Nothing has changed since Hoover died, the American government continues to spy on her own citizens with the same intrusiveness.

Isn't Domestic Spying Illegal?
Yeah. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution forbids it. Congress passed laws allowing them anyhow. Congress even created a secret court system to rubber stamp domestic spying. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is a misnomer since the targets of thousands of approved wiretaps are Americans living in the United States "suspected" of being foreign agents. But the government doesn't even bother with the charade of a warrant for its massive datamining program. They just do it, cite "national security," and fuck the Constitution.

I've Been Bugged
In the late 1980's I was working for an anti-establishment candidate for the San Diego City Council. My telephone line developed a mysterious noise on it that continued throughout the campaign and stopped suddenly the day after the election. Everybody working on the campaign experienced the same thing. It's possible I've been bugged on other occasions and just never noticed.

Obama and Bush
The program, PRISM, under attack was implemented by President Bush Jr. but enthusiastically continued by President Obama, Obama even appointed a Bushite to oversee the program. Both are equally to blame. Most of the Republicans and Democrats who are currently outraged by the program voted, in secret, for it. Republicans condemning it now approved of it when Bush was the spymaster. Hypocrisy abounds.

What Should We Do?
Domestic spying will continue unabated, it has too many decades of momentum to be stopped now. We should live our lives like East Germans did during the Communist era. Assume our phones are tapped, our emails are being read, our internet search patterns are being studied. Because they are. Never say or write anything is private you wouldn't want the police to read because they probably are.

If you are up to something nefarious use simple precautions. Communicated in code. Use pirated or public Wi-Fi, hack some innocent's computer so it looks like they did your suspicious searches. The NSA is much more interested is peaceful dissidents than in actual terrorists.

UPDATE: James Clapper is director of National Intelligence and not chief of the NSA. That just means Clapper is a higher ranked Peeping Tom. The head of the NSA is Keith Alexander whose resume is even thinner than Clapper's.

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The Wacky World of E. W. Jackson

It takes a whole lot of crazy to be a Republican and you have to be deeply demented to be a black Republican. I mean, you go to party gatherings and everyone assumes you're there to clean the dishes or polish their shoes. After you've introduced yourself as the party's candidate for lieutenant governor you'll experience extensive fawning with everyone treating you like a four year-old who has proudly spelled "cat" correctly. "Isn't he special, bless his heart." It takes a unique person with a bizarre outlook on life to exist in that kind of world without ever realizing that everyone, including you friends, are laughing at you.

E. W. Jackson is that kind of person.

Yoga spells Satan.

 I was really attracted to Jackson's statement that yoga opens people up to satanic possession. That would certainly explain my shingles if you reject that unGodly chicken pox science stuff. I've done yoga for years so it was only a matter of time.

Jackson hates gays with the obsessive enthusiasm that only a closeted poof can manage. He claims that gay rights is worse for black Americans than the Ku Klux Klan and slavery.

He wants a law requiring women to report miscarriages as a homicide and punish any woman who fails to promptly report a miscarriage to police. Most women don't immediately know if they have miscarried but that doesn't make them any less murderers.

He has called President Obama an "atheist Muslim." Which is an oxymoron; he can't be both.

Jackson says that Democrats are the Antichrist, which means that half the nation is evil incarnate.

Jackson doesn't think everything is evil. He has a special love for rich folk. He believes that charity ought to be reversed. He advocated that the poor should give their money to the rich because the wealthy are more deserving of charity.

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Sandy Adelson Is the New Al Capone

Sandy Adelson tried valiantly to buy himself a president. He invested $150 million in presidential candidates, first Newt Gingrich and later Mitt Romney, only to see it all wasted.

Not Sandy Adelson. I know this because Al Capone was both better looking and a better person.

To some extent he lost the money the same way he got it, gambling. He put a shitload of chips on double zero (Newt) only to watch that political salamander crap out (I know I'm mixing my gambling metaphors). Then, like any addicted gambler, he doubled down his bets on Mitt and lost that too.

Of course, Sandy wasn't just placing bets, he was trying to purchase a president. See, Sandy Adelson is a crooked little SOB, up to his over-sized earlobes in bribery and money laundering allegations. Sandy wanted to own himself an Attorney General and the best way to do that is buy the president.

Since that didn't happen Sandy faces the possibility of spending the rest of his miserable little life hiring a phalanx of expensive lawyers to protect his ill-gotten gains from John Law on several continents. And, of course, Sandy will hit the political roulette tables again next presidential cycle gambling that his billions can elect some other corrupt politician, like Bobby Jindal, to the highest office.

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Shingles!!!

No, not the roof covering. I wish. I have the other kind of shingles, the revenge of chicken pox shingles.

I had the vaccine a couple of years ago. Still got shingles. I didn't get them in one of those annoying but otherwise mundane location like the chest or back. Of course not. My shingles appeared on the face. Specifically, the first rash is adjacent to my right eyebrow.

That location runs a risk of attacking my sight. Not to mention if the rash runs rampant I could end up with a face perfectly designed for the role of Erik in the Phantom of the Opera.

Fortunately, I did have the vaccine which should limit the severity of the rash. I caught it early (given it was staring me in the face when I looked in a mirror) and was able to start an anti-viral medicine quickly. That also should limit the severity. Also, years of practice at meditation is allowing me to quietly tolerate the irritation without picking at the lesions and causing scarring.

Chicken Pox
Back in the olden days there was great relief if the pox you caught was chicken and not Small Pox or Great Pox (syphillis). Few people lived long enough to suffer from shingles. All in all, chicken pox was a relative romp. The virus does its thing for a few days until the human immune system beats it back. Then it goes into hiding in nerve cells near the spine. There it waits for decades for the immune system to lose its vigilance. The virus then follows a bundle of nerve cells to reach the skin and take another shot at reproducing.

It's all very wondrous, this complex dance of species, unless it's happening to your skin.

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