High-tech fascism straight out of V For Vendetta on the horizon
In the 2005 movie V For Vendetta, a film about a totalitarian society ruled by a fascist government with an iron surveillance fist, there’s a scene where state spooks drive down a residential street with a gadget that records the conversations people are having inside their homes and gives them a rating on how antagonistic towards the authorities they are.
A frighteningly similar scenario is now on the horizon with the news that the CIA’s investment arm In-Q-Tel is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a company that monitors the output of social media, in order to “Read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon,”reports Wired News.
However, the prospect of the CIA closely monitoring social networking websites, whose content largely comprises of inane gossip and sophomoric blabber, shows just how afraid the establishment is of rising popular opposition to their agenda.
“Visible crawls over half a million web 2.0 sites a day, scraping more than a million posts and conversations taking place on blogs, online forums, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon. Customers get customized, real-time feeds of what’s being said on these sites, based on a series of keywords,” according to Wired.
The software scores whether each post is positive, neutral or negative on a particular topic and can judge who the most influential poster is in a conversation, for example on a comment board or forum.
According to In-Q-Tel, it wants to use the technology to see how international issues are playing out in foreign media, but as the report notes, “Of course, such a tool can also be pointed inward, at domestic bloggers or tweeters. Visible already keeps tabs on web 2.0 sites for Dell, AT&T and Verizon. For Microsoft, the company is monitoring the buzz on its Windows 7 rollout. For Spam-maker Hormel, Visible is tracking animal-right activists’ online campaigns against the company.”
Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists warns that the software could be used to track and target critics of the government, as well as political figures and journalists.
“Intelligence agencies or employees might be tempted to use the tools at their disposal to compile information on political figures, critics, journalists or others, and to exploit such information for political advantage,” Aftergood told Wired.
Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras said that the CIA was just one of several government clients that were using the technology and that more were on the horizon.
The ‘birther’ allegation that President Obama wasn’t born in the US is nothing new. America has a long tradition of political accusations gaining traction.
The recent chatter over theBirther’s Movementand President Obama’s birthplace has a long way to go before it can be considered one of the top political conspiracy theories out there. Here are several that endure year after year, often despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
1. JFK’s assassination: Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone
Many people still question the death of the 35th president on a sunny afternoon in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Was it really Lee Harvey Oswald? If so, did he act alone? Under whose direction? Were the FBI or CIA involved? There are endless questions posed about that day, and asmany different theoriesabout how to answer them.
2. The American government was behind 9/11
According to911Truth.org, the collapse of the Twin Towers wasn’t caused by Al Qaeda or foreign terrorists, but rather “elements within the US government and covert policy apparatus must have orchestrated or participated in the execution of the attacks for these to have happened in the way that they did.”
3. The government hushed up what really crashed in Roswell, N.M.
Something crashed in the desert outside Roswell, New Mexico in July of 1947.But what? Some conspiracy theorists maintain it was an alien space ship and that the US military covered up the discovery of the crash site and alien bodies. The enduring theory has turned the small town of Roswell into a circus of alien paraphernalia shops and a tourist destination for seekers of the paranormal.
4. The CIA created AIDS
Most people and scientists believe that the AIDS virus was transferred from monkeys to humans in the 1930s. But a small group maintains that the virus was man-made,manufactured by the US governmentor the CIA and specifically used to target African-Americans and homosexuals. Others believe the US created AIDS as a bioweapon, but that it spiraled out of control.
5. The moon landing was a hoax
We’ve all seen the grainy video of Neil Armstrong taking his historic steps on the moon, planting the American flag, and declaring, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” But some sayit was all stagedso that the US could beat Cold-War-Rival Russia in the Space Race.
Ye Olde Conspiracy Theories
For conspiracy theories that date back to the founding of the Republic, including His Royal Highness King John Adams and Confederate turncoat Mary Todd Lincoln, check outthis essayon The Daily Beast.
Former FBI translator and founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, Sibel Edmonds.
In the interview, Sibel says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden, and the Taliban, “all the way until that day of September 11.”
These ‘intimate relations’ included using Bin Laden for ‘operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ‘operations’ involved using al Qaeda and the Taliban in the same manner “as we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, fighting ‘enemies’ via proxies.
As Sibel has previously described, and as she reiterates in this latest interview, this process involved using Turkey (with assistance from ‘actors from Pakistan, and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia’) as a proxy, which in turn used Bin Laden and the Taliban and others as a proxy terrorist army.
Control of Central Asia
The goals of the American ’statesmen’ directing these activities included control of Central Asia’s vast energy supplies and new markets for military products.
The Americans had a problem, though. They needed to keep their fingerprints off these operations to avoid a) popular revolt in Central Asia ( Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), and b) serious repercussions from China and Russia. They found an ingenious solution: Use their puppet-state Turkey as a proxy, and appeal to both pan-Turkic and pan-Islam sensibilities.
Turkey, a NATO ally, has a lot more credibility in the region than the US and, with the history of the Ottoman Empire, could appeal to pan-Turkic dreams of a wider sphere of influence. The majority of the Central Asian population shares the same heritage, language and religion as the Turks.
In turn, the Turks used the Taliban and al Qaeda, appealing to their dreams of a pan-Islamic caliphate (Presumably. Or maybe the Turks/US just paid very well.)
This started more than a decade-long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US intent on furthering the oil industry and the Military Industrial Complex, using Turkish operatives, Saudi partners and Pakistani allies, furthering this objective in the name of Islam.
Uighurs
Sibel was recently asked to write about the recent situation with the Uighurs in Xinjiang, but she declined, apart from saying that “our fingerprint is all over it.”
Of course, Sibel isn’t the first or only person to recognize any of this. Eric Margolis, one of the best reporters in the West on matters of Central Asia, stated that the Uighurs in the training camps in Afghanistan up to 2001:
“were being trained by Bin Laden to go and fight the communist Chinese in Xinjiang, and this was not only with the knowledge, but with the support of the CIA, because they thought they might use them if war ever broke out with China.”
And also that:
“Afghanistan was not a hotbed of terrorism, these were commando groups, guerrilla groups, being trained for specific purposes in Central Asia.”
“That illustrates Henry Kissinger’s bon mot that the only thing more dangerous than being America’s enemy is being an ally, because these people were paid by the CIA, they were armed by the US, these Chinese Muslims from Xinjiang, the most-Western province.
The CIA was going to use them in the event of a war with China, or just to raise hell there, and they were trained and supported out of Afghanistan, some of them with Osama Bin Laden’s collaboration. The Americans were up to their ears with this.”
Rogues Gallery
Last year, Sibel came up with a brilliant idea to expose some of the criminal activity that she is forbidden to speak about: she published eighteen photos, titled “Sibel Edmonds’ State Secrets Privilege Gallery,” of people involved the operations that she has been trying to expose. One of those people is Anwar Yusuf Turani, the so-called ‘President-in-exile’ of East Turkistan (Xinjiang). This so-called ‘government-in-exile’ was ‘established‘ on Capitol Hill in September, 2004, drawing a sharp rebuke from China.
Also featured in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery was ‘former’ spook Graham Fuller, who was instrumental in the establishment of Turani’s ‘government-in-exile’ of East Turkistan. Fuller has written extensively on Xinjiang, and his “Xinjiang Project” for Rand Corp is apparently the blueprint for Turani’s government-in-exile. Sibel has openly stated her contempt for Mr. Fuller.
Susurluk
The Turkish establishment has a long history of mingling matters of state with terrorism, drug trafficking and other criminal activity, best exemplified by the 1996 Susurluk incident which exposed the so-called Deep State.
Sibel states that “a few main Susurluk actors also ended up in Chicago where they centered ‘certain’ aspects of their operations (Especially East Turkistan-Uighurs).”
One of the main Deep State actors, Mehmet Eymur, former Chief of Counter-Terrorism for Turkey’s intelligence agency, the MIT, features in Sibel’s Rogues Gallery. Eymur was given exile in the US. Another member of Sibel’s gallery, Marc Grossman was Ambassador to Turkey at the time that the Susurluk incident exposed the Deep State. He was recalled shortly after, prior to the end of his assignment, as was Grossman’s underling, Major Douglas Dickerson, who later tried to recruit Sibel into the spying ring.
The modus operandi of the Susurluk gang is the same as the activities that Sibel describes as taking place in Central Asia, the only difference is that this activity was exposed in Turkey a decade ago, whereas the organs of the state in the US, including the corporate media, have successfully suppressed this story.
Chechnya, Albania & Kosovo
Central Asia is not the only place where American foreign policy makers have shared interests with Bin Laden. Consider the war in Chechnya. As I documented here, Richard Perle and Stephen Solarz (both in Sibel’s gallery) joined other leading neocon luminaries such as Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, James Woolsey, and Morton Abramowitz in a group called the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). For his part, Bin Laden donated $25 million to the cause, as well as numerous fighters, and technical expertise, establishing training camps.
US interests also converged with those of al-Qaeda in Kosovo and Albania.
Of course, it is not uncommon for circumstances to arise where ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend.’ On the other hand, in a transparent democracy, we expect a full accounting of the circumstances leading up to a tragic event like 9/11. The 9/11 Commission was supposed to provide exactly that.
State Secrets
Sibel has famously been dubbed the most gagged woman in America, having the State Secrets Privilege imposed on her twice. Her 3.5 hour testimony to the 9/11 Commission has been entirely suppressed, reduced to a single footnote which refers readers to her classified testimony.
In the interview, she says that the information that was classified in her case specifically identifies that the US was using Bin Laden and the Taliban in Central Asia, including Xinjiang. In the interview, Sibel reiterates that when invoking the gag orders, the US government claims that it is protecting ” ’sensitive diplomatic relations,’ protecting Turkey, protecting Israel, protecting Pakistan, protecting Saudi Arabia…” This is no doubt partially true, but it is also true that they are protecting themselves too, and it is a crime in the US to use classification and secrecy to cover up crimes.
I have information about things that our government has lied to us about… those things can be proven as lies, very easily, based on the information they classified in my case, because we did carry very intimate relationship with these people, and it involves Central Asia, all the way up to September 11.
Summary
The bombshell here is obviously that certain people in the US were using Bin Laden up to September 11, 2001.
It is important to understand why: the US outsourced terror operations to al Qaeda and the Taliban for many years, promoting the Islamization of Central Asia in an attempt to personally profit off military sales as well as oil and gas concessions.
The silence by the US government on these matters is deafening. So, too, is the blowback.
The Air Force’s geek squad wants the technology to monitor government employees’ deviant online behavior. And they want you to build it.
Today, the Air Force issued a call for proposals from small businesses, with this objective: “Define, develop, and demonstrate innovative approaches for determining ‘good’ (approved) versus ‘bad’ (disallowed/subversive) activities, including insiders and/or malware.”
But taboo activity could span everything from leaking top secret information to spamming contacts with a chain letter to visiting any site that government officials deem dubious. Previously, they’ve said some interesting things about social networking, which may or may not influence what they’d do with new tools.
Now, those tools are a ways away. Current methods to detect insider breaches of cyber security “only address the most blatant violations of policy or the grossest deviations from accepted behavior,” according to the Air Force request. The cyber security system works mostly by rejecting certain predefined digital signatures at the borders of the network. But, as the Air Force request pointed out, people with inside access are more familiar with the security system and best know how to thwart it.
Not everyone who jeopardizes security does it intentionally. The Air Force also wants the algorithm to flag unwitting security breaches like opening an infected site during research.
Get cracking if you want to help root out the deviants. The technology needs to be ready to test nine months from now, and you’ll be compensated up to $100,000 for your troubles.
A top US domestic security chief announced Wednesday a strategy to make ordinary citizens the first line of defense against an increasingly multi-faceted terrorist threat.
“For too long, we’ve treated the public as a liability to be protected rather than an asset in our nation’s collective security,” Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said in a speech in New York.
“This approach, unfortunately, has allowed confusion, anxiety and fear to linger.”
Napolitano, who also announced an extra 78 million dollars in anti-terrorism funding for 15 mass transit systems nationwide, said modern communications had increased the sophistication of threats since the September 11, 2001 attacks.
“The tools for creating violence and chaos are as easy to find as the tools to buy music online or restocking inventory,” she said. “If 9/11 happened in a web 1.0 world, terrorists are certainly in a web 2.0 world now.”
Napolitano urged a “much broader society response” in which the public helps curb a growing phenomenon of so-called home-grown terrorism.
Referring to a spate of arrests around the country of US citizens and residents charged with jihad-type militancy, Napolitano said that ordinary people were often the best eyes and ears.
“You are the ones who know when something is not right in your communities,” she said in her speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Indeed if you look at the last couple of weeks, arrests have been made in places like Minneapolis and North Carolina,” she said.
“So I think better education, about the breadth of the threat and how it can be carried out, is important.”
In the latest case, seven people were arrested Monday, including an American-born Muslim convert and his two sons living in a quiet North Carolina suburb.
Napolitano even called on children to join an effort previously shouldered by police and other security services.
“There’s actually an important role we can play in educating even our very young about watching for, and knowing what to do, if you’re in an airport and you see a package left with no one around,” she said.
However, she stressed she was not advocating “a culture of spying on one another.”
She insisted that President Barack Obama’s administration was committed to repairing the erosion of civil liberties that took place under his predecessor, George W. Bush.
“We have to be careful,” she said. “That’s a balance to be struck.”
An example, she said, was the need to respect mosques and other Islamic institutions.
“We have to be very careful about profiling a religious institution just as we have to be careful about profiling individuals,” she said. “We have to be very, very careful about interfering with the free exercise of religion.”
Even as US troops become increasingly focused on fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan, more attention is being paid to violent plots hatched within US borders — often led by US citizens or residents.
The Washington Post on Wednesday described the chief suspect in the North Carolina arrests, Daniel Boyd, as the son of a US marine who had a “typical American childhood” in the suburbs of the US capital, Washington.
This week, a New York court unsealed a confession made in January by a Long Island man, Bryant Vinas, who says he joined Al-Qaeda to attack US forces in Afghanistan and had plotted to attack a New York commuter train.
In May, five Miami men were found guilty of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, which just this month was renamed the Willis Tower.
Also in May, four New York men — three of them US citizens — were arrested on charges of trying to blow up synagogues and destroy a US military plane.
Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists warns that the software could be used to track and target critics of the government, as well as political figures and journalists.
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