Finding enemies.

All right - I was listening to journalist James Bamford on Democracy Now! talk about his new book on the NSA, The Shadow Factory, and it has really made me angry. Part of what is so irritating about this is that it isn't even considered significant news - that people have become so inured to the notion of a government tapping their phones, reading their email, transcribing their private conversations, and archiving them for whatever future use they may want to put them to. For chrissake, these fuckers in the Bush White House directed the NSA to work with companies like AT&T and Verizon - companies that profit from our business - to sift through our correspondence without any limits, to the point where staffers at the NSA were actually passing around recordings of intimate phone calls between members of our military deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan and their spouses and partners back home. Hey, Charlie - get a load of this one! What the fuck.

But it's far worse than just an invasion of privacy. In accord with typical Fortune 500 practice, the telecom "giants" outsourced the actual data collection and analysis to foreign-connected firms, including two companies named Narus and Verint, both founded in Israel. Verint can boast of a founder and former CEO who is currently on the lamb in Namibia to avoid prosecution for felony charges of fraud and other violations. Both companies have extensive relationships with intelligence services in anti-democratic and repressive regimes the world over. Bamford also tells of the NSA's pre-9/11 fuck-ups, including not informing the FBI that two Al Qaeda 9/11 hijackers under surveillance by the NSA were living in Los Angeles and, later, within spitting distance of the NSA headquarters in Laurel, Maryland. (The hijackers even frequented the same restaurants and Gold's Gym as NSA staffers.) Even more bone-chilling for me was his description of how NSA analysts in Georgia determine targets in Iraq and Afghanistan - i.e. houses to bomb or invade - based on sloppy translations of communications intercepts and often reckless assumptions about what is being said. So people are killed, wounded, and incarcerated on the basis of snap decisions made in a building thousands of miles away.

This obsession with all-encompassing surveillance and an expansion of our ability to project deadly force anywhere on the globe with the casual push of a button - it is all intimately intertwined. This has been the project of the U.S. government for at least the last decade, probably longer. It involves a massive investment in the technology of death - sophisticated unmanned drones, orbital launch platforms, etc., all capable of reaching any point on the planet nearly instantaneously whenever our interests are threatened, in a manner so easy and safe that even Cheney could do it. Those "interests," by the way, include economic considerations, obstruction of trade, disruption of shipping or energy supplies, and so on. So this is the 21st Century equivalent of gunboat diplomacy, executed with a simplicity once seen only in television dramas. "Find the enemy. Kill the enemy." In what is often called the most important election of our lifetimes, I have yet to hear this issue addressed by the major party candidates. What will either of them do about this steady movement toward the establishment of a global police state for that less-fortunate 70% of humanity?

Kind of seems like the answer is "nothing". That's why we need to push a little harder on this.

luv you,

jp