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Weirdo National Security Agency posters from the 1950s, 60s and 70s
06.18.2018
09:43 am
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I hope you kids are all as grateful for the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) as I am. Thanks to FOIA, we get to read, see and have access to all kinds of things that THE MAN never wanted us to see. He probably still doesn’t. But…fuck that noise, right?

Now me? I’m a poster, propaganda and advertising junkie. Most nights these days, I can be found at my film bench building reels of 16mm TV commercials, prepping them for night of film fun with friends. I also have a healthy size collection of campaign ads and weird political films on 16mm. What can I say? Somebody’s gotta do it, right?

Propaganda of all kinds peaks my interest. My book collection is rife with volumes on political ads, posters on disease prevention from the 1950s, and domestic marketing campaigns. It’s a wild time over here.

So when I discovered that the NSA (National Security Agency) had responded to the person who requested access to the motivational security posters from the ‘50s and ‘60s, well…I was pretty damn pleased. As it turns out, I had every right to be. They are massively cool. One of my fave things about these posters? How tight Santa Claus’s relationship was with the NSA. Who knew that he was in so deep with government secrets, right?? Damn, Santa! Next I’m gonna find out that Rudolph’s nose was blinking Morse code!

Now, if you want to go have a look at all the posters yourself, you can. But it’s a hefty download of approximately 140 pages that can be found here and all the posters are on one PDF. I have taken the liberty of grabbing a collection of many of what I consider to be some of the best ones. The public hasn’t seen these babies in a grip of years so you are getting a nice glimpse of how our world has changed…or hasn’t.

Enjoy! And remember folks—security is up to you!



 
Many more after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Ariel Schudson
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06.18.2018
09:43 am
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‘Trust is hard to rebuild once it has been broken’: NSA’s own advice column trashes unwanted spying
03.12.2014
05:11 pm
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Willy Wonka
 
On June 15, 2010, the NSA debuted a new recurring feature on its intranet—an advice column. This really happened. The existence of the column was revealed by Glenn Greenwald’s new website The Intercept a few days ago. The advice column was called “Ask Zelda!” The “Ask Zelda!” columns were distributed on the agency’s intranet and accessible only to those with the proper security clearance; they were among the documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The lighthearted column addressed to most mundane and quotidian issues of NSA life, issues familiar to all office workers, including workplace attire, stolen food from common refrigerators, co-worker body odor, and so on.

The inaugural column consisted of one letter, and it was about the skimpy clothes that some younger NSA staff were wearing during the balmy late spring of 2010:
 

Dear Zelda,

Now that the warm weather is here, some of the newer Agency employees in my office are dressing in ways that are less than professional. How do I, as their supervisor, get them to stop dressing like they’re going to the beach when NSA doesn’t have a formal dress code?

Signed,
Prudish Prudence

Dear Prudence,

Oy! Once the thermometer hits 80 degrees, it can look like Ocean City West around here. Somehow, shorts and flip-flops don’t exactly convey the image of a fierce SIGNIT warrior.

You are right to be concerned, and I applaud your initiative as the supervisor to take corrective action. Not only is beach attire unprofessional in the workplace, but in certain cases it can be downright distracting to co-workers (if you get my drift).

-snip-

As with most things, communication is the key to a happy and productive workplace. With a little proactive discussion on your part, your staff can look professional during the summer months. So the next time one of your employees looks like they work at the National Snorkeling Academy instead of the National Security Agency, try these tips and let me know how it turns out.

 
The NSA
 
The identity of “Zelda” is not known, but a biographical snippet in the first column supplies some clues for those who are familiar with the NSA hierarchy.
 

“Zelda” is the pen name for a manager who has spent most of her 29 years at NSA in SID [Signals Intelligence Directorate] (and its predecessor orgs), supplemented by several years in career development (ADET [Associate Directorate for Education and Training]). Her managerial experience includes approximately 20 years as a first-line and mid-level Agency supervisor, as well as supervisory positions in the entertainment and food service industries. Zelda develops and teaches leadership training as part of the Nartional Cryptologic School’s Adjunct Faculty, and enjoys bossing people around outside of work, too.

 
In September of 2011, “Zelda” addressed the issue of—you guessed it—unwanted spying in the workplace. Her response was a fascinating brew of pie-in-the-sky helpfulness, naivete, and inadvertent revelation. Here’s the exchange in its entirety.
 

Dear Zelda,

Here’s the scenario: when the boss sees co-workers having a quiet conversation, he wants to know what is being said (it’s mostly work related). He has his designated “snitches” and expects them to keep him apprised of all the office gossip – even calling them at home and expecting a run-down! This puts the “designees” in a really awkward position; plus, we’re all afraid any offhand comment or anything said in confidence might be either repeated or misrepresented.

Needless to say, this creates a certain amount of tension between team members who normally would get along well, and adds stress in an already stressful atmosphere. There is also an unspoken belief that he will move people to different desks to break up what he perceives as people becoming too “chummy.” (It’s been done under the guise of “creating teams.”)

We used to be able to joke around a little or talk about our favorite “Idol” contestant to break the tension, but now we’re getting more and more skittish about even the most mundane general conversations (“Did you have a good weekend?”). This was once a very open, cooperative group who worked well together. Now we’re more suspicious of each other and teamwork is becoming harder. Do you think this was the goal?

Silenced in SID


Dear Silenced,

Wow, that takes “intelligence collection” in a whole new – and inappropriate – direction.

It’s lonely at the top

First let me say that I do not think this manager’s intent is to discourage teamwork. What it sounds like to me is that he (I’ll call him “Michael”) feels like an outsider and wants to be in the know. It can be lonely being the boss. You sit closed off in an office and miss the easy camraderie with your co-workers, while at the same time feeling the need to “police” their behavior. Maybe someone told Michael there was too much chit-chat in his organization or that some specific problem existed, and resorting to snitches is his misguided way of ferreting out the culprit(s). Either that or he’s been watching too much “Law & Order.”

Why don’t you try this: go overboard communicating with him. Call him over when he’s wandering around spying on people and fill him in on things. Give him details of work projects and ask his opinion about mission matters so he feels like he’s “in the loop.” Get others to drop by his desk periodically just to say hello, “hope you had a good weekend,” or “How ‘bout them O’s?” [I’m pretty sure this means the Orioles.] I bet that will satisfy his need to know what’s going on and he’ll back off with the nosiness.

NSA=No Secrets Allowed

We work in an Agency of secrets, but this kind of secrecy begets more secrecy and it becomes a downward spiral that destroys teamwork. What if you put an end to all the secrecy by bringing it out in the open? You and your co-workers could ask Michael for a team meeting and lay out the issue as you see it: “We feel like you don’t trust us and we aren’t comfortable making small talk anymore for fear of having our desks moved if we’re seen as being too chummy.” (Leave out the part about the snitches.) Tell him how this is hampering collaboration and affecting the work, ask him if he has a problem with the team’s behavior, and see what he says. …. Stick to the facts and how you feel, rather than making it about him (“We’re uncomfortable” vs “You’re spying on us.”).

If, after your attempts to bring things out into the open, it becomes clear that Michael is simply evil (some people live to stir up trouble), your best recourse may be to approach Michael’s boss with the problem and perhaps Michael can be reassigned. Be sure to focus on the effect it’s having on the team’s work when you talk to his manager.

No one likes a tattle-tale

“Silenced” implied that in this situation the snitches were unwilling accomplices for Michael. The reluctant snitches feel like they’re “damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” and everyone else is walking on eggshells. If you are bothered by snitches in your office, whether of the unwilling or voluntary variety, the best solution is to keep your behavior above reproach. Be a good performer, watch what you say and do, lock your screen when you step away from your workstation, and keep fodder for wagging tongues (your Viagra stash, photos of your wild-and-crazy girls’ weekend in Atlantic City) at home or out of sight. If you are put in the “unwilling snitch” position, I would advise telling your boss that you’re not comfortable with the role and to please not ask that of you.

Trust is hard to rebuild once it has been broken. Your work center may take time to heal after this deplorable practice is discontinued, but give it time and hopefully the open cooperation you once enjoyed will return.

zelda

 
Emphasis mine. I’m relishing that series of words…. “We work in an Agency of secrets, but this kind of secrecy begets more secrecy and it becomes a downward spiral that destroys teamwork. What if you put an end to all the secrecy by bringing it out in the open?” I hope that wherever in Russia Edward Snowden is today, he can take come grim solace in the fact that somewhere inside the vast NSA, there exists or once existed (maybe she’s retired) a 29-plus-year veteran who, even if she doesn’t know it, thinks that Snowden did the right thing.

But then again, as she wrote, “No one likes a tattle-tale.” I think I’ll go vomit now.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Former CIA NSA Expert Discusses Upcoming Alien UFO Disclosure by US Government
None Dare Call it FASCISM: How the NSA has (already) privatized tyranny

Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.12.2014
05:11 pm
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Edward Snowden’s testimony to the European Parliament is a must-read for EVERY concerned American

Edward Snowden
If Edward Snowden isn’t very careful, they’re going to crush his head!

The fate of Edward Snowden continues to be excruciatingly unresolved. The former NSA contractor who made international headlines in 2013 when he illegally disclosed details about the shocking scope of federal surveillance programs via The Guardian and other news outlets has been obliged to seek asylum from various non-U.S.-aligned governments, such as Russia, Ecuador, and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China. Nobody really disputes that Snowden has committed criminal acts—no matter how justified—and yet the intransigent stance of the U.S. to hold over Snowden’s head the most draconian penalties (short of the death penalty, praise Jeebus). Attorney General Eric Holder promised that Snowden would not be tortured if Russia, Snowden’s current home, were to turn him over to U.S. authorities, but in the wake of Bush/Cheney and Obama himself, such promises ring hollow. In the end, the behavior of the U.S. government and other western governments has, unfortunately, tended for the most part to substantiate Snowden’s more “paranoid” claims. The optimal outcome at this stage would be for the United States to offer a more “reasonable” prison term of 3-5 years—such a gesture would go a long way towards confirming to suspicious citizens that the U.S. intends to get its house in order.

Short of that, acceptance by U.S.-friendly western goverments of the European Union would likewise tend to send the message that U.S.security-related surveillance interests don’t trump every other value in the geopolitical system. One of the dispiritng lessons of the Snowden affair thus far has been the lack of counterbalancing perspective in the global system, in other words, the only apparent recourse Snowden has had to escape punishment from the United States has been various “bad guys” like Iran, North Korea, Russia and so on.  The strong impression has been left that countries like Germany, France, U.K., and so on, which once may have acted as sensible, fair brokers are all (a) unduly beholden to the U.S., and (b) compromised in their own right, as each country has its own semi-legal regime of espionage and surveillance. If all western states are but satellites in the U.S. sphere of influence, then Snowden’s revelations become all the more urgent.

For this reason, Snowden’s testimony (delivered in the form of a written statement) to the European Parliament on March 7 is a huge story—one that, sadly, has gone largely unnoticed by major U.S. media outlets. (At this point it’s a little difficult to distinguish sinister anti-Snowden propaganda from regular Snowden fatigue.) You can read Snowden’s entire testimony here.

In his testimony, Snowden related that he has requested asylum in from a number of EU countries, only to be told by European Parliamentarians that the United States would not permit its EU partners to make such an offer. “I do seek EU asylum, but I have yet to receive a positive response to the requests I sent to various EU member states. Parliamentarians in the national governments have told me that the US, and I quote, ‘will not allow’ EU partners to offer political asylum to me, which is why the previous resolution on asylum ran into such mysterious opposition. I would welcome any offer of safe passage or permanent asylum, but I recognize that would require an act of extraordinary political courage.”
 
The NSA
 
In Snowden’s view, the NSA and the security agencies of various EU states have created a “European bazaar” in which the perception of shared interests among the EU states trump the rights and expectations of western citizens to conduct their affairs in private. Wrote Snowden:

“The result is a European bazaar, where an EU member state like Denmark may give the NSA access to a tapping center on the (unenforceable) condition that NSA doesn’t search it for Danes, and Germany may give the NSA access to another on the condition that it doesn’t search for Germans. Yet the two tapping sites may be two points on the same cable, so the NSA simply captures the communications of the German citizens as they transit Denmark, and the Danish citizens as they transit Germany, all the while considering it entirely in accordance with their agreements. Ultimately, each EU national government’s spy services are independently hawking domestic accesses to the NSA, GCHQ [U.K. Government Communications Headquarters], FRA [Försvarets radioanstalt, the Swedish National Defense Radio Establishment], and the like without having any awareness of how their individual contribution is enabling the greater patchwork of mass surveillance against ordinary citizens as a whole.”

Snowden has gone out of his way to put up a non-threatening front to the EU, insisting that he left the Russian secret service frustrated in its attempts to procure from Snowden further classified information about the United States. To the question “Did the Russian secret service approach you?” Snowden replied:

“Of course. Even the secret service of Andorra would have approached me, if they had had the chance: that’s their job. But I didn’t take any documents with me from Hong Kong, and while I’m sure they were disappointed, it doesn’t take long for an intelligence service to realize when they’re out of luck. I was also accompanied at all times by an utterly fearless journalist with one of the biggest megaphones in the world, which is the equivalent of Kryptonite for spies. As a consequence, we spent the next 40 days trapped in an airport instead of sleeping on piles of money while waiting for the next parade. But we walked out with heads held high. I would also add, for the record, that the United States government has repeatedly acknowledged that there is no evidence at all of any relationship between myself and the Russian intelligence service.”

According to Snowden, the NSA itself, which has well-nigh unregulated status within the U.S. federal government, has itself been pushing for EU states to take actions that do not benefit EU citizens:

“One of the foremost activities of the NSA’s FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance. Lawyers from the NSA, as well as the UK’s GCHQ, work very hard to search for loopholes in laws and constitutional protections that they can use to justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations that were at best unwittingly authorized by lawmakers.”

The Snowden “affair” is a highly sensitive “node” in the incredibly complex network of institutions that touch on so many important aspects of our lives—the federal government, telecom companies, Google and Facebook, credit card companies, the U.S. military, Russia, the UN, and so on. If the European Parliament denies Snowden’s requests, it will be another depressing sign that those interrelated interests do not have your or my well-being at heart.

In this video, Democracy Now! looks at the three most important of Snowden’s revelations:
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Is Berlin going to name a street after Edward Snowden?

Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.11.2014
01:11 pm
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Who is Edward Snowden: Whistle-blower hero, enemy of the state or covert ops shapeshifter?
07.08.2013
04:10 pm
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This is a guest post from Jon Rappoport
 
If you absolutely must have a hero, watch Superman movies.

If your need for a hero is so great, so cloying, so heavy, so juicy that it swamps your curiosity, don’t read this. 

If you can’t separate Edward Snowden’s minor revelations from the question of who he is, if you can’t entertain the notion that covert ops and intelligence-agency games are reeking with cover stories, false trails, and limited hangouts, you need more fun in your life.

NSA?  CIA?  These guys live for high-level bullshit.  They get down on their knees and worship it.  They fall into a suicidal funk if they aren’t lying on at least three or four levels at once.

Okay.  Let’s look at Snowden’s brief history as reported by The Guardian.  Are there any holes?

Is the Pope Catholic?

In 2003, at age 19, without a high school diploma, Snowden enlists in the Army.  He begins a training program to join the Special Forces.  At what point after enlistment can a new soldier start this elite training program? 

Snowden breaks both legs in an exercise.  He’s discharged from the Army.  Is that automatic?  How about healing and then resuming service? 

If he was accepted in the Special Forces training program because he had special computer skills, then why discharge him simply because he broke both legs?

“Sorry, Ed, but with two broken legs we just don’t think you can hack into terrorist data anymore.  You were good, but not now.  Try Walmart.  They always have openings.”

Circa 2003, Snowden gets a job as a security guard for an NSA facility at the University of Maryland. He specifically wanted to work for NSA?  It was just a generic job opening he found out about?

Snowden shifts jobs.  Boom.  He’s now in the CIA, in IT.  He has no high school diploma.  He’s a young computer genius.

In 2007, Snowden is sent to Geneva.  He’s only 23 years old.  The CIA gives him diplomatic cover there.  He’s put in charge of maintaining computer-network security.  Major job.  Obviously, he has access to a wide range of classified documents.  Sound a little odd?  He’s just a kid.  Maybe he has his GED.  Otherwise, he still doesn’t have a high school diploma.

Snowden says that during this period, in Geneva, one of the incidents that really sours him on the CIA is the “turning of a Swiss banker.”  One night, CIA guys get a banker drunk, encourage him to drive home, the banker gets busted, the CIA guys help him out, then with that bond formed, they eventually get the banker to reveal deep secrets to the Agency.

This sours Snowden?  He’s that naïve?  He doesn’t know by now that the CIA does this sort of thing all the time?  He’s shocked?  He “didn’t sign up for this?”  Come on.

In 2009, Snowden leaves the CIA.  Why?  Presumably because he’s disillusioned.  It should be noted here that Snowden claimed he could do very heavy damage to the entire US intelligence community in 2008, but decided to wait because he thought Obama, just coming into the presidency, might keep his “transparency” promise.

After two years with the CIA in Geneva, Snowden really had the capability to take down the whole US inter-agency intelligence network, or a major chunk of it? 

If you buy that without further inquiry, I have condos for sale on the dark side of the moon.

In 2009, Snowden leaves the CIA and goes to work in the private sector.  Dell, Booze Allen Hamilton.  In this latter job, Snowden is assigned to work at the NSA.

He’s an outsider, but, again, he claims to have so much access to so much sensitive NSA data that he can take down the whole US intelligence network in a single day.  The.  Whole.  US.  Intelligence.  Network. 

This is Ed Snowden’s sketchy legend.  It’s all red flags, alarm bells, sirens, flashing lights. 

Then we have the crowning piece: they solved the riddle: Ed Snowden was able to steal thousands of highly protected NSA documents because… he had a thumb drive.

It’s the weapon that breached the inner sanctum of the most sophisticated information agency in the world. 

It’s the weapon to which the NSA, with all its resources, remains utterly vulnerable.  Can’t defeat it. 

Not only did Snowden stroll into NSA with a thumb drive, he knew how to navigate all the security layers put in place to stop people from stealing classified documents.

“Let’s see.  We have a new guy coming to work for us here at NSA today?  Oh, whiz kid.  Ed Snowden.  Outside contractor.  Booz Allen.  He’s not really a full-time employee of the NSA.  Twenty-nine years old.  No high school diploma.  Has a GED.  He worked for the CIA and quit.  Hmm.  Why did he quit?  Oh, never mind, who cares?  No problem.

“Tell you what.  Let’s give this kid access to our most sensitive data.  Sure.  Why not?  Everything.  That stuff we keep behind 986 walls?  Where you have to pledge the life of your first-born against the possibility you’ll go rogue?  Let Snowden see it all.  Sure.  What the hell.  I’m feeling charitable.  He seems like a nice kid.”

NSA is the most awesome spying agency ever devised in this world.  If you cross the street in Podunk, Anywhere, USA, to buy an ice cream soda, on a Tuesday afternoon in July, they know.

They know whether you sit at the counter and drink that soda or take it and move to the only table in the store.  They know whether you lick the foam from the top of the glass with your tongue or pick the foam with your straw and then lick it.

They know if you keep the receipt for the soda or leave it on the counter.

They know whether you’re wearing shoes or sneakers.  They know the brand of your underwear.  They know your shaving cream, and precisely which container it came out of.

But this agency, with all its vast power and its dollars…

Can’t track one of its own, a man who came to work every day, a man who made up a story about needing treatment in Hong Kong for epilepsy and then skipped the country.

Just can’t find him.

More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Thomas McGrath
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07.08.2013
04:10 pm
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None Dare Call it FASCISM: How the NSA has (already) privatized tyranny


 
Though most people seem to be dimly aware of the fact that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was not technically an employee of NSA or the US Federal Government, I don’t see anyone raising the kind of stink that this pertinent little fact truly merits. And combine that with the “anything goes” environment that was clearly in operation while Snowden was peering into pretty much whatever he wanted, and the implications are pretty fucking serious indeed.

Let’s start with one of Snowden’s comments to Glenn Greenwald and the UK’s Guardian newspaper:

But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a Federal judge to even the President if I had a personal e-mail.”

Say what? So I’m not allowed to even know this program exists, but a high school dropout working in a lowly cubical in Booz Allen Hamilton can listen in to everything I say on the telephone or write in an email or post on the Internet? What the fuck? Doesn’t anyone see how screwy that is?

Maybe we’ve just stopped giving a shit and are hoping to ride out the last years of Empire in blissful ignorance, chatting about cute cats on Facebook and watching our favorite shows on TV (The Mad Men season finale was just superb, wasn’t it?) OK, I get that. But let’s at least think about what it is we’re tuning out because, who knows? It could cause the US death-spiral to come around far sooner than anticipated, and that would be a serious buzz kill.

So let’s break it down, shall we? What’s the biggest secret exposed by Snowden so far? That the NSA engages in ubiquitous surveillance on pretty much all forms of communication in the US, of both domestic as well as internationally-bound traffic? Well, we kinda knew that already. Back in 2005 AT&T Telecom engineer Mark Klein blew the whistle on the NSA’s “secret room” in the Folsom Street CO (Central Office). Any kind of analysis of that setup (and Klein even included the connection diagrams) would give you a decent idea of what was going on. So no, ubiquitous surveillance wasn’t much of a surprise, not if you were paying careful attention.

What IS a surprise was just how fucked up and sloppy the whole NSA operation is. In fact, during his live chat via The Guardian’s website on June 17th, Snowden said this:

Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications.

In other words, the National Security Agency just let a bunch of freelance contractors more or less run wild with unlimited access to the most sensitive conceivable data of any and every US citizen along with a goodly portion of communications of non-US residents as well.

Monitoring? Controls? Audits? Are you shittin’ me? But how can we be absolutely sure, you might ask, that Snowden was telling the truth? Precisely because even a low-level contractor was able to access and download highly classified PowerPoint presentations and a whole smorgasbord of super secret spy stuff and then leak it to the world! (In modern computer networks this is trivial to control.)

At first blush it would appear that the main thing NSA has been doing with their impenetrable cloak of secrecy is to completely goof off and unaccountably run wild with their very special powers with the only “control” in place being the fear that any leakers would experience the Bradley Manning treatment. If it weren’t for the NSA cone of silence, this would be heralded universally as laughably and unbelievably incompetent. On the other hand, perhaps this isn’t simply complete negligence. Perhaps it’s the symptom of something far darker…

Consider what YOU would do with that level of access. After you got into work, grabbed coffee, and read TMZ, you might spend half an hour or so checking out red-tagged conversations of, say, members of Mosques in Brooklyn, or say, groups of Muslim girls gathering to watch Jon Stewart (yeah, that’s a real thing), or maybe even listen in on the methed-out ravings of some hillbilly militia scaring each other into buying yet more guns in preparation of the UN’s inevitable communist takeover of bumfuck Idaho. But all of that “real work” would get boring fast. So maybe you daydream a bit and then, all of a sudden, it hits you: What if you could, say, listen in on the CEOs, CFOs and whatever other Os there are of some mega-corporation. Hell, you could probably use a special software “agent” to automatically scan huge wads of traffic and send you anything with the phrases, “Bankruptcy announcement to the press tomorrow”, or “Earnings shortfall” or “Hostile takeover.” Knowing as you do that no one’s monitoring what you access on those super-secret NSA pipes, you realize it would be both trivially easy and unbelievably lucrative to act on an early tip before it was announced to Wall Street. In fact, you could possibly make millions.

But then another thought hits you. Maybe, just maybe, you aren’t the first person to think of this. In fact, Booz Allen Hamilton has been growing their government consulting business to National Security agencies by leaps and bounds, and their financial consulting arm has been doing pretty good too:

Booz Allen provides support to all federal finance and treasury organizations charged with the collection, management, and protection of the nation’s financial system. Such agencies include the US Department of the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Reserve Board and Banks, Securities Exchange Commission, and Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation

So doesn’t this strike you as somewhat “funny”? Isn’t this some major league conflict of interest? On the one hand, BAH has been clearly given carte blanche to listen in on anything and everything, and they also happen to be in the financial “consulting” business. Would BAH ever take a significant financial position based on, oh let’s say, very privileged information? Though they may or may not do this under their own name, they clearly have the financial chops to create a vast maze of shell companies. Or maybe BAH as an organization doesn’t do this, but bigshots within it do.

Perhaps this sounds paranoid or like completely baseless speculation, but after the LIBOR and REIT scandals, it’s obvious that there are no government checks in place to detect such activities. Moreover, even if this hasn’t actually happened yet, given the sloppiness of the controls and unlimited access to surveillance data, it’s absolutely obvious that this is going to happen sooner or later. Indeed, perhaps that sloppiness in protecting confidential data is precisely because someone’s dipping into this data goldmine and is making out like a bandit.

From here it’s easy to imagine all sorts of ugly scenarios: A giant, über-secret private company that is ultimately answerable to no one but that has access to anything you might say or post on the Internet (ie, including what you might do to try to stop it), while also being able to capitalize on their access to literally priceless financial secrets via their consulting and access to the markets. Once such a monstrosity sunk its claws in deep enough it would be very difficult to pull that thing off…ever. Then again, isn’t this what the Koch Brothers and their stooges the Tea Party wanted all along? They want to kill the state and Federal agencies so that a small keiretsu of giant companies can step in and take over. This “state corporatism” had a name which was called, hold on a minute while I remember…oh yeah, that’s right, Fascism.

Am I saying there’s some gigantic fascist conspiracy out there ready to take over the world? Nah. Well, probably not. But the point is that there doesn’t need to be an actual conspiracy in order for our true liberties to be under attack by the large corporations: Remember, Nestlé‘s CEO wants to privatize your water supply and sell your water back to you; Bush, Cheney and the cartoonishly malevolent Dr Strangelove Donald Rumsfeld privatized war and Mike McConnell of Booz Allen Hamilton has long been a (successful) advocate of privatizing US national security (and he was previously director of National Security under Bush).

Where’s all this headed? I don’t know, but I DO know it ain’t headed for more security, more freedom and better access to water in the world! These fuckers have a vested interest in keeping things nice and turbulent while making you think that there are legions of Muslims, communists and homosexuals out there just waiting to steal your freedoms, give away all your hard-earned stuff and sodomize your children. Meanwhile, of course, they and the Congress they have bought and paid for keep defunding essential Federal programs to the point where they can no longer function properly, so the public concludes, “Well, these government agencies can’t do anything so we might as well just get rid of them. And let’s privatize prisons and schools while we’re at it.”

Who knows? Will we soon enter the time where private contractors raised on “Call of Duty” operate domestic drones and have kill quotas that earn them cash incentives? Fuck, I read the kill list wrong, one might say, Can you ask your buddy to change the name on my list to whoever it was I just nailed? Thanks, pal. Beers are on me tonight.

What’s the solution? I don’t know, but let’s apply a nice, hot blowtorch to Booz Allen Hamilton’s filthy snout and push them the hell out of that giant government feeding trough filled to the brim with our tax dollars: They’re clearly incompetent, negligent, and have allowed documents of National Security to be accessed, downloaded and then leaked. (And don’t misunderstand: Snowden is a hero for exposing all of what’s been going on, but that still doesn’t mean BAH wasn’t negligent.) We also need to take baseball bat to the giant, heavy-lidded porcine head of the NSA as it gobbles down the information you and I own.

Let’s just not miss what is arguably an even greater danger, the privatization and outsourcing of tyranny itself to the big mega-corporates.
 

 

Posted by Em
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06.26.2013
12:49 pm
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