Surveillance State, U.S.A.

Alfred W. McCoy: How America's Wars Are Systematically Destroying Our Liberties

(CBS)  Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of A Question of Torture, among other works. His most recent book is Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (University of Wisconsin Press) which explores the influence of overseas counterinsurgency operations throughout the twentieth century in spreading ever more draconian internal security measures here at home. This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.

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In his approach to National Security Agency surveillance, as well as CIA renditions, drone assassinations, and military detention, President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. This bipartisan affirmation of the imperial executive could "reverberate for generations," warns Jack Balkin, a specialist on First Amendment freedoms at Yale Law School. And consider these but some of the early fruits from the hybrid seeds that the Global War on Terror has planted on American soil. Yet surprisingly few Americans seem aware of the toll that this already endless war has taken on our civil liberties.

Don't be too surprised, then, when, in the midst of some future crisis, advanced surveillance methods and other techniques developed in our recent counterinsurgency wars migrate from Baghdad, Falluja, and Kandahar to your hometown or urban neighborhood. And don't ever claim that nobody told you this could happen -- at least not if you care to read on.

Think of our counterinsurgency wars abroad as so many living laboratories for the undermining of a democratic society at home, a process historians of such American wars can tell you has been going on for a long, long time. Counterintelligence innovations like centralized data, covert penetration, and disinformation developed during the Army's first protracted pacification campaign in a foreign land -- the Philippines from 1898 to 1913 -- were repatriated to the United States during World War I, becoming the blueprint for an invasive internal security apparatus that persisted for the next half century.

Almost 90 years later, George W. Bush's Global War on Terror plunged the U.S. military into four simultaneous counterinsurgency campaigns, large and small -- in Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, and (once again) the Philippines -- transforming a vast swath of the planet into an ad hoc "counterterrorism" laboratory. The result? Cutting-edge high-tech security and counterterror techniques that are now slowly migrating homeward.

As the War on Terror enters its ninth year to become one of America's longest overseas conflicts, the time has come to ask an uncomfortable question: What impact have the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- and the atmosphere they created domestically -- had on the quality of our democracy?

Every American knows that we are supposedly fighting elsewhere to defend democracy here at home. Yet the crusade for democracy abroad, largely unsuccessful in its own right, has proven remarkably effective in building a technological template that could be just a few tweaks away from creating a domestic surveillance state -- with omnipresent cameras, deep data-mining, nano-second biometric identification, and drone aircraft patrolling "the homeland."

Even if its name is increasingly anathema in Washington, the ongoing Global War on Terror has helped bring about a massive expansion of domestic surveillance by the FBI and the National Security Agency (NSA) whose combined data-mining systems have already swept up several billion private documents from U.S. citizens into classified data banks. Abroad, after years of failing counterinsurgency efforts in the Middle East, the Pentagon began applying biometrics -- the science of identification via facial shape, fingerprints, and retinal or iris patterns -- to the pacification of Iraqi cities, as well as the use of electronic intercepts for instant intelligence and the split-second application of satellite imagery to aid an assassination campaign by drone aircraft that reaches from Africa to South Asia.

In the panicky aftermath of some future terrorist attack, Washington could quickly fuse existing foreign and domestic surveillance techniques, as well as others now being developed on distant battlefields, to create an instant digital surveillance state.

The Crucible of Counterinsurgency

For the past six years, confronting a bloody insurgency, the U.S. occupation of Iraq has served as a white-hot crucible of counterinsurgency, forging a new system of biometric surveillance and digital warfare with potentially disturbing domestic implications. This new biometric identification system first appeared in the smoking aftermath of "Operation Phantom Fury," a brutal, nine-day battle that U.S. Marines fought in late 2004 to recapture the insurgent-controlled city of Falluja. Bombing, artillery, and mortars destroyed at least half of that city's buildings and sent most of its 250,000 residents fleeing into the surrounding countryside. Marines then forced returning residents to wait endless hours under a desert sun at checkpoints for fingerprints and iris scans. Once inside the city's blast-wall maze, residents had to wear identification tags for compulsory checks to catch infiltrating insurgents.

The first hint that biometrics were helping to pacify Baghdad's far larger population of seven million came in April 2007 when the New York Times published an eerie image of American soldiers studiously photographing an Iraqi's eyeball. With only a terse caption to go by, we can still infer the technology behind this single record of a retinal scan in Baghdad: digital cameras for U.S. patrols, wireless data transfer to a mainframe computer, and a database to record as many adult Iraqi eyes as could be gathered. Indeed, eight months later, the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had collected over a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans. By mid-2008, the U.S. Army had also confined Baghdad's population behind blast-wall cordons and was checking Iraqi identities by satellite link to a biometric database.

Pushing ever closer to the boundaries of what present-day technology can do, by early 2008, U.S. forces were also collecting facial images accessible by portable data labs called Joint Expeditionary Forensic Facilities, linked by satellite to a biometric database in West Virginia. "A war fighter needs to know one of three things," explained the inventor of this lab-in-a-box. "Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?"

A future is already imaginable in which a U.S. sniper could take a bead on the eyeball of a suspected terrorist, pause for a nanosecond to transmit the target's iris or retinal data via backpack-sized laboratory to a computer in West Virginia, and then, after instantaneous feedback, pull the trigger.

Lest such developments seem fanciful, recall that Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward claims the success of George W. Bush's 2007 troop surge in Iraq was due less to boots on the ground than to bullets in the head -- and these, in turn, were due to a top-secret fusion of electronic intercepts and satellite imagery. Starting in May 2006, American intelligence agencies launched a Special Action Program using "the most highly classified techniques and information in the U.S. government" in a successful effort "to locate, target and kill key individuals in extremist groups such as al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency and renegade Shia militias."

Under General Stanley McChrystal, now U.S. Afghan War commander, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) deployed "every tool available simultaneously, from signals intercepts to human intelligence" for "lightning quick" strikes. One intelligence officer reportedly claimed that the program was so effective it gave him "orgasms." President Bush called it "awesome." Although refusing to divulge details, Woodward himself compared it to the Manhattan Project in World War II. This Iraq-based assassination program relied on the authority Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld granted JSOC in early 2004 to "kill or capture Al Qaeda terrorists" in 20 countries across the Middle East, producing dozens of lethal strikes by airborne Special Operations forces.

Another crucial technological development in Washington's secret war of assassination has been the armed drone, or unmanned aerial vehicle, whose speedy development has been another by-product of Washington's global counterterrorism laboratory. Half a world away from Iraq in the southern Philippines, the CIA and U.S. Special Operations Forces conducted an early experiment in the use of aerial surveillance for assassination. In June 2002, with a specially-equipped CIA aircraft circling overhead offering real-time video surveillance in the pitch dark of a tropical night, Philippine Marines executed a deadly high-seas ambush of Muslim terrorist Aldam Tilao (a.k.a. "Abu Sabaya").

In July 2008, the Pentagon proposed an expenditure of $1.2 billion for a fleet of 50 light aircraft loaded with advanced electronics to loiter over battlefields in Afghanistan and Iraq, bringing "full motion video and electronic eavesdropping to the troops." By late 2008, night flights over Afghanistan from the deck of the USS Theodore Roosevelt were using sensors to give American ground forces real-time images of Taliban targets -- some so focused that they could catch just a few warm bodies huddled in darkness behind a wall.

In the first months of Barack Obama's presidency, CIA Predator drone strikes have escalated in the Pakistani tribal borderlands with a macabre efficiency, using a top-secret mix of electronic intercepts, satellite transmission, and digital imaging to kill half of the Agency’s 20 top-priority al-Qaeda targets in the region. Just three days before Obama visited Canada last February, Homeland Security launched its first Predator-B drones to patrol the vast, empty North Dakota-Manitoba borderlands that one U.S. senator has called America's "weakest link."

Homeland Security

While those running U.S. combat operations overseas were experimenting with intercepts, satellites, drones, and biometrics, inside Washington the plodding civil servants of internal security at the FBI and the NSA initially began expanding domestic surveillance through thoroughly conventional data sweeps, legal and extra-legal, and -- with White House help -- several abortive attempts to revive a tradition that dates back to World War I of citizens spying on suspected subversives.

"If people see anything suspicious, utility workers, you ought to report it," said President George Bush in his April 2002 call for nationwide citizen vigilance. Within weeks, his Justice Department had launched Operation TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System), with plans for "millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees and others" to aid the government by spying on their fellow Americans. Such citizen surveillance sparked strong protests, however, forcing Justice to quietly bury the president's program.

Simultaneously, inside the Pentagon, Admiral John Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's former national security advisor (swept up in the Iran-Contra scandal of that era), was developing a Total Information Awareness program which was to contain "detailed electronic dossiers" on millions of Americans. When news leaked about this secret Pentagon office with its eerie, all-seeing eye logo, Congress banned the program, and the admiral resigned in 2003. But the key data extraction technology, the Information Awareness Prototype System, migrated quietly to the NSA.

Soon enough, however, the CIA, FBI, and NSA turned to monitoring citizens electronically without the need for human tipsters, rendering the administration's grudging retreats from conventional surveillance at best an ambiguous political victory for civil liberties advocates. Sometime in 2002, President Bush gave the NSA secret, illegal orders to monitor private communications through the nation's telephone companies and its private financial transactions through SWIFT, an international bank clearinghouse.

After the New York Times exposed these wiretaps in 2005, Congress quickly capitulated, first legalizing this illegal executive program and then granting cooperating phone companies immunity from civil suits. Such intelligence excess was, however, intentional. Even after Congress widened the legal parameters for future intercepts in 2008, the NSA continued to push the boundaries of its activities, engaging in what the New York Times politely termed the systematic "overcollection" of electronic communications among American citizens. Now, for example, thanks to a top-secret NSA data base called "Pinwale," analysts routinely scan countless "millions" of domestic electronic communications without much regard for whether they came from foreign or domestic sources.

Starting in 2004, the FBI launched an Investigative Data Warehouse as a "centralized repository for... counterterrorism." Within two years, it contained 659 million individual records. This digital archive of intelligence, social security files, drivers' licenses, and records of private finances could be accessed by 13,000 Bureau agents and analysts making a million queries monthly. By 2009, when digital rights advocates sued for full disclosure, the database had already grown to over a billion documents.

And did this sacrifice of civil liberties make the United States a safer place? In July 2009, after a careful review of the electronic surveillance in these years, the inspectors general of the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the CIA, the NSA, and the Office of National Intelligence issued a report sharply critical of these secret efforts. Despite George W. Bush's claims that massive electronic surveillance had "helped prevent attacks," these auditors could not find any "specific instances" of this, concluding such surveillance had "generally played a limited role in the F.B.I.'s overall counterterrorism efforts."

Amid the pressures of a generational global war, Congress proved all too ready to offer up civil liberties as a bipartisan burnt offering on the altar of national security. In April 2007, for instance, in a bid to legalize the Bush administration's warrantless wiretaps, Congressional representative Jane Harman (Dem., California) offered a particularly extreme example of this urge. She introduced the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, proposing a powerful national commission, functionally a standing "star chamber," to "combat the threat posed by homegrown terrorists based and operating within the United States.” The bill passed the House by an overwhelming 404 to 6 vote before stalling, and then dying, in a Senate somewhat more mindful of civil liberties.

Only weeks after Barack Obama entered the Oval Office, Harman’s life itself became a cautionary tale about expanding electronic surveillance. According to information leaked to the Congressional Quarterly, in early 2005, an NSA wiretap caught Harman offering to press the Bush Justice Department for reduced charges against two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of espionage. In exchange, an Israeli agent offered to help Harman gain the chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee by threatening House Democratic majority leader Nancy Pelosi with the loss of a major campaign donor. As Harman put down the phone, she said, "This conversation doesn't exist."

How wrong she was. An NSA transcript of Harman's every word soon crossed the desk of CIA Director Porter Goss, prompting an FBI investigation that, in turn, was blocked by then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales. As it happened, the White House knew that the New York Times was about to publish its sensational revelation of the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, and felt it desperately needed Harman for damage control among her fellow Democrats. In this commingling of intrigue and irony, an influential legislator's defense of the NSA's illegal wiretapping exempted her from prosecution for a security breach discovered by an NSA wiretap.

Since the arrival of Barack Obama in the White House, the auto-pilot expansion of digital domestic surveillance has in no way been interfered with. As a result, for example, the FBI's "Terrorist Watchlist," with 400,000 names and a million entries, continues to grow at the rate of 1,600 new names daily.

In fact, the Obama administration has even announced plans for a new military cybercommand staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees at Lackland Air Base in Texas. This command will be tasked with attacking enemy computers and repelling hostile cyber-attacks or counterattacks aimed at U.S. computer networks -- with scant respect for what the Pentagon calls "sovereignty in the cyberdomain." Despite the president's assurances that operations "will not -- I repeat -- will not include monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic," the Pentagon's top cyberwarrior, General James E. Cartwright, has conceded such intrusions are inevitable.

Sending the Future Home

While U.S. combat forces prepare to draw-down in Iraq (and ramp up in Afghanistan), military intelligence units are coming home to apply their combat-tempered surveillance skills to our expanding homeland security state, while preparing to counter any future domestic civil disturbances here.

Indeed, in September 2008, the Army's Northern Command announced that one of the Third Division's brigades in Iraq would be reassigned as a Consequence Management Response Force (CMRF) inside the U.S. Its new mission: planning for moments when civilian authorities may need help with "civil unrest and crowd control." According to Colonel Roger Cloutier, his unit's civil-control equipment featured "a new modular package of non-lethal capabilities" designed to subdue unruly or dangerous individuals -- including Taser guns, roadblocks, shields, batons, and beanbag bullets.

That same month, Army Chief of Staff General George Casey flew to Fort Stewart, Georgia, for the first full CMRF mission readiness exercise. There, he strode across a giant urban battle map filling a gymnasium floor like a conquering Gulliver looming over Lilliputian Americans. With 250 officers from all services participating, the military war-gamed its future coordination with the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and local authorities in the event of a domestic terrorist attack or threat. Within weeks, the American Civil Liberties Union filed an expedited freedom of information request for details of these deployments, arguing: "[It] is imperative that the American people know the truth about this new and unprecedented intrusion of the military in domestic affairs."

At the outset of the global war on terror in 2001, memories of early Cold War anti-communist witch-hunts blocked Bush administration plans to create a corps of civilian tipsters and potential vigilantes. However, far more sophisticated security methods, developed for counterinsurgency warfare overseas, are now coming home to far less public resistance. They promise, sooner or later, to further jeopardize the constitutional freedoms of Americans.

In these same years, under the pressure of War on Terror rhetoric, presidential power has grown relentlessly, opening the way to unchecked electronic surveillance, the endless detention of terror suspects, and a variety of inhumane forms of interrogation. Somewhat more slowly, innovative techniques of biometric identification, aerial surveillance, and civil control are now being repatriated as well.

In a future America, enhanced retinal recognition could be married to omnipresent security cameras as a part of the increasingly routine monitoring of public space. Military surveillance equipment, tempered to a technological cutting edge in counterinsurgency wars, might also one day be married to the swelling domestic databases of the NSA and FBI, sweeping the fiber-optic cables beneath our cities for any sign of subversion. And in the skies above, loitering aircraft and cruising drones could be checking our borders and peering down on American life.

If that day comes, our cities will be Argus-eyed with countless thousands of digital cameras scanning the faces of passengers at airports, pedestrians on city streets, drivers on highways, ATM customers, mall shoppers, and visitors to any federal facility. One day, hyper-speed software will be able to match those millions upon millions of facial or retinal scans to photos of suspect subversives inside a biometric data base akin to England's current National Public Order Intelligence Unit, sending anti-subversion SWAT teams scrambling for an arrest or an armed assault.

By the time the Global War on Terror is declared over in 2020, if then, our American world may be unrecognizable -- or rather recognizable only as the stuff of dystopian science fiction. What we are proving today is that, however detached from the wars being fought in their name most Americans may seem, war itself never stays far from home for long. It's already returning in the form of new security technologies that could one day make a digital surveillance state a reality, changing fundamentally the character of American democracy.

[prajaowain]

Screw the Czar and the N.S.A and the F.B.I and the military and the C.I.A!

[joejibblets]

Everyone who reads articles like this are probably considered domestic terrorists. Be careful about posting your opinion or the internet Czar will focus on you.

[mnbrant]

Hmm my NSA bit at the beginning of this blog is gone. It said in short that the NSA and the CSA are building huge data warehouse where they will/have stored phone records, emails (your emails are never deleted you know) credit and bank accounts. Every bit of data you have out there basically on all citizens in the country. I guess I misspoke the cost but didn't think about it much because the number was so impossible large. Allegedly (actually the amount was reported to congress but I am too lazy to look it up) was 20 billion in 2006 up to 80% of the 46 billion spent of intelligence in 2009. Correct me if I am wrong but you won't because the number is so impossible large. In my mind that would by alot of storage space. And they indeed are building huge complexes in core data areas to house all of this. They are supposedly collecting all this data to catch terrorists but it appears its only catching the really stupid ones. You know the burger king hat guy. etc. Basically because of the patriot act companies are forced to comply and not disclose their compliance. I presume that my comment was deleted because of this. Of course all this is available on the web. I am pretty sure operation garden plot would get you started. I am not sure why they need your phone records etc to fight terrorism. Then theres the name garden plot heh. Sounds like they want to plant a seed. A seed of fascism. haha

[veteran71]

The Patriot Act is popular with many Americans that have been seduced by our de facto fascist state's promotion, and the pro-fascist news media's promotion, of the notion that the state can convert America into a huge playpen for adults in which all will be 100 percent safe from terrorism.

In the Soviet Union, at the height of its power, Moscow was one of the safest cities in the world for American travelers. How was this possible? Because the Soviet Union was a military/police state.

Bottom line: If safety is your goal, and you are willing to sacrifice all of your civil rights, the rule of law, and the democratic political process for your personal safety, then support the Patriot Act because it is a huge step in the direction of a military/police state that will make the streets of every American city as safe as those in the Soviet Union's Moscow.

John P. Stoltenberg


If the American people don't stop the continued rapid denegration of their liberty by our present government of criminal feudalist/authoritarian elites, we will soon have every activity of our lives controlled by the state, no longer free to travel or even think or speak in opposition, told when and what we will do every minute of the day.
Terrorists can't take our freedoms away; only we can do that to ourselves.

[veteran71]

Excerpt from-
"Dick Cheney and the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone:

"It was under Cheney's watch that the decision was made to privatize not only specific services in support of U.S. troops overseas-such as food services, or doing the laundry, or repairing vehicles-but to privatize the actual planning process that went into providing logistics for U.S. troops when they had to be sent into an inhospitable foreign hot spot on short notice.
In 1992, near the end of Cheney's tenure as defense secretary, Halliburton won a contract from the U.S. Army's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), which P.W. Singer has described as a deal to "work with the military in planning the logistical side of contingency operations". Singer notes that "it was the first time the U.S. military had ever contracted such global planning to a private organization". In a pattern that would mark both Halliburton's and Cheney's business paths, the firm got the LOGCAP contract after conducting a top secret $3.9 million report for the Pentagon on how private companies could essentially provide the bulk of the logistics involved in major U.S. contingency deployments, from transportation and base-building to cooking the food and doing the laundry. The initial study contract called for a plan for how a private company could bear the bulk of the logistical burden for deploying 20,000 troops to 5 separate bases overseas within a 180 day period. Later in the year, Halliburton got a $5 million follow-on study contract to outline how a private firm might supply logistics for a series of more specific contingencies. By the end of the year, Halliburton had been selected to receive a five-year contract to be the U.S. Army's "on call" private logistics arm.
The work started almost immediately. Halliburton was called upon to provide support services for U.S. forces deployed to Somalia as part of "Operation Restore Hope", an operation that began at the end of the Bush administration and carried over into the first Clinton term. As Singer notes, "Brown and Root employees arrived in Mogadishu just 24 hours after the first U.S. troops arrived and stayed until the final withdrawal in March 1995, when its employees left with the last U.S. marines". The company did everything from hiring local women to hand wash Army laundry to importing "a mortician to clean up the bodies of killed UN peacekeepers before shipping them out of the country". Singer notes that for a good portion of its time in country, Halliburton was "the largest employer in Somalia, with some 2,500 local employees".

Yes, that's right,...Darth not only concocted the entire Private War Contractor business model from scratch, (WHILE Sec. of Defense, no less), but he got the taxpayers to PAY HIM FOR IT!!!!!!!!
Soon, these humble beginnings and piddling $Millions$ payed in initial consultation and concept-design fees would be considered laughable.
But unimaginable wealth alone is never enough for a Sociopath as evil as Darth. He had much bigger plans - plans that involved using the U.S. Government and it's military to consolidate control over most of the worlds Oil reserves, and institute the concept of perpetual wars for profit, where the need for contracted services supplied by himself would be never ending.
CHA-CHING!!!!!!!!!!

[lynnsfischer]

If you really want to see how things have degenerated, take a look at this URL: hspd12JPL.org
I look at the Obama-Gov't Secrecy material from 5 reputable media outlets each day and it's the same as with Bush -- a nightmare a day.

[veteran71]

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.....
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

- President Dwight D. Eisenhower,
in a televised Farewell Address to the Nation, January 17, 1961

[enwr77]

So we are supposed to be afraid. Minorities are use too being watched and know how to handle it. Politicians will eventually spy on politicians. This is just. Manual trumps high-tech. Manual controls high-tech. High-tech cannot control manual. If the voyeurs want to monitor and intimidate a toll will be taken on them. This is justice seeking itself.

[mnbrant]

Damn this is good I am going to ABC and spam there.

[mnbrant]

I am spamming this from a Minneapolis Star tribune article I replied to a couple minutes agi. I think it turned out so good I am putting it here. The Star Tribune article wouldn't even let you directly comment on it. They used the ol link within a link method to hide comments. I think you can pretty much figure out what the article was about by reading my comment but feel free to check it out if you have doubts what I say is true.

It took a bit of researching but I found a site called Libertus that put the 2006 duel conviction rate at 16%. I know this flies in the face of what gets reported as news. That leaves 84% convicted of having child porn on their computers. Your figures do not add up 16% + 69% is less that 100%.
I do believe that there is a 90% conviction rate because of the high cost of defending even no-evidence child porn cases. Cost of successfully defending a recent no-evidence case was upwards of 250,000 dollars. Thats dollars. I am not making this up check the AP article. In the article a prosecutor was quoted
as telling the judge you didn't do it is called the "lottery defense". In my and your world thats called "presumption of innocence", but, in the minds of judges and prosecutors thats called a technicality before conviction. How else could they come up with a 90% conviction rate? Evidence though not necessary for conviction does help. Emails and discs containing child porn pretty much seal the deal. But is this really evidence? I myself have had emails on my computer that disappear minutes later. I have had a person put a picture of me when I was 18 and a Wiki article I wrote awhile back on a social networking site I had discarded. For some reason they changed my address to Colorado. I have had my identity stolen 18 times that I know of so, I have no expectation of privacy but I would say that I could get your email password pretty cheap if I tried. If it's not already gotten, someone can pretend to be you and get it that way. Finally, despite running Norton 360 version 4 every day I still got one or two malware running in my computer. One with .dwm something or other and one thing called paragon backup. I get the .dwm one nearly every day and have to shut it off manually.

This is getting pretty long to read so I will cut to the chase. First of all in the article, the vague descriptions of people who are charged with the crime read a bit like Mein Kampf. Google it, compare it and you will see what I mean. Second is the fact that his parents live near a park. I am not sure what they mean by that. Are there no buses that he cannot get to a park by? I am motivated to write this because I am starting to hate what gets reported as news these days. Google MNBrant. Thats me. They even have a wonder wheel on me somewhere so you can find out whether I prefers spaghetti to tamales etc. Actually I prefer spaghetti. Thanks for reading if you got this far.

[veteran71]

Colin Powell:
"What is the greatest threat facing us now?" "People will say it's terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn't do it to ourselves, and we shouldn't use fear for political purposes, scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex."

Bechtel Group Inc..
Fluor Corp.
Halliburton Co.
Kellogg, Brown & Root
Louis Berger Group Inc
Parsons Corp.
Carlyle Group
AirScan
Dyncorp
MPR,Inc
MVM,Inc
NorthropGrumman
Raytheon
Triple Canopy,Inc
Sharp End International
Xe(formerly Blackwater worldwide)

Try and find out how many Multi-$Billion$ contracts by these and other War Contractors are presently either already funded or are in the process of being funded for ongoing massive expansion in Afghanistan, many projects not to be completed for many years, while the MSM tells the dullard citizenry the POTUS hasn't yet decided whether or not we're even going to stay there......
Welcome to Corporate Controlled America, where the Military Industrial Complex Ike warned us about years ago, has already taken over and War is now the #1 Industry, favored by Crooked Wholly-Owned Politicians 100 to 1.
Go to opensecrets.org and see how much your corporate owned "reps" have recieved in "donations".
Many no-bid contracts given to Chenyburton cannot be easily tracked, as they were labled "Classified" by the Bush/Cheney Crime Cartel and sealed under Executive Priveledge. That's right, they are above the law, unaccountable, and can simply use national security as a reason to keep their numerous and heinous crimes secret.
Just about time to storm the Bastille and break out the Guillotines.

[veteran71]

From Colin Powell's September 12, 2007 interview with GQ Magazine:

"What is the greatest threat facing us now?" Powell asked. "People will say it?s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. ... The only thing that can really destroy us is us. We shouldn?t do it to ourselves, and we shouldn?t use fear for political purposes?scaring people to death so they will vote for you, or scaring people to death so that we create a terror-industrial complex."

When Powell delivered a speech at the University of Oklahoma a short time later, campus reporters asked what he had meant by his remarks, and he replied:

"We're spending an enormous amount of money on homeland security,...I think we have to be careful that we don't get so caught up in trying to throw money at the terrorist and counter-terrorist problem that we're essentially creating an industry that will only exist as long as you keep the terrorist threat pumped up"......

Although Powell's follow-up remarks focused on the potential for wasting money, the original model for his statements, President Eisenhower's 1961 farewell address, was primarily concerned with the threat to a free society of granting "unwarranted influence" over US policy to a "military-industrial complex" of defense contractors and national security think-tanks that might "endanger our liberties or democratic processes."

*******************************************

Mo' Money, Mo' Money.......
Read more @: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Corporate_Welfare/CarlyleGroup_HMOWD%3F.html

Dick Cheney and the Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone
The Carlyle Group: Crony Capitalism without Borders
excerpted from the book
How Much Are You Making On The War Daddy?
A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration
by William D. Hartung

............So many Reich Wingnut War Criminals, so little rope.....

[prajaowain]

People like me will use sophisticated communication tech to get around the Surveillance State. The underground will get stronger and infiltrate the Surveillance State. The picture isn't that gloomy. I believe we can reverse this Orwellian trend if we all band together and tell Uncle Sam we will take the power back.

[ToolMangler1]

Surveillance State, U.S.A. is another word that describes George Orwells Book, "1984" and there is no escaping the future described therein. The war on terrorism By Big Government fueled by Big Business and a morbid fear of having to fight a war on our soil has eensured the arrival of super surveillance techniques that will lay bare every facet of every human being. (not employed in high level Government) This is not 'speculation', the roadmap has been laid out in this article. There will be no stopping it. The only thing anybody can do is slow the onslaught.

[dancingmoon]

~ President Obama has to a surprising extent embraced the expanded executive powers championed by his conservative predecessor, George W. Bush. ~

Surely you must be joking!

Who did not see this coming for all future Presidents once Bush granted himself such powers and set the precedent?

Bush made great strides in dismantling the foundation of rights and freedoms that literally defined us as Americans.

The astounding part is that so many willingly surrendered the rights and freedoms for which previous generations quit their land of birth and fought and died for.

And as I recall when Bush imperialistically granted himself and the office of the President with such powers of unwarranted surveillance of Americans, those in opposition were stridently denounced by the right as "un-American" and "with the terraists". The right was very fond of saying what's the problem if you have nothing to hide.

Make no mistake. Regardless of party affiliation future politicians will not only retain the powers seized by Bush, they will continue to seek to expand those powers and reduce the rights and freedoms of Americans.

How surreal that some, maybe many, will actually gladly participate in their own subjugation.

[YourVeryWrong]

Thorazine, gentlemen. Consult your physician.

[chrisbieber]

BIPARTISAN surveillance state....and MOST of the people who are not addleminded by partisan politics, AmIdol, football or drugs(99% of Americans - they are either condoning the monster by voting or helping it and its cancerous growth) are patriotically hacking away at the branches of the tree of tyranny(Thoreau)while Ron Paul and the rest of us who still understand what freedom is and entails are striking at the root.
The surveillance state will finish being installed very soon...just wait for another false flag or bank collapse...
get ready.

[OregonJames]

While we all whine about our loss of privacy we continue to attach ourselvs electronically to every tool used by the spy agencies willingly. We know our conversations on the telephones are listened to, and we know the CIA is reading every e-mail in the country, and we know all of the agencies monitor us through our credit cards and bills. Our cities are filled with surveillance cameras, our government spies upon us, and we are fed a continuous stream of propoganda through radio and television. I suspect the thought police will read these words.....

1984 arrived and we didn't even notice...

[babooph]

The great effort to" protect" is leaving a nation "not worth protecting"-it was great while it lasted though...

[edgy44]

For every Senator and Congressman, there is 1000 clerks. It's those 1000 clerks who exist despite who the current office holder is, that has destroyed Representative Government.