By Robert Heiney It’s fun to watch the blustering, posturing and outright lying when a big news story exposing some government malfeasance shows up on prime time. Amidst the recent revelations that the National Security Agency has been spying on millions of terrorists, oops, I mean American citizens, we find the usual federal government thugs. Oh, I didn’t collect data on millions of Americans, huh, ‘not wittingly,’ said director of national intelligence James Clapper in March. Foxnews.com reports, ‘NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander also told Fox News last year that the agency does not ‘˜hold data on U.S. citizens.” Yet amazingly, construction on a 1,000,000 square foot NSA spying facility complete with super computers was started back in 2011 and is now just about completed. For what purpose? Why, to keep track of cyberterrorism of course. But psst ‘¦ the facility also reportedly will track and store every cell phone call, web search, email and just about anything else that travels the internet. In fact, NSA will track and store lots of stuff that’s deep inside corporate and government intranets as well. According to wired.com, ‘The NSA is more interested in the so-called invisible web, also known as the deep web or deepnet ‘“ data beyond the reach of the public. This includes password-protected data, U.S. and foreign government communications and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers.’ This is old news and it should surprise no one, except those at room temperature, that the NSA via court order demanded Verizon turn over all its phone data. Because two years ago, a giant 1,000,000 square foot facility was built to store all that data. The spies over at the NSA even have their very own special ‘spies only’ search engine to make data searches through scuzzilions of gigabytes faster and more thorough. The court order forcing Verizon to turn over its customer data was issued from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 laws that were beefed up by the Patriot Act. You know the Patriot Act ‘“ this essentially permits the federal government to rifle through all your personal effects anytime they feel you might be a terrorist. It suspends the 4th Amendment ‘“ but in the name of terrorism now ‘“ so you can be safe from all threats real and imagined. You really can blame Bush for much of this because he was instrumental in ramming the Patriot Act through Congress in the first place. Pacifist and liberty lover Obama seems to have a little Bush in him as well. After all, are we less of a police state today than when under Bush? The whole charade would be laughable if we were talking about a third world banana republic. Sadly, we’re watching America slide ever further into a police/surveillance state right in front of our eyes. Many folks simply toss their hands up in the air and say, ‘At least we haven’t had any terrorist attacks like other countries.’ Instead we have a near suspension of the U.S. Constitution and the construction of a massive surveillance apparatus capable of capturing and storing every single thing we do and say. That coupled with National Defense Authorization Act and Patriot Act laws permitting arrest and detention without charge, permission to detain indefinitely and the recent attempt to implement an all-out gun ban and you have the raw ingredients for a real slide into dictatorship ‘“ with the special blessings of trillions of dollars of your taxpayer dollars to support it. The NSA has been collecting data on American citizens for decades. It now has high technology super computers, storage capacity and other sophisticated surveillance devices that enables it to really get into your home and look around ‘“ whenever it feels like it. Wired magazine said NSA will monitor you through your dishwasher in the future. That should make you feel a lot safer. Free lance writer Robert Heiney is a CERT team volunteer and lives in Redbone with his family.
you’re a real piece of shit, Robert, as well as incredibly ignorant and just down right dumb as fuck.