Surveillance in Unistat Pre-Snowden, File #23a

"Life is either a great adventure or it is nothing." (see below)
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"A case can be made...that secrecy is for losers. For people who don't know how important information really is. The Soviet Union realized this too late. Openness is now a singular, and singularly American, advantage. We put it in peril by poking along in an age now past. It is time to dismantle government secrecy, this most pervasive of all Cold War regulations. It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness that is already upon us."
-Daniel Patrick Moynihan in his 1998 book Secrecy: The American Experience, p.227

Moynihan the intellectual in the Senate. Published 10 books before going to Congress, vacillated from NeoLiberal to NeoCon. You figure it out.
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Meanwhile, after the Berlin Wall came down, the intellectuals I was reading (kicked out of academia or were never part of it), or Noam Chomsky (as special case), were (mostly) predicting "Islamic Terrorism" as what the Pentagon would need in order to keep their rotten Show on the road. None of these writers I was reading were allowed on TV, so for most Unistatians, this idea didn't exist.
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                                                Kathryn Olmsted, History professor at
                                                 University of California-Davis, who writes
                                                books on spies and national security issues

Earlier this year I read U.C. Davis History professor Kathryn Olmsted's book Right Out of California, which has the thesis that the Unistatian Right as it's now constituted started in the farmland of California in the Depression, because FDR's labor people realized he needed the South, so there were no protections for labor organizers of the farmworkers in California. I found it fairly persuasive, and I'm a fan of Olmsted's books now.

In this book I happened upon the story of a US General named Ralph Deman, who had accumulated a massive file on anyone he thought might harbor thoughts he might deem "dangerous," that is: anything that didn't toe the corporate state line. And he shared his files with right wing groups and the cops. (See Right Out of California, pp.151-157)

And some of us at one time thought J. Edgar Hoover was the only one. I thought so in my 20s.

*-regarding Ralph Deman, one of Olmsted's grad students responded to an email query about information sources on him. Obviously you can Duck Duck Go Deman, but Scott Pittman cited books titled Policing America's Empire and Negative Intelligence.
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Esquire magazine decided to send William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, and Jean Genet to cover the 1968 Democratic Convention in "Czechago." Genet had a line: "The danger for America is not Mao's Thoughts; it is the proliferation of cameras." (see Smiling Through the Apocalypse: Esquire's History of the Sixties, p.98)

Poet as Distant Early Warning system?
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While Patty Hearst's trial was ongoing, it came out that her mother - Catherine - gave or lent $60,000 to $70,000 to a company called Research West back in 1969. What was "Research West"? It was "a private right-wing spy organization that maintained files supplied by confessed burglar Jerome Ducote." (Patty Hearst and the Twinkie Murders, Paul Krassner, p.35) There had been journalistic investigations of this, but Hearst-owned newspaper reporters were told to stop investigating, for obvious reasons. A Santa Cruz paper - the Sundaz, not owned by the Hearsts, did investigate, and found that, before Mrs. Hearst bought it, it was supported by "contributions" averaging $1000 and, well, I'll quote Krassner here on who was "contributing":

Pacific Telephone, Pacific Gas and Electric, railroads, steamship lines, banks, and [Hearst's own] The Examiner. In return, the files were available to those companies, as well as to local police and sheriff departments, the FBI, the CIA and the IRS. The Examiner paid $1500 a year through 1975 to retain the services of Research West. (p.35, Krassner)

It gets deeper and more (of course!) nefarious, but I'd like you to read Krassner's book to see how much we've missed from the Official Story.

                                        Investigative satirist and national treasure
                                         Paul Krassner

The good folks at Open Culture are currently (as of the date I'm writing this) featuring an animated 1958 Aldous Huxley predicting our world. "Dystopian threats to freedom." How alarmist! And yet...
Aldous immediately presented a threat to assholes like J. Edgar Hoover (who denied the Mafia existed, because they knew he was gay and could crush him, and furthermore, he protected and was friends with a major mobster, Frank Costello, see The Secret Histories: An Anthology, ed. by John S. Friedman, article "Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover," by Anthony Summers, 1993, pp. 192-200), and other protectors of the 1%. Huxley arrived in Unistat in 1938, and author Herbert Mitgang obtained Huxley's FBI files. "Of the 130 pages, 111 were released to me, many heavily censored. The net of them: he and his daring and original writings were watched." - Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors, pp.192-194

Mitgang surmises the FBI tried to understand Huxley's famous book Brave New World, but apparently couldn't. Most bright 10th graders I know understand it. This has always been what we're dealing with, folks: losers. Cops who profess to love the Constitution, but in reality hate every bit of it. They (not all of them, of course) seem to be carriers of what Wilhelm Reich called "the emotional plague." 

Mitgang notes from Aldous's file that Hoover and his loser cop-pals thought Huxley was a threat, largely due to his overt pacifism. Think about that for awhile. Furthermore, the FBI subjected Brave New World to "cryptographic examination," and Mitgang observes, "but nothing subversive was discovered."

[NB: A bit of divagation: The British philosopher Peter Strawson would read my judgments on Hoover and his minions (as "assholes," etc) and assert that my judgments, which merely imply that they should be held accountable, reflect attitudes which derive from my own participation in personal relationships: forgiveness, resentment, gratitude, indignation, etc. I find this a very plausible idea.- OG]
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I'm a subscriber to Muckrock, which specializes in obtaining and making public government information via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Not long ago I wondered about Robert Anton Wilson's file, so I made a request and got nowhere. Then I realized Michael Morisy of Muckrock had already tried to get RAW's FBI file, and posted THIS. Note the FBI were "unable to identify main file records responsive to FOIA." ("Main file records"? What others might there be?)

Then, as we read "Congress excluded three discrete categories of law enforcement and national security records from the requirements of the FOIA." You and I wonder what this means. We can't know. We're given some bureaucratic numbers and symbols to prove that what Congress did is true. Okay. Obama ran promising the "most transparent" administration ever, and yet 'tis more Orwell: he's probably been the least transparent. What do these assholes think "Freedom of Information" means?

Stupidly, I then realized my blogging friend Tom Jackson had already covered this in 2013. (Note the one comment was from Bruce Kodish, who has self-published a wonderful fat biography on Alfred Korzybski. If you're as interested in Korzybski as I am, you must get hold of this; it's a gem and divulges scads of info on its subject, info that seems to have only been privy to Korzybski's closest colleagues.)

If you've been involved in trying to get info under FOIA, you may have acquired government files that are so redacted that what's left is meaningless. So, we go from Orwell to Kafka. If you're not convinced, look at what the FBI sent Morisy on RAW: they say records for the request might exist. Or they might not. They won't tell us.

But we can be practically certain RAW has a fairly substantial file, somewhere in the Belly of the Beast.

From RAW's introduction to Donald Holmes's book The Illuminati Conspiracy: The Sapiens System:

During my last year of employment as Associate Editor of Playboy, a certain executive came into my office one day and closed the door behind him. He told me that my home phone was tapped and that I was under surveillance by the Red Squad of the Chicago Police Force. 

I was stunned, and asked how he knew this. 

He replied that certain people in the Playboy empire had made an arrangement with a Chicago police official. The official received regular money through some circuitous route that was not explained to me; in return he notified his Playboy contacts whenever an executive of the firm was under police investigation. 

That was when I first realized how often there are spies spying on spies.
-p.9

RAW finds that, because he was involved in the anti-war movement and had talked to some Black Panthers, some spook for some agency dreamed up that RAW was running guns to the Black Panthers. RAW guesses some low-level spy wanted to beef up his reports to justify his work. Later RAW found out that there were "over 5000 government agents assigned to infiltrate peace groups in Chicago alone" (p.8), and that this was all part of COINTELPRO, which was meant to make everyone in a peace group paranoid that one of another of their fellows were spies for the government, and in effect reduce the efficacy of the peace movement...because we're a "free country" and our "way of life" is so superior to the Rooskies.

RAW says no one at Playboy thought he was dangerous, and offered to support him legally if anything happened.

Then RAW became an intimate of Dr. Leary, so that file must be very thick. Or one would think. But we don't know how to ask/guess the right questions in order to obtain why they thought Robert Anton Wilson was worth surveilling/wiretapping, etc.

Through most of his time as counterculture writer and activist, RAW knew he was being spied on, but decided to be amused by it, quoting Helen Keller: "Life is either a great adventure or it is nothing."

I know all of this seems comparatively ultra-innocent in light of what we know now that we're in the Snowden Era; I just want y'all to be aware of how the Official Story about "who we are, as a nation" clashes so radically with "reality."

                                                  grafikai Bob Campbell
                                             

On the Snowden Revelations and Learned Helplessness

Quick like a bunny: name all the ways your communications are being tapped, tracked, and impounded.

If you said, "Every one of them, probably" congrats! You're a...winner?

Snowden was so, like two years ago, man. (Yea, but despite the fact a Federal Appeals Court ruled the indiscriminate Hoovering of all ALL all telephonic calls was "illegal" we have no reason to believe the NSA/CIA/DIA/all the other Fink-based alphabet soup assholes have stopped collecting. Sorry.)

Stewart A. Baker, a former general counsel for NSA and a critic of Snowden's ironically admitted nine months ago we're only talking about the first thing Snowden leaked to Greenwald and Poitras:

"The only debate we're really having in the US is about the very first document that Snowden produced," said Stewart A. Baker, a former N.S.A. general counsel and outspoken critic of the leaks, referring to the secret court order authorizing the phone records program. "The rest of the documents have been used as a kind of intelligence porn for the rest of the world - 'Oooh, look at what the N.S.A. is doing.'"

I can't tell if Baker is embarrassed before the world (I somehow doubt it), or if the borderline traitor is ironically telling the rest of us, "You think the phone records are something, wait till you find out we can turn on your smartphone's mic and listen to what you're saying...even when the power's off! Or that we can turn on your laptop's camera and watch you have sex and take pics of you and your lovers nude."

(Have a look-see from Jeffrey T. Richelson's book The US Intelligence Community for info on those two programs, "Captivated Audience" and "Gumfish," and as they say on infomercials, "much much more!")

NB: in the NYT article I linked to above, with the quotes from Stewart Baker, there are the required quotes from a commissar-like CIA fink-traitor to the Constitution, Michael Morrell, who says flat-out Snowden's leaks helped ISIS. Morrell is quite likely a liar.

And you know who else is a liar about Snowden? Hillary Clinton. Forget that she and Bill are now so far inside Wall St they're filthy rich off others' suffering.

Hillary can "never condone" what Snowden did.

See also re: Hillary's lies about Snowden here:
http://www.mediaite.com/online/hillary-clinton-what-snowden-did-gave-all-kinds-of-information-to-terrorists/

https://freedom.press/blog/2014/04/fact-checking-hillary-clintons-comments-about-edward-snowden-and-nsa

Hey, I'd be happy to have someone with a vagina as Prez of Unistat, but not this one. It seems a sure bet she'd continue the retrograde moves Obama made. Snowden didn't vote for Obama, but believed him when he said, running in 2007-2008, well, let me quote Obama from 13 June, 2007:

No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime...No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.

The sorts of Authoritarian contemptibles who Just Follow Orders and work for the Unistat spy agencies now? Quite likely sexual fascists also. J. Edgar Hoover's FBI was notoriously on the lookout for info on sex practices of freethinkers, in order to try and blackmail them. Snowden said his fellow NSA workers commented upon and even joked about the nude bodies and sexual acts they surveilled. 

So, what do you think Thomas Jefferson would make of all this?

On second thought, don't answer that...

Re: sexual fascism: Sorry, I know that "slut shaming" is horrible. But let's not pretend something far worse, more despicable and illegal isn't happening among the security-cleared Finks whose paychecks We the People fund. (I call anyone with such a heinous interpretation of the 4th Amendment a "fink." It's one of my quirks. If you're offended, pardonamente!)

On the real issue here, privacy, I feel compelled to link to another longstanding member of our commissar class, David Brooks. For me, Brooks has quite the punchable face. I really detest David Brooks. But lawdamercy! sometimes he can write something smart, as he did in this piece about why privacy is one of Our Values. I could have quoted one of "my" guys/gals; here I just like the irony of linking to one of my enemies. 22 months before this, Brooks wrote that he "disapproves" of Snowden. As they would say about Brooks at BoingBoing, "Christ What An Asshole."

Why did all this shit go down in the first place? You probably have something to say about this. I think the venerable Alfred W. McCoy seems pretty hot when he writes about "imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA's latest technological breakthroughs look like a seductive bargain when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line."

So, getting back to the prick from Stewart A. Baker, why aren't we all talking about all the other forms of our Orwellian Panopticon? Ted Rall wonders, "Is it the media's notorious inability to focus on stories, especially when they're complicated? Or are they consciously complicit in a conspiracy to keep silent about America's out-of-control security state - nothing to see here, just move on?" (p.212, Snowden) Rall says Greenwald and Poitras's The Intercept, which was started to handle the massive info from Snowden so we can all read and comment, has not - au grand dam to many of us - produced a steady drip drip drip until Obama had to reign it all in. Unistatians seem to have passively accepted they're being watched all the time. 

How to account for this? Rall and others have cited M.E.P Seligman's theory of "learned helplessness" in human's dealings with stuff they don't think they can handle, which produces anxiety and human depression. People act like a dog reduced to whimpering helplessness after sustained abuse. (Followed by, I presume, self-medication with Facebook?)

Then also, I found in Robert Anton Wilson's book Everything Is Under Control an entry under P for "Passive Conspiracy." These are possibly more noxious than active conspiracies. The heroin problem circa 1998 will go on in Unistat, the author writes (I'm not sure if this is Wilson saying the following or the writer he's quoting from an NYU student he found on the Web) as long as it's perceived as a "black" "inner city" problem. The gummint will only pretend to care about stopping it. (Prophetic in 2016? You be the judge.)

RAW finishes the entry by linking the Passive Conspiracy idea with Wilhelm Reich's darker version, that "masses neurotically yearn to surrender to some fascist leader and will throw away their liberties as soon as a leader of that sort appears." (p.336) I guess Dick Cheney would've qualified here.

Just think of President Ted Cruz, ladies and germs: he has access to all your kinky sex stuff that Jesus wouldn't like. Gosh, what hijinks would ensue?

Some Sources:

The Intercept

Snowden, by Ted Rall

No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State, by Greenwald and Ganser

The Snowden Files, by Luke Harding

Citizen Four (2014 Laura Poitras) must-see documentary if ya haven't already. In a sane country, we'd realize we were wrong after 9/11 and give Snowden the Medal of Freedom and a ticker-tape parade and an official national holiday named after him...but which day of the year?
Snowden Statue
"Snowden, Assange and Manning Statues Unveiled in Berlin"

                                         You too might have your own blog artfully tagged!
                                         For inquiries, see Bob Campbell

Five Reasons the MI6 Story is a Lie

[From OG: see end of article: author's postscript! - OG]

by Craig Murray:

The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie.

1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by officers. Their informants are agents. In real life, James Bond would not be a secret agent. He would be an MI6 officer. Those whose knowledge comes from fiction frequently confuse the two. Nobody really working with the intelligence services would do so, as the Sunday Times source does. The story is a lie.

2) The argument that MI6 officers are at danger of being killed by the Russians or Chinese is a nonsense. No MI6 officer has been killed by the Russians or Chinese for 50 years. The worst that could happen is they would be sent home. Agents’ – generally local people, as opposed to MI6 officers – identities would not be revealed in the Snowden documents. Rule No.1 in both the CIA and MI6 is that agents’ identities are never, ever written down, neither their names nor a description that would allow them to be identified. I once got very, very severely carpeted for adding an agents’ name to my copy of an intelligence report in handwriting, suggesting he was a useless gossip and MI6 should not be wasting their money on bribing him. And that was in post communist Poland, not a high risk situation.

3) MI6 officers work under diplomatic cover 99% of the time. Their alias is as members of the British Embassy, or other diplomatic status mission. A portion are declared to the host country. The truth is that Embassies of different powers very quickly identify who are the spies in other missions. MI6 have huge dossiers on the members of the Russian security services – I have seen and handled them. The Russians have the same. In past mass expulsions, the British government has expelled 20 or 30 spies from the Russian Embassy in London. The Russians retaliated by expelling the same number of British diplomats from Moscow, all of whom were not spies! As a third of our “diplomats” in Russia are spies, this was not coincidence. This was deliberate to send the message that they knew precisely who the spies were, and they did not fear them.

4) This anti Snowden non-story – even the Sunday Times admits there is no evidence anybody has been harmed – is timed precisely to coincide with the government’s new Snooper’s Charter act, enabling the security services to access all our internet activity. Remember that GCHQ already has an archive of 800,000 perfectly innocent British people engaged in sex chats online.

5) The paper publishing the story is owned by Rupert Murdoch. It is sourced to the people who brought you the dossier on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, every single “fact” in which proved to be a fabrication. Why would you believe the liars now?

There you have five reasons the story is a lie.

Author’s postscript:

The site is under a strong denial of service attack from a bot trying to crash it by overloading with millions of pings from multiple locations. I presume the objective is to take down the revelation of the fake MI6 Snowden story, which had been read by tens of thousands already and is now really taking off.

While the copyright in that article remains mine, I grant permission for it freely to be reproduced by anybody, anywhere. I shall be grateful for multiple copies to be posted around the web so it can’t be taken down.

OG-added addenda: If even CNN exposes you for what a Murdoch whore you are, you have problems. WATCH THIS.

The Day We Fight Back

This one's gonna be short, as I short-circuited trying to whittle down commentary on this situation we're in.

I counted and I have amassed 472 articles on mass surveillance in my "personal" files...since May 2013, shortly before the Snowden Era went supernova.

Yes, I apparently am some sort of maniacal hoarder of information written by others about how others are maniacally hoarding information about..."us?" (But then the NSA can tap this blog, so it's come full-circle!)

Some 20th Century Prophets: Huxley, Aldous
                                                        Orwell, George
                                                           Kafka, Franz

With our topic in mind: Here's what I consider a particularly fascinating article. It's by a George Washington U. Law Prof named Daniel J. Solove, who later published an outstanding book on the subject, Nothing To Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security.

His book is eminently readable, but if you don't have the time, most of his thesis is in this article, which I'll try to convince you to read:

"Why Privacy Matters Even If You Have 'Nothing To Hide'"

Solove shows how the "if you've got nothing to hide, well..." argument is not only pervasive, but frames the concept of privacy so narrowly that privacy advocates spend a lot of time fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.

Note the seven sample responses he received from commenters to the blog he contributes to, Concurring Opinions, about how to respond to "Well, I've got nothing to hide, so..."

I liked his example from Durrenmatt's play Traps: "A crime can always be found." We ought all to think about this more.

The extreme form of privacy and "Well, I've got nothing to hide, so..." cashes out to easy ones like, "Well, okay then: let me take pictures of you nude and give them to all of your neighbors." People will realize they take much of their ideas about privacy for granted.

I like how Solove extensionalizes the term "privacy" and shows that it is a complex term that's been unjustly narrowed by the "I'm not afraid of being wiretapped if it helps catch terrorists; I've got no secrets. I've done nothing wrong" types. He uses the Wittgensteinian term "family resemblances" but Korzybski would have said "extensionalization" of terms.

"Privacy" does not just mean "secrecy" or "hiding something that's wrong." What if a Peeping Tom looks at you through the window as you get out of the shower (author's admission: I actually enjoy this, but most people don't as I understand it): you haven't lost anything "secret" but your privacy seems to have been invaded, no?

If someone steals your diary and reveals your most personal secrets, this is an invasion of privacy and your own secrecy, but those secrets were not about doing anyone any harm. (Probably?) Solove says judges  and lawyers often overlook this semantic sense of "privacy" when they use to the term to defend the truncated ideas about dangerous secrets and "terror" (blood/death) that inform too many arguments about "privacy."

Blackmail and identity theft would also deserve consideration as "privacy" extensionalizations and they don't have to do with terror either.

I like how Solove sheds light on government surveillance  within the context of Orwell's 1984 and Kafka's The Trial. In the former, everyone knows they're being watched, so surveillance serves as a form of social control and inhibition. In a so-called free society, under the First Amendment (in Unistat), we have freedom of speech, assembly and the freedom of and from religion. In a surveillance state, these lawful activities can become inhibited so that the citizen's rights mean almost nothing, due to fear. In Kafka's novel, a bureaucracy with indeterminate purpose that can make decisions about your life detains you, but you can't find out why. This fosters hopelessness and powerlessness.

The stronger form of privacy argument, says Solove, is the "I'm willing to give up some of my privacy if it will save lives from a terrorist attack." I think Solove's unpacking of different types of mistaken and unjust dangers that could happen to anyone answers the "strong form" adequately. See for yourself...)

For me, the most interesting parts of Solove's argument about the damage of broad government surveillance are covered briefly in his short paragraphs about ideas all-too-often left out of the "privacy" discussion: aggregation, exclusion, "secondary use," and distortion.

Interestingly, something like the availability heuristic seems to inform our ideas about "privacy." When a horrific terrorist attack occurs, it's so vivid we can't think straight, and the enemies of individual rights and/or control freaks rush in to capitalize, as happened with the USA/Patriot Act. But Solove says the true dangers are in a "slow accretion of relatively minor acts," under confirmation bias, so we don't notice them, because they do not seem like significant emotional or legal issues to us, and he uses the analogy of environmental degradation: the oil tanker hits a glacier and ruins the ecosystem in some area of the world. That's bad, and very emotional. We notice it. We discuss it with colleagues and friends. But in actuality, most of the total damage done to the world's ecosystem is a daily, constant, mundane thing, and few of us can get worked up over it, much less "notice" it in significant way.

Finally: notice that the article was published in May of 2011, two years before the Snowden Era began. What was so striking about re-reading this article again recently - besides Solove's elegant arguments for a far more inclusive definition of "privacy" - was how utterly naive so much of it seems in light of what has been revealed by Snowden and others in just 31 months. Read the article and look at what seem to Solove as hypotheticals. It seems we now often find the reality to be far worse than even his hypotheticals. Solove seems to have thought he was positing fictional-but-possible scenarios; now we find out that while he was writing the article the reality was usually beyond/worse/more baroque than his imaginings...

Examples gratis:
"A Reason To Hang Him": How Mass Surveillance, Secret Courts, Confirmation Bias and the FBI Can Ruin Your Life."

"The NSA Has Probably Installed A Virus On Your Computer...And Everyone Else's"

NSA spied on porn habits in effort to discredit "radicalizers"

"Report Suggests NSA Engaged In Financial Manipulation, Changing Money In Bank Accounts"

"NSA's Elite Hacking Unit Intercepts Laptop Deliveries"

If you used the "secure" TOR webmail site, the FBI has your in-box

NSA Official: Mass Spying Has Foiled One (or fewer) Plots in Its Whole History

"111 Things We've Learned About the NSA"

We can be spied on via our webcams even when they're not on

"NYT: Snowden Docs Reveal NSA Has Radio Pathway Into Computers, To Spy Even When Device is Offline"

"New Algorithm Finds You, Even in Untagged Photos"

"NSA Uses Google's Tracking Cookies to Target and 'Exploit' Subjects"

"Snowden Docs: British Spies Used Sex and 'Dirty Tricks'"

"Snowden: The NSA is also Engaged in Industrial Espionage" (but there's so much of this now, Slate didn't notice this was olde news: From a few months previous:
"NSA and Canadian Spooks Illegally Spied on Diplomats at Canadian G-20 Summit"

"France's New Surveillance Law Creates a Police State"

"Spy Agencies Tap Data Streaming From Phone Apps"

"Data Broker Was Selling Lists of Rape Victims, Alcoholics and 'Erectile Dysfunction Sufferers'"

"NSA Harvested Contacts From Email Address Books"

"The Interest-Divergence Dilemma Between Tech Companies and the NSA"

"Death By Data: How Kafka's The Trial Prefigured the Nightmare of the Modern Surveillance State"

"NSA Award Winner Wants NSA Abolished"

American Coup D'Etat Semantics: You Can't Just Pee On A Stick

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."

"'The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all."

-A long time ago a logician wrote a book that was double-coded: Children could enjoy it on a child's level, while mum and pop were edified at an adult level. The author's name was "Lewis Carroll" and "Charles Ludwidge Dodgson."

In my studies of assassinations in Unistat history, and associated events, certain years pop up as ones authors more or less argue could be construed as something on the order of some subspecies of the coup d'etat, or "blow against the state." 1947 and the National Security Act is still my personal object for deep study. But certainly: 1963, 1974, 1980 (the "October Surprise" and what resulted from long-time FBI snitch-President Reagan), and 2000 are all "up there." Now let's consider 2013. I think it has a lot to say to us, but because I fear I bore you far too often, I'll try to make it brief.

But first, a digression of sorts: historically the coup d'etat has been associated with a military take-over of the corridors of power, and for good reason: a very high percentage of total coups are of this sort. (See the still-seminal Coup d'Etat: A Practical Handbook, by Edward Luttwak, skip right to the amazing Appendices.)

We think of the President hopping on a helicopter with a suitcase in some Third World country, rushing to exile in Lichtenstein, the generals storming into the Palace, or some scenario we've ingested with spy thrillers filtered through Hollywood. 

What about a different sort of coup? One you may not have seen depicted in a novel of film or history book. Something like a "slow-motion coup d'etat"? That's the term a Berkeley professor has recently used. An M.I.T. professor used the exact same term recently. They were both talking about Unistat.

                                                      Robert Reich

Rosa Brooks

On the 4th of July last, Rosa Brooks wrote "America the Coupless" for Foreign Policy. It's about how military leadership increasingly self-identifies as "more conservative and more Republican than the general population." I find this harrowing, but she's concerned about a military coup in the US, writing on July 4, 2013. Less than 1/2 of 1% of the population actively serves in the military, and Unistatians show a very high degree of respect for the military while having almost zero knowledge about what military life is like, what problems people in the military face, etc. Brooks finds this alarming. She ends her piece this way: 

"Tocqueville famously quipped that in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. It's a good thing we don't yet have the military we deserve: If we did we might be seeing tanks in our own public squares."

Andrew Bacevich

Well, to catch the younger Sarnaev brother, we did see a militarized local police force that ought to make Rosa Brooks nuance her thinking a bit. But a military coup seems unlikely in Unistat, at this stage, largely for the reasons that Prof. Andrew Bacevich gives here, from the blog Crossed Crocodiles, 2 August, 2009, an excerpt from a discussion that included Luttwack himself and other experts on the possibility of a military coup. Bacevich thinks the military - the Pentagon - after 1945, learned to play politics with Congress and the media and they get what they want: just look at the "defense" budget! Bacevich uses the term "creeping coup" to describe a deflection of concerns from domestic needs to "national security" ones (and how hard can it be when you have morons like Michelle Bachmann on the Intelligence Committee?). No, but seriously: go back to the Crossed Crocodiles blog-link and read the back-and-forth between Bacevich and Richard Kohn, especially the part blogger "xcroc" has highlighted.

Bacevich: "creeping coup."

[Sidelight: Here's one of my main guys, George Scialabba, reviewing a book that came out in 2006 and its inconspicuousness - James Carroll's book House Of War, not Scialabba's review - seems to me unmerited and unjust. Maybe it's just another case of the Murrrkins being prejudiced against fat books?]

Chris Hedges

Hedges seems to me like a tortured, very dramatic soul, extremely well-educated, a brilliant speaker, and he has some valuable ideas that seem to want to harness a left-wing religiosity dormant in the Unistatian mind. This righteous fervor would link working class people (most of us) with an intelligent, populist progressive politics. But I'm oversimplifying Hedges, who deserves your attention if you haven't already given him some of it. In the 17 September 2012 issue of The Economist he answered questions about a very slow capitalist coup that has happened in Unistat. It perhaps started with the destruction of popular/radical movements during World War I and gained momentum under an almost religious movement called "anticommunism" in Unistat (I think this point is woefully underrated). Hedges (and this is but one of many interesting aspects of his thought, to my eyes) sees the New Left as weaker than the Old Left. In the 1970s a neo-feudalism is seen in which the Empire went from being an Empire of Production to an Empire of Consumption. He tears Neoliberal Bill Clinton a neo-one, and says that the populace was kept mollified for a spell by easy access to credit and cheap market goods, but now the jig is up, the jobs are gone, it's a Temp/McDonald's/Wal-Mart Reality Sandwich for Unistatian workers, and they don't know what...wha?...wha happened? Read this piece: he wonders if Aldous Huxley or George Orwell was right, then he splits the difference - as I would - and gives Huxley the criminal level of hedonism untinged by any humanistic ethics, and Orwell gets the surveillance state nod. Here's Hedges on video for 17 minutes, from very recently, explaining why we're now in "corporate totalitarianism."

Hedges: a slow "capitalist coup." We're now under "corporate totalitarianism."

Brief digression: on the subject of Americans and the violence that erupts from their imposed amnesia: Henry A. Giroux: "The Violence of Organized Forgetting" (The OG does NOT want to absolve the Unistatian citizenry for allowing themselves to get into this mess!)

Robert Reich

Prof at Berkeley, formerly of the Clinton administration. On 5 June, 2012, Reich blogged that "I fear that at least since 2010 we've been witnessing a quiet, slow-motion coup d'etat whose purpose is to repeal every bit of progressive legislation since the New Deal and entrench the privileged positions of the wealthy and powerful - who haven't been as wealthy or as powerful since the Gilded Age or the late 19th century."

How have the new plutocratic oligarchy pulled off the coup? Citizen's United, and their ownership of media and the overwhelming repetition of lies about "Obama is increasing the debt by $4 billion a day! Stop the liberal spending, black man! You're  'out of control'!" The fascist Koch brothers and other billionaire right-wingers are "job creators" (they're actually job-destroyers), the government is evil, regulation is strangling every thing that's good, true, and wholesome, etc. Obama's "mortgaging our childrens' futures!" As if these multi-billionaires need to worry about their kids. The reality is that the debt is growing because the Republicans in Congress refuse to repeal the Bush tax cuts, threatening to throw the country off a "fiscal cliff" if we dare make the billionaires pay something close to their fair share of taxes. Remember: Bush and Cheney started two wars while cutting taxes on the rich, which...has that ever been done in history? It's...sorry: it's fascism. And the amnesiac public (see Giroux) let 'em get away with it. Oh hell, maybe the public is just fucking stupid. There. I said it.

Now check out succinct Robert Reich from approximately 1 year, 1 month, and I week later!

Reich: a "slow-motion coup d'etat." And: "treason?" 

Paul Craig Roberts

13 July, 2013: the American people are "hesitant to acknowledge it..." (yea yea...see Giroux?)

Roberts was one of the architects of Reaganomics! So: quite some distance from Reich, Brooks, Hedges, and Bacevich. Not that any of the aforementioned are squarely in any of the others' camp.

What gets me here is the style: the appeal of the "Founding Fathers." That Bush/Cheney/Obama/Biden and their minions and cabinet are "usurpers." It's an Executive Branch coup for Paul Craig Roberts. The leadership in Unistat is "illegitimate" and the Unistatians are serfs: we can be picked up for no good reason at all, kept incommunicado, thrown in a dungeon, tortured, no lawyers, no court appearance, no evidence. We can be placed on lists compiled by the "National Stasi Agency" and killed by drone, if Caesar (at the moment: Obama) so deems. We are no longer a nation of laws or Constitution. It's sheer "lies and naked force." The only Amendment left standing is the 2nd, which is a joke in the face of the Empire's forces (see Roberts's prose). When Obama intercepted the Bolivian jet that had Morales on it, because they were sure Snowden was stowed onboard, they showed that they cared more for "revenge" than International Law. 

It's a short piece, but this former Reaganite is sure we've undergone a coup. While I find much sympathy with Roberts here, the style - for what it's worth - doesn't gleam for me. He repeats at least three times that since 2000 the leadership is not legitimate, but he asserts it's less legit than So.Africa under apartheid, Israel in Palestine, the Taliban, Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein. Okay, yea. Maybe. I'll give ya this, brother Paul: it's one clusterfuck of a mess.

I like that he took pains to single out John Yoo and Jay Scott Bybee as legal legitimators of the Imperial President who is above Constitutional Law. (maybe see my blogspew on NeoMedievalism?

Roberts: "a coup" with heavy stress on the Executive Branch; and "illegitimate."

Jimmy Carter

The same week that Roberts blogged - it's really all starting to coalesce now, <cough> isn't it? - Jimmy Carter was in Atlanta, giving a talk to further German-Unistat relations. Der Spiegel covered it in German, but oddly, it wasn't "news" to the hordes of dipshits who get paid as "journalists" in Unistat, so it didn't appear in mainstream press here, but some guy Tweeted, and...well, read the very very short piece. Basically, Carter thinks that the Snowden revelations mean there's a "suspension of American democracy." (As opposed to actual democracy? Anyway...) Carter apparently added that the NSA story will leave Google and Facebook with less credibility worldwide, which...don't hold your breath. Still: Carter is not exactly in any of these other peoples' camp, is he? 

Carter: vague: didn't utter the "c" word, but a "suspension" of "democracy." A real cliff-hanger.

                                                          John Tirman

John Tirman

M.I.T. professor at the Center for Intl. Studies, and along with Reich and Hedges, my favorite. He boldly asserts Unistat has undergone a coup, and tells why: five days after the 4th of July, Tirman wrote that the Snowden revelation are a "blow to the traditional authority of constitutional government, the sine qua non of American political experience." He's no Paul Craig Roberts, clearly.

Tirman is a man after my own heart by reminding us of Unistat's fomenting of traditional-style military coups in Iran (1953), Gautemala (1954), Chile (1973), and Turkey (1980). 

What I appreciate most about Tirman is his use of the terms "parallel state" and "deep state," which deserve far wider use by the citizenry. Yes, we have the FISA court, which resembles democracy in the way a horse resembles a hippo. The parallel state, now in its 12th year, is secret, nondemocratic, up to its ears in spooks, spies on everyone, friend and foe alike, and is basically lawless. It has had 12 years to grow structures that institutionalize an alternative authority, a hidden set of rules, and who knows what is permissible. Thomas Jefferson, that old wig, is spinning at 78 rpms as he hears about this. As Paul Craig Roberts wouldn't hesitate to say: "illegitimate."

Tirman says that Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin warned us, and he's worth quoting when he's quoting them:

Snowden's and others' revelations should not be completely surprising, given the work of Dana Priest and William Arkin in their 2011 book Top Secret America. Many of the most shocking bits were excerpted in the Washington Post , where Priest is a reporter. They uncovered a vast, opaque security bureaucracy, extremely inefficient but aggressively intrusive. "The federal-state-corporate partnership has produced a vast domestic intelligence apparatus that collects, stores, and analyzes information about tens of thousands of US citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing," they wrote.  It involved, they calculated, nearly 4000 organizations in the United States, "each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions."

After Tirman ticks off a litany of explosively obvious corrosive effects of Big Money and corporations on the body politic, he ends with this: "The seduction of policymakers by corporate money is sad. The psychotic, parallel state is terrifying." 

Tirman: "slow-motion coup d'etat."

Here's Dana Priest on NPR for 39 mins. Take what she says with a pinch of Snowden, and a snifter of Cheney, add some torture and the Patriot Act and a dash of All-American Idiocy, and tell me Unistat hasn't undergone a coup, that, in the immortal prose of Paul Craig Roberts, is an "illegitimate" state.

The Surveillance State: Some Books and Other Media, Precursors, Re-Taking Stock

There's a textbook titled Surveillance and Democracy, edited by Haggerty and Samatas. It came out in 2010 and I got it via Berkeley's wonderfully extensive "Link Plus" system. Even though it was only about 220 pages, much of it was too theoretical for what I was looking for, but I did "enjoy" - if that's the word - a chapter by Ben Hayes: "'Full Spectrum Dominance' As European Union Security Policy: On the Trail of the NeoConOpticon.'" I think at the time I was interested in stories about how the NeoCons (or the NeoCon Mind At Large, mostly in media and banking and the Pentagon; Obama played Occupy for his own ends) wanted to isolate and contain or crush Occupy, but this all seems so long ago now. I had no idea that Constitutional Law professor Obama would continue in the Cheney mode. Humility is endless, someone once said...Suffice to say that the next edition of this text - read in Political Science classes? - could easily jump the record by going from 270 pages to 2700 pages.

                                     Marshall McLuhan seems to have foreseen our 
                                     Patriot Act/Snowden Era

In light of what's been revealed and will continue to pour out in this, the Snowden Era, as some of us now call this Epoch (9/11 is so...like...yesterday, man), I'd like to point out that it's still not too late to get filled-in by what Dana Priest and William Arkin of the Washington Post accomplished in their stellar research and collating and just overall journalist mega-due diligence in Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State. Dig how Bush/Cheney privatized surveillance on such a massive scale that Priest and Arkin found nondescript snoop centers in industrial parks all over Unistat. And I mean all over. And they're not government agencies! It's privatized now. It pays better than the low-mid-level gummint spook gig, so why not defect to the private sector, get paid more, and have absolutely zero ideas about democratic principles? No more of that nagging, cognitive-dissonance-y pangs that you may not be serving the people of Unistat, but only the servicing the needs of the 1%.

Of course, we still have  ye olde fashioned spooks, like the alphabet soup of NSA/CIA/FBI, et.al...that we're paying with out tax dollars to listen in on...well, just about everything, really.

Here's Richard Rhodes's review of Priest and Arkin. A passage:

“A culture of fear,” write journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin, “had created a culture of spending to control it, which, in turn, had led to a belief that the government had to be able to stop every single plot before it took place, regardless of whether it involved one network of twenty terrorists or one single deranged person.” The resulting “security spending spree,” they report, “exceeded $2 trillion.”

But let's not worry too much. The number of people who have Top Secret Security Clearance is only at least 854,000. 

A few years ago a film about life in East Germany under the Stasi came out: The Lives of Others. The Hollywood elite voters gave it the Oscar for Best Foreign Movie of 2006. Way back in 2006! I remember seeing the film and wondering how close we in Unistat were to this situation, and thinking: probably closer than most Unistatians would want to know. At the same time, another part of my brain told me, Stop being such a paranoiac...
Here's the trailer.

James Bamford's Puzzle Palace came out in 1982. Around 1995 I bought a battered paperback copy at a used bookstore and read it all, riveted. The few people I knew who were fascinated by this stuff agreed: how come the CIA are the rock star spooks, while you mention "the NSA" and the common response is, "Who?" Bamford deserves credit for doing the first extended book-job on Snowden's former employer.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention the last book I read about the NSA - how evil they could be - before the Snowden stuff hit. It was Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. Yes, I admit it. I had gone through a point where I felt like I had to read DaVinci Code, if only to see what all the fuss was about. When that book sold 10 million (or however many), his previous potboilers got popular again. So I read those too. Here's someone from Democratic Underground, writing this past Bloomsday, on how oddly prescient the novel now seems. I admit I hadn't thought much about the NSA (except they were probably doing something nefarious with regards to the 4th Amendment in addition to maybe getting a line or three on possible terrorists) when I read Brown's book. 

A question after all these books and films and now the Snowden Era: what are we supposed to do this all this information that They have about us? And what do They plan to do with their information about us? And a third question, if I may: must we replay something like East Germany, or is there some saner way out of this madness? What part of the 4th Amendment don't They get? (I know, I know: they get it all, but they're just obeying orders; it's nothing personal, yadda blah yadda blah meh meh meh.) 

It's far too easy for paranoids like me to see a President Palin and local cops having ultra-fast digital info, based on my license plate whizzing by, that I'm an "America-Hater" and it's best for True Americans to get rid of people like me...who read Chomsky, have been involved with Occupy, support the ACLU, and are clearly guilty via documentation of hundreds of thousands of Thought Crimes...

Going Back
In 1967, when Allen Ginsberg visited Ezra Pound in Rapallo, they talked about the craziness of Vietnam and how the Unistat government seemed to see the "peaceniks" as troublemakers. And they agreed: Make everything open. End the State secrets game. The artist Bobby Campbell has remarked on Timothy Leary's very similar vision, which emanates from that era. (For Ginsberg/Pound: see What Thou Lovest Well Remains, pp.36-37)

Poets as Distant Early Warning signalers...

In Only Apparently Real, a collection of interviews with Philip K. Dick with Paul Williams, the ever-present topic of PKD paranoia comes up, and PKD has ideas about the end of privacy...in 1974! (see pp.154-164)

In Thomas Pynchon's novel Inherent Vice, in 1970 the ARPANET is suspected as a future Panopticon. (see pp.364-366)

In his book of poetry, Coming To Jakarta: A Poem About Terror, Canadian-raised and later Berkeley English Professor and chronicler and theorist of "Deep Politics," Peter Dale Scott, recalls that, in the 1930s, when his father was away on conferences about economic democracy or world peace, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police tapped their phone. (see p.30)

In Laurel Canyon, a history of late 1960s/early 1970s rock and folk musicians who lived in that area of LA, information about the LA County Sheriffs harassing hippies, wiretapping, surveillance. Sure, the Manson stuff could bring that on, but...

Marshall McLuhan, dying sometime in the early hours of the last day of 1980, had been wondering where the new tribalized electronic human was going, with the evident omnipresence of electronic and digital technologies, which were extensions of our own nervous systems and which changed us in ways we could not know about unless we constantly investigated and "probed" how they were working in feedback loops with our own nervous systems. Add synergetically to that: the-non-wired environment, and our conscious sensibilities. In his Catholic, quasi-anachist mind, he worried about the elimination of  what he thought of as "natural law," mostly in the Catholic Church, Aquinas-on sense. The trouble with all this new tech: it seemed to render ourselves evermore "discarnate." He thought this discarnate-ness would lead to a new religious age, which could be an occult-like thing. It might be a diabolical or destructive age that was upon us. McLuhan biographer Philip Marchand takes it from here:

"There was yet another twist to the phenomenon of discarnate man, as McLuhan saw it. In an age when people were translated into images and information, the chief human activity became surveillance and espionage (recall: McLuhan died in 1980!- OG). Everything from spy satellites to Nielsen ratings to marketing surveys to credit bureau investigations was part of this intelligence-gathering, man-hunting syndrome. So pervasive was the syndrome that discarnate man worried whether he existed as nothing more than an entry in a databank somewhere." (see Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger, p.250)

Do the (very) few OG readers suspect the OG could go on and on with these classic "counterculture" figures and their musings on the "Surv State" (as poet Ed Sanders often writes it)? Aye. I could. I will. But to end this blahg, let me go WAY back:

Do not revile the king even in your 
          thoughts,
  or curse the rich in your bedroom,
because a bird of the air may carry
          your words,
  and a bird on the wing may report
         what you say.
-Ecclesiastes 10:20

PS: Bertold Brecht:

Some party hack decreed that the people
had lost the government's confidence
and could only regain it with redoubled effort.
If that is the case, would it not be be simpler,
If the government simply dissolved the people
And elected another?

• "The Solution" ["Die Lösung"] (c. 1953), as translated in Brecht on Brecht : An Improvisation (1967) by George Tabori, p. 17