NSA and CIA is the enemy of the people

 

Astute students of history understand that government agencies often further their own interests and not the administration they are designated to serve. Seldom is the genuine national security advanced when bureaucrats pledge their loyalty to their respective fiefdoms of projecting influence and power. Absent in this supremacy struggle equation is the abstract notion that state legitimacy is founded upon the will and consent of the people. Such a quaint concept does not reflect a chapter in the training manual that breeds the spooks who operate as above the law and unaccountable super spies.

Guarding signals traffic or capturing foreign communication is a logical task to protect national secrets, while gathering information on intentions and operations from adversaries. Once upon a time the National Security Agency directed the ECHELON project as a cold war network. Over the decades the functions of electronic surveillance broadened into collection on all forms of data, no matter the source or the national origin of the subject.

Surprise: At the End, Obama Administration Gave NSA Broad New Powers

(AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

 

This story, from the Jan. 12, 2017, edition of the New York Times, was little-remarked upon at the time, but suddenly has taken on far greater significance in light of current events:

In its final days, the Obama administration has expanded the power of the National Security Agency to share globally intercepted personal communications with the government’s 16 other intelligence agencies before applying privacy protections.

The new rules significantly relax longstanding limits on what the N.S.A. may do with the information gathered by its most powerful surveillance operations, which are largely unregulated by American wiretapping laws. These include collecting satellite transmissions, phone calls and emails that cross network switches abroad, and messages between people abroad that cross domestic network switches.

The change means that far more officials will be searching through raw data. Essentially, the government is reducing the risk that the N.S.A. will fail to recognize that a piece of information would be valuable to another agency, but increasing the risk that officials will see private information about innocent people.

Hunting for Hackers, N.S.A. Secretly Expands Internet Spying at U.S. Border

This is why the ‘end of NSA spying‘ was such a joke. You can’t impose restrictions on an agency that has no oversight and is answerable to no one. Even if their hand was forced, they will find another way or duties will be passed on to another agency such as the DEA, which has already been spying on millions of cars and tapping phone lines of even non-suspects for decades.

 

WASHINGTON — Without public notice or debate, the Obama administration has expanded the National Security Agency‘s warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international Internet traffic to search for evidence of malicious computer hacking, according to classified N.S.A. documents.

In mid-2012, Justice Department lawyers wrote two secret memos permitting the spy agency to begin hunting on Internet cables, without a warrant and on American soil, for data linked to computer intrusions originating abroad — including traffic that flows to suspicious Internet addresses or contains malware, the documents show.

Revealed: DEA’s massive phone tapping scheme that preceded NSA’s

For nearly a decade before 9/11 and the controversial phone tapping program enacted by the National Security Agency, another American intelligence organization, the Drug Enforcement Administration, operated a mass phone surveillance scheme.

Mexican drug cartels reportedly dispatching agents deep inside US

The cartels have literally controlled parts of Arizona for quite some time now, at least four years now, and have have used these years to flourish and expand northward. If the readership here is interested in learning a bit of history of how this partly came to be, a well-sourced book written years ago, entitled Red Cocaine would be a good place to start. The playbook once used by Mao Zedong to soften the public and set the stage for his “great leap forward” that lead to tens of millions of deaths, is likely being used in the same manner and inside the United States today. As history repeats itself, hopefully it isn’t repeating with this case in point.

Mexican drug cartels whose operatives once rarely ventured beyond the U.S. border are dispatching some of their most trusted agents to live and work deep inside the United States — an emboldened presence that experts believe is meant to tighten their grip on the world’s most lucrative narcotics market and maximize profits.

…

But a wide-ranging Associated Press review of federal court cases and government drug-enforcement data, plus interviews with many top law enforcement officials, indicate the groups have begun deploying agents from their inner circles to the U.S. Cartel operatives are suspected of running drug-distribution networks in at least nine non-border states, often in middle-class suburbs in the Midwest, South and Northeast.