WTF?! 1984 is Here to Stay – Proof is Vault 7

This article is addressed to the public in general, but especially the media, i.e., journalists who should know better but don’t.

Last week, WikiLeaks released classified documents relating to CIA-funded surveillance programs and techniques. Under the codename Vault 7, Julian Assange’s organization has so far disclosed only a small fraction (1%) of the total documents, which they claim to be the “largest intelligence publication in history.” The “Year 0” release contains 7,818 web pages and 943 attachments. (You can view the entire Vault 7 ‘Year 0’ collection here. For a good overview of what Vault 7 consists of and some potential implications, follow this link.)

Some of the more sensational activities documented in Vault 7 explain how the CIA has retained, through electronic and programming loopholes and proprietary technology, an ability to remotely activate a variety of personal electronic devices, enabling them to – for example – listen to private conversations within earshot of your smartphones microphone. Ostensibly, this is also true for cameras (e.g., on your smartphone phone, laptop, iPad, on your television).

For many Americans, this news comes as an unwelcome surprise. Before we continue, let’s pause and examine whether the public outcry is justified.

1984 is not fiction, it’s fact. Electronic surveillance (or ELINT, electronic intelligence) is nothing new – it’s old. Phone and all other transmission lines have been wiretapped for decades at least. America, and our enemies and allies alike, spy on each other literally constantly. You shouldn’t be surprised. All governments surveil their domestic population for a variety of lawful, well-intentioned, and important reasons. For example, to combat organized crime, the drug trade, and also counter-terrorism.

If you were born after 1950, wiretapping has been pervasive (yet likely unnoticed, in the background) for your entire life. Unless you’re a criminal (or just plain paranoid), it’s highly unlikely these methods were ever of personal concern to you. It’s totally unlikely that the FBI, CIA, NSA etc. ever bothered to listen to, much less analyze your chit chat. The extent to which the average person’s phone calls, emails, or internet usage, Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. are scrutinized is in the form of metadata, i.e. global data used to determine norms, from which aberrations of interest can be identified and selected for further analysis.

There’s far too much data generated daily for even an army of intelligence analysts to review in any detail.

“An army” is not an exaggeration. Let’s take a look at some figures related to Vault 7 and, more broadly, the entire intelligence community.

Please note that the figures below are estimates, as exact figures are classified.*

Budget: $18.0 billion Employees: 35,000 - 55,000 Salary (dependent on position): $60,000 - $115,000 CIA

Budget: $14.7 billion Employees: 21,575 Salary: $100,000 National Intelligence Program (NIP) and Military Intelligence Program (MIP) Budgets

Total National Intelligence Program Budget (2016): $53.9 billion Total Military Intelligence Program Budget (2016): $17.9 billion Total Intelligence Budget: $71.8 billion * All figures as-of 2016 or as current as possible.

With all of that money and all of those people, what does the public think they should do? The security of the nation relies on the ability to discreetly collect accurate information by all means available, many which seem futuristic. With $25.3 billion per year (2013) spent on data collection alone, we can expect and should demand that the CIA and NSA develop novel and sophisticated technological tools, and use them at their – legal – discretion.

A word should be said to differentiate between capability and usage. Vault 7 proves that the CIA has the ability to electronically surveil anyone they wish to. However, so far there is no proof that these programs are widely and systematically abused to target the innocent. There are numerous legal protections in place that protect the public, such as the need for court warrants and the FISA court itself. Again, the average member of the innocent public will never be affected by government surveillance.

Of course, the CIA and NSA don’t work in a cocoon. Their international counterparts are linked via programs such as CRUCIBLE, ECHELON, Perseus, TREMOR, UMBRAGE etc. There is also a significant involvement in private sector, to the point of active investment in emerging HAL 3000-type technologies.

Enter In-Q-Tel, established in 1999, at the peak of the dot-com boom. (Maybe “global warming” pundit Al Gore really did invent the internet after all? After all, who knows?)

Officially, independent from the CIA, In-Q-Tel “invests in high-tech companies for the sole purpose of keeping the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology.” Think “Q,” the techie character from James Bond.

Founded by a former Lockheed Martin executive, the portfolio of this company reads like an encyclopedia of modern information technology. Consider: they’re behind companies/technologies such as Google Earth, Palantir Technologies (Peter Thiel’s company), automatic language translation, geospatial imaging, virtual reality, search engines and malware protection, and many, many others.

Studying an organization like In-Q-Tel, it is easy to see how high tech military and intelligence investment helps drive technological progress.

Recently, FBI Director James Comey was quoted as saying there is “no such thing as absolute privacy in America.”

Noting the considerable outcry by the public at these revelations, Julian Assange has offered to work with hardware manufacturers and software companies to address bug fixes and shortcomings outlined in Vault 7.

For all Assange’s critics, and there are many, this move is telling of his motivations: like thousands of other privacy advocates, he genuinely believes in real privacy. He acts out of personal conviction, without greed, and is totally apolitical.

This may come as a surprise to our readers, but the leaking, release, and dissemination of Vault 7 should be viewed in a positive light. While the leaking of this classified information does pose many risks and questions, now that it is available for public scrutiny, why not look on the bright side?

We now have incontrovertible proof that the United States and closest allies have the tools to not only fight, but decisively defeat, our various enemies. The intelligence community should deploy these tools to their maximum potential against all those who seek to do us great harm and destroy us.

We possess the technical and imaginative abilities to achieve victory and should aim for total surrender. Time to take off the gloves!

Yah, well, when the NSA and CIA jump to the tune of the below cited peckerheads, then no apologist rationale is gonna cut the mustard with any citizen who knows where the monkey sleeps...

“Some even believe we (the Rockefeller family) are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure – one world, if you will. If that’s the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.”
— David Rockefeller, Memoirs, page 405

“Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government.”
— Dr. Henry Kissinger, Bilderberger Conference, Evians, France, 1992

“US must not stop Syrian resettlement. It would be a threat to ‘global governance’”.
— David Miliband, former British Foreign Secretary who came to New York in 2013 to take the reins of the International Rescue Committee

“The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities...”
— Zbigniew Brzezinski from his book “Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technotronic Era”

“This regionalization is in keeping with the Tri-Lateral Plan, which calls for a gradual convergence of East and West, ultimately leading toward the goal of one world government. National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept.”
— Zbignew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter

“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future”
— Dr. Chester M. Pierce, Psychiatrist, address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973

“To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas…”
— G. Brock Chisholm, psychiatrist and co-founder of the World Federation of Mental Health

“We ... ourselves, who still nurse a sense of our homogeneity and difference from others ... And that’s precisely what the European Union, in my view, should be doing its best to undermine… States have to become more open states, in terms of the people who inhabit them; sovereignty is an illusion ... sovereignty is an absolute illusion that has to be put behind us.”
—Peter Sutherland, UN migration chief & chairman at Goldman Sachs bank, who wants to use (Muslim) immigration to destroy European countries’ culture

“If we are frank with ourselves, we shall admit that we are engaged on a deliberate and sustained and concentrated effort to impose limitations upon the sovereignty and independence of the fifty or sixty local sovereign independent States which at present partition the habitable surface of the earth and divide the political allegiance of mankind. It is just because we are really attacking the principle of local sovereignty that we keep on protesting our loyalty to it so loudly. … I will merely repeat that we are at present working, discreetly but with all our might, to wrest this mysterious political force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local national states of our world. And all the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands…”
—Arnold Toynbee, Address to the 1931 Copenhagen conference as published in International Affairs: Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs (November 1931)

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