Posted on 06/09/2013 10:49:40 PM PDT by Jyotishi
Over the past week all the ugliest truths about America and Americans are out — it considers whistleblowers “traitors” but protects soldiers who massacre innocent women and children abroad. And yes, Uncle Sam thinks nothing of tapping all our phone and email communications
What is the breaking point, I found myself asking as the British paper, Guardian, followed by The Washington Post, inundated my sensibilities with details of the data mining operations of America’s top secret spy organisation, the National Security Agency.
The first alert came in the form of Guardian’s publication of a copy of a secret court order handed by a court set up under the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to broadband and telecommunications giant Verizon requiring it to hand over, on a daily and ongoing basis, information about all the calls on its network - records of originating and receiving phone numbers, theduration of calls and, even cell phone location.
Soon, Guardian, joined by the Post, went on to reveal how the NSA, under a top-secret programme called PRISM, has since 2007 obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other internet giants material which includes search histories, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats. Some whistleblower had obviously leaked to the two papers a classified 41-slide PowerPoint presentation used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the programme. The document claimed “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.
No one can doubt any longer that America is a police state. Otherwise why should it pump an estimated (never verifiable) $ 8-10 billion annually into maintaining what writer-expert Jane Mayer (The Dark Side: the inside story on how the war against terror turned into a war on American ideals, Washington 2008) called “the largest, most costly, and most technologically sophisticated spy organisation the world has ever known?” Historian Matthew Aid (The Secret Sentry: the untold history of the NSA, Washington 2010) wrote, “It spies on all foreign communications, and it also encodes US government communications. About 75 per cent of its budget is spent on vacuuming up outside communications, and about 25 per cent goes to protecting US government communications.” Guardian commented as Saturday Special went to Press: The fact that police have the right to monitor the communications of all its citizens — in secret — is a classic hallmark of a State that fears freedom.”
Whose business?
The Americans can have their NSA, which is reportedly three times the size of the CIA, operating out of a 5,000-acre campus at Fort Meade protected by iris scanners and facial recognition devices. Best of luck at its next location, which I am told is a million-acre joint somewhere in the Utah desert in a facility costing more than $ 10 billion. Frankly, nobody is missing any sleep here over the “freedoms” lost by the American people. For all I care, the American people deserve a sip of the same medicine they are delivering on half of humanity day in and day out.
Wait a minute, did I say “half of humanity?” Dreadfully sorry — this involves all of us. The calls heard in on between an American and an Indian compromises the privacy rights of not only the former but the latter as well. A peeping tom violates all the occupiers of a ladies’ room and not just the object of his lust. The American government has got to answer to entire humanity how it proposes to compensate for its evil offensive on human values.
Except those wonderful Chinese who are getting their backs through a devastating hacking programme which the Americans are only now beginning to understand, the only “freedom” the rest of us seem to be enjoying these days is the removal from the reality that Uncle Sam is data mining us three times a day at Fort Meade. According to Aid, NSA has several satellites of its own tracking us all the time, apart from remote listening posts whose locations will be known only from the next whisteblower.
Mayer, who I interviewed on tape two years back, told me in unequivocal terms that America is indeed “offending” its “allies” (a charmed society which includes India) by eavesdropping/snooping. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act prescribes procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and collection of “foreign intelligence information” between “foreign powers” and “agents of foreign powers” (which may include American citizens and permanent residents suspected of espionage or terrorism) but it is not supposed to apply outside the United States.
But the point we are missing, and Mayer agreed with me there, is that most of the actual work of listening-in is done by private sector contractors who cannot, and should not, be trusted with the information which passes through their ears. Who knows how these contractors are linked with entities hostile to India? Or, at a more benign level, one that is keen on winning an Indian contract? India, for instance, is the world’s biggest armaments and military hardware customer. Often times, a telephone conversation or email picked up through one of NSA’s dedicated satellites or remote listening posts (locations never revealed but some could well be located in India) could give away an Indian bargaining position on a aircraft or destroyer purchase deal. Is that not betrayal of trust? Mayer agreed it was.
Matthew Aid, who I befriended in the course of my research (I still have some of the recordings of the Skype sessions I’d recorded with him) told me of the awful state of preparedness which exists in most countries, including India. We are smug in the belief that they are out of Uncle Sam’s radar screen. We don’t have a culture of encrypting messages. If some entities under the Raksha Mantranalaya have woken up to the need to use cipher-coded lines for its internal communications, there is no compulsion on the private sector companies who do business with it to follow the same regimen. Everybody in Washington or Beijing comes to know what the Indian government is thinking on X, Y or Z by following the phone calls and emails of the Tatas, the Ambanis, etc. Besides, the technologies used for making the encryption hardware at the Defence Ministry companies in Bangalore are known to be Chinese discards.
Broad front
In its dealings with opponents — whether “Islamic terrorists” or its own citizens alarmed by the daily abuse of the fundamental values of its nationhood — the American State is increasingly manifesting fascist tendencies. By prosecuting Pvt. Bradley Manning as a “traitor” for leaking to WikiLeaks the dark facts of American diplomacy and foreign military adventures, the government of the United States is plainly resurrecting the worst of Stalin and Hitler.
At the same time as it is preparing to put Manning away for life without possibility of parole, it is in a forgiving mode on Sergeant Robert Bales, who last year gunned down 12 innocent Afghan villagers, most of them women and children. This week, under a plea bargain which would give him immunity from the death sentence, Bales pleaded guilty. By September, he could even win the right to parole.
We Indians have got a taste of American double standards through the Richard Coleman Headley episode. The man behind the “Indian 9/11” got away with just 35 years in jail and avoided transfer to his victim country despite a clear extradition law. But thousands of innocent Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis and others have had to die for the “real 9/11”.
Why do we, the intellectuals of the free world, acquiesce in Pax Americana? Why has America’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from journalists, authors, playwrights and film makers the world over? In middle age, I recall the debates between Soviet acolytes and American ‘dalals’ (agents) which was so much a feature of my childhood. I think it is time to recall that hoary age, albeit in a more inclusive way.
(Udayan Namboodiri is an author and Senior Editor of The Pioneer)
Just... damn...
The traditional definition of a police state is one in which citizens are arrested and placed in gulags or summarily executed for merely expressing discontent with their lives, which is interpreted by the authorities as somehow reflecting badly on them and therefore deserving of exemplary punishments. Thus, the gulags or the show trials and executions.
Typical Indian anti-Western BS. This stuff is simultaneously very typical of the stuff I hear from Indians and the reason why I think anything who holds out hope that India will ever be an American ally is either smoking something very illegal or just not paying attention.
“A peeping tom violates all the users of the ladies’ room, not just the object of his lust.”
Yeah, Udayan’s a trip all right. A bad trip. Purple prose and barely concealed hatred for America. Kinda like another guy, name escapes me....
And that reminds me. I’d like to be the first to welcome whoever at the NSA is reviewing this post, as well as my e-mails to Aunt Wanda about the weather.
India. I never really considered their cultural basis in regards to how they view the US, but being as they still believe some people are not human, I can definitely see there being a problem.
Your comment indicates shallow thinking. Obviously there are a lot of left wingers in Indian press EXACTLY SAME as in US.
Have you talked to any Indian business people lately? I have, and they are most certainly in tune with American capitalism & entrepreneurship. Indian business people are usually the most successful in many countries all over the world, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, South Africa, Caribbean countries, etc.
So in conclusion, ignore the leftist drivel by journolists and focus on capitalism & democracy. In those two regards the countries have a lot in common.
Pure drivel. Gulags were never necessary for a police state. Not in the ME, not in South America, nor in your (I suspect) beloved China.
I think it makes a fundamental difference in the perspective in which Udayan Namboodiri rails so vociferously against the US that he is decidedly not Christian. That he is Muslim, and all that the 7th century mentality and barbarism that being a Muslim entails, not one to hesitate to slit your throat, decapitate you slowly to please Allah, makes what he says a lot less academic in making his point with any veracity, credibility.
Not a muslim, as you would know it. Or as any muslim would know it, for that matter. Apostate.
Well, your veracity lacks a bit of knowledge. He is not Muslim. He is Hindu. He is also a columnist for an Indian News Org.
That allows him to criticize and editorialize... and his credibility is up to the reader! From some brief research, he seems to be quite aware of the world around us! Like most Hindu folk, they don't criticize other religions, as they are pantheistic...
I stand corrected. Thank you. My comment that he was a Muslim was mere speculation.
Seems to be only one way out of this.
While concerns about gov. monitoring of private individuals is disturbing, this guy is a Marxist kook. I assure you before the country had ever heard of Obama or we were killing Islamist murderers, he was conducting his own leftist jihad against America. This idiot hates America...period. Because it is not a Marxist state and not for anything we’ve done in the last ten years or whatever. The truth is leftists like him would love America to be a police state on his order...which would resemble Stalinist Russia.
It's amazing that there are so many knees jerking here on FReeRepublic! Ignorance abounds!
Direct quotes from the author, re : communism and Islam...
...Who believes this nonsense? The spectacular failure of the Indian State to recruit the support of the common man in the war against Communist banditry (aka Maoist terrorism) ranks as the lowest point in our collective journey towards great nationhood. Thanks to the shenanigans of the Srinivasan band, the lay public is assured of temporary relief. Until the next massacre....
-http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/oped/who-remembers--the-last-time.html
...Today, a lot of land and time has been lost to Islam. What were once the glorious civilizations of Gandhara and Uddiyana, are today both under Taliban rule. The gates of our civilization have been moved further east. Islam has taken over all our Western provinces. The beautiful art and sculpture of Gandhara and Uddiyana - these are lost even to the memory of the Hindu civilization and only those that spend their evenings in libraries know of that tragic tale.
So what is the storm brewing at our gates today? My own belief is that it is the Pakistani Taliban. Today, the Pakistani Taliban have taken over Swat. This is significant because for the first time the Taliban control lands to the east of the tribal provinces where they have always had free reign.
Left-Liberal Media Bias by Udayan Namboodiri, 2005
...A pronounced media bias against projecting news and reflecting opinions unpalatable to the left-liberal intellectual elite has been quite apparent to consumers of current affairs products, both in print and audio-visual, for some years now. This is not a phenomenon restricted to India. Indeed, the free Press of all democracies has manifested this tendency in varied forms since the late 1990s. The ceaseless caricature of George W. Bush as a war-mongering demagogue, the doctoring of “opinion polls” against him ahead of the 2004 Presidential elections and the unidimensional projection of the American Army in Iraq as modern-day versions of the Scutz Staffel ( Nazi SS) are part of a strategy articulated by the entrenched media elite of the United States to demonize the Right Wing. ...
...But the Left-liberal elite which controls the decision making levers of most media in democracies would like to deny even minimum space and time to publicize or defend our position. The characteristics of this craft are too well known for repeating here. But, if it is of any consolation, the Indian “Right-Winger”, or “Hindutvavadi” or downright “BJP supporter” is not alone. I myself would not have come to learn of this veritable “world war” against the forces of nationalism, family values, patriotism and the general spirit of traditionalism had I not read a book called “Bias” which was published in the United States in 2002. ...
Sorry, anyone who calls the U.S,. a police state is a kook...Marxist or not.
And it’s the same kind of “can do no wrong” knee-jerk surrender that brings things like the “Patriot” Act and the NSA citizen snooping, to life.
Show me where I approved all snooping by the government. But we’re hardly at police state stage. When people start getting arrested for criticizing the government, then we’re in a police state. The guy who wrote the article just equated the U.S. with the worst regimes in the world. Yes, rein in the oversnooping, but don’t call our country a rogue state because some idiots in government get a little too big for their britches.
By the time you notice government having established agencies to snoop on private citizens and society exhibits a general apathy toward the implications of the same, it’s already too late.
If the PRISM was a program run by France, you’d be ROTFLing calling the French all the things you heard the guy above calling the US.
If instead it was Germany, you’d be screaming yourself hoarse about the return of the Nazis.
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