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Originally Posted by SyntheticallY
I wonder who will they spy on first?
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Well, as we know, the major telecommunications corporations were all pressured by the White House post-9/11 to start recording calls until all or most (not sure) were compliant.
Now, as the news slowly seeped out this was going on, and due to the constitutional issues it raises, we the public, learned a bit more.
We were told that the monitoring was due to Homeland Security as a way to counter terrorist activity within the United States.
Most, naturally, and out of their fear, accepted this logical explanation for a sacrifice of part of our freedoms.
Besides, everyone has a general malaise and believes we've lost control over our representation and our government, so it's easier to lie to oneself and just blindly trust the governement than to think about what's really happening because, that after all, is only going to make you uncomfortable and unable to fulfill your duties as a slave to the system, and it might just serve to drive you crazy to dwell on the naked truth too much, right?
Now, to get back to the subject, the method by which these monitored calls would help intelligence agencies and law enforcement fight terrorism has, to my knowledge, never been explained and expounded upon to the general public, at least. I suppose that would be letting the terrorists know too many of our supposed secrets haha.
So, that leads us to a point in this reasonable step-by-step analysis of a case in which the government spies on its citizens where we must start to engage in conjecture. The speculation we are embarking on has to do with the nature of how the monitoring network actually is supposed to work and function. Because therein lies the shadow of the truth, you see.
Reportedly, monitoring began on 9/12/01, the day after the tragedy when we here in the United States were horrifically attacked on continental soil. Somewhat ironically, 9/12 was also the day bin Laden relatives begain being jetted out of the country by secret executive (presidential/vice-presidential) order while all other flights were grounded. But, forgive me for straying from the point.
Since montitoring began, it has indeed led to the successful apprehension of legitimate potential terrorists. Then again, the spying is also allegedly responsible, as many know from the alternative media, for the false arrests of far too many an individual and some of these are rather bizarre cases with seemingly no rhyme or reason. At any rate, before I begin to really get to my point here, I'd like to relate about how terrorists in Los Angeles were arrested and found guilty because some chatter was picked up after the death of journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002. The police went in and searched an apartment when the suspects were not home and confirmed their valid suspicions with the literature, weapons, and bomb-making substances that were confiscated. Here we have a success story. A reason to not be afraid of the monitoring because, hey, the monitoring gets results, right? Desperate times call for desperate measures and so on, right?
No, no--wrong, wrong. In the area those particular arrests were made, there has been a lot of monitoring going on since Bush, Sr. authorized all those types of activity by permission of court order. He did that in 1991. The difference between Bush, Sr. and Jr.'s regime, is that now, no court order is required. Gotta protect, you see, haha at any cost.
Anyone with any sense in their head (any sense of patriotism as well) knows the constitution also needs protecting. Besides, any rube can also know deep in their bones that it's a simple invasion of privacy. Racial profiling also raises valid ethical questions. Where does one strike a balance then?
But, damn me, I still haven't gotten around to my point...
And that point is the method of the gathering of some sort of data that supposedly catches terrorists. The common view holds that there is a network in place that scans for code words. Words like "bomb." This is not science-fiction entirely as systems like this were, I believe, first developed in Britain (as Orwell rolled over in his grave, no doubt) some time ago. Anyway, anyone that's not an idiot (interjection of my opinion) should know that there's no possible way to monitor all the calls that get recorded. At best, maybe the same type of system that detects the word "bomb" (& a few variations on that theme) could, I suppose, be adapted to pick up any chatter in Arabic languages. Personally, I think it's all bullshit. There's no possible way to effectively monitor any kind of significant percentage of all the telecommunications activity in this country. It's simply not possible for people or machines to carry out that type of task. If you believe otherwise, I'd like to hear why.
Personally, I think that the main reason that monitoring began is so that the government could spy on leftist groups, and that they could finally do so without fear of reprisal really. It's Nixon's revenge from beyond the grave hehe. There has been evidence to support this assertion. Now, to elucidate a bit further, the government, for many reasons that should be obvious, has much vested interest in monitoring so-called "leftist" groups because they consider them a threat to exposing their lies, corruption, and abominable misdeeds. In today's information age, the power that small media and policital groups have and the word-of-mouth that can be engendered is a political force that genteel politicians have to reckon with. The monitoring also affords the government a handy-dandy databank to use against anyone or any group that it deems a threat. If they start to get annoyed with you, they'll just pull and actually really listen to your phone records until they find some dirt on you or an angle to work, you see. At this point, I will guess that the "databank" of recorded info is not all that comprehensive, that there are major kinks to still sort out, but I'm sure it's a major priority to get it all up and running and recording as much of everything as possible in the near future. And this will certainly happen unless a course of action is followed soon to disallow this reprehensible practice that is extremely dangerous to our our way of life, democracy and freedom which are the very virtues we are supposed to be protecting.
But, while dastardly benefits can be gleaned by a tyrannical government spying on its citizenry like some potential future day mega-Gestapo, it now alarmingly has been seemingly just accepted, and it's yet another bad rationalization the American people got force-fed after 9/11. While it should be readily apparent that the (in the beginning)
secret monitoring began to keep tabs on those organizations that held dissenting views, it also served a specific purpose at the time of its initial inception.
Monitoring began so the government could spy on leftist groups, yes, and the principal telecommunications activity that the government set out from the beginning to monitor was not the activity of Muslim terrorists as they claim, it was American activists (and possibly American terrorists) they were worried about that might be planning to terminate the terms of the (in their mind) treasonous Bush or Cheney and take them out by non-violent, or possibly even violent, means.
And there you have it. Sorry it took me so very long to get there.