[American Thinker] If you think instances of government surveillance are isolated, you need to think again. It’s not a matter of if your online and offline activities are being tracked, it’s just a matter of when. And while you only have so much control over this fact, educating yourself can help you make wiser and more informed decisions.
American Concerns Over Privacy
If you feel like Big Brother is watching, you aren’t alone. It’s no longer just crazy old guys in tinfoil hats that are convinced the government is tracking and analyzing their every move. Thanks to recent developments and discoveries over the past few years -- including the Edward Snowden whistleblower incident -- millions of Americans have been forced to confront their past naivety and embrace the reality before them.
According to a recent Pew Research survey, a majority of Americans now believe their online and offline activities are being monitored by a variety of companies and organizations -- including some within the government. Interesting takeaways include:
#10
The good (or bad, depending on how you look at it) part is you probably are of no interest to the gummint anyway, unless you try to stiff the taxman...
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
10/07/2020 15:31 Comments ||
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#11
Had a TS/SCI clearance for 20+ years. On their list to ensure I don't disclose anything for another 70 years. I've got news for them -- I'm going to live another 60 years, and DISCLOSE EVERYTHING! 8^) Not that it'll mean much, if we don't still have a government.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
10/07/2020 18:37 Comments ||
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#12
BTW, I saw my FBI file (you can go in and request to see it in person), and it was in two folders, about two inches thick each.
Posted by: Old Patriot ||
10/07/2020 18:38 Comments ||
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#13
/\ I'll bet there wasn't a hint or shred of DEROG in either folder. Just my guess.
[Epoch Times] If The Federalist co-founder Sean Davis's informants are even half-right, CIA Director Gina Haspel is making a big mistake‐for herself, for the agency, and, above all, for the country.
Davis wrote: "Haspel is personally blocking the declassification and release of key Russiagate documents in the hopes that President Donald Trump will lose his re-election bid, multiple senior U.S. officials told The Federalist. The officials said Haspel, who served under former CIA Director John Brennan as the spy agency's station chief in London in 2016 and 2017, is concerned that the declassification and release of documents detailing what the CIA was doing during the 2016 election and the 2017 transition could embarrass the CIA and potentially even implicate Haspel herself."
What Haspel seems to be missing here is that the CIA, and the FBI, of course, have already been embarrassed, greatly, their reputations tarnished almost beyond recognition with tens of millions of U.S. citizens by the Spygate/Russiagate scandal.
She and FBI Director Christopher Wray, deluding themselves that they are protecting vital institutions of our society, are apparently waiting with the proverbial bated breath for a Biden administration, so that all revelations and potential indictments that might come via John Durham and William Barr are flushed down the equally proverbial memory hole.
It won't work. The only way to resuscitate those reputations is for Haspel and Wray to be fully transparent, now, before the election.
Even if everything Durham and Barr are investigating is flushed away before reaching fruition, and even if the Biden–Harris administration instantly installs a new attorney general and cleanses the Justice Department and the intelligence agencies of all remnants of the dreaded Trump overnight, tens of millions of Americans already know.
They have already seen at least parts of the story and they won't forget. How could they?
They would know that their new president, Joe Biden, and many allied with him had been implicated in a treasonous plot of previously unheard of proportions to upend the prior administration.
These same people, these millions, now distrust the CIA and the FBI, and, to a great extent, their government. They consider these pivotal institutions their enemies, working against their interests and, more importantly, the interests of the country. And these people are some of the most deeply patriotic of all Americans.
What a situation for our county! How can we then function as a democratic republic?
Did Haspel think about that? Did Wray consider that as he withholds or endlessly redacts documents, allegedly to protect … who exactly?
(Wray has taken his desire for a Biden victory to such lengths that he tried to downplay the importance of Antifa.)
Haspel and Wray are doing the reverse of safeguarding their vital institutions. They are increasing public distrust of them, a distrust so great that many of us see our society moving inexorably in the direction of China, a high-tech tyranny of "social credit scores" and obedience to a Big Brother that Orwell could never have conceived.
What is the road back from that?
We should be heartened, however, by reports as Trump was exiting Walter Reed National Military Medical Center that the president was planning on declassifying and releasing many of these documents himself within days. His chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was said to have a briefcase stuffed with them.
Perhaps, by the time you read this, you will know more.
If so, Haspel and Wray, to use another old proverb, will have missed the boat. Everyone will know that their agencies need a thorough house cleaning and it will be done, as it should be, without them.
And I will add, although the media will shout the contrary to the hills, though this is October, revealing these documents is in no way an October Surprise. This is information We the People (remember them?) were owed years ago.
When you have been deliberately deceived, that's no October Surprise. That's justice.
#1
Excellent post. I believe we're at a turning point. Either we have a legitimate representative form of government based on the Constitution of we have a Shadow Government, run by moneyed oligarchs and entrenched bureaucrats.
Excerpt: Concurrent with the FBI's anti-Trump foreign counterintelligence operation, launched from the United Kingdom (with Haspel's affirmative "coordination"), keep in mind that the UK's version of the National Security Agency -- the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) -- was engaged in an aggressive Signals Intelligence campaign later codified in UK law as the Investigatory Powers Act (and referred to colloquially as the "Snoopers' Charter"). Having the British run an aggressive intelligence collection operation against Team Trump targets, bypassing US legal prohibitions, and then laundering the intelligence "take" back to US officials via the UK-US liaison relationship is precisely something an "honorary UK desk officer" might be good and adept at accomplishing.
Certainly, these subjects and questions deserve closer examination, without the phony prophylactic defense of grave warnings about "sources and methods." No one examining the coup against President Trump is seriously interested in the precise technical collection techniques of GCHQ -- they just want to know if the Brits were involved in an attempt to subvert a presidential campaign and then overturn the results of an election. CIA Director Gina Haspel can answer all of those questions, and she does not even have to touch upon classified information to do so. The American public is due her answers.
#6
Especially to try and change the outcome of elections, not that the UK establishment puts much effort into following the instructions of the electorate...
#9
Unfortunately, government has become the last refuge of scoundrels.
Criminality hides behind secrecy, classification and redactions. Full transparency, "Yes", let's see who the scoundrels are and what they did. Have faith and trust in Americans to do the right thing.
#2
Nkor is one [an]other Satellite Soviet border buffer states, as is Mongolia. We have seen how successful that failed fiscal strategy was in the Eastern Bloc, ala Ukraine, which required intervention, Georgia, also Azerbaijan and Armenian. As Magpie suggests, citizen tensions rise as foreign aid drops.
[KhaamaPress] I, the ISN 3148, am sitting in Guantánamo, as I hear about the Afghan government’s promise to release a hundred more prisoners. The news report said they would be released very soon, over the next few days. The idea is that releasing prisoners helps bring peace in the country, as both the Afghan government and the Taliban sit together to determine a political settlement in the country.
It is a fair judgment that visions to bring peace and solidarity in the country despite the odds, where Afghan could follow their dreams with complete peace of mind. But, this move leaves me with thoughts in my head, as I have been languishing behind the bars with no charges for 13 years.
It was Dwight D. Eisenhower, overall Allied commander in the battle against the Nazis and later the Republican U.S. president, who said: “I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of their way and let them have it.” If a Republican American military man could see this more than half a century ago, then surely so can the rest of us. Perhaps even the current Republican American president can see it, though he dodged the Vietnam War and said that people who got killed fighting Hitler were “losers”.
Continued on Page 49
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
