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U.S. president Barack "DroneMan" Obama saw fit to stick his snout into domestic British politics by lobbying the British public on How To Vote in the upcoming referendum on continuing membership in the European Union (EU). British exit, referred to as "Brexit" for British exit, would be a big mistake, so Obama has been schooling the British public in media interviews, public statements, and guess columns in at least one British newspaper. [1]
Most of Obama's arguments were economic, along with a trade threat- namely that Britain would be at the back of the line in negotiating a trade deal with the U.S. (You see, the U.S. government, despite the trillions of dollars and millions of personnel at its disposal, cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. Negotiate TWO trade deals at once? Clearly impossible! This is a sleepy bureaucracy. One at a time please.)
Then, in a BBC interview a few days ago, Obama gave another reason why Britain must stay in the EU to make itself useful to the U.S.: to influence EU policy on surveillance and privacy.
The EU is slightly interested in protecting at least some privacy for its citizens, and has some weak, poorly enforced rules to that effect. Britain, on the other hand, is a privacy Holocaust-land, like the U.S. (London, like New York and other U.S. cities, is honeycombed with many thousands of surveillance cameras in a simulacrum of the nightmarish world of George Orwell's 1984.) And the UK is one of the so-called "Five Eyes," the five English-language Anglo-Saxon dominated nations that have electronic spying agencies tightly tied to the NSA, the so-called "National Security Agency," a military body. (The five are the U.S. Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) Their targets include their own populations, and continental Europe's, as well as anyone and everyone on earth they can eavesdrop on.
Obama piously opined that he just wanted to make sure the EU struck the proper "balance" between "security" and "privacy." This is an act he has put on ever since Edward Snowden exposed Obama as one of the worst violators of privacy and the Bill of Rights "guarantees" in U.S. history. As so often with Obama, his actions are the exact opposite of his mendacious words. To him, the proper "balance" is 100% for state spying and zero for citizen privacy. That is his actual practice.
It is very obvious that American politicians, with only a small minority as exceptions, only care about increasing the power of the state, at the expense of the citizens, who are made ever more vulnerable and exposed to malevolent targeting by government apparatchiks. (I have over 40 years of personal experience in this regard, unfortunately.) The U.S. power system has done a good job of keeping its ubiquitous surveillance, and its victims, invisible. As long as the number of people who feel themselves directly impacted is a small proportion of the total population, those in power figure they can continue to get away with it. On the other hand, large U.S. tech companies are faced with a loss of overseas business, hence the public displays of pushback by the likes of Apple and other tech companies.
It's a sad day when the most consequential resistance to the repressive U.S. state comes from large corporations! The interests of the corporate sector and the U.S. state are usually in sync, or when not, the government defers to the corporations. The Supreme Court commonly sides with large corporations in cases versus the U.S. government. Right now, the secret police sector, led by the FBI and their nominal master, the Department of "Justice" (the FBI-DO"J" relationship is often one of the tail wagging the dog), is pushing to make tech companies subservient to the secret police. The recent trumped-up case over an Apple iPhone 5, used by one of the San Bernardino mass murderers, was a salvo in that campaign. (The FBI pretended it needed Apple to create an encryption-breaking tool, which was false. Politicians and media stooges of the secret police sector all attacked Apple. Even the "progressive" mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, piled on Apple.)
Some other Big Lies of Obama and the U.S. political and media classes are worth mentioning in this context, in the interest of promoting mental hygiene.
-Snowden could and should have worked within proper channels:
Numerous whistleblowers who did just that have been crucified during the Obama regime, including NSA veterans William Binney, who for his troubles got an FBI raid on his home complete with an FBI agent sticking a gun in his face while in the shower, and Thomas Drake, indicted with the use of government-forged documents.
-Spying is overseen by Congress and the courts, as well as by the executive branch:
This was one of Obama's lines. Well of course Obama conspired to keep it secret, and approved the expansion of the massive police state. The "judicial oversight" consists of the rubber-stamp "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" (FISA) "court," which are hand-picked reactionary judges whose sole function is to rubber-stamp warrants. (They've granted over 40,000, and rejected about a dozen that had paperwork errors. Even that "court" grumbled that the NSA went far beyond what the court's warrants granted.)
The Congressional "oversight" consists of just those Congresspeople on the "Intelligence" committees of the House and Senate, who are legally prohibited from informing the rest of Congress about what's going on, as it's all "classified." Furthermore, they are in the dark and even blatantly lied to, as Obama's "Director of National Security" James Clapper notoriously did (you can view him lying to the committee on youtube.com) and NSA bosses Keith Alexander and Michael Hayden. Furthermore, the various secret police agencies spy on the committees, such as whe the CIA broke into the computers of committee staffers reviewing the CIA's torture program. So who is overseeing whom?
-Only metadata is collected by the NSA:
This lie is assiduously and relentlessly repeated not only by all the awful politicians of both parties, from Obama on down, but by the mendacious U.S. corporate media. The 30-year NSA veteran William Binney has said numerous times in public forums that the NSA is collecting the content of phone calls, emails, etc., not just metadata. Not that we need him to tell us. The fact that the NSA just built a gigantic storage center in Utah, that can store data equivalent to 100,000 Libraries of Congress, and is now building another storage center, makes it obvious that they aren't just storing metadata, which take up no more room than a small text file per message.
-It's all "legal:"
Well, if the criminals are the ones "interpreting" the law.
The U.S. Constitution is the basic law of the land, the foundation of all other laws. At least that's what they claim. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is quite specific:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Clearly, sweeping up every single communication of millions of people at once, not to mention rummaging through the bank, medical, library, and every other kind of record, ( the FBI alone has seized hundreds of thousands of those types of records using the "PATRIOT" Act as an excuse- are there really so many "terrorists" here?) turns the Fourth Amendment "guarantee" into confetti.
"The Free World" should surely be recognized by now as the cynical Orwellian slogan that it is.
1] See "Obama Threatens Britons Over Leaving European Union," April 22.
Most of Obama's arguments were economic, along with a trade threat- namely that Britain would be at the back of the line in negotiating a trade deal with the U.S. (You see, the U.S. government, despite the trillions of dollars and millions of personnel at its disposal, cannot walk and chew gum at the same time. Negotiate TWO trade deals at once? Clearly impossible! This is a sleepy bureaucracy. One at a time please.)
Then, in a BBC interview a few days ago, Obama gave another reason why Britain must stay in the EU to make itself useful to the U.S.: to influence EU policy on surveillance and privacy.
The EU is slightly interested in protecting at least some privacy for its citizens, and has some weak, poorly enforced rules to that effect. Britain, on the other hand, is a privacy Holocaust-land, like the U.S. (London, like New York and other U.S. cities, is honeycombed with many thousands of surveillance cameras in a simulacrum of the nightmarish world of George Orwell's 1984.) And the UK is one of the so-called "Five Eyes," the five English-language Anglo-Saxon dominated nations that have electronic spying agencies tightly tied to the NSA, the so-called "National Security Agency," a military body. (The five are the U.S. Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.) Their targets include their own populations, and continental Europe's, as well as anyone and everyone on earth they can eavesdrop on.
Obama piously opined that he just wanted to make sure the EU struck the proper "balance" between "security" and "privacy." This is an act he has put on ever since Edward Snowden exposed Obama as one of the worst violators of privacy and the Bill of Rights "guarantees" in U.S. history. As so often with Obama, his actions are the exact opposite of his mendacious words. To him, the proper "balance" is 100% for state spying and zero for citizen privacy. That is his actual practice.
It is very obvious that American politicians, with only a small minority as exceptions, only care about increasing the power of the state, at the expense of the citizens, who are made ever more vulnerable and exposed to malevolent targeting by government apparatchiks. (I have over 40 years of personal experience in this regard, unfortunately.) The U.S. power system has done a good job of keeping its ubiquitous surveillance, and its victims, invisible. As long as the number of people who feel themselves directly impacted is a small proportion of the total population, those in power figure they can continue to get away with it. On the other hand, large U.S. tech companies are faced with a loss of overseas business, hence the public displays of pushback by the likes of Apple and other tech companies.
It's a sad day when the most consequential resistance to the repressive U.S. state comes from large corporations! The interests of the corporate sector and the U.S. state are usually in sync, or when not, the government defers to the corporations. The Supreme Court commonly sides with large corporations in cases versus the U.S. government. Right now, the secret police sector, led by the FBI and their nominal master, the Department of "Justice" (the FBI-DO"J" relationship is often one of the tail wagging the dog), is pushing to make tech companies subservient to the secret police. The recent trumped-up case over an Apple iPhone 5, used by one of the San Bernardino mass murderers, was a salvo in that campaign. (The FBI pretended it needed Apple to create an encryption-breaking tool, which was false. Politicians and media stooges of the secret police sector all attacked Apple. Even the "progressive" mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, piled on Apple.)
Some other Big Lies of Obama and the U.S. political and media classes are worth mentioning in this context, in the interest of promoting mental hygiene.
-Snowden could and should have worked within proper channels:
Numerous whistleblowers who did just that have been crucified during the Obama regime, including NSA veterans William Binney, who for his troubles got an FBI raid on his home complete with an FBI agent sticking a gun in his face while in the shower, and Thomas Drake, indicted with the use of government-forged documents.
-Spying is overseen by Congress and the courts, as well as by the executive branch:
This was one of Obama's lines. Well of course Obama conspired to keep it secret, and approved the expansion of the massive police state. The "judicial oversight" consists of the rubber-stamp "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" (FISA) "court," which are hand-picked reactionary judges whose sole function is to rubber-stamp warrants. (They've granted over 40,000, and rejected about a dozen that had paperwork errors. Even that "court" grumbled that the NSA went far beyond what the court's warrants granted.)
The Congressional "oversight" consists of just those Congresspeople on the "Intelligence" committees of the House and Senate, who are legally prohibited from informing the rest of Congress about what's going on, as it's all "classified." Furthermore, they are in the dark and even blatantly lied to, as Obama's "Director of National Security" James Clapper notoriously did (you can view him lying to the committee on youtube.com) and NSA bosses Keith Alexander and Michael Hayden. Furthermore, the various secret police agencies spy on the committees, such as whe the CIA broke into the computers of committee staffers reviewing the CIA's torture program. So who is overseeing whom?
-Only metadata is collected by the NSA:
This lie is assiduously and relentlessly repeated not only by all the awful politicians of both parties, from Obama on down, but by the mendacious U.S. corporate media. The 30-year NSA veteran William Binney has said numerous times in public forums that the NSA is collecting the content of phone calls, emails, etc., not just metadata. Not that we need him to tell us. The fact that the NSA just built a gigantic storage center in Utah, that can store data equivalent to 100,000 Libraries of Congress, and is now building another storage center, makes it obvious that they aren't just storing metadata, which take up no more room than a small text file per message.
-It's all "legal:"
Well, if the criminals are the ones "interpreting" the law.
The U.S. Constitution is the basic law of the land, the foundation of all other laws. At least that's what they claim. The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution is quite specific:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Clearly, sweeping up every single communication of millions of people at once, not to mention rummaging through the bank, medical, library, and every other kind of record, ( the FBI alone has seized hundreds of thousands of those types of records using the "PATRIOT" Act as an excuse- are there really so many "terrorists" here?) turns the Fourth Amendment "guarantee" into confetti.
"The Free World" should surely be recognized by now as the cynical Orwellian slogan that it is.
1] See "Obama Threatens Britons Over Leaving European Union," April 22.
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