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Tuesday June 18, 2013

The Truth Behind the Spying

Why is anybody surprised at what the government is doing to American citizens in the name of fighting terrorism? The Department of Homeland Security director, Janet Napolitano has made statements that she views certain American citizen groups as dangerous as radical Islamists.

By Alicia Colon

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001 were preventable had there been communication between the intelligence agencies. The Patriot Act was supposed to break down that wall and make it easier for agencies to consolidate information about potential terrorist activity. It also expanded the Treasury's authority to regulate financial transactions, particularly those involving foreign individuals and entities. In 2011, President Obama signed a four-year extension of three key provisions in the Act that allowed roving wiretaps, searches of business records, and conducting surveillance of "lone wolves"--individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to groups.

Why is anybody surprised at what the government is doing to American citizens in the name of fighting terrorism? The Department of Homeland Security director, Janet Napolitano has made statements that she views certain American citizen groups as dangerous as radical Islamists. A report by the Homeland Security Office of Intelligence and Analysis defines "rightwing extremism in the United States" as including not just racist or hate groups, but also groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority such as those opposed to abortion and immigration. Hmmm. In other words those opposed to this administration's policies, right?

Hollywood has been making films and television shows about how the government spies on its citizens for some time. Films like the "Bourne Identity" series and "Enemy of the State" clearly demonstrate how pervasive governmental surveillance is and one of the lines from 'Enemy of the State' a film made before 9/11 is very chilling: Brill: "The government's been in bed with the entire telecommunications industry since the forties. They've infected everything. They get into your bank statements, computer files, email; listen to your phone calls... Every wire, every airwave. The more technology used, the easier it is for them to keep tabs on you. It's a brave new world out there. At least it'd better be." No, it's not.

In other words, you can't hide, they will find you especially if you are an innocent law abiding American who happens to own registered guns. On the other hand, if Russia informs the FBI of a possible jihadist in our area as they did before the Boston massacre, more than likely they will lose all contact with the suspect. For that matter, how come our intelligence (and I use that description lightly) agencies can't seem to find the 12 million or more illegals hiding in the shadows? They must not be attending tea party or right to life rallies or they'd be easier to track.

Currently, there is a CBS television program, 'Person of Interest' starring Jim Caviziel with a plot about how all our data is available to prying eyes. The main protagonist is the inventor of the spy system who has given it to the government but uses it personally to help those in danger. At first, I found the incredible ease accessing our data somewhat fantastical but it is actually very accurate and frightening. But it's not just Big Brother watching us. It's the money men. Rush Limbaugh received a call from a man explaining the importance of databases in the business world. He said:

"I left a multibillion-dollar phone company to start a smaller company, and our core product is a product that looks up phone numbers instantly when people make or receive phone calls and uses that information to populate details on the screen for people to use in selling or supporting customers, like their name, their address, the value of their home, their marital status, approximate income, approximate assets, cards they have registered to the address they live at, whether they're in foreclosure, Facebook profiles, LinkedIn profiles, Twitter profiles associated with that number. The advent of mobile phones has created a situation where a phone number equals a person, so the phone number's a much better index for getting everything you know about a person than something that's less easy and less public like a Social Security number. And so my company sells that information to companies so that they can know who is calling and route that call better and offer appropriate products or not."

The caller had suggested that Obama was collecting information for political purposes for his party and for his post presidential years. What does all this mean? It means that everybody's been lying about this latest Obama scandal. It's not about securing our National Security. It's about obtaining power over all our lives and money.

In 1995 I was an office manager for a literary headhunter. I was responsible for all the incoming mail and one in particularly was rather shocking. It was from a company offering the employer easy access to any potential employees' information that was in the public domain. Bankruptcy, divorce, arrest records, real estate dealings, contracts all available to the employer for a low fee. Once the Internet made public records available to databases, privacy died. Thanks to social networks, most of our individual privacy committed suicide.

I love the Internet. I could not do my job without it but it is a dangerous tool for those bent on doing harm and in a sane world with sane individuals in charge there would be a way to harness its power. Unfortunately, the world has gone mad and the inmates are running the asylum. Ideologues, socialists, and pure liberal fanatics have made the World Wide Web the behemoth that it is and sadly the most vulnerable (our children) have become targets for evil. Off topic for a minute, I'd just like to make this one point to prove my insanity charge--Pornography has always been a trigger for sexual assaults but any attempt to censor Internet content by Congress has been denied by the ACLU and Democrats asserting that pornographers have First Amendment rights to free speech. This is absolutely insane.

There may be those who still think that the government spy program, PRISM, is actually about seeking out terrorists but I'm not that naïve nor is it even about seeking out criminal activity. Why does the government want our telephone data? Criminals and terrorists communicate via untraceable prepaid cell phones. They do not sign up for cell service,; ordinary law abiding citizens do. The miscreants are under the radar always.

As for that wall that prevented federal agencies from sharing information with local law enforcement agencies before 9/11, who put it there? Ironically many claim it was Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, who ended up serving on the 9/11 panel. She wrote a 1995 directive that made it more difficult for the FBI to locate two of the September 11 hijackers who had already entered the country by the summer of 2001. The practical effect of the "Gorelick wall" was that counterintelligence information was generally kept away from law enforcement personnel who were investigating al Qaeda activities.

But Ms. Gorelick's memo clearly indicated that the Clinton administration had decided as a matter of policy to go even beyond the law's already stringent requirements in order to further choke off information sharing. That's because Clinton's beef with Director Freeh's FBI was not counterterrorism but widely reported allegations of contributions to the Clinton-Gore Presidential re-election campaign from foreign sources involving the likes of John Huang and Charlie Trie. Before this administration, Clinton's was the most corrupt but nobody cared. Like Barack Obama, he's a Democrat and protected by the MSM.

The harsh truth is that there are very few people in Congress in either party and none in this administration who are that concerned about our national security or our civil rights. The ones who do care, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, are being called 'wackos' or something to be afraid of, warns V.P. Biden.

I say to them, Godspeed and whatever you do--stay off your cell phones.

Alicia Colon resides in New York City and can be reached at aliciav.colon@gmail.com and at www.aliciacolon.com

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