The Myth of Privacy and Washington: a City of Secrets and Lies

It's hardly a secret that in the end the intelligence agencies get what they want when they want. All they have to do is make sure they cover their tracks properly. The government is essentially keeping tabs on all of us. At this point they simply don't have a way to properly deal with all the data. It's too much. Cloud computing is a gold mine for data miners, but at the same time it's hard to fill a tea cup from a fire hose.

But give it some time. They will continue to utilize the material in sinister ways. The question is... how much will the public take? How long will the polarization endure before government authority starts breaking down? That breaking point may arrive long before the public reacts to the security (tyranny) state. That will be the real crisis...if the political powers that be are willing to use violence to maintain this nebulous concept of 'union'.

I hope this aspect of the story gets more attention....

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22811002

Here's the truly outrageous part....much of the meta-data mining and data collation is outsourced to companies making a nice profit on stealing and analyzing the public's personal date. I was waiting for this to come out. If you watched the Frontline programme on 'Top Secret America' then you know this vast complex consists of many subcontractors.

Even this is nothing new. Intelligence agencies have always used independent companies, front companies, and contract agents. It's a shadowy overlapping world where you have people that in many cases are ex-intelligence operatives, but still connected. Sometimes it might be a matter of who you know. Perhaps you're just a computer guy, but your father-in-law is connected and you have colleagues with other military connections etc...

The recent Wikileaks file on Stratfor revealed some of this information. It's like reading the plot for a political thriller or spy movie.

This is that wholly dark, fascinating and yet sanitized world that exists in the suburbs and exurbs of the Washington-Baltimore metro area. When you drive around down there, you're passing nondescript office parks closed off to outsiders. No one on the outside can tell what is happening, and you encounter people who are equally cryptic about what they do.

Before we were married my wife lived in the Washington DC area and worked in a residential setting. The neighbourhood was laden with CIA and other Federal Government employees.  

My wife lived about a mile from where Robert Hansen was leaving his materials for Russian Agents. We were married and gone long before he was caught. She spent a lot of time getting to know the other wives in the neighbourhood and the rumours abounded. The fact that certain people worked for this or that agency was more or less an open secret. Not everyone in the CIA is a spy. I've met some folks that are just analysts and office workers. They're still cryptic but will acknowledge working in a place like say...Langley.

Of course maybe they were just telling me they were analysts?

Even today we like to go back. Washington is a city of intrigue and strange contrasts.

These folks are untouchable. I think if Obama had any integrity he would put a stop to this or expose it all and resign. I still wonder did they do a scare-job on him when he came into office? Did he become a true believer and embrace the military-state? Or does he go along with it all because he began to see it was too vast. You can't bring it down. It will get him long before he can even make a dent in their power. The military-industrial-intelligence community was gravely wounded in the mid- to late 1970's. Watergate, Vietnam and the Church hearings brought them pretty low. But they only had to wait a few years. There was a cowboy coming to their rescue and they were quickly revitalized beyond their wildest dreams.

That's the problem with the United States economy. It's heart and soul is the military-industrial complex and its appendages. If you try to break it you will literally break the country. We are Assyria...the warfare state.