Greg Palast in the Guardian today has a
very strong article about what seems to have gone wrong in Mexico (beyond
ballots in garbage dumps as Raw Story has reported). The key parts of the story are illuminated quite brightly by
Steven D. at the Booman Tribune:
While many foreign observers have been quick to claim the there were no significant electoral irregularities in the process that formally awarded a half-percentage-point victory of Felipe Calderón, the candidate of President Fox's right wing National Action Party, Greg Palast is not among them. The first journalist to expose the massive voter suppression tactics that Jeb Bush employed in Florida in 2000 to ensure his brother's ascension to the White House, has an article in the Guardian (UK) in which he suggests that ChoicePoint, the same company the Jeb Bush employed to purge Florida's voting rolls of African Americans, may have operated in Mexico to scrub the voting rolls of leftist voters.
But what does this have to do with domestic spying and NSA databases? One company: CHOICEPOINT.
As the New York Times has repeatedly informed us, the Bush Administration is using the NSA to spy domestically upon our phone calls, bank records and Internet Traffic (the
EFF vs ATT suite has details on TCP/IP spying as does
this article regarding the FBI at RawStory).
CHOICEPOINT is active here as well, providing data to government agencies that would otherwise have to use the courts to collect such data. But what is the real purpose behind this activity?
The standard apology is always the Global War on Terror -- and how by spying on what happens inside of the United States the Bush Administration can stop plots before they become active. This is the dominant narrative behind the "discovered" plot in Miami, as well as the latest "discovery" in New York City. The inactivity on the August 2001 PDB also supports this narrative -- these spy programs were not in place and therefore the government was somehow paralyzed, couldn't act.
I think the Mexican election sheds light upon the reality behind Bush and Rove's reasoning. As Palast notes:
Just before the 2000 balloting in Florida, I reported in the Guardian that its governor, Jeb Bush, had ordered the removal of tens of thousands of black citizens from the state's voter rolls. He called them "felons", but our investigation discovered their only crime was Voting While Black. And that little scrub of the voter rolls gave the White House to his brother George. Jeb's winning scrub list was the creation of a private firm, ChoicePoint of Alpharetta, Georgia. Now, it seems, ChoicePoint is back in the voter list business - in Mexico - at the direction of the Bush government.
Palast backs up his accusation with the following:
Months ago, I got my hands on a copy of a memo from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, marked "secret", regarding a contract for "intelligence collection of foreign counter-terrorism investigations". Given that the memo was dated September 17 2001, a week after the attack on the World Trade Centre, hunting for terrorists seemed like a heck of a good idea. But oddly, while all 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf, the contract was for obtaining the voter files of Venezuela, Brazil ... [sic.] and Mexico.
The purging of voter files with a certain, ideological perspective in mind, could certainly be done with the kinds of information being gathered about our activities. (Just think back to the IRS and party affiliation scandal). By categorizing enough Americans based upon their browsing and consuming habits -- the votes of those who are in opposition could be easily suppressed -- or even countered in a hacked election. If the media works in concert with the suppression -- pretending that the actions are legal or even somehow ethical (as they did during the the Cold war and the "threat" of Communism) -- we see a cleanly manufactured democracy, one, perhaps, rising already in Mexico today.