This story's breaking over at the NY Times' website, as of 25 minutes ago...
Verizon Case Offers Glimpse of Vast N.S.A. Surveillance
CHARLIE SAVAGE and EDWARD WYATT
NY TIMES
June 6, 2013
WASHINGTON — The United States government has been compiling a huge database of calling logs of Americans’ domestic communications under a hotly debated section of the Patriot Act for at least seven years, but before any particular caller can be scrutinized, counterterrorism officials must seek additional permission from a secret national security court, the top lawmakers on the Senate Intelligence Committee said on Thursday.
Responding to the disclosure on Wednesday night of a highly classified court order to a subsidiary of Verizon Communications seeking all of its customers’ communications logs, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California and Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Democrat and Republican on the Intelligence Committee, said the order appeared to be a routine reauthorization as part of a broader program that lawmakers have long known about.
“As far as I know, this is an exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years,” Ms. Feinstein said, adding that it was carried out by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court “under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore, it is lawful. It has been briefed to Congress.”
The program appears to warehouse and analyze calling “metadata” — time and number logs showing when communications have been made, but not their content or the name of any subscriber — which the government analyzes to try to identify terrorists. Mr. Chambliss said that under the rules of the program, when a computer program flags a number as suspicious, the authorities return to the national security court for permission to scrutinize that person more closely….
Those who have been following my posts for the past 18 months on the rise of the surveillance state here in the U.S. shouldn't be surprised by today's latest breaking news on this massive story, with today's most recent developments on it brought to us via the NY Times, and excerpted above. Frankly, there's going to be much more info on the extent of this travesty to come, either immediately or in coming days, weeks and months; and, being even more frank about this over-arching story, it is--to a great extent--IMHO, all about a term coined by Princeton University political philosopher, theorist, and Professor Emeritus
Sheldon Wolin (author of "
Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought") known as "
inverted totalitarianism." (More about that, further down, below.) In his discussion of inverted totalitarianism, Professor Wolin actually and quite comprehensively explains why we're seeing Senator Feinstein coming out with this story (excerpted above) less than 24 hours after Glenn Greenwald's piece in the Guardian (UK) was published, too. You may read more regarding Greenwald's scoop, which is also referenced and linked in this newest NYT story/excerpt, over at Kossack Jesselyn Radack's outstanding post, currently on the DKos Recommended List, and
LINKED HERE.
I had originally started publishing this piece based upon requests made of me to publish the following (see below) via comments made at DKos, in other posts here, today. Of course, that was before the Times story (above) broke. But, here, in a relatively easy to digest format is why I started publishing this diary in the first place...
The Greenwald story provides some immediate background, and it's covered so well both by Ms. Radack and even in the Times story, excerpted above, I really don't feel the need to be redundant about it.
But, as folks have started to note, even in the comments to this post, these series of "revelations" should not come as a surprise to those that have been following this over-arching, state surveillance story, to date.
For starters, there's this, among many other critical facts, from my post here on May 20th, just over two weeks ago: "How Many Former NSA and FBI Counterterrorism Employees Will It Take For This Story To Reach The MSM?"
Here’s the snippet in it from an actual interview between CNN's Erin Burnett and former FBI counterterrorism expert Tim Clemente, from early this past month; the other person on-screen is renowned criminal defense attorney Mark Geragos…
Then there's my 10,000+ words on this subject that I've published here over the past year-and-a-half, and the inconvenient reality is that Attorney General Holder (and President Obama) "signed off on TOTAL INFORMATION AWARENESS," 15 months ago. (That's a signoff by our government providing the state with the ability to keep records/data and maintain total information awareness on all citizens for five years.)
The writing's been on the wall for quite awhile. As we blog, the government already has the "RIGHT" to access virtually EVERYTHING (see the link above to my post here from March 23rd, 2012) about us, up to and including HIPAA-protected medical information from many state hospitals, as Bloomberg just noted, yesterday.
EV-RY-THING: recordings, phone metadata, bank records, credit card transactions, Internet, email, Twitter, etc. We're just not paying attention. And, yes, Virginia, every freakin' call (landline or cell) is recorded, nowadays. As Bill Binney pointed out--and as it was discussed in Wired Magazine in early March 2012, as well as in Jesselyn Radack's post here, today--what the government does when it issues subpoenas is simply seeking the right to use the information (it already has; or has access to--important difference) in court. (I'm finding out, the hard way, that you really do have to repeat this stuff a few hundred times for it to sink in; or, at least get the MSM to pick up on it.)
The information (the writing on the wall) on our quickly-developing, "inverted totalitarian society" has been around for quite awhile (links to just some of my posts on this subject)...
Done Deal: Our Government's Subpoenas For "Information" Are Little More Than Kabuki These Days (5/26/13)
How Many Former NSA and FBI Counterterrorism Employees Will It Take For This Story To Reach The MSM? (5/20/13)
NYT Lead: U.S. Law Enforcement Made 1.3 Million+ Surveillance Requests Of Cell Carriers In 2011 (7/9/12)
NYT Lead: ACLU Documents Rampant, Warrantless Phone-Tracking By Police Throughout U.S. (4/1/12)
NYT's Orwellian Lead: AG Holder Officially Signs Off On "Total Information Awareness" For All (3/23/12)
Wired’s Mind-Blowing Scoop On “Stellar Wind” And The “Enormity” of U.S. Domestic Spying (3/17/12)
And, speaking about our inverted totalitarian society, and how "we're just not paying attention," I recently stumbled across some of the absolutely most eye-opening, scholarly work on what's happening in America today, as far as all of this is concerned. It's from Professor Wolin, whom I initially discussed above. You really should get to know more about INVERTED TOTALITARIANISM, because we're living and breathing in it as you read this, now moreso than ever (please remember, this is pretty wonkish "stuff," and definitely from a very highly-respected academician's vantage point; in other words, it's not some blogger's commentary, so please tread lightly, because it is going to raise a LOT of eyebrows)...from the Wiki...
Inverted totalitarianism and managed democracy
Wolin believes that the United States (which he refers to using the proper noun "Superpower", to emphasize the current position of the United States as the only superpower) has been increasingly taking on totalitarian tendencies, as a result of the transformations that it has undergone during the military mobilization required to fight the Axis powers, and during the subsequent campaign of containing the Soviet Union during the Cold War:[2]
While the versions of totalitarianism represented by Nazism and Fascism consolidated power by suppressing liberal political practices that had sunk only shallow cultural roots, Superpower represents a drive towards totality that draws from the setting where liberalism and democracy have been established for more than two centuries. It is Nazism turned upside-down, “inverted totalitarianism.” While it is a system that aspires to totality, it is driven by an ideology of the cost-effective rather than of a “master race” (Herrenvolk), by the material rather than the “ideal.”[5]
According to Wolin, there are three main ways in which inverted totalitarianism is the inverted form of classical totalitarianism.
• Whereas in Nazi Germany the state dominated economic actors, in inverted totalitarianism, corporations through political contributions and lobbying, dominate the United States, with the government acting as the servant of large corporations. This is considered "normal" rather than corruption.[6]
• While the Nazi regime aimed at the constant political mobilization of the population, with its Nuremberg rallies, Hitler Youth, and so on, inverted totalitarianism aims for the mass of the population to be in a persistent state of political apathy. The only type of political activity expected or desired from the citizenry is voting. Low electoral turnouts are favorably received as an indication that the bulk of the population has given up hope that the government will ever help them.[7]
• While the Nazis openly mocked democracy, the United States maintains the conceit that it is the model of democracy for the whole world.[8] Wolin writes:
Inverted totalitarianism reverses things. It is all politics all of the time but a politics largely untempered by the political. Party squabbles are occasionally on public display, and there is a frantic and continuous politics among factions of the party, interest groups, competing corporate powers, and rival media concerns. And there is, of course, the culminating moment of national elections when the attention of the nation is required to make a choice of personalities rather than a choice between alternatives. What is absent is the political, the commitment to finding where the common good lies amidst the welter of well-financed, highly organized, single-minded interests rabidly seeking governmental favors and overwhelming the practices of representative government and public administration by a sea of cash.[9]
Managed democracy
Wolin believes that the democracy of the United States is sanitized of political participation and refers to it as managed democracy. He defines managed democracy as "a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to control".[10] Under managed democracy, the electorate is prevented from having a significant impact on policies adopted by the state through the continuous employment of public relations techniques.[11]
Wolin believes that the United States resembles Nazi Germany in one major way without an inversion: the essential role that propaganda plays in the system. According to Wolin, whereas the production of propaganda was crudely centralized in Nazi Germany, in the United States it is left to highly concentrated media corporations, thus maintaining the illusion of a "free press".[12] Dissent is allowed, although the corporate media serves as a filter, allowing most people, with limited time available to keep themselves apprised of current events, only to hear points of view which the corporate media deems to be "serious".[4][13][14]
According to Wolin, the United States has two main totalizing dynamics:
• The first, directed outward, finds its expression in the Global War on Terror and in the Bush Doctrine that the United States has the right to launch preemptive wars. This amounts to the United States seeing as illegitimate the attempt by any state to resist its domination.[4][14][15]
• The second dynamic, directed inward, involves the subjection of the mass of the population to economic "rationalization", with continual "downsizing" and "outsourcing" of jobs abroad and dismantling of what remains of the welfare state created by U.S. Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Thus, neoliberalism is an integral component of inverted totalitarianism. The state of insecurity in which this places the public serves the useful function of making people feel helpless, thus making it less likely that they will become politically active, and thus helping to maintain the first dynamic.[4][14][16][17]
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UPDATE (6:30PM EDT 6/6/13): Kossack
Joan McCarter just published a post about this new and breaking report over at the WaPo, as you read this...
NSA also scooping up your internet activity
Joan McCarter
Daily Kos
June 6, 2013
The Washington Post opens the NSA/Verizon data-mining story further, with this report of NSA tapping into the central services of nine key Internet services, "extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time."…
As noted by Princeton Professor Sheldon Wolin, via links in this post, in his studies relating to inverted totalitarianism -- what's happening now/today, with Feinstein's statements this afternoon and now this story on the NSA's Prism program -- it is precisely how inverted totalitarianism works; the goal of it is to make the population numb so they accept the philosophy. And, again, that's just what's happening as you read this.
Are you feeling numb yet?
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