Big Love meets Big Brother

[Octafish]

[font size="1"]George W Bush HARKEN Energy and Jackson Stephens by Mark Lombardi[/font size]


James Bamford explains:

The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)

By James Bamford
Wired, March 15, 2012

The spring air in the small, sand-dusted town has a soft haze to it, and clumps of green-gray sagebrush rustle in the breeze. Bluffdale sits in a bowl-shaped valley in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west. It’s the heart of Mormon country, where religious pioneers first arrived more than 160 years ago. They came to escape the rest of the world, to understand the mysterious words sent down from their god as revealed on buried golden plates, and to practice what has become known as “the principle,” marriage to multiple wives.

Today Bluffdale is home to one of the nation’s largest sects of polygamists, the Apostolic United Brethren, with upwards of 9,000 members. The brethren’s complex includes a chapel, a school, a sports field, and an archive. Membership has doubled since 1978—and the number of plural marriages has tripled—so the sect has recently been looking for ways to purchase more land and expand throughout the town.

But new pioneers have quietly begun moving into the area, secretive outsiders who say little and keep to themselves. Like the pious polygamists, they are focused on deciphering cryptic messages that only they have the power to understand. Just off Beef Hollow Road, less than a mile from brethren headquarters, thousands of hard-hatted construction workers in sweat-soaked T-shirts are laying the groundwork for the newcomers’ own temple and archive, a massive complex so large that it necessitated expanding the town’s boundaries. Once built, it will be more than five times the size of the US Capitol.

Rather than Bibles, prophets, and worshippers, this temple will be filled with servers, computer intelligence experts, and armed guards. And instead of listening for words flowing down from heaven, these newcomers will be secretly capturing, storing, and analyzing vast quantities of words and images hurtling through the world’s telecommunications networks. In the little town of Bluffdale, Big Love and Big Brother have become uneasy neighbors.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/1

Those who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear. So why can't the government -- as in We the People government -- get to see who's opening our mail, listening to our phone calls, registering our receipts, marking down our politics and mapping our associations into social diagrammatics, among who-knows-what-else other things?

[Justice wanted]

1. This is NOT what the founding fathers had in mind. We gave up Liberty for Security and this is

the B.S. we got!

[Octafish]

2. People were outraged to discover CIA, FBI had been opening snail mail from the 40s to the 70s.

The Church Committee put a stop to that, we were told at the time.

DOMESTIC CIA AND FBI MAIL OPENING PROGRAMS

Wonder when it started up again?

[Justice wanted]

6. If it did STOP than start up again IT was the Patriot Act. Or the Patriot act allow them not to hid

[OnyxCollie]

3. This is being done for economic interests.

This is similar to the Japanese internment, where all Japanese and Japanese Americans (instead of those who may have been disloyal) were deprived of their farms, resulting in a staggering loss to the farmers and a fantastic gain for the farm corporations.

K&R.

[Octafish]

5. That was a point I'd raised on GD that didn't get as much traction as I'd hoped...

PATRIOT Act Being Used to Keep Super Duper Government Spy Operation Top Secret

Instead of farms and other forms of solid, but low-return investments, today's thieves go straight to the biggest effin' ROI around -- haute finance:

Stratfor & Goldman Sachs started hedge fund called Stratcap to trade on illegal inside gov't info

"Stratfor’s use of insiders for intelligence soon turned into a money-making scheme of questionable legality. The emails show that in 2009 then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman hatched an idea to "utilise the intelligence" it was pulling in from its insider network to start up a captive strategic investment fund. CEO George Friedman explained in a confidential August 2011 document, marked DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS : "What StratCap will do is use our Stratfor’s intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like". The emails show that in 2011 Goldman Sach’s Morenz invested "substantially" more than $4million and joined Stratfor’s board of directors. Throughout 2011, a complex offshore share structure extending as far as South Africa was erected, designed to make StratCap appear to be legally independent. But, confidentially, Friedman told StratFor staff : "Do not think of StratCap as an outside organisation. It will be integral... It will be useful to you if, for the sake of convenience, you think of it as another aspect of Stratfor and Shea as another executive in Stratfor... we are already working on mock portfolios and trades". StratCap is due to launch in 2012. "

http://wikileaks.org/the-gifiles.html

Michael Parenti documents how it's the same as it ever was.

PS: Where do those onyx collies come from?

[EFerrari]

4. Amy did a long segment with the author today and also with Thomas Drake.

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/21/exposed_inside_the_nsas_largest_and

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/21/in_unprecedented_obama_admin_crackdown_nsa

[Octafish]

7. Excellent pieces, those!

Hope all interested in real change get a moment to hear those interviews.

Thank you infinitely, Elisita!