PENTAGON PREPARES FOR MASS CIVIL BREAKDOWN, NSA OFFICIAL SAYS U.S. A POLICE STATE

The former top NSA official who created NSA’s mass surveillance system says, “We are now in a police state“.
Bill Binney is the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information. A 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency, Binney was the senior technical director within the agency and managed thousands of NSA employees.
Last year, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together, and said:

We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.

But today, Binney told Washington’s Blog that the U.S. has already become a police state.

"This is a total corruption of the justice system not only in our country but around the world. The source of the info is at the bottom of each slide. This is a totalitarian process – means we are now in a police state."

[BEFORE WE GO INTO THIS, ALLOW ME TO JUST SAY THIS...
I NEVER EXPECT READERS TO AGREE OR "BUY INTO" ANYTHING PRINTED HERE.
JUST READ, THINK, RETHINK, RESEARCH IT YOURSELVES...SEE WHAT COMES OF IT.]


20,000 TROOPS PREPARING TO PUT DOWN CIVIL UNREST

"The DoD is classifying ‘anti-government and radical ideologies’ as something that threatens government stability. When a major ‘domestic disturbance’ comes along that all of these documents are discussing, such as perhaps in the form of mass protests, it’s the ‘anti-government extremists’ they will be coming after."

DOD DOCUMENT <HERE>. WRITTEN IN 2008.
IF YOU READ NOTHING ELSE, PLEASE DO READ THE SUMMARY.

“DoD might be forced by circumstances to put its broad resources at the disposal of civil authorities to contain and reverse violent threats to domestic tranquility. Under the most extreme circumstances, this might include use of military force against hostile groups inside the United States. Further, DoD would be, by necessity, an essential enabling hub for the continuity of political authority in a multi-state or nationwide civil conflict or disturbance.”

“Federal military commanders have the authority, in extraordinary emergency circumstances where prior authorization by the President is impossible and duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation, to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances.”

To go along with this, and the idea of the military coming in to stop domestic resistance in the midst of an economic collapse, the Pentagon has created a force consisting of 20,000 troops whose sole purpose is to be available for civil unrest and catastrophes – all based on the 2005 Homeland Security program to prepare for ‘multiple, simultaneous mass casualty incidents‘.

 

FROM THE GUARDIAN UK:

[WITH 'PROPER ENGLISH', U.K. SPELLING OF WORDS...DEAL WITH IT, PLEASE.]
"A US Department of Defense (DoD) research programme is funding universities to model the dynamics, risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world, under the supervision of various US military agencies. The multi-million dollar programme is designed to develop immediate and long-term "warfighter-relevant insights" for senior officials and decision makers in "the defense policy community," and to inform policy implemented by "combatant commands."

Launched in 2008 – the year of the global banking crisis – the DoD 'Minerva Research Initiative' partners with universities "to improve DoD's basic understanding of the social, cultural, behavioral, and political forces that shape regions of the world of strategic importance to the US."
Among the projects awarded for the period 2014-2017 is a Cornell University-led study managed by the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research which aims to develop an empirical model "of the dynamics of social movement mobilisation and contagions." The project will determine "the critical mass (tipping point)" of social contagians by studying their "digital traces" in the cases of "the 2011 Egyptian revolution, the 2011 Russian Duma elections, the 2012 Nigerian fuel subsidy crisis and the 2013 Gazi park protests in Turkey."

Twitter posts and conversations will be examined "to identify individuals mobilised in a social contagion and when they become mobilised."

Another project awarded this year to the University of Washington "seeks to uncover the conditions under which political movements aimed at large-scale political and economic change originate," along with their "characteristics and consequences." The project, managed by the US Army Research Office, focuses on "large-scale movements involving more than 1,000 participants in enduring activity," and will cover 58 countries in total.
Last year, the DoD's Minerva Initiative funded a project to determine 'Who Does Not Become a Terrorist, and Why?' which, however, conflates peaceful activists with "supporters of political violence" who are different from terrorists only in that they do not embark on "armed militancy" themselves. The project explicitly sets out to study non-violent activists:

"In every context we find many individuals who share the demographic, family, cultural, and/or socioeconomic background of those who decided to engage in terrorism, and yet refrained themselves from taking up armed militancy, even though they were sympathetic to the end goals of armed groups. The field of terrorism studies has not, until recently, attempted to look at this control group. This project is not about terrorists, but about supporters of political violence."

The project's 14 case studies each "involve extensive interviews with ten or more activists and militants in parties and NGOs who, though sympathetic to radical causes, have chosen a path of non-violence."
I contacted the project's principal investigator, Prof Maria Rasmussen of the US Naval Postgraduate School, asking why non-violent activists working for NGOs should be equated to supporters of political violence – and which "parties and NGOs" were being investigated – but received no response.
Similarly, Minerva programme staff refused to answer a series of similar questions I put to them, including asking how "radical causes" promoted by peaceful NGOs constituted a potential national security threat of interest to the DoD.
Among my questions, I asked:

"Does the US Department of Defense see protest movements and social activism in different parts of the world as a threat to US national security? If so, why? Does the US Department of Defense consider political movements aiming for large scale political and economic change as a national security matter? If so, why? Activism, protest, 'political movements' and of course NGOs are a vital element of a healthy civil society and democracy - why is it that the DoD is funding research to investigate such issues?"

Minerva's programme director Dr Erin Fitzgerald said "I appreciate your concerns and am glad that you reached out to give us the opportunity to clarify" before promising a more detailed response. Instead, I received the following bland statement from the DoD's press office:

"The Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United States, its citizens, and US allies and partners. While every security challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict does not involve the US military, Minerva helps fund basic social science research that helps increase the Department of Defense's understanding of what causes instability and insecurity around the world. By better understanding these conflicts and their causes beforehand, the Department of Defense can better prepare for the dynamic future security environment."

In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.

From the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75 million over five years for social and behavioural science research. This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by US Congress.

An internal Minerva staff email communication referenced in a 2012 Masters dissertation reveals that the programme is geared toward producing quick results that are directly applicable to field operations. The dissertation was part of a Minerva-funded project on "counter-radical Muslim discourse" at Arizona State University.

The internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a principal investigator for the project, describes a meeting hosted by the DoD's Human Social Cultural and Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) programme in which senior Pentagon officials said their priority was "to develop capabilities that are deliverable quickly" in the form of "models and tools that can be integrated with operations."

Although Office of Naval Research supervisor Dr Harold Hawkins had assured the university researchers at the outset that the project was merely "a basic research effort, so we shouldn't be concerned about doing applied stuff", the meeting in fact showed that DoD is looking to "feed results" into "applications," Corman said in the email. He advised his researchers to "think about shaping results, reports, etc., so they [DoD] can clearly see their application for tools that can be taken to the field."

Many independent scholars are critical of what they see as the US government's efforts to militarise social science in the service of war. In May 2008, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) wrote to the US government noting that the Pentagon lacks "the kind of infrastructure for evaluating anthropological [and other social science] research" in a way that involves "rigorous, balanced and objective peer review", calling for such research to be managed instead by civilian agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The following month, the DoD signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the NSF to cooperate on the management of Minerva. In response, the AAA cautioned that although research proposals would now be evaluated by NSF's merit-review panels. "Pentagon officials will have decision-making power in deciding who sits on the panels":

"… there remain concerns within the discipline that research will only be funded when it supports the Pentagon's agenda. Other critics of the programme, including the Network of Concerned Anthropologists, have raised concerns that the programme would discourage research in other important areas and undermine the role of the university as a place for independent discussion and critique of the military."

According to Prof David Price, a cultural anthropologist at St Martin's University in Washington DC and author of Weaponizing Anthropology: Social Science in Service of the Militarized State, "when you looked at the individual bits of many of these projects they sort of looked like normal social science, textual analysis, historical research, and so on, but when you added these bits up they all shared themes of legibility with all the distortions of over-simplification. Minerva is farming out the piece-work of empire in ways that can allow individuals to disassociate their individual contributions from the larger project."

Prof Price has previously exposed how the Pentagon's Human Terrain Systems (HTS) programme - designed to embed social scientists in military field operations - routinely conducted training scenarios set in regions "within the United States."

Citing a summary critique of the programme sent to HTS directors by a former employee, Price reported that the HTS training scenarios "adapted COIN [counterinsurgency] for Afghanistan/Iraq" to domestic situations "in the USA where the local population was seen from the military perspective as threatening the established balance of power and influence, and challenging law and order."
One war-game, said Price, involved environmental activists protesting pollution from a coal-fired plant near Missouri, some of whom were members of the well-known environmental NGO Sierra Club.

Participants were tasked to "identify those who were 'problem-solvers' and those who were 'problem-causers,' and the rest of the population whom would be the target of the information operations to move their Center of Gravity toward that set of viewpoints and values which was the 'desired end-state' of the military's strategy."

Such war-games are consistent with a raft of Pentagon planning documents which suggest that National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance is partially motivated to prepare for the destabilising impact of coming environmental, energy and economic shocks.

James Petras, Bartle Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University in New York, concurs with Price's concerns. Minerva-funded social scientists tied to Pentagon counterinsurgency operations are involved in the "study of emotions in stoking or quelling ideologically driven movements," he said, including how "to counteract grassroots movements."

Minerva is a prime example of the deeply narrow-minded and self-defeating nature of military ideology. Worse still, the unwillingness of DoD officials to answer the most basic questions is symptomatic of a simple fact – in their unswerving mission to defend an increasingly unpopular global system serving the interests of a tiny minority, security agencies have no qualms about painting the rest of us as potential terrorists."

ONE COMMENTER WROTE:

"The creation of a ubiquitous, preemptive and global surveillance apparatus on the scale revealled [SIC] by Edward Snowden is in no small part, designed suppress any emergingl [SIC] threat to the current economic and social paradigm and to protect the elites at the apex at all costs. They would rather let the world burn than loose control:  
Spying Is Meant to Crush Citizens’ Dissent, Not Catch Terrorists  "
FROM 'ZERO HEDGE' WEBSITE:

Meet The "Minerva Research Initiative" - The Pentagon's Preparation For "Mass Civil Breakdown"

"We wonder: why is that surprising - by the time the "mass civil breakdown" is set to take place (and grand central-planning experiments by the Fed and its peers will merely accelerate said T-zero Day), virtually everyone who poses even the tiniest threat to the collapsing regime will be branded a terrorist.
Since as we reported previously, yet another current version of what previously was merely science fiction, namely the arrival of pre-crime, or where a big data NSA "pre-cog" computer will determine who is a future terrorist threat merely based on behavioral signals, is just around the corner too, it is simply a matter of time before men in gray suits or better yet - drones - quietly arrest any and all potentially threatening social network "nodes" of future terrorist behavior on the simple grounds that their mere presence threatens the status quo with an even faster collapse.

And now, just ignore all of the above, and keep buying stocks, because all is well: these most certainly aren't the droids you are looking for."

AND A COMMENT FROM THAT ARTICLE:

"...study how violent political overthrow, aka mass civil breakdown, happens in the day and age of social networks, and be prepared to counteract it - by "targeting peaceful activities and protest movements" - when it finally reaches US shores.
It will reach U.S. shores!

Collapse of Europe, then Japan then America, then what?
Interesting that government together with cronyism is causing both economic and society to break down and then they have a desire control the people which they have screwed!
What will the people choose, totalitarian rule or individual freedom and liberty???"
I ALSO WONDER THAT. WHAT WILL WE CHOOSE?
NEXT, FROM "WASHINGTON'S BLOG"

The Big Secret Behind the Spying Program

While many Americans understand why the NSA is conducting mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, some are still confused about what’s really going on.
In his new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald writes:

The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalised and deserving group of those “doing wrong” – the bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behaviour and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.
The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism – Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, anti-war activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.
The FBI’s domestic counterintelligence programme, Cointelpro, was first exposed by a group of anti-war activists who had become convinced that the anti-war movement had been infiltrated, placed under surveillance and targeted with all sorts of dirty tricks. Lacking documentary evidence to prove it and unsuccessful in convincing journalists to write about their suspicions, they broke into an FBI branch office in Pennsylvania in 1971 and carted off thousands of documents.

Files related to Cointelpro showed how the FBI had targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous, including "the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black nationalist movements, socialist and communist organizations, anti-war protesters and various rightwing groups".

 

The bureau had infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them. 

Those revelations led to the creation of the Senate Church Committee, which concluded:

“[Over the course of 15 years] the bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”

These incidents were not aberrations of the era.  

During the Bush years, for example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed, as the group put it in 2006, “new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups“.  

The Pentagon was “keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database”. The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.    

The opportunity those in power have to characterise political opponents as “national security threats” or even “terrorists” has repeatedly proven irresistible. In the past decade, the government, in an echo of Hoover’s FBI, has formally so designated environmental activists, broad swaths of anti-government rightwing groups, anti-war activists, and associations organised around Palestinian rights. Some individuals within those broad categories may deserve the designation, but undoubtedly most do not, guilty only of holding opposing political views. Yet such groups are routinely targeted for surveillance by the NSA and its partners. 

One document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas and who have a “radicalising” influence on others.  

***   
The NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a member of a terrorist organisation or involved in any terror plots. Instead, their crime is the views they express, which are deemed “radical“, a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to “exploit vulnerabilities”.    

Among the information collected about the individuals, at least one of whom is a “US person”, are details of their online sex activities and “online promiscuity” – the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex chats with women who are not their wives. The agency discusses ways to exploit this information to destroy their reputations and credibility. 

The NSA’s treatment of Anonymous, as well as the vague category of people known as “hacktivists”, is especially troubling and extreme. That’s because Anonymous is not actually a structured group but a loosely organised affiliation of people around an idea: someone becomes affiliated with Anonymous by virtue of the positions they hold.  

Worse still, the category “hacktivists” has no fixed meaning: it can mean the use of programming skills to undermine the security and functioning of the internet but can also refer to anyone who uses online tools to promote political ideals.  

That the NSA targets such broad categories of people is tantamount to allowing it to spy on anyone anywhere, including in the US, whose ideas the government finds threatening.

Greenwald told Democracy Now yesterday:  

People are aware of J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses. The nature of that series of events is that the United States government looks at people who oppose what they do as being, quote-unquote, “threats.” That’s the nature of power, to regard anybody who’s a threat to your power as a broad national security threat.   

***  

There has already been reporting that shows that—the document, for example, in the book that shows the NSA plotting about how to use information that it collected against people it considers, quote, “radicalizers.” These are people the NSA itself says are not terrorists, do not belong to terrorist organizations, do not plan terrorist attacks. They simply express ideas the NSA considers radical.  

The NSA has collected their online sexual activity, chats of a sexual nature that they’ve had, pornographic websites that they visit, and plans, in the document, on how to use this information publicly to destroy the reputations or credibility of those people to render them ineffective as advocates.  

There are other documents showing the monitoring of who visits the WikiLeaks website and the collection of data that can identify who they are. There’s information about how to use deception to undermine people who are affiliated with the online activism group Anonymous."   

 
The government may treat anyone who challenges its policies as terrorists.  For example:

• The former head of the NSA and CIA compared privacy advocates to terrorists

• Peaceful protest may be treated as terrorism by the FBI

• Questioning war may be considered terrorism

The indefinite detention law may be used against American dissenters. Specifically, the trial judge in the lawsuit challenging the law had asked the government attorneys 5 times whether journalists like Pulitzer prize-winning reporter Chris Hedges could be indefinitely detained simply for interviewing and then writing about bad guys.  

The government refused to promise that journalists like Hedges won’t be thrown in a dungeon for the rest of their lives without any right to talk to a judge.
Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead writes:

No matter what the Obama administration may say to the contrary, actions speak louder than words, and history shows that the U.S. government is not averse to locking up its own citizens for its own purposes. What the NDAA does is open the door for the government to detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker. 

According to government guidelines for identifying domestic extremists—a word used interchangeably with terrorists, that technically applies to anyone exercising their First Amendment rights in order to criticize the government.

Daniel Ellsberg notes that Obama’s claim of power to indefinitely detain people without charges or access to a lawyer or the courts is a power that even King George – the guy we fought the Revolutionary War against – didn’t claim. 

 (And former judge and adjunct professor of constitutional law Andrew Napolitano points out that Obama’s claim that he can indefinitely detain prisoners even after they are acquitted of their crimes is a power that even Hitler and Stalin didn’t claim.)

And the former top NSA official who created NSA’s mass surveillance system says, “We are now in a police state“.


Recent stories show that Greenwald, WHO IS A PULITZER PRIZE WINNER AFTER ALL,  is right:

• In 1972, the CIA Director Relabeled “Dissidents” As “Terrorists” So He Could Continue Spying On Them … And Nothing Has Changed
  
• 500 Years of History Shows that Mass Spying Is ALWAYS Aimed at Crushing Dissent
  
  
  ~ WORST SPYING IN HISTORY, RIGHT NOW  
  
• “These Programs Were Never About Terrorism: They’re About Economic Spying, Social Control, and Diplomatic Manipulation. They’re About Power” 

And it’s not just spying …

A REPORT FROM RUSSIA TODAY CITING REUTERS:

HOW AMERICANS ARE BEING "LOCKED DOWN".
(This article contains the 2 slides previously referred to by the ex-NSA official and below.)

"A document obtained by Reuters “specifically directs” the agents of the Special Operations Division (SOD) to cover up their information sources from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony.

Such sources may include intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, three-letter-agencies’ informants and a massive database of telephone records – all of which could reportedly be used to help the authorities launch criminal investigations of Americans.

“Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function,” reads the document, which is said to be presented to the agents of this Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) unit.

A former US federal agent who received such tips from SOD described the process to Reuters.

“You’d be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.’ And so we’d alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it.”

Following the arrest, the agents would then pretend the investigation started with the traffic stop, he said.

This process, referred to as “parallel construction,” is a routine practice used by the agents, two senior DEA officials told the news agency, speaking on condition of anonymity. 

THE TWO SLIDES REUTERS DISPLAYED ARE TELLING, QUITE.

While most of “a dozen” of other agents interviewed by Reuters were said to have defended the tactics as “legal,” former DEA agent Finn Selander has compared it to a criminal activity.

“It’s just like laundering money – you work it backwards to make it clean,” Selander, who is now a member of the Law Enforcement Against Prohibition group, explained.

‘Blatantly unconstitutional’

Meanwhile, lawyers, prosecutors and legal experts have been outraged by the report, saying that if the so-called “parallel construction” was indeed used for disguising how an investigation began it explicitly violates pretrial discovery rules.

Such practice “would not only be alarming but pretty blatantly unconstitutional,” Lawrence Lustberg, a New Jersey defense lawyer has said.  
All Wars Are Bankers’ Wars
Former managing director of Goldman Sachs – and head of the international analytics group at Bear Stearns in London (Nomi Prins) – notes:

"Throughout the century that I examined, which began with the Panic of 1907 … what I found by accessing the archives of each president is that through many events and periods, particular bankers were in constant communication [with the White House] — not just about financial and economic policy, and by extension trade policy, but also about aspects of World War I, or World War II, or the Cold War, in terms of the expansion that America was undergoing as a superpower in the world, politically, buoyed by the financial expansion of the banking community."

(http://www.washingtonsblog.com...)


LEST WE FORGET...
Which Corporations Control the World?
A surprisingly small number of corporations control massive global market shares. How many of the brands below do you use? It’s a Small World at the Top.
Largest banks hold a total of $25.1 trillion
Enough to fund the federal U.S. government for over 7 years. Or roughly $3500 per person on earth.
http://www.internationalbusinessguide.org/corporations/

JUST THINK ABOUT THIS.
LOOK INTO IT YOURSELVES.

QUESTION EVERYTHING.

AND HAVE NO FEAR.

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER, MY FRIENDS.
GATHER ALL YOU CAN WHILE YOU MAY.