What is the NSA really for?

[JackRiddler]

Last edited Mon Dec 23, 2013, 03:09 PM - Edit history (2)

Back in October, when the NSA claimed that their bulk surveillance program had figured in preventing 50+ terrorist plots, the only example they presented in any detail turned out to be one where human intelligence alone did the job. NSA's bulk surveillance had nothing to do with catching the suspects in that case.

You gotta wonder how they couldn't manufacture anything better!

If this was the best they could do, perhaps it was an act of contempt. Perhaps they were telling us that yes, they are full of bullshit, but enough people believe them or don't care so that nothing will change.

What are you going to do about it?

But first, let's consider another question that arises.

Since it's value as a protection against "terrorism" is butkus, what is the actual function of the NSA?

I propose four answers:

(1) Industrial Policy:

For ideological reasons, the U.S. pretense is that the government does not subsidize technological development. This is supposed to be one of the worst Sins Against Capitalism. Industrial policy is something that the Socialist Europeans and Chinese Commies do. We just have a "market" that accomplishes everything by magic.

Now of course U.S. governments have always subsidized R&D. That is necessarily how most R&D happens in the capitalist and imperialist powers, regardless of all our myths about lone geniuses and courageous private entrepreneurs. Outfits like NSA and DARPA (previously ARPA) have paid to develop computing and telephony going back to the Bell Labs days. Directly or indirectly, Top Secret America has spawned the basis for the WWW, Oracle, Cisco, Apple, MS, Google, Facebook, Paypal, etc.

Industrial policy, an indispensable component of modern capitalism, is implemented in the form of a so-called "security agency" that subsidizes industries but does not actually provide any security. In fact, it's part of a larger military-industrial-intelligence apparatus that makes enemies. And if it doesn't make enough enemies, it makes them up.

(2) Blanket Surveillance For Clients:

A general surveillance apparatus of Americans, Earthians and all of their businesses and corporations, with all of the power and benefits for those who have access to it that such an apparatus implies.

For those who have access -- including the private contractors -- an enormous advantage, with the ability to manipulate, blackmail and own politicians, officials, corporate CEOs and other key figures around the world.

Such information can be accessed and used covertly, without needing to go through protocols, warrants, court orders, etc. The target under threat need not know what the source is, only that the targeter has the troublesome information. And that's just in the case of blackmailing someone. A company can be outmaneuvered, find that its secrets have been stolen, or be hit by trading with insider information, all without having any clue how its competitors or antagonists got the information.

This is the kind of power that is allowed to the likes of Booz Allen Hamilton and its friends. (Oh wait, there are access limits monitored by software and no one can do a search without oversight being aware, ha ha.)

Congress, the main body with an ostensible oversight function, would be an obvious target for such surveillance attacks. As if this is necessary given its general abdication from responsibility and fearful kowtow to the god of "security," and the fact that only a handful of committed, bought and sold properties of the MIC like Feinstein get to be in the leadership positions of the responsible committees, and thus have substantive access if they want to use it.

(3) Getting Rich:

The system of course makes a lot of money for the contractors and, importantly, their executives and consultants, the decision makers and policy framers.

NSA and other "Top Secret America" officials go through the revolving door after an early retirement from "service" and are recruited by the contractors as very high-paid "consultants" and the like, so that the system becomes a massive self-licking ice-cream cone. It is the equal of Wall Street in corruption and self-deceiving justifications - and, fatally, fully unaccountable power.

To further justify it, it creates all those wonderful jobs jobs jobs. Many thousands of them, but not millions like a real manufacturing sector would. You have to ask, so what? We could be paying a far higher number of people just as well to put up solar panels and wind turbines and make electric cars, damn it.

It's hard not to think of this as the most important factor. Money is a huge motivator, but I believe it also needs an ideological and emotional justification, because most people don't like to think they're power-mongering assholes out only for themselves. (The ones who don't mind, the sociopaths, are the most dangerous, most able to disguise themselves to everyone else, and tend to succeed very well and rise to the top in such a system.)

So, finally-

(4) Satisfying Ideological Needs:

All institutions require an internal morality, a religion. For the military-industrial-intel complex this is going to have to be a lie, since these agencies and industries are superfluous, parasitic, destructive, and actually cause most of the problems they purport to address. They have become a dictatorship over a separate, extraconstitutional realm of government -- a parallel state that provides "security" against "enemies" and is thus expected by definition to break laws and "Do business with unsavory characters."

So there is a nearly totalitarian but seemingly sincere ideology in place, and most of the operators, the non-sociopaths, presumably believe it in earnest. They usually become fanatic about it. Everything they do is justified, and much worse will be justified besides, because all this is all necessary to protect "Americans" and help America -- oh beloved land of the free! -- to survive in a perpetual death-struggle against World Communism.

Sorry! Terrorism! I meant World Terrorism.

(Communism, where did that come from?)

And this is the system that Snowden and the earlier whistleblowers have begun to expose, at sacrifice to themselves. They are the ones who need defense from progressives and all people of good conscience -- not the NSA!

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. $$$$/greed/power in which ever order seems to make most sense. n/t

[billhicks76]

13. Leverage ie Blackmail, Drug War, Corporate Advantage, Fear

Those are my 4

[NRaleighLiberal]

15. +1. n/t

[gulliver]

2. We should elect representatives via the democratic process...

...to define what the NSA does and use the court system to regulate it per the Constitution.

Oh wait.

[woo me with science]

3. Excellent post. I think we need a loud, clear, focused media blitz on this.

Corporate fascism relies on an overworked and distracted public to justify the unjustifiable through all sorts of muddied propaganda and distraction.

I think we need explicit messaging now that drives home in very simple terms what is *really* happening here: the subversion of OUR government that is supposed to act on behalf of The People, into a spy machine that is being used at our expense for the enrichment of a few.

Defense of the people versus exploitation and theft.....and an obscene surveillance machine to stomp out dissent that would expose the exploitation and theft.

Every American should be enraged at what they are doing.

[RC]

9. One would think that, especially on a kinda Lefty message board where you are supposed to post links

to support your source.
But we have a bunch of "usual suspects" defending the NSA and deriding Edward Snowden as some kind of trader, instead of the Patriot he is. Even showing them the 4th Amendment means little to them.

Every American should be enraged at what they are doing.

[scarletwoman]

4. Great question. Answer: Not what they say they are for. (nt)

[truedelphi]

5. So I am sitting here waiting for the usual crowd to show up to tell you

that your fears are tinfoil, and that you are part of the "fringe group" of idiotic Americans who still care about things like civil rights. (It' s so Eighteenth Century of us, to care about those rights!)

Yes, support civil liberties, guaranteed by the US Constitution, and soon you will be told that only Right wing racists are of that persuasion.

After all, if Rand Paul cites the Constitution, then don't you get it: you must denounce this document! It is rather antique-ey anyway. (In fact, it wa written on parchment!) And why care about the Constitution when there are tens of millions of dollars to make while employed for the Surveillance State!

[villager]

10. +1

n/t

[PSPS]

6. Certainly not what it used to be

Back in Truman's day, he warned of the danger of its apparatus ever being turned on american citizens. It's pretty obvious, at least to me, that its mission has become monitoring everything possible so that any threat to the oligarchs, such as a potential or nascent mass movement, can be crushed before it gets anywhere. It's become our surveillance state's stasi.

[solarhydrocan]

7. Gathering info for corporations so they can monopolize their markets and

so anyone at anytime can be blackmailed into doing what TPTB desire.

Instead of becoming energy independent and spending on our infrastructure the American people are being charged for their own enslavement.

And it's WORKING!!

CIA NSA DEA DIA ASA NRO

WTF

[woo me with science]

8. +100000

Well and clearly said.

[jsr]

11. The NSA is to protect and perpetuate the surveillance industry

[moondust]

12. Cashing in on 9/11. n/t

[Rosa Luxemburg]

14. To protect us from the Soviet Union

and Emmanuel Goldstein!




(well.....only kidding)

[JackRiddler]

16. Anyone care to argue it's for stopping terrorism?

[randome]

17. To monitor foreign communications.

If for any of the reasons you propose, then why are we not already rulers of the world? To some extent, I'd say we are but one might think we would be the Godzilla of all countries by now and we aren't.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

[JackRiddler]

18. DU Contest! Name that fallacy!

Last edited Mon Dec 23, 2013, 05:40 PM - Edit history (1)

Hey DUers, help me out here. I know this piece of superlative lameness from our randome (a specialist) qualifies for categorization among those common logical fallacies with a name. But I can't remember which one.

It's the one that fits this general example: "You claim a six-gun can kill people. But if that were true, everyone would already be dead! Explain to me why everyone isn't already dead?!"

[randome]

20. "Follow the money" as they say. Except there doesn't appear to be any to follow.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]There is nothing you can't do if you put your mind to it.
Nothing.[/center][/font][hr]

[JackRiddler]

22. Huh?

Keep kicking!

[GoneFishin]

19. Excellent OP. Well written and focused. All 4 answers are good ones. nt

[JackRiddler]

21. Thank you!

[politichew]

23. As someone that is indifferent to the NSA issue, I will concede this answer:

Not terrorism.

The ROI seems to be minimal if not nonexistent in regards to terrorism.

[bvar22]

24. More Paulite ODS Fringe Leftist Hate FUD!

I keep telling you that the NSA loves you,
and only wants to keep you safe,
but you JUST WON'T LISTEN!!!!
YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!!

You know, we have WAYS of making you see things the Sensible, Pragmatic way,
and we have a letter from our lawyer saying that its ALL "legal" now.

[JackRiddler]

25. Just haven't grown up yet I guess.

[johnnyreb]

26. Cogent, sharp and to the point.

Thank you JackRiddler! You have taught me much.

[JackRiddler]

27. I forgot the big one.

WARFARE AND EMPIRE.

Beyond Plan Colombia: Covert CIA Program Reveals Critical U.S. Role in Killings of Rebel Leaders

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/12/24/behind_plan_colombia_covert_cia_program

http://dncdn.dvlabs.com/ipod/dn2013-1224.mp4

Killing FARC leaders, sabotaging peace talks in Colombia.

Meanwhile, government forces by day, right-wing paramilitary death squads by night -- those guys get arms and supplies out of U.S. taxpayer money.

Dana Priest:

Well, they had a hard time finding the hostages, and yet they had a lot more capacity down there at this point. They started an embassy fusion cell. They got a lot of help from the NSA, the National Security Agency, who brought in eavesdropping equipment so that they could basically spy on the FARC when they communicated with one another. They were doing the same thing with drug cartels already, and they brought that together to find the hostages, but they weren’t very successful. So they said, "You know, we’ve got all this capability here. Let’s turn it against the FARC leadership," which is something they had done or they had begun to do successfully in other parts of the world against the al-Qaeda leadership, the so-called HVTs, high-value targets. So they started that same thing in Colombia using the equipment and personnel and partnership that they had begun with the Colombians.

And then, at a certain point, they realized—actually, it was one individual who was down there at the time, who had just been sent, who was a U.S. Air Force mission chief for all the air assets that were being deployed down there—took a look at the Plan Colombia budget and said, "Why aren’t we able to kill more FARC leaders? This would be—this is something that we should do." And he analyzed it and discovered that one of the reasons they weren’t doing that is that the FARC leaders had a ring of security around their camps that extended for miles out, so that when they brought in ground troops by helicopter, the FARC camp could see them beforehand and flee. And so, he, being an Air Force guy, came up with this idea, actually said he googled around to find bombs and fighters, and came up with this idea of a precision-guided munition, which is a smart bomb, which has a GPS coordinate—or GPS antenna on it, which can tell the bomb where to go. And if you could find the person and program in the coordinates and link it up to GPS satellites that were already in the sky, then you could do what the U.S. had been doing for years before in various war scenarios. So, that’s what he proposed.

It took a while for the U.S. to agree to that, for various reasons that I’d be glad to discuss, but they eventually did. But because they didn’t trust the Colombians totally to use it as it was supposed to be used—they were worried, given their human rights record, that they might use it against political enemies—they kept what is described as the encryption key, which is the key that unlocks—it basically unlocks the scrambling of the communications between the plane—between the bomb and the GPS satellite. So you need that key in order to get the GPS satellite to link down to the bomb, and so it will know where it is at all times that it’s flying, but also where to go to hit the target. And they kept that for three years, until they trusted that the Colombians would do what they promised to do, and they eventually gave that to them.

IMPERIALISM

[JackRiddler]

28. Someone reminded me of this!

[JackRiddler]

29. As the New Cold War gears up...

this wretched enterprise gains new life and justification.