It's About Blackmail, Not National Security
By Alfred McCoy, TomDispatch
21 January 14
For more than six months, Edward Snowden's revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) have been pouring out from the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian, Germany's Der Spiegel, and Brazil's O Globo, among other places. Yet no one has pointed out the combination of factors that made the NSA's expanding programs to monitor the world seem like such a slam-dunk development in Washington. The answer is remarkably simple. For an imperial power losing its economic grip on the planet and heading into more austere times, the NSA's latest technological breakthroughs look like a bargain basement deal when it comes to projecting power and keeping subordinate allies in line -- like, in fact, the steal of the century. Even when disaster turned out to be attached to them, the NSA's surveillance programs have come with such a discounted price tag that no Washington elite was going to reject them.
For well over a century, from the pacification of the Philippines in 1898 to trade negotiations with the European Union today, surveillance and its kissing cousins, scandal and scurrilous information, have been key weapons in Washington's search for global dominion. Not surprisingly, in a post-9/11 bipartisan exercise of executive power, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have presided over building the NSA step by secret step into a digital panopticon designed to monitor the communications of every American and foreign leaders worldwide.
What exactly was the aim of such an unprecedented program of massive domestic and planetary spying, which clearly carried the risk of controversy at home and abroad? Here, an awareness of the more than century-long history of U.S. surveillance can guide us through the billions of bytes swept up by the NSA to the strategic significance of such a program for the planet's last superpower. What the past reveals is a long-term relationship between American state surveillance and political scandal that helps illuminate the unacknowledged reason why the NSA monitors America's closest allies.
Not only does such surveillance help gain intelligence advantageous to U.S. diplomacy, trade relations, and war-making, but it also scoops up intimate information that can provide leverage -- akin to blackmail -- in sensitive global dealings and negotiations of every sort. The NSA's global panopticon thus fulfills an ancient dream of empire. With a few computer key strokes, the agency has solved the problem that has bedeviled world powers since at least the time of Caesar Augustus: how to control unruly local leaders, who are the foundation for imperial rule, by ferreting out crucial, often scurrilous, information to make them more malleable.
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/424-national-security/21617-focus-its-about-blackmail-not-national-security
= new reply since forum marked as read
is light years away from being got. 
... light from 7 years ago, from Ray McGovern:
J. Edgar Hoover With Supercomputers
by Ray McGovern
January 6, 2006
On Dec. 19, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Director of National Intelligence Gen. Mike Hayden held a press conference in which they once again misled the American people.
Gonzales and Hayden answered questions about reports that the National Security Agency (NSA), which Hayden directed from 1999 to 2005, was eavesdropping on Americans via a special program in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The implications for privacy – and our system of checks and balances – are immense.
SNIP...
A more nuanced explanation may lie in the physics of the challenges faced by the NSA and the availability of sophisticated technologies not foreseen when the FISA law was passed in 1978. At the press conference, the attorney general issued a pointed reminder that there have been "tremendous advances in technology" since 1978. Recent press reports on the number of communications being monitored by the NSA suggest that the number may be so large as to be technically or practically impossible to take to the attorney general for approval as individual FISA "emergencies." Consistently high numbers of monitored communications could have trouble passing muster at the FISA court as "emergencies," for the exceptions would quickly swallow the rule.
A recent article by Charles Fried in the Boston Globe suggests that communications are now selected for monitoring based on highly sophisticated algorithm programs and that "at the first, broadest stages of the scan, no human being is involved – only computers." This, and the high numbers involved, would make it impossible to obtain "emergency" AG approval on an individual basis, as required by FISA.
As Gonzales has indicated, initial soundings were taken with Congress and the prognosis was deemed poor for obtaining NSA vacuum-cleaner-type authority to suck up communications – including those to or from Americans – from wires and the ether. But is that not what government lawyers are for; i.e., to devise ways to make such things legal and possible at the same time? There is no sign of any serious effort on the administration's part toward that end. Rather, administration officials preferred to fall back on the "anyway" rationalization; i.e., the notion pushed by top administration lawyers that the president has the power to authorize eavesdropping anyway.
The vast quantity of communications reportedly intercepted by the NSA under this special program (New York Times reporter James Risen says "roughly 500 people in the U.S. every day over the past three or four years"
makes suspect the president's claim that all of the monitored communications have some link to al-Qaeda. If he is telling the truth, we are indeed in serious trouble; fortunately, his record with such statements does not inspire credulity.
CONTINUED...
http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=8349
