Barrett Brown is a journalist who has been arrested and is in jail on remand, facing charges that could result in life imprisonment for merely carrying out his investigative work. Michael Hastings was an investigative journalist who wrote for Rolling Stone but who died tragically in a car crash, which occurred under mysterious circumstances. What links them, apart from investigative journalism? Answer: both were working on the same story, but from different angles. And the story? The surveillance programs managed by a company called Endgame (irony intended) and which has resurfaced in the wake of the Edward Snowden revelations. ..What is at stake here is that the United States government has outsourced the most evil elements of national security: the ability to hack into computer systems across the world, foreign and domestic, private or government owned. The organizations they outsourced this to then set about monetizing the process, selling it to the highest bidder. This process could also allow corporations and the financial and political elites to create acts of war that appear to have come from the US Government due to the severely interconnected nature of the intelligence community, split between private companies and actual government agencies with alleged oversight of sorts. Edward Snowden’s access to NSA data while an employee of a private company for only four months (Booz Allen Hamilton, owned in large part by the Carlyle group which has long ties to the Bush family) illustrates the extent of the problem. While Snowden was in Hong Kong he stated that the US Government had been attacking foreign systems of governments we are allegedly at peace with. Clearly these systems and exploits have their roots in the NSA and CIA and the private firm Endgame.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 16:36:01 +0000