The New York Times reports the FBI is now integrated in the NSA surveillance apparatus. In order to minimize the fact such a development is destructive of the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans, The Times perpetuates the myth that only foreign non-citizens are surveilled. A declassified and heavily redacted report released to the newspaper after it filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit concludes “that the F.B.I. was doing a good job in making sure that the email accounts targeted for warrantless collection belonged to non-citizens abroad.” The NSA disclosed in a secret Capitol Hill briefing in 2013 that thousands of analysts listen to domestic phone calls and also snoop on email and text messages of Americans. The NSA built a mammoth data center in Bluffdale, Utah specifically for this purpose. A timeline breaking down the extent of NSA spying on the American people can be found here. The agency also stated it is not obliged to obey the Constitution. The Justice Department, and subsequently the FBI, have also interpreted this to mean they have the authority to engage in surveillance of Americans without a warrant. The redacted sections of the report, not surprisingly, deal with PRISM, the clandestine “anti-terrorism” mass electronic surveillance data mining program launched in 2007 by the NSA. PRISM is “the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports,” and accounts for 91% of internet data vacuumed up by the agency. FBI: America’s Secret Police NSA surveillance programs are not designed to monitor the activity of foreign terrorists. They are designed to conduct surveillance on the political activity of the American people. That the FBI is now fully connected to the NSA surveillance network should not come as a surprise. The agency has operated as a political police force since its inception. The FBI’s real objective, as the Church Committee discovered in the mid-1970s, is to “disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and neutralize” groups and individuals the government considers political threats. “Suffice it to say that when and if a true history of the FBI is ever written, it will not only track the rise of the American police state but it will also chart the decline of freedom in America: how a nation that once abided by the rule of law and held the government accountable for its actions has steadily devolved into a police state where justice is one-sided, a corporate elite runs the show, representative government is a mockery, police are extensions of the military, surveillance is rampant, privacy is extinct, and the law is little more than a tool for the government to browbeat the people into compliance,” writes John W. Whitehead.
Posted on: Mon, 12 Jan 2015 17:54:25 +0000
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