Steve Watson | December 19 2005

Last week, the New York Times suggested that the
Bush administration has instituted "a major shift in American intelligence-gathering
practices" when it "secretly authorized the National Security
Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States
to search for evidence of terrorist activity without [obtaining] court-approved
warrants."

Bush
defended the actions Saturday, saying that he acted in the aftermath
of the Sept.11 attacks because the United States had failed to detect
communications that might have tipped it off to the plot.

As a result, "I authorized the National
Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept
the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaida
and related terrorist organizations," Bush said. "This is
a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security."

Bush acknowledged that he had ordered the National
Security Agency to conduct an electronic eavesdropping in the US without
first obtaining warrants, and said he would continue the highly classified
program because it was "a vital tool in our war against the terrorists."

The "leak" of this story came at a very
convenient time as the Neo-Cons were desperately trying to get through
the extended Patriot Act in the Senate. Revelations indicate that The
New York Times had known
about the story for at least a year and had not run it, under
government orders.

A New York Times insider, who wishes to remain
anonymous has said that “The Bush administration put its ‘rubber
stamp’ of approval on the release of the story during the hot Patriot
Act debates in order to launch a counter-attack against opposition lawmakers
and civil rights groups, depicting them as anti-American and weak on
terror protection,”

Further indication, not that we need it, that
the corporate media is, at the top, under direct government control.
The intention is to make Bush look strong by telling the general public
that although it has pained him very much, he has had to instigate such
programs and sacrifice liberty for security. The natural response from
the sleeping majority will be to assume that the government knows best
because there has not been another terror attack since 9/11.

Commenting on the Patriot Act, Bush used his weekly
radio address to state that “The terrorists want to attack America
again and kill the innocent and inflict even greater damage than they
did on September 11th and the Congress has a responsibility not to take
away this vital tool that law enforcement and intelligence officials
have used to protect the American people,”

Combined with the "leak" of the spying
story Bush looks like the saviour and those that criticize him, the
outsiders. This is a release valve, eavesdropping on citizens is nothing
new, the only shift here is that the can now TELL us that they're spying
on us and it will slowly be accepted. Soon enough domestic government
spying will become accepted as the norm and somewhere shortly down the
line we may end up in a Nineteen Eighty Four type situation whereby
citizens begin to spy on each other, reporting those who denounce the
accepted policy of eavesdropping.

If the NY Times is to be believed, the National
Security Agency engages in “some eavesdropping inside the country,”
There are hundreds of sources that prove the intelligence services have
been operating similar programs for decades.

“In June 1970 Nixon met with Hoover [FBI],
Helms [CIA], NSA Director Admiral Noel Gaylor, and Defense Intelligence
Agency (DIA) representative Lt. Gen. Donald V. Bennett and told them
he wanted a coordinated and concentrated effort against domestic dissenters,”
Verne Lyon - former
CIA undercover operative.

"For over fifteen years, the CIA, with assistance
from numerous government agencies, conducted a massive illegal domestic
covert operation called Operation CHAOS. It was one of the largest and
most pervasive domestic surveillance programs in the history of this
country. Throughout the duration of CHAOS, the CIA spied on thousands
of U.S. citizens. The CIA went to great lengths to conceal this operation
from the public while every president from Eisenhower to Nixon exploited
CHAOS for his own political ends."

There are also multiple Pentagon projects in operation
that involve the collection of intelligence through domestic eavesdropping.

One example is the Defense Department's Counterintelligence
Field Activity (CIFA)

Consider this from William
M. Arkin of the Washington Post:

"CIFA already
has these authorities, has its own agents, and collects information
on common American citizens under the guise of "sabotage"
and "force protection" threats to the military. Since 9/11,
functions that were previously intended to protect U.S. forces overseas
from terrorism and protect U.S. secrets from spies have been combined
in one super-intelligence function that constitutes the greatest threat
to U.S. civil liberties since the domestic spying days of the 1970's."

"On May 2, 2003, Deputy Secretary of Defense
Paul Wolfowitz signed a memorandum directing the military to collect
and report "non-validated threat information" relating to
U.S. military forces, installations or missions. His memorandum followed
from the establishment of the Domestic Threat Working Group after 9/11,
the intent of which was to create a mechanism to share low-level domestic
"threat information" between the military and intelligence
agencies."

Then we have the "Total
Information Awareness" program whereby "Every purchase
you make with a credit card, every magazine subscription you buy and
medical prescription you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you
send or receive, every academic grade you receive, every bank deposit
you make, every trip you book and every event you attend — all
these transactions and communications will go into what the Defense
Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand database."

Shortly after the announcement of TIA, the Pentagon
backtracked and told us that TIA was shutting down, but read the second
paragraph in this article, the tools are there waiting to be
used, They'll just rename it and start it up again at any given time.
The Tools of TIA include "LifeLog"
which is described as "a multimedia, digital record of everywhere
you go and everything you see, hear, read, say and touch". Another
tool is the MATRIX
database, A federally funded crime database run by multiple
states at once.

Operation
TIPS and similar programs were geared towards turning citizens
themselves into domestic spies.

Then of course there is the joint NSA / Government
Communications Head Quarters of England (GCHQ) Project
Echelon. This long running operation was first exposed in the
mid nineties and then again most prominently by author James
Bamford in his 1999 book Body of Secrets. Bamford comments,
"The cooperation between the Echelon countries is worrying. For
decades, these organizations have worked closely together, monitoring
communications and sharing the information gathered. Now, through Echelon,
they are pooling their resources and targets, maximizing the collection
and analysis of intercepted information."

In the greatest surveillance effort ever established,
the NSA global spy system captures and analyzes virtually every phone
call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world. Quite
obviously they cannot listen to everyone anywhere ALL the time, but
they have the capability to choose when to listen and who to listen
to, wherever they may be.

James Bamford famously recalled how the NSA successfully
intercepted satellite calls from Osama Bin Laden in the late nineties
as he was talking to his mother.

"I don't want to see this country ever go
across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny
total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies
that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper
supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss
from which there is no return." - Senator Frank Church, quoted
in ECHELON:
America's Secret Global Surveillance Network

Under the Clinton
Administration Echelon certainly turned its attention to citizens
of countries everywhere and monitored millions of calls and other communications.

Echelon expert Mike Frost, who spent 20 years
as a spy for the Canadian equivalent of the National Security Agency,
told CBS's "60 Minutes" that the agency was monitoring "everything
from data transfers to cell phones to portable phones to baby monitors
to ATMs."

Domestic spying is nothing new, there has been
at least half a century of such activity in America. The naïveté
of the public is at an all time high as they would rather switch off
than engage in the mess that is modern day politics in America. The
general public will believe that government spying on them is new, and
secondly, they will just accept it because they are being told in a
very unsophisticated fashion, that it is keeping them safe.

The corporate controlled media will keep coming
to the aid of the government when it needs to release these stories
as it has this time around. The only voice of dissent and reason is
coming from the alternative media who will not keep quiet when every
time the "story" is simply something we have been saying,
proving and explaining for years.

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