"In America we once believed our First Amendment prevented a government monopoly on information. But in the age of globalization, the Internet, and social media, the state has become the enemy—not the protector—of free speech."
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/16/the-tentacles-of-the-social-media-octopus/
EXCERPT:
In the decades before 9/11/01 the intelligence apparatus intersected with government, influenced government, and undoubtedly controlled many institutions with it. The legislative oversight function was weak and growing weaker, but it still existed and could have been used to keep the IC in check. However, after the events of 9/11/01, the short-sighted legislative reactions opened the door to allow the surveillance state to weaponize against domestic enemies.
After the Patriot Act was triggered, not coincidentally only six weeks after 9/11, a slow and dangerous fuse was lit that ends with the intelligence apparatus being granted a massive amount of power. Simultaneously the mission of the intelligence community now encompassed monitoring domestic threats as defined by the people who operate the surveillance system.
The problem with assembled power is always what happens when a Machiavellian network takes control over that power and begins the process to weaponize the tools for their own malicious benefit. That is exactly what the network of President Barack Obama did.
The Obama network took pre-assembled intelligence weapons (we should never have allowed to be created) and turned those weapons into political tools for his radical and fundamental change. The target was the essential fabric of our nation.
Ultimately, this corrupt political process gave power to create the Fourth Branch of Government, the Intelligence Branch. From that perspective the fundamental change was successful.
This is the scale of corrupt political compromise on both sides of the DC dynamic that we are up against. Preserving this system is also what removing Donald Trump is all about…. And like I said in the precursor, I doubt Donald Trump fully comprehends the motives of his opposition.
You can find many timelines that follow allegations of Russia tampering in the U.S. election and alleged involvement of Trump officials. But I couldn’t find any comprehensive timelines cross-referencing Obama-era surveillance of whistleblowers, journalists and other U.S. citizens with Russia surveillance allegations. So I built one. Please note: temporal proximity of events doesn’t necessarily imply a connection.READ MORE
READ MOREWhen the media and members of Congress say the NSA spies on Americans, what they really mean is that the FBI helps the NSA do it, providing a technical and legal infrastructure that permits the NSA, which by law collects foreign intelligence, to operate on U.S. soil. It's the FBI, a domestic U.S. law enforcement agency, that collects digital information from at least nine American technology companies as part of the NSA's Prism system. It was the FBI that petitioned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order Verizon Business Network Services, one of the United States' biggest telecom carriers for corporations, to hand over the call records of millions of its customers to the NSA.But the FBI is no mere errand boy for the United States' biggest intelligence agency. It carries out its own signals intelligence operations and is trying to collect huge amounts of email and Internet data from U.S. companies -- an operation that the NSA once conducted, was reprimanded for, and says it abandoned.
Once he reached the conclusion that the NSA's surveillance net would soon be irrevocable, he said it was just a matter of time before he chose to act. "What they're doing" poses "an existential threat to democracy", he said.READ MORE
If there is one country in the world that you would not want to live in, it would be North Korea.READ MORE
Unfortunately, the United States of America is becoming more like North Korea with each passing day. North Korea is a totalitarian police state hellhole where the state rules supreme, the “leader” is lavishly worshipped, no dissent is tolerated, and the government micromanages everything. America is supposed to be the opposite of that, but now Barack Obama is implementing his version of “change” and he has promised to engage in the “remaking” of this nation and to transform it “brick by brick“. A tremendous “cult of personality” has been built up around Obama, and under his leadership the U.S. government has become larger and more repressive than ever before. But do we really want to “change” America so that it more closely resembles totalitarian regimes such as North Korea, communist China, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany? After all, all of those regimes have a nightmarish history of brutality and death. Even today, there are starving North Koreans that are eating their own children. Is that really where we want to end up as a nation?
The truth is that we desperately need to take America in the opposite direction of where Barack Obama is trying to take us. We need a much smaller federal government, a much greater emphasis on freedom and liberty, a return to true free market capitalism, and politicians that are willing to take a low profile and that are actually there to serve the American people.
But what we need and what we are getting are two very different things.
The following are 22 signs that Barack Obama is transforming America into a larger version of North Korea…
...there was a “key decision made shortly after 9/11, which began to rapidly turn the United States of America into the equivalent of a foreign nation for dragnet blanket electronic surveillance.”Yes, something changed after 9/11 and we ended up with a president who NEVER replaced his Muslim name "Hussein" with a Christian name as most do when they undergo a religious conversion (as he professes to have done).
Although Drake’s accusations seem astounding, they corroborate allegations made by Binney only a week earlier. Speaking at the Hackers On Planet Earth conference in New York City earlier this month, Binney addressed a room of thousands about the NSA’s domestic spying efforts. But in a candid interview with journalist Geoff Shively during HOPE, the ex-NSA official candidly revealed the full extent of the surveillance program.
“Domestically, they're pulling together all the data about virtually every U.S. citizen in the country and assembling that information, building communities that you have relationships with, and knowledge about you; what your activities are; what you're doing. So the government is accumulating that kind of information about every individual person and it's a very dangerous process,” Binney said.
Drake and Binney’s statements follow the revelation that law enforcement officers collected cell phone records on 1.3 million Americans in 2011. More news articles are emerging every day suggesting that the surveillance of Americans — off-the-radar and under wraps — is growing at an exponential rate.
An angry Michael V. Hayden insists that top members of Congress were kept informed and supported the post-9/11 program.Read more
Associated Press
July 12, 2009
Washington -- Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden angrily struck back Saturday at assertions that the Bush administration's post-9/11 surveillance program was more far-reaching than imagined and was largely concealed from congressional overseers.
In an interview with the Associated Press, Hayden said that top members of Congress were kept well informed all along the way, notwithstanding protests from some that they were kept in the dark.
Alias Barack Obama: a lie is born: The greatest identity fraud in history Paperback – July 10, 2012
