A 42-page, declassified memo called Transition 2001, published in December 2000 to brief newly elected President Bush on the National Security Agency, declares that the agency’s mission demands “a powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host ‘protected’ communications of Americans as well as the targeted communications of adversaries.” [emphasis added] The word “protected,” surrounded by double quotations in the memo, refers to all of the personal, private data of Americans protected by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Simply put, prior to the post-9/11 War on Terror, the NSA had every intention of ensnaring the phone conversations, e-mails, chat logs, search history, etc. of all Americans into their wide net of domestic surveillance. Even the double quotations imply a veil of contempt towards our rights. Predating the Transition 2001 memo by three months, and 9/11 by an entire year, a report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century calls for the U.S. Department of Defense to aggressively embrace information technologies but warns of a slow implementation unless a “new Pearl Harbor” ushers in an era of high-tech intelligence gathering. was published by the now-extinct Project for the New American Century, a think tank founded by former State Department staff member Robert Kagan and neoconservative William Kristol, the latter known for his statements suggesting the GOP would be better off without Ron Paul. Although Kristol is now spinning the NSA’s end run around the Fourth Amendment as targeting foreign terrorists with proper oversight, Ron Paul on the other hand predicted the dangers of this Orwellian surveillance state over a quarter-century ago, ironically in the year 1984. Unfortunately Ron Paul’s warning was completely ignored by our government. Not too long after the Transition 2001 memo and the Rebuilding America’s Defenses report, the U.S. Department of Defense moved towards integrating existing information on American citizens and aliens into a centralized, virtual database, as reported in a December 15, 2002 article in the New York Times by Jeffrey Rosen, entitled Total Information Awareness. - Kit Daniels
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:35:16 +0000
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