"But what’s freedom good for if you’re dead? Some say that global surveillance is the price to pay for staying alive. Senate Intelligence Committee chair, Dianne Feinstein, and her House counterpart, Mike Rogers, credit Big Brother for the capture of Najibullah Zazi and David Headley, two genuine nasties. Alas, if that’s the best our two NSA cheerleaders have to offer, they might as well pack up their pom-poms and go home. A former British foreign office minister dispatched their boast as an illusion: Zazi’s name was caught by British Intelligence the old-fashioned way; likewise, the arrest of David Headley, who was involved in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, came in the wake of a British tip-off of the conventional kind. Former NSA surveillance huncho, William Binney, characterizes the entire spying dragnet as useless. Acting on a Russian tip, the NSA did record phone calls of the Tsarnaev brothers before the Boston bombings, and we all know how effective that was. Almost as helpful as the interceptions of the phone calls that bin Laden’s chief of operations made right before 9/11. The only attacks the Feds seem good at preventing are those it instigates. All-time favorites include the sting operation that netted the crackerjack squad of terrorists whose first step to Armageddon was to order al-Qaeda boots from an FBI informant. (Who would want to meet the 72 virgins with the wrong shoes on?) Despite our best efforts to create new terrorists by vaporizing their children with our drones, they still remain a rare breed. Matthew Yglesias estimates the number of lives saved annually by airport security measures as approximately zero. Saving zero lives does not come cheap, mind you. Body scanning alone has cost the US taxpayer billions of dollars. No sooner was he done running Homeland Security than Michael Chertoff cashed in the big bucks at Rapiscan Systems by leading thecheers for full-body scans. This revolving-door pathology afflicting the Beltway can appear paradoxical. Ever wondered why the NSA outsources work that falls squarely within its core competencies? No surprise if the agency contracts out its catering, plumbing, and lawn mowing, but… information technology? The NSA employs thousands of IT experts, from seasoned sysadmins to world-class cryptographers. Whatever Snowden did for the agency as a Booz Allen employee, the NSA could do it in-house more cheaply. So why doesn’t it? The answer to this $75-billion question is money, gobs of it floating right under the nose of public servants cruelly kept by law from getting a piece of the action. The revolving door is there to release the tension. It is a legal mechanism for funneling billions of taxpayer dollars into a handful of private wallets. Contractors serve stints in government for the same reasons thieves case a bank before robbing it. There they learn to operate the moola pipeline and keep it flowing into the right pockets." lobelog/the-nsa-and-the-one-percent/
Posted on: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 00:57:43 +0000
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