The Fog of Spying In The Fog of War

neoCrusader Church-War Mobile

In a past Dredd Blog post we noted how various U.S. officials realized that they were war criminals.

But they also realized that they would only be prosecuted for war crimes if they lost the war (On The Origin of The Bully Religion - 2).

These depraved ways of looking at reality evolve during a state of war, and the subsequent evolution that takes place is from left to right (Evolution From Left to Right - 5).

Recently, whistleblower information has been published by a newspaper in England, The Guardian, which shows that the U.S. military is gathering vast amounts of private data from hundreds of millions of citizens (On The Origin of Security - 2) and is storing that information for later use (Obama Administration Rides Into The W Sunset).

Revelations that have by now led to federal lawsuits in at least two federal courts (ACLU vs. Clapper, Alexander, Hagel, Holder, and Mueller) and a propaganda campaign not unlike one carried on by Iranian Mullahs declaring their innocence ("We Would Not Cheat" - Iranian Mullah - 2).

"It is The Fog of Spying", they say, adding that they would "not wittingly" seize private data from hundreds of millions of innocent American citizens.

Which is an attempt to spin this into a "you're doin' a heckuva job Brownie" moment.

But that faux claim of incompetence does not rise to the occasion, nor is it anywhere near the truth:

However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to:

• Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years;

• Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity;

• Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications;

• Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine[s]" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance.

The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access Americans' call or email information without warrants.

The documents also show that discretion as to who is actually targeted under the NSA's foreign surveillance powers lies directly with its own analysts, without recourse to courts or superiors – though a percentage of targeting decisions are reviewed by internal audit teams on a regular basis.

(Guardian, emphasis added). So, we were lied into various wars which were thick with the fog of war, wars which have now led to the fog of spying.

The military is treating U.S. citizens as if they were foreign enemies who have to be spied on in order to protect their privacy.

This fog of government is simply another name for propaganda (The Matriarch of the Matrix - 3).

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Bleeker Street (a nickname for Highway 61):

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The DOJ has charged the whistleblower with espionage (US charges Edward Snowden with spying). The fog thickens.