"Gentlemen don't read each other's mail."
SecState Henry L. Stimson
We need spies that look like their targets, CIA officers who speak the dialects terrorists use, and FBI agents who can speak to Muslim women who might be intimidated by men.
Jane Harman
COINCIDENCE? I think NOT.
From the Church of Ineffable Stupidity:
Jane Harman, AIPAC's wholly owned subsidiary in Congress (see Jane's little NSA problem.) has long thought that the best way to conduct intel ops was to infiltrate the target with people who fit in, rather than old, fat, balding, sweaty, white guys from Boston College or that other school that seems to clone CIA and FeeBI agents.
She does have a point. Had we had contacts within Al Qaida before September 11, 2001, I am sure Condi Rice would have . . . . Never mind. Still, when you are dealing with tribal folks at home in Tora Bora, an old, fat, balding, sweaty, white guy tends to stand out a bit, especially if he brought his whiskey to keep warm.
That must be why the federal government has infiltrated dKos - to capture the anti-American terrorists, hidden deep under cover.
I am not making this up.
In the lead-up to President Obama's inauguration, federal investigators conducted a major sweep of online social networks in search of threats.
In the process, according to a memo unearthed by a privacy advocate group, feds singled out numerous popular web sites and social networks to be scanned for threats and other information, including the liberal blogging community Daily Kos and National Public Radio.
The Raw Story
NPR? I knew that Bush had pretty much emasculated that organization, installed neocon creeps in its leadership, and pretty much turned it into Fox Lite, but I never knew that NPR posed such a great threat to the US and A.
As for dKos, obviously we are a threat to the nation. We are evil, plotting, conspiratorial, intent on destroying the body politic, fascist, nazi, communist, progressive liberal bastards all. Of course, the best place to find a domestic threat to our nation would be here.
Not Free Republic. Not Faux News. Not Whirled Nut Delay. Here.
Intel work is hard, I will grant you. At times, in years past, it was hard to tell whether the CIA was deliberately pretending to be completely clueless (See the USSR, generally), or whether this super secret organization was actually befuddled, screwed up beyond belief, and incapable to pulling their collective heads out of their asses (see Castro, cigars, generally) when the truth was so obvious to any outsider. But, clearly, the CIA has been seriously damaged in recent times. They closed down their Osama bin Laden branch in 2004. Porter Goss decided that the CIA should be a political arm of the GOP, creating "truths," rather than discovering them. Their renditions program should have resulted in serious jail time, especially for those who gave the orders to kidnap and torture. Unfortunately, Obama has been swindled and blindfolded by the burro-crats, entrenched deep inside the Bloatway, and has provided complete immunity to all concerned. So much for our being a country based on laws.
The FBI is even worse, ably described by former insiders in recent tell all books as utterly dysfunctional and often working at cross purposes. (See Sept. 11, generally).
So we have proof that the INS infiltrated us to seek out dangers to our nation.
EFF recently received new documents as a result of our FOIA lawsuit on social network surveillance, filed with the help of UC Berkeley’s Samuelson Clinic, that reveal two ways the government has been tracking people online: surveillance of social networks to investigate citizenship petitions and the Department of Homeland Security’s use of a “Social Networking Monitoring Center” to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration. This is the first of two posts describing these documents and some of their implications. (Read part one.)
Of the two disclosures, the citizenship verification initiative is perhaps the most disconcerting, both for its assumptions about people who use social networking sites and for its potentially deceptive and unethical approach to collecting information.
Is it that much of a stretch to think that others, (FBI, CIA, NSA, DOD, etc) have done the same? To the contrary, we would be foolish and horribly naive if we didn't suspect that every word we write was reviewed, quite possibly by AI programs, and that certain members here are little more than plants. After all, recall how the feds had infiltrated nuns groups, religious groups and others who planned to attend the Minnesota convention in 2004? That could not have been accomplished unless our government was illegally spying on us. After all, holding cookie sales in order to finance a trip to Minnesota might evolve and eventually become illegal donations to Hamas or Al Qaida!
America is not the same place that it was only a decade ago. 9/11 did change everything, or rather, we sat on our asses and allowed some creeps in office change everything on us. The Patriot Act is so unconstitutional, so offensive, so ridiculous that the original authors of our bill of rights would scoff and call it a work of fiction. Warrantless surveillance, infiltrating peace loving nuns, library surveillance, INS spying on dKOS - my god, when you put it all together, it becomes scary as hell. We've become the Soviet Union!
Big brother is here. Long Live Big Brother.