American Dream: Is it propaganda meant to perpetrate victimhood?

"The AMERICAN DREAM is a 30 minute animated film that shows you how you've been scammed by the most basic elements of our government system." That's how this movie is billed on YouTube (linked below). The movie intends to wake up the viewer to truths about the Federal Reserve that supposedly are secret, and that it's part of an evil global banking elite that's sucking the money out of countries around the world. The movie has some good points to it, but misses one aspect to it. We're not automatically the victim of the banks, we can make choices so that we are free of the banks. Further, the system could work if regulations were in place to keep greedy tendencies in check, but those regulations were dismantled over the last few decades.

The movie seems to come from the Tea Party movement. Clue? It has a long section focused on one of the U.S. Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, and especially gives a rendition of his statement that occasionally the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants. That phrase has recently come back to the surface in a way that's advocating for a new civil war or revolution. As if fighting in the streets will result in anything useful.

The movie shows the life of a financially ignorant everyman who wakes up one morning to undergo foreclosure. As his house is being taken away he's whining about being behind in his payments, but next month he'll have more money just have mercy. The movie goes from there through a tour of the history of money and banking, slanting the presentation towards bankers being evil villains and us normal folk being victimized every time money stops being "real money"

"Real money" appears to be defined as being backed by gold held in a vault.

The story does have a lot of good information in it, and is probably factually correct. But it's highly slanted towards keeping the viewer thinking they're a victim of the system.

One crucial piece it misses is the depression of the 1870-1880's. The movie shows Pres. Andrew Jackson "killing the banks" and fast forwards to 1913, claiming that everything in-between was hunky-dory. It wasn't, that depression in the late 1800's was supposedly extremely severe, and occurred while the U.S. was not under the influence of any form of false money.

The main thing ignored by the movie however is our power of personal choice.

Individual people have two choices about their financial health. They can live above their means, spending willy nilly, maxing out the credit cards, etc. Or they can live beneath their means, keeping borrowing to a minimum, instead saving and investing their money in a way that creates personal financial resiliency.

The movie shows the ignorant everyman as having lived above his means. Unable to keep up with his personal greed, the banks simply exercised their rights in the contract he signed when he couldn't keep up payments on the loans that fueled his greedy lifestyle. Living above ones means is just as greedy as the bankers depicted in the movie as evil demons, what's different is the scale.

The fact is that any time you take out a loan you're putting yourself under the control of someone else. Somewhere inside that loan will be provisions of taking back stuff in case loan payments are not made. Any lender who doesn't put those provisions into loan agreements is stupid and will go out of business. The banking business has thousands of years of history behind it, so every bank will understand that principle.

The way to not being controlled by others? Don't take out loans. Instead of living a life based on borrowed money, be frugal and create personal financial resilience.

It's that simple.

We don't have to see ourselves as victims of the great evil banking conglomerates. We can live beneath our means and be free of debt.

Links: 

http://theamericandreamfilm.com/

9/11 Debate: Loose Change vs. Popular Mechanics

Loose Change is a documentary depicting some serious questions about the veracity of the claims around the September 11, 2001 attacks. There's huge doubt that the 9/11 Commission came even close to the truth, just as there are huge doubts that the Warren Commission came up with anything close to the truth regarding the Kennedy Assassination. It seems to me that a whole new industry of conspiracists are going to be debating September 11, 2001 for the next 40 years.

On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman hosted the makers of the Loose Change movie in a debate with editors from Popular Mechanics who had written a book debunking many of the claims of September 11, 2001 theorists.

Re: Fascism: Are we there yet?

At antiwar.com is the question Fascism: Are We There Yet? Hmmm... I suppose if I'd taken more political science courses in college I might have an understanding of the meaning for fascism and totalitarianism but, like Democrat and Republican and Liberal and Conservative, these are just words which, to me, seem more like the name of a team rather than an ideological anything. I'd written before from the quest to understand what fascism is. There's a lot of people who'll declare Bush is a Fascist, but it doesn't seem to me they understand the meaning any better than I do. The Nazi party in Germany was Fascist, but what does that mean?

All that aside, the article linked above does make for an interesting (and alarming) case. There's clearly a growing capability within the U.S. Government to establish ubiquitous screening of all activities. Their justification is to find terrorists, and to find terrorists they'll capture records of all our activities and then deploy a zillion computers to sift through that data to find suspicious patterns.

When the plan was more public it was called Total Information Awareness ... while that project name was canceled and closed by the DoD, the individual projects were continued to be developed. For example document analysis, tracking telephone calls and more. Again the article linked above has other examples of TIA projects continuing onwards.

As he points out - the administration officials promised us they weren't spying on us. They've also said that revealing the existance of surveillance programs would give "the terrorists" too much information. And they promised the wiretapping that was revealed in 2005 was "it", and that the surveillance they were doing was targeted carefully and did not track domestic phone calls. But the most recent program revelation showed those were all lies. The most recently revealed program is tracking all phone calls, even domestic. Why are we not surprised they lied to us again?

The most interesting thing I found through the above linked article is a discussion of totalitarianism: Lecture 10, The Age of Totalitarianism: Stalin and Hitler ... this is part of a series of lectures about history, so it's mostly about events that happened in Eastern Europe and other European countries in the 1900's. There were many regimes during that period with brutal governments, brutal supression of the people, and which are called totalitarian.

What I gather is totalitarianism is a government practice of having total control over the people that are being governed.

Several times in the article it said totalitarianism required sufficiently fancy technology to make total control effective.

As I've discussed in other blog entries, what is enabling a vision like Total Information Awareness is the increasing capability of computer systems.

So, it's worth pondering how it could be that a database of phone calls leads to totalitarianism? The Fascism article makes a claim it does, but to understand what he's getting at lets try and reason it through.

It's clear that by itself a database of phone calls doesn't tell very much. Especially as, supposedly, the database doesn't have peoples names in it, just phone calls. The most you can do with just a list of phone calls is to build up a map of connections between phone numbers based on who is calling whom.

Building up a map of connections between phone numbers is interesting, but without a connection to people it's not terribly useful. You know phone A called phone B, but that carries little information. If you can add to that the names of the caller and callee, that adds a lot of information. If you can record the phone call, that adds even more, especially if you can automatically translate the voices to text.

By the way, one of the projects in the TIA was specifically to automatically translate any voice into text.

With that in hand you have information. Information about connections between people based on the phone calls between them. There are databases showing the owner name for a given telephone number, and since the phone companies are apparently willing to cooperate with the government to give them access to the phone calls being placed, it's not too far a leap to think they might also share with the government the owner names for each phone number.

But, where is the totalitarian control?

I think it gets to the stereotype of the totalitarian regime. That "spies are everywhere", and that there's a file of your activities being kept by the secret police. Except, in this case the ubiquitous spies are being built into the computer equipment that's running our society, and the files are being kept in a database.

I'm pondering away and keep coming back to this: Collecting data is one step. The totalitarian control comes when the government acts on that data.

An example of likely legal U.S. spying inside U.S.

With the recent hubbub over domestic syping by U.S. spy agencies, here's an example that's probably legal.

Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space

The article is about the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Their work is described this way:

Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters.

...

With help, the agency can also zoom in. Its officials cooperate with private groups, such as hotel security, to get access to footage of a lobby or ballroom. That video can then be linked with mapping and graphical data to help secure events or take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

Privacy advocates wonder how much the agency picks up — and stores. Many are increasingly skeptical of intelligence agencies with recent revelations about the Bush administration's surveillance on phone calls and e-mails.

Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite "snapshot" from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one meter level, which is 3.3 feet.

In other words their job is similar to the Google Earth service. But it's likely that, because they're the military, the resolution on their images is much better.

The images available through commercial services are, by law, limited to a resolution of 1 meter. Meaning the smallest object that can be identified is 1 meter in size. So we wonder what their resolution is. For example if you have a habit of having sex in the back yard, the commercial images won't recognize what you're doing, but what about theirs?

The article raises a big question. Just what are they doing spending most of their effort looking inside the U.S. territory? What are they looking for? An obvious use leaps to mind, that this service could help locate marijuana fields and the like. It might also help locate illicit airfields, such as used by drug smugglers.

I expect one strategic service they provide is finding new construction. This would require some fancy image analysis, but with a whole world full of images detecting new construction would be very labor intensive. However a computer, with fancy image analysis, might be able to identify changes between pictures taken at different times. The tricky part of course is the pictures will never be at the same angle or lighting conditions, hence the required fancy image analysis.

My thought is that if "change" is detected in a series of pictures, then a flag could be raised to send those pictures to an analyst for further study. It may be benign, but it may be an illicit nuclear weapons construction facility.

In any case the current hubbub is over domestic spying. Earlier in this I suggested this is probably legal. My reasoning is pictures taken of the outdoors are, by definition, public spaces. A warrant is not required for anybody to take a picture of the outside of a building, nor is one required to take a picture from above. That's all they're doing.

Where it becomes a little tricky is they have made arrangements with building owners to incorporate video from surveillance cameras. Where are those surveillance cameras pointing? Inside or outside buildings? Are they pointing into private spaces or only public ones?

Massive privacy violation by U.S. government

The revelations of privacy violation by the U.S. Government keeps going on. The latest is news that the NSA has a huge database recording the "envelopes" of most telephone calls made in the U.S. This is following the wiretapping scandal from last year, and I see a lot of hubbub in the news.

NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls USA Today, May 11, 2006

Anger grows over NSA surveillance report C|NET News, May 11, 2006

NSA Sweep "Waste of Time," Analyst Says, DefenseTech.org May 12, 2006

"Every Call Ever Made" in NSA Database DefenseTech.org, May 12, 2006

NSA's data mining explained, CNET News, May 12, 2006

The system in the latest revelation relies on cooperation from the telephone carriers. The telephone carriers worked with the NSA to install equipment in their switching systems, and the equipment extracted certain information from the telephone switching systems, and transmitted that information back to NSA headquarters.

The claim is the data is simply the telephone numbers involved with every phone call. This is known as "envelope" information, as it is akin to the addressing on the outside of an envelope sent through postal mail.

The way I understand this, each individual telephone call doesn't give much information. But by collecting a huge number of phone calls one can build a map of associations between telephone numbers. That is, if person A at phone number N regularly calls person B at phone number Z, that's an association.

Each call sets up a relation between the phone numbers involved in the call.

If, by other means, the spooks have determined that phone number T is used by nefarious individuals, then any phone call to/from that phone number should be of interest to the spooks. Calls to/from that phone number associates the other phone number with those nefarious activities done by the owner of phone number T.

Since the system only records the envelope (supposedly) all phone calls have equal significance. Suppose the nefarious people at phone number T decide to make an innocent phone call? For example someone might come to their door saying "my car broke down, can I call my brother". Now the brother of this innocent bystander has now become associated with the nefarious people. Who knows what method the spooks have for detecting innocent bystanders and weeding them out.

This system is obviously a followon to the Total Information Awareness system. I recorded the status of the TIA back in 2002: DARPA's Information Awareness Office, The Total Information Awareness System; Or, Big Brother in-carnate

It's important to point out that the discovery by the public of the TIA caused a privacy hubbub, which then caused the Congress people to make enough hubbub that the Department of Defense "cancel" the program. What they actually did was cancel a couple of the programs, and then migrate the rest of the programs to other directors.

Among the TIA projects existant in 2002, there are two which are obviously related to this.

Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery (EELD) involved detection of interesting correlations and connections between specific elements in large sets of data. The discussion I wrote above about the relations between telephone numbers by tracking the calls between phone numbers would fit very well with EELD.

Genisys describes a data collection and storage system that would be very useful to EELD.

I think it's very important to interpret this relevation within the larger context. It's clear that the U.S. Government wants a very intrusive system that watches everything that we do. The revelations last year of wiretapping, and the current revelations of collecting the phone numbers of every phone call, these are not isolated incidents.

The prior existence of the Total Information Awareness system tells us what they are interested in. They will not have lost interest in their goal, instead they will have moved the projects around putting them behind cloaks of secrecy and more.

Again I find myself thinking -- is this the world we want to create? Does this match the core values of America? Or is this representing a government that has diverged itself from American values?

I think this is divergent from American values. If this is true, then why are we, Americans, sitting on our hands and not doing anything about this?

UPDATE: William Arkin with the Washington Post just posted Telephone Records are just the Tip of NSA's Iceberg which gives more details of the existing programs being developed by the government. Included in this posting is a list of 500 software tools that have been developed by government agencies for intelligence data gathering and mining.

Of course it makes sense for the government to be employing advanced software tools. As technology advances, shouldn't the government make use of it?

Well, okay. But, the issue is how often are they going to make mistakes, and whether the systems are intrusive or not.

UAV's coming to the U.S. for more spying on U.S. Citizens

Okay, that's possibly the most alarmist title I could have chosen. But this is what the government is moving to doing.

What's a UAV? Unmanned Air Vehicle, a.k.a. Drone. They are being used widely in Iraq and Afghanistan against "the terrorists". There's pointers to various articles at the end of this. This has been a long time coming, and it clearly fits into the general government strategy to install broad surveillance.

My first thought is -- the C|NET and AOPA articles (linked below) are only looking at regulatory issues. One example is a tiny surveillance aircraft, that weighs all of 14 pounds, and was used to buzz a couple biker rallies in North Carolina. A point in one of the articles is that an airplane hitting a bird causes a lot of damage to the aircraft (and kills the bird), so what would this thing, at 14 lbs weighing much more than the typical bird, do to an aircraft? These things don't carry transponders, so how are pilots going to detect them and avoid running into them? They are unmanned, and so won't have an in-built ability to avoid other aircraft.

So, yeah, there's some clear air safety considerations. The AOPA is doing their job in raising those concerns.

But, that's as far as they're going. I get the impression that if the FAA enforces some set of rules against UAV's the AOPA will be happy. But what about the rest of us, the ones who are going to be spied upon?

On the one hand the government and industry representatives are portraying this as being used for border security. Again, the danger of terrorists lurking in every corner ready to kill us if we don't deploy eternal vigilance. But on the other hand these were used to monitor a biker rally. It was used to watch for "unruly behavior". Yeah, you can expect "unruly" behavior at a biker rally alright, but does that warrant spying on the people?

It seems that yet again I'm coming up with the same question that's turned up before.

Technology is giving us more and more capabilities. But is the world that's being created around us the one we want to live in?

Is the technology getting away from us and creating a monster that will be difficult to reign in?

Resources and articles

Drone aircraft may prowl U.S. skies discusses regulatory concerns about the depoloyment of UAV's in the U.S. for border surveillance, detection of marijuana crops, and buzzing biker rallies.

AOPA acts to keep unregulated UAV operation out of navigable airspace and AOPA questions FAA's 'stealthy' UAV TFR on Mexican border discussing actions by the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association to cause the FAA to review UAV usage for safety considerations.

Electric airplane (UAV) stays aloft for 48 hours and High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) - 'Eternal Planes' to watch over us and Aerovironment tests a hydrogen powered airplane -- my previous UAV coverage.

Theocracy in America, an "Unholy Alliance"?

Kevin Phillips is one of the political operatives who helped bring the Republicans into power in the 1960's and 1970's. He's billed as a Republican Strategist, and eventually worked in the Reagan White House. With that as background we have a very interesting book from him, warning of the danger of the neo-Theocracy we find ourselves with today in the United States.

Here's some resources:

American Theocracy : The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21stCentury

Interview with Democracy Now, March 21, 2006

The Unholy Alliance Kevin Phillips believes the U.S. is threatened by a combination of petroleum, preachers and debt

This gives a sense of where the book is going:

AMY GOODMAN: Kevin Phillips, you talk about radical religion, about debt, and about oil, about this being an oil war. You also talk about peak oil. That's not talked about very much in the mainstream. Explain.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: The peak oil idea is that just as the United States oil production peaked in 1971, that we have a limited amount of oil globally, and that it’s something that can't be re-created. It’s running out. And the expectation of some is that the oil production of the non-OPEC countries will peak at some point during the 2010s, and that then the production of OPEC itself will peak in the 2020s or 2030s. Now, some people think that Saudi production has already peaked.

Now, if you believe this, and it’s possible, then we face an enormous convergence, again under specific oil-related circumstances, of a global struggle for natural resources as the price of oil climbs, as we turn the armed services into a global oil protection service, which has been happening, and as we see the administration refuse to grapple with the need to really curb oil consumption in the United States, which is mostly through transportation and especially motor vehicles.

And I just have a sense, as many others on the conservative side do, this administration has no strategy to deal with these converging problems, be they foreign policy, military, oil, debt. They are like the three little monkeys on the old jade thing – the one sees no evil, one speaks no evil, and one hears no evil. Do they know anything? You know, that's an open question.

But, it just goes on and on. Such as an assertion that: "that the Bush electorate is probably 50 to 55% people who believe in Armageddon and probably more or less the same numbers who believe that the Antichrist is already on earth. And when you have this backdrop and you have a president who got his start in national politics as his father’s liaison with the religious right back in 1987 and ‘88, you just have an enormous exposure to this whole psychological context and an awareness on the part of people in the White House that this huge constituency interprets the Middle East in this very unusual way."

Inside the US's regime-change school

For a couple years the Bush Administration has been rattling war against Iran (and Syria). (see here, here, here, and background material for the Iraq war for some of my previous coverage).

The justification is said to be Iran's plan to build out nuclear weapons ability. Except Iran says their plans are for peaceful nuclear power production, just for electricity. And, in any case, Iran is a Non Proliferation Treaty signatory and apparently they haven't done anything to violate that treaty. It's more than a little contradictory that on the one hand we are threatening Iran, who has yet to violate the NPT, while we are making a broad deal with India to support their nuclear power program, and India has never signed on to the NPT and is known to have (today) nuclear weapons.

Logic has never been a strong suit of the Bush Administration. And given their clear goal of toppling Iran after toppling Iraq we shouldn't be surprised to have them invent some kind of justification for launching a new war.

Inside the US's regime-change school offers an interesting glimpse into a "regime change school". It's clear to me the article isn't highly verifiable, instead it's an account of one person who "accidentally" attended a secretive U.S. backed program to train activists in methods that can be used to topple a government.

The "school" was a week-long session held at a Holiday Inn in Dubai. Sessions were led by members of the Otpor democratic movement that overthrew the late Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. And, given the secretive nature of the "school" the hotel advertised them as "Griffin Hospital".

In class, the Serbian instructors organized role-playing games in which the participants would assume the personas of characters such an Iranian woman or a Shi'ite cleric. Throughout these exercises in empathy and psychology, stress was laid on the importance of ridiculing the political elite as an effective tool of demythologizing them in the eyes of the people.

"They taught us what methods they used in Serbia to bring down Milosevic," Nilofar said. "They taught us some of them so we could choose the best one to bring down the regime, but they didn't mention directly bringing down the regime - they just taught us what they had done in their own country."

Hurm... your tax dollars at work, I suppose.

Later in the article Nilofar described the activists as mahrum, a Farsi word for deprived. Apparently the ones inside Iran most clamoring for change are "lower-class families who have been deprived of everything and now they've decided to overthrow the government".

Our right to privacy, killed by the Bush administration? Or was it inevitable?

It's easy to lay the blame for loss of privacy on the Bush Administration. It is while the Bush Administration was in power when massive privacy invasion by the government was disclosed. While I'm quick to lay blame on the Bush Administration, in this case there's a heavy dose of inevitablity.

Let's consider these articles which make an interesting juxtaposition.

No longer can the right of privacy be expected in any walk of life -- an editorial in a local newspaper in Hagerstown Maryland.

Invasion of privacy must stop -- An editorial in a local newspaper in India

Taking Spying to Higher Level, Agencies Look for More Ways to Mine Data - A New York Times article by John Markoff

The first two take the opinion that we have a "right to privacy". As the Hagerstown editorial mentions, a right to privacy wasn't written into the U.S. Constitution, but that was because the Founders assumed privacy was such an obvious right as "breathing" or "eating" that they didn't bother to discuss it. But little did they have a clue of the sort of technology which would be developed.

The article from India is interesting because of the expression of fear which comes up just with a hint that any of our phone conversations could be tapped.

The NY Times article just demonstrates how the government is continuing to look for more and more surveillance and privacy-destroying tools. It discusses an NSA visit to Silicon Valley looking for data mining tools. Which just makes me think of the Total Information Awareness project.

Data mining is widely used by corporations. For example credit card companies data-mine transactions looking for possibly fraudulent activity. In the article they discuss a prison which used data mining of telephone call records to discover a drug smuggling ring.

The point is technology creates new possibilities. The digitization of "everything" makes privacy invasion so much easier to do. Which gets to the inevitability.

Even if it's inevitable, that doesn't mean "we the people" should just allow it to happen without protest.

Asia Times Online :: India to join Turkmenistan gas pipeline

Hopefully you saw Fahrenheit 9/11, the movie by Michael Moore that was prominent in 2004. His main topic throughout the movie was to explore cronyism and how that created the war in Iraq. The main example is the laundry list of business ties between the Administration, the Saudi royalty and even to the bin Laden family. That most of the Administration has ties to the Oil Industry (both GW and GHW Bush owned oil companies, VP Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton, Chevron named an oil tanker for Condoleeza Rice, etc) figured heavily in this movie.

In one segment Moore talked about the oil in Central Asia and the U.S. plan for bringing that oil to market. The Central Asia oil has been a matter of power play for several years, and it's land-locked position that isn't easily accessible makes it difficult to "extract" and sell on the market. Taking it in one direction, you'd be going through Russia. Another direction and you're going across Siberia and then the port is in the arctic and probably locked in by ice. And to the south are steep mountains, some of the highest in the world. Also to the south is Iran, a sworn enemy of the U.S.

The chosen U.S. route was through Afghanistan. The U.S. has pushed for this route since the 1990's. The problem was, neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan were terribly friendly to the U.S. The Taliban was in control, and Pakistan was very friendly with the Taliban. It didn't make any difference that during the 1980's the U.S. worked closely with Pakistan and the people who became the Taliban. In the 1980's the menace was Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, and the U.S. effort to drive Russia out, which meant a secret operation supplying the mujahadeen (as they were known then) with arms and training. By the 1990's that was long in the past, and U.S. policy had shifted away. Even so the Taliban government visited the U.S., as Michael Moore documented, working to negotiate both the opium poppy eradication as well as the pipeline deal.

BTW, since the toppling of the Taliban government, opium poppy production has sprung back to pre-Taliban levels.

In any case there was an existing plan to run an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. And you can imagine the big question in U.S. and oil industry planning -- how the heck do we get access to Afghanistan? Essentially that country had become enemy territory.

Conveniently the September 11, 2001 attack provided the needed excuse. The culprits were in Afghanistan, which gave us all the excuse in the world to invade that country, topple its government, etc.

And, now, conveniently the path was clear. Afghanistan was no longer essentially enemy territory. Further, in the process of making war on Afghanistan the U.S. established bases and cooperation with several Central Asian countries. These countries had been carved out of the former Soviet Union after its collapse in the early 1990's.

A nagging question is whether the September 11, 2001 attack was merely a coincidence, or whether some behind the scenes conspiracy created it? There's enough connections there to make one ponder. The Bush family had ties with the bin Laden family, to the point that one of the bin Laden cousins bailed George W Bush out of at least one of his failed businesses. And there was the pre-existing plan for a pipeline through Afghanistan, and coincidentally the major players in creating that plan are now major players in both the Afghanistan government and the U.S. relationship with Afghanistan.

But there isn't enough proven data to truly connect the attack to any behind the scenes conspiracy. So we'll just leave that question dangling out there.

What's of interest now is this article: India to join Turkmenistan gas pipeline

It discusses two different pipeline projects to bring Natural Gas to "market". One is the US-backed Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan (TAP) while the other is the Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI).

This appears to be part of the larger geopolitics power struggle. The different sources of these two pipelines is interesting. Iran being an U.S. enemy at this moment makes this statement interesting:

Moreover, unlike IPI, the project does not run the risk of being blacklisted for participation by US and European financiers and companies. The US has been encouraging Pakistan to abandon the IPI project and consider TAP for meeting its gas needs.

Blacklisted?? This isn't explained, but clearly the official relationship with Iran is problematic for many countries. But Pakistan probably has a lot of cooperation with Iran, given they share a long border and probably have common cultural elements. But to the U.S. and the "west" Iran is a pariah, being controlled by fundamentalists who are opposed to the western powers.

Chavez threatens to cut off oil to U.S. - Feb 18, 2006

This CNN article: Chavez threatens to cut off oil to U.S. discusses a threat by Hugo Chavez to cut off Venezuela's shipments of oil to the U.S. Part of this has been an ongoing story, for example the American-backed coup attempt in Venezuela a couple years ago.

Chavez has been making statements for years about vague threats against him by the U.S. They might sound like the ravings of paranoia, except that there was this weird coup which started to topple him out of power. A coup which was clearly inspired by American interests. And, there is the long history of the U.S. toppling governments in the Western Hemisphere through following the Monroe Doctrine, in which President Monroe declared to the world, "The Western Hemisphere is ours, and you can't have it" and which has justified repeated actions by the U.S. government against western hemisphere governments from at least the Dominican Republic, to Allende's government in Chile, to the invasions of Grenada and Panama.

A part of the game playing between the U.S. and Venezuela is repeated expulsions of diplomats over allegations of spying.

Which just reminds me of: The confessions of an economic hit-man an interview I heard on Democracy Now a few days ago. The interviewee, John Perkins, had written a book exposing, as a former insider to the game, how the U.S. government has quietly created a worldwide economic empire. A part of that game is to make deals with world leaders where people like him would meet newly elected world leaders and offer them a deal. In one hand the economic hit man will offer riches, kickbacks for example from the sale of whatever resources that country has. In the other hand the economic hit man will hold a threat of violence against that leader or his/her family. These leaders know the history and know that legions of previous world leaders have been assassinated or overthrown by these people.

The confessions of an economic hit-man

Democracy Now for February 15, 2006 has an interesting interview with John Perkins, author of "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man". Ostensibly he worked as an economist for a big consulting company, but he describes his real job as

JOHN PERKINS: We economic hit men, during the last 30 or 40 years, have really created the world's first truly global empire, and we've done this primarily through economics, and the military only coming in as a last resort. Therefore, it's been done pretty much secretly. Most of the people in the United States have no idea that we've created this empire and, in fact, throughout the world it's been done very quietly, unlike old empires, where the army marched in; it was obvious. So I think the significance of the things you discussed, the fact that over 80% of the population of South America recently voted in an anti-U.S. president and what's going on at the World Trade Organization, and also, in fact, with the transit strike here in New York, is that people are beginning to understand that the middle class and the lower classes around the world are being terribly, terribly exploited by what I call the corporatocracy, which really runs this empire.

His story is as an insider to the creation of the current empire, what techniques are used by these self-described economic hit-men. The empire was constructed quietly through economic leverage rather than in obvious ways like marching armies into a country and toppling governments. The fact that we're in Iraq and Afghanistan today is more an example of the extremes to which the economic hit-men will go, that they begin with threats and bribes, but if the individual government leaders do not cooperate under threats or bribes then they can create wars as needed.

He ends with this thought: "...I look at myself as an extremely loyal American citizen. I believe in the principles of this country, which I think that in the past few decades, increasingly, we've put them way in the back burner. But as good Americans, we need to insist that our government and our corporations honor democracy."

But I think that, while he said that very nicely, it's very short sighted. This empire is economic, and is based on the corporations being used as leverage against other countries and to control other countries. In my view this story isn't about the United States controlling other countries ... but instead some other entity, which is not beholden to any one government but instead beholden only to itself. It's using the United States government today simply because of the power the U.S. holds.

I think the same leverage is being used against the United States as well. For example consider the debt being run up under the Bush Administration. John Perkins describes how debt is being used as a lever against these other countries, so of course it's also being used against the U.S. as well. A huge amount of our national strength is going towards paying off that debt.

And, always, when you owe money to others, those others has some measure of control over you.

At a personal level what happens when you "own" a house? The vast majority of people don't own their houses, they have a mortgage and it's the mortgage company that owns the house. If they don't keep up a sufficient income level to pay the mortgage payments, the mortgage company will forclose and take away their house. Therefore the debt they have against "their" house forces them towards some kind of work life, towards having a job so they can have the money to pay their debt. They wouldn't have the freedom to quit their stinking job and go off to the country and paint art. They have to stay in their job to pay their debts.

So it goes also for governments.

Is this the world we want to live in? Where a kind of secretive entity of some kind is controlling the world, toppling governments, etc, all to maintain some kind of power stranglehold?

Iraq, Vietnam all over again?

In Permanent bases in Iraq? Tom Engelhardt suggests we interpret Iraq as Vietnam.  Iraq is a worsening situation, where it's hard to see any face-saving exit from the country and where the population is increasingly rising up against the American presence.  Plus, at home there's a growing anger over this war.  I don't know what's taken the American people so long, the war is clearly illegal and immoral.

Engelhardt's main point of discussion is to contrast the plan for troop reductions with a fact "on the ground".  Namely the presence of the permanent bases that have been constructed, which cost several billion dollars.  An army engineer tasked with facilities development described them in an engineering magazine article with "staggering" cost.  If the plan is to withdraw, then why spend billions of dollars on bases?

One of the bases has finally been discussed in the mainstream press as having a "small town feel".  It has all the comforts of home, extensive telecom and other infrastructure, etc.  And in the London Telegraph is another covering the still-under-construction al-Asad airbase.  Apparently each of these bases cover 15-20 square miles of land.  There are at least four of these bases in Iraq and the fact we're stating this as "at least" is a symptom of the secrecy.

"Why we Fight", a movie you must see

On January 17, 1961 (45 years ago) President Eisenhower delivered his farewell address as he was leaving office, and as President Kennedy was taking office.  It is this speech in which he made the fateful warning to beware the growing influence of the military-industrial complex.  I'll copy the text of that address to the end of this posting.

"Why We Fight" is a new movie, released on January 17, 2006, which takes his speech and examines the state of that military-industrial complex.  Well, it's clear the military-industrial complex is alive and well, and has great influence in all branches of U.S. government.

A point made strongly by this movie is that supplying the military with weapons and equipment and services is big business.  Somewhere around three quarters of a Trillion dollars, per year.  That's more than a lot of money.  Which makes me wonder, just how much of the current U.S. militarism is inspired by those companies.

As a speaker says in the movie, the companies in the defense industry have fiduciary requirements just the same as any other company.  Those fiduciary requirements obviously require keeping the shareholders happy, require continued improvement in revenue and earnings.  But what if the natural course of the country were peace, and to require fewer armaments, wouldn't those companies have decreased revenues?  It's well understood the defense industry has powerful lobbyists and everything else in the halls of government, so can't the defense industry pull some strings to create wars and conflict?

This movie makes a very powerful statement about the current conduct of war.  It includes in-depth interviews of a range of people who were directly involved with either creating that war, or the consequences of it.   The movie is presented as several story threads that proceed together to tell a joint story, one of an overbearing U.S. power being used for Imperialistic ends.

One of the moving story threads is that of a NY City cop who was a Vietnam veteran.  One of his sons worked in the World Trade Center, and on his way to work on September 11, 2001 he saw from the subway train the WTC burning.  In his grief from losing his son he became, like many of us, angry and vengeful.  Through the progress of the movie he tells that story of vengeance, including how he got his sons name painted on the side of a bomb which was used in the Iraq war.  And then he heard President Bush admit on national television that he was confused how anybody could have thought there was a connection between Iraq and the events of September 11, 2001.

President Bush lied to us.  He lied us into war.  As this NY City cop says, the stereotype of the office of the President is Integrity.  President Bush ran on a platform of Integrity.

But, as the movie says, in almost every armed conflict the U.S. has been involved in, the President and other leaders lied to us.  One of the clearest cases was the Gulf of Tonkin incident which President Johnson used to justify launching the Vietnam War.

This movie contains so much information and ideas.  It is a very moving and full of powerful statements from all sides of the debate over the military-industrial complex.

Since Eisenhowers farewell speech plays such an important role in this movie, and contains some powerful statements, I thought to see if it could be found on the Internet.

The Disclosure Project has the video of the address.

On CommonDreams.org Eisenhower's Farewell Warning Was Meant For Our Time by James Carroll, says what I tried to say above very well. And, it's interesting that article was written in 2001, on the eve of GW Bush being sworn in as president.

Here is the text (copied from informationclearinghouse.info):

Eisenhower's Farewell Address to the Nation
January 17, 1961

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Good evening, my fellow Americans: First, I should like to express my gratitude to the radio and television networks for the opportunity they have given me over the years to bring reports and messages to our nation. My special thanks go to them for the opportunity of addressing you this evening. 
Three days from now, after a half century of service of our country, I shall lay down the responsibilities of office as, in traditional and solemn ceremony, the authority of the Presidency is vested in my successor. 

This evening I come to you with a message of leave-taking and farewell, and to share a few final thoughts with you, my countrymen. 

Like every other citizen, I wish the new President, and all who will labor with him, Godspeed. I pray that the coming years will be blessed with peace and prosperity for all. 

Our people expect their President and the Congress to find essential agreement on questions of great moment, the wise resolution of which will better shape the future of the nation. 

My own relations with Congress, which began on a remote and tenuous basis when, long ago, a member of the Senate appointed me to West Point, have since ranged to the intimate during the war and immediate post-war period, and finally to the mutually interdependent during these past eight years. 

In this final relationship, the Congress and the Administration have, on most vital issues, cooperated well, to serve the nation well rather than mere partisanship, and so have assured that the business of the nation should go forward. So my official relationship with Congress ends in a feeling on my part, of gratitude that we have been able to do so much together. 

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts America is today the strongest, the most influential and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment. 

Throughout America's adventure in free government, such basic purposes have been to keep the peace; to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among peoples and among nations. 

To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. 

Any failure traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us a grievous hurt, both at home and abroad. 

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle – with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment. 

Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties. A huge increase in the newer elements of our defenses; development of unrealistic programs to cure every ill in agriculture; a dramatic expansion in basic and applied research – these and many other possibilities, each possibly promising in itself, may be suggested as the only way to the road we wish to travel.

But each proposal must be weighed in light of a broader consideration; the need to maintain balance in and among national programs – balance between the private and the public economy, balance between the cost and hoped for advantages – balance between the clearly necessary and the comfortably desirable; balance between our essential requirements as a nation and the duties imposed by the nation upon the individual; balance between the actions of the moment and the national welfare of the future. Good judgment seeks balance and progress; lack of it eventually finds imbalance and frustration. 

The record of many decades stands as proof that our people and their Government have, in the main, understood these truths and have responded to them well in the face of threat and stress. 

But threats, new in kind or degree, constantly arise. 

Of these, I mention two only. 

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction. 

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea. 

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. 

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. 

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. 

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. 

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades. 

In this revolution, research has become central, it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. 

Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers. 

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded. 

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. 

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society. 

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we – you and I, and our government – must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without asking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow. 

Down the long lane of the history yet to be written America knows that this world of ours, ever growing smaller, must avoid becoming a community of dreadful fear and hate, and be, instead, a proud confederation of mutual trust and respect. 

Such a confederation must be one of equals. The weakest must come to the conference table with the same confidence as do we, protected as we are by our moral, economic, and military strength. That table, though scarred by many past frustrations, cannot be abandoned for the certain agony of the battlefield. 

Disarmament, with mutual honor and confidence, is a continuing imperative. Together we must learn how to compose differences, not with arms, but with intellect and decent purpose. Because this need is so sharp and apparent I confess that I lay down my official responsibilities in this field with a definite sense of disappointment. As one who has witnessed the horror and the lingering sadness of war – as one who knows that another war could utterly destroy this civilization which has been so slowly and painfully built over thousands of years – I wish I could say tonight that a lasting peace is in sight. 

Happily, I can say that war has been avoided. Steady progress toward our ultimate goal has been made. But, so much remains to be done. As a private citizen, I shall never cease to do what little I can to help the world advance along that road. 

So – in this my last good night to you as your President – I thank you for the many opportunities you have given me for public service in war and peace. I trust that in that service you find some things worthy; as for the rest of it, I know you will find ways to improve performance in the future. 

You and I – my fellow citizens – need to be strong in our faith that all nations, under God, will reach the goal of peace with justice. May we be ever unswerving in devotion to principle, confident but humble with power, diligent in pursuit of the Nations' great goals. 

To all the peoples of the world, I once more give expression to America's prayerful and continuing aspiration: 

We pray that peoples of all faiths, all races, all nations, may have their great human needs satisfied; that those now denied opportunity shall come to enjoy it to the full; that all who yearn for freedom may experience its spiritual blessings; that those who have freedom will understand, also, its heavy responsibilities; that all who are insensitive to the needs of others will learn charity; that the scourges of poverty, disease and ignorance will be made to disappear from the earth, and that, in the goodness of time, all peoples will come to live together in a peace guaranteed by the binding force of mutual respect and love. 

Now, on Friday noon, I am to become a private citizen. I am proud to do so. I look forward to it. 

Thank you, and good night. 

Revenge of the Return of the Son of TIA, Part LXVII

arsTechnica has an interesting overview of government spying on U.S. Citizens. Revenge of the Return of the Son of TIA, Part LXVII It refers to a Christian Science Monitor article I discussed here: U.S. Spies plan massive data sweep of Internet as well as other information.

The overall context for this story is the Total Information Awareness system which had been under development by the DoD, been exposed to the public, which caused a stink, resulting in the supposed cancelation of the project.

What actually happened is one sub-project was canceled, and the remnants has continued on. As the arsTechnica article says:

When Total Information Awareness (TIA) was shot down by Congress amid a storm of public controversy, it seem pretty clear that the government would keep trying, and trying, and trying until it got something that was very much like TIA. The promise of the Big Database in the Sky, the database that knows everything about everyone and can tell who's been naughty and who's been nice, is just too tempting for The Powers That Be to pass up. As it turns out, there's more than one program going on at the moment that's designed to implement such a database,

They discuss two (known) projects that are obviously implementing the same goal. The first, Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), is discussed by the Christian Science Monitor article. The other is Topsail, which is the actual successor to the TIA project (minus the futures market).

Topsail is discussed in this Newsweek article: Wanted: Competent Big Brothers As the Senate frets over whether the NSA has violated the outdated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, no one is paying attention to the real issue: proficiency. by Michael Hirsh

There's an interesting question here between the different views in these articles.

On the one hand we, Americans anyway, are very opposed to massive government surveillance. I say this because of the nearly universal abhorent reaction to 1984 (the book). Just say Big Brother and watch the heebie jeebies crawl up peoples spine.

On the other hand Michael Hirsh makes some interesting points. His article is very positive to these developments. His article claims the NSA is stuck in old technology, and old ways of conducting its business of watching communications. His article repeats the claim that the spy agencies had enough facts about the terrorist attack, but didn't have the technology required to connect the dots.

As Hirsh says "data mining", when used well, can connect facts together to let one see the bigger picture. Given that there are, clearly, some people out there who want to cause damage to society, it makes some sense to use advanced technology to try and find their tracks.

A part of this story is that the capabilities of technology are advancing. As we make more powerful computers, the spooks can do more stuff.

The spooks clearly want to create a system that can track a large portion of the transactions that happen every day. By connecting together disparate transactions, they might detect an attack before it happens.

For example ... take the Oklohoma City bombing. The story is the bomb was made from fertilizer and kerosene, and they used a rental truck as a "car bomb". This means the conspirators will have bought certain supplies before making their attack. Since the area has a lot of farming, a large fertilizer sale wouldn't be too strange by itself, but when connected by data mining to other purchases that together could create a bomb. Well, that's tantalizing the spooks, I'm sure.

But, I think, what about when they make mistakes? As the arsTechnica article alludes, they don't know what patterns to look for.

In the Newsweek article, Hirsh relies on perfect hindsight. It's easy to say the attackers used some specific weapon, and if only we'd known what to look for ahead of time we could have stopped the attack. But, in truth how can one know what to look for ahead of time? That is, until someone makes a weapon how do you know what form their attack will take?

CNN.com - Libby: My 'superiors' authorized leaks - Feb 9, 2006

Libby: My 'superiors' authorized leaks Prosecutor says Libby shared classified intelligence with media: Summary is, Scooter Libby, VP Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, has apparently testified that he leaked Valerie Plame's identity under orders from his superiors. While the article tries to be vague about who they are, well, doesn't a "chief of staff" generally work directly for the person whom they are the chief of their staff? So isn't the superior for the Vice President's chief of staff, then, the vice president?

U.S. Spies plan massive data sweep of Internet

There's this current story about massive snooping into telephone conversations by the NSA. The NSA and CIA and other spy agencies are supposed to turn their efforts on targets outside the U.S. but under Bush Administration edict they've been working inside the U.S., in opposition to U.S. law. Yes, the President has been breaking the law.

The conduct of the U.S. Administration is that this is not a war on Terror, but instead a war on Personal Freedom.

Consider: US plans massive data sweep Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far? (Christian Science Monitor, February 09, 2006)

The article describes a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE), a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio.

The project it describes is very similar to the process of search engine companies like Google, Yahoo, Technorati, etc. It's to scoop up a vast amount of data from the Internet and to draw out extra information from it. The technical phrase is "data mining" which is a practice of taking one data source, and putting it to a different use. Data mining is widely performed in businesses.

For example credit card companies perform data mining to detect fraudulent use of credit cards. e.g. they might look for your card being used to make an abnormally large purchase, or a purchase made far from your normal area of activity. And if they see it, they could give you a phone call saying "we noticed suspicious activity, did you make purchase X on date Y".

So long as the ADVISE system is collecting publicly available data, is there a problem?

The difference here between the government activity and what, e.g. Google, would do with it is: The government is looking for "terrorists", and the government has people with guns who are known to use those guns to kill people.

The problem with the government's hunt for terrorists, is they've got a rather loose definition and they make mistakes. For example in the Extraordinary Rendition stories, one was a German tourist who the U.S. agents identified as Al Qaeda linked, they kidnapped him, flew him to Afghanistan, tortured him for months, eventually realized they mistakenly identified him, and dropped him off penniless in Kosovo. And for loose definitions of terrorism, we can think of the people arrested for "ecoterrorism" where they are taking their protests of e.g. logging activities to doing property damage and whatnot. Sure, commiting property damage is illegal and they should be punished, but labeling them as terrorists is going too far.

In other words, I think it's legal to collect data that's publicly available (e.g. published on a web site) and to make secondary uses of it. If it's good enough for Google or Technorati, then it's good enough for the U.S. Government. But there needs to be oversight and measurement to ensure they don't overstep themselves.

For example, what if they made a deal with Google or other search engines to capture some of the private search query data which the search engines have on hand. That is, each time you make a search engine query, the company running your preferred search engine receives your IP address, your web browser, your operating system, etc, along with the query terms. If you've registered with the search engine (e.g. signed into your "mail" account) then the search engine can know exactly who you are.

Now, that's private data which the search engine collects. One way they use it is to further tailor your search results based on past queries you've made. But what if they began handing that data over to the government, which the government would than incorporate into this ADVISE system?

Would you get a knock on the door just because you had a hankering to learn about terrorists and did a lot of google searches about activities done by terrorists? Or you wanted to see for yourself just how easy (or not) it is to get information on making nuclear bombs?

I want to close by reminding the reader of the Total Information Awareness system. TIA is/was a Department of Defense project to that acted as an umbrella over several inter-related projects, some of which would use data mining techniques of the kind described in the CS Monitor article. While a couple minor TIA projects were shut down, it's clear the bulk of them went forward, and that the intent of the Government for several years has been to create a technologically advanced system that can effectively track every action and look for "dangerous" patterns.

The TIA existed before the September 11, 2001 events which "changed everything". The TIA existed before the Bush administration. This is just an ongoing desire by government agencies to vastly step up their capabilities to spy on everyone.

Police store DNA records of 24,000 innocent kids

Police store DNA records of 24,000 innocent kids provides an alarming overview of police surveillance activity in the UK. As the article says "Britain already has the largest network of CCTV cameras in the world", and they intend to go further. The main issue in the article is DNA profiling, where it's known the police have DNA records of 24,000 young people who have never been even accused of anything. Where there's great room for concern, the article claims "most people are already resigned to the whole population having its DNA held in police and government databases". SIGH

The article details several projects which, taken together, amount to the same end goal as the Total Information Awareness System (TIA). Since that's in the UK, this would be the British equivalent to TIA. And perhaps since some aspects of British and American government are joined at the hip, maybe MI5/6 and the NSA/CIA/DOD are working together to implement TIA?

You, the reader, may have believed the TIA project was shut down. What happened is that one of the sub-projects in TIA (it was either FutureMap or Wargaming the Asymmetric Environment) was unveiled to the public, and it offended officialdom, and enough of them went on a harumphing storm that the DoD made a show of shutting down TIA. But it's obvious that most of the subprojects to TIA continued on being funded, as they would be very useful to a surveillance system.

Now, let's go through the projects reported by The Register and align them with the TIA projects which I recorded back in 2002.

DNA Profiling: There isn't a direct analogue to a TIA project. One problem with DNA profiling, however, is the expense of doing DNA testing. Doing a full sequencing of the DNA in a tissue sample currently costs many thousands of dollars. Perhaps forensic DNA testing doesn't do full sequencing, but it still isn't going to be cheap. Be aware, though, that the government is funding research to decrease the cost of DNA testing.

The currently understood methods of DNA testing involve tissue culturing steps. For example, they take a tissue sample, grow a tissue culture in a laboratory, then kill the tissue sample, and study it under microscopes. That means identifying someone from DNA in a tissue sample will take several days.

The Bio-Surveillance project in TIA is very different from any DNA profiling system.

CCTV cameras on the roads and streets: Associated with this is number plate recognition, and face recognition. This is clearly associated with Human ID at a Distance with the addition of number plate recognition.

Implementation involves installing closed-circuit TV cameras (CCTV) in desired areas. The more cameras, the more intrusive and comprehensive is the monitoring system. You might think "oh, monitoring TV is manual, there's going to be a human looking at every video feed". No, if you have a city full of video cameras, there's no way a staff of humans can effectively scan them all. The cameras might be ignored most of the time, and only used when a call arives in the neighborhood of a given camera.

But what's possible is for the video feeds from these cameras to be analyzed by computers. That's what the Human ID at a Distance project is intended to be doing. And face recognition systems have been under test for several years. For example a public test was performed at a Super Bowl game a couple years ago, but apparently the test results were very disappointing.

The technique is to use image analysis to look for patterns that let the computer software zero in on the information of interest. The problem is computers are rather dumb. Human bodies have zillions of years of evolution to our image recognition hardware, and we recognize such things very readily. But computers have only 60 years of development (or so) behind them, and all they can deal with are numbers. It may look like they deal with words, and pictures, and sounds, and movies, and whatnot, but the software developers have to invent ways to turn all that into streams of numbers, because computers only know how to deal with numbers. This makes image analysis tricky.

Take face recognition. There's probably some pattern of pixels that usually indicate a human face. There's a small range of skin pigmentations, and then the shape of a face is generally the same with two eyes, nose, mouth, etc. It's made tricky because faces have a lot of variability, even when there's a lot of similarity. Recognizing license plates (number plates, as the British call them) would be simpler. There's a fairly well known set of colors to look for, and you know ahead of time what shape the license plate will have, and its location on a car.

Once you've got software that can reliably recognize what you're looking for ... car license plates ... you connect a fleet of computers to the CCTV cameras. They'd constantly be looking for motion, when they see motion the software looks for a license plate, and records whatever it sees. Assuming reliable software the computers can register all cars that pass by a CCTV camera.

The next step is to install multiple cameras throughout the city. Each camera gets connected to the computers. The computers register each car that passes by each camera. Or, if reliable face recognition software exists, the computers can also register each pedestrian as they pass by each camera. Hence, these computers could easily track the movement of every car or every pedestrian where-ever they (we) go in the city.

Dave Emory, politics conspiracy theorist

Dave Emory has been researching a peculiar line of reasoning for a couple decades, namely the continued existance of elements from Nazi Germany. His research draws from material published in mainstream newspapers, magazines and books. What he does is connect the dots which are otherwise separated too widely for the general public to make the connections themselves. The conclusion one draws from his research is that these elements from Nazi Germany are alive, well, and greatly influencing world events.

How could they have survived the fall of Nazi Germany in WW II? There's a few aspects to this as covered by his research. First is the Martin Bormann organization (Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile) which secretly created control over a huge number of companies around the world, and funneled the wealth of Nazi Germany out of the country. It is through this quiet corporate control which these Nazi remnants are greatly influencing world events. The other aspect is collaboration with and protection by certain peoples in power in other countries, of particular interest here is the Bush Dynasty. Prescott Bush was deeply involved with funding Hitler beginning in his early rise to power, and was involved with the coverup of the control over some of the German corporations after WW II ended.

Perhaps, Dave draws too broad of a conclusion? Nazi's still in power? How can that be? Well, it's really for you to decide.

His work is broadcast freely on an elite collection of public radio stations (KKUP, WFMU and occasionally KFJC). The radio programs and copious notes are archived on these web sites:

http://spitfirelist.com/ - Main archive and hub.

http://wfmu.org/daveemory - An archive of his material hosted by WFMU.

http://rpirani.best.vwh.net/FTR_Search.html - Search engine encompassing his material.

Excerpts from Dave Emory's broadcast archive:

• Trouble on Oiled Waters: Detailing various shenanigans over the decades around oil and U.S. electoral politics.
• The Bush League - The Associates and Actions of the Georges Bush: Detailing the associates and some activities of the Bush family.
• German Corporate Control over American Publishing: It's fairly well known that corporate control over the American media (news and otherwise) is devolving into a smaller and smaller circle of control. This circle of control, or locus of decision-making, means that a smaller and smaller group of people have control over what's said to the public through that media. What's interesting is that a large part of this ever-shrinking locus of control over the American media are German conglomerates who have ties to the Nazi past history of Germany. These same corporations, Bertlesmann especially, have recently made several moves to take over media distribution on the Internet via such portals as Barnes & Nobles and Napster. A particular thing to consider while reading this is: Are these moves he describes sinister attempts to control the thought of American people (via controlling their news sources), or is it just the normal power grabbing done by business leaders?

NOTE: These excerpts are the work of Dave Emory, and not the work of David Herron. He gives permission to republish or rebroadcast his work, and that is what I am doing. My contribution is to clean up the formatting, and make cross-referencing links to as many of the sources as I can. I do not agree with everything he says. I do find the information he presents to be well researched and thought provoking, even while disagreeing with some of his conclusions. As Dave says, do your own research, and make up your own mind.

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