The Surveillance State

 

 

Even in the 21st century, there has been mass surveillance in America. We know the evolution of such surveillance laws in the 21st century. Recently, the Guardian published a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over data for all the calls made on its network (ongoing, daily basis). There has been surveillance by the state of phone and digital communications. This is not new since the National Security Agency has done this for a long time. Since 9/11, the NSA and others have utilized surveillance against the American citizenry. This is documented in news stories, documents, official statements, and other information. FISA or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was created as a means to regulate how the government can monitor suspects, spies or terrorists in the U.S. It came about after the 1970's Church Committee found abuses of power by the government. The government doesn’t have to demonstrate probable cause of a crime, just that the “purpose of the surveillance is to obtain foreign intelligence information.” All but 11 applications have been accepted by the government since 1978 alone. Ex-President George W. Bush passed the Patriot Act in October of 2001. It allowed the FBI to ask the FISA court to compel the sharing of books, business documents, tax records, library check out lists, etc. as a apart of international terrorism investigations (in Section 215). Back in October 2003, AT&T technician Mark Klein admitted something. He found newly installed NSA data mining equipment in a secret room at a company facility in San Francisco. Klein believed that this equipment was made to create surveillance all across the Internet (even watching email, web surfing, and other data). In March 2004, then Attorney General John Ashcroft was in the hospital. Members of the Bush administration (like Presidential aides Andrew Card and Alberto Gonzales) came to the hospital bed of John Ashcroft to attempt to allow Ashcroft sign off the extension of a secret domestic spying program. Ashcroft refused to it since he believed that the warrantless program to be illegal. It was reported by the NY Times and Newsweek later on. The NSA, Newsweek reported citing anonymous sources, collected without court approval vast quantities of phone and email metadata “with cooperation from some of the country’s largest telecommunications companies” from “tens of millions of average Americans.” The magazine says the program itself began in September 2001 and was shut down in March 2004 after the hospital incident. But Newsweek also raises the possibility that Bush may have found new justification to continue some of the activity. In December of 2005, the warrantless wiretapping has been revealed publicly. Michael Hayden or the director of the NSA admitted to the existence of the warrantless wiretapping program. The Times said that since 2002, the government “monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants.” The program involves actually listening in on phone calls and reading emails without seeking permission from the FISA Court. President George W. Bush defends the program in Kansas inside of Kansas State University. The Patriot Act was renewed at March of 2006 with new protections for records required to be produced under the controversial section 215. In May of 2006, the USA Today reported that the NSA has been collecting data (of millions of Americans since 2001via Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth. Their level of involvement has been disputed. Their phone numbers were collected. In January of 2007, then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said that the Bush administration is targeting international communications with FISA court approval. The PRISM program, which everyone is talking about, began in September of 2007. It was about the FBI and the NSA getting user data from Microsoft. It was ta op secret program. The data collected from the program varies. In July of 2008, the FISA Act and the Protect America Act expands the government spying powers for 4 years. The FISA act gives immunity to telecom companies for their actions in warrantless wiretapping (and then Senator Barack Obama voted for the act). The NSA had over collected personal data in April of 2009. President Barack Obama extended Section 215 or other controversial parts of the Patriot Act in February of 2010. The Patriot Act is renewed again in May 2011. In a letter to the attorney general, Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Mark Udall, D-Colo., write, “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details” of how the government has interpreted Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Because the program is classified, the senators offer no further details. He wrote those words in March of 2012. Wyden showed a declassified statement that one time when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court found that one time the government did an information collection action that was unconstitutional. Obama extends FISA Amendments Act for 5 years. The recent Verizon Order came in April of 2013. The FISA court Judge Roger Vinson cited Section 215 of the Patriot Act as a means to try to get metadata records from Verizon. Many in Congress even Senators Diane Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia love the act as nothing new. It is nothing new though, but it is something Big Brother like (and other policies which violate human liberties have been worse than the Verizon action).


The Pentagon has depopulated areas for years. There was the replacement of Native Americans by colonizers with new settlements growing in the United States westward. Back during the Great Depression, poor human beings were evicted from their homes. Their lands became more areas for national parks. These matters were in the past and now they exist in the present. Some environmental disasters have displaced people. The human beings displaced in several occasions are regularly the poor or the marginalized. Now, we witness about 1,000 plus military bases standing today in some 175 foreign countries. The military occupy the lands for other reasons other than lives of the folks in those lands. Yet, the U.S. military has displaced and continues to displace lands in foreign lands as a means to construct its bases. Entire populations of villages and islands have been harmed in contradiction of international law. This is contrary to the tenets of human decency and other tenets that we should stand for. The United States government continues to deny displaced populations the right to return to their homelands. We know that the state have bombed and burned entire villages in wars and non-wars. We know that millions of refugees have existed as a product of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. We know about the evils of drone attacks in Pakistan. Now, we see the international displacement of particular populations moved out of the way of base construction and many human beings left alive to struggle as refugees in exile. In the Philippines, America built bases on lands belonging to the indigenous Aetas people. Now, the Aetas in some cases tried to comb trash to survive. In WWII, the U.S. Navy seized the small Hawaiian island of Koho’alawe for a weapons testing range and ordered its inhabitants to leave.  The island has been devastated. In 1942, the Navy displaced Aleutian Islanders. President Harry Truman displaced the 170 native inhabitants of Bikini Atoll since he deduced that they had no right to their island without evidence. They were evicted in February and March of 1946. They dumped the refugees on other islands without means of support or a social structure in place. Years later, America would remove the 147 human beings from Enewetak Atoll and all the people on Lib Island. U.S. atomic and hydrogen bomb testing rendered various areas depopulated and still populated islands uninhabitable leading to more displacements. Up through the 1960's, the U.S. military displaced hundreds of human beings from Kwajalein Atoll. The super densely populated ghetto was created on Ebeye. On Veiques, off Puerto Rico, the Navy displaced thousands of inhabitants between 1941 and 1947 announced plans to evict the remaining 8,000 in 1961. Yet, it was forced to back off and in 2003, America stopped bombing the island. In nearby Culebra, the Navy displaced thousands between 1948 and 1950 and attempted to remove those remaining up through the 1970s. Now, the Navy is considering having the island of Pagan as a possible replacement for Vieques. The population has been removed by a volcanic eruption. During WWII and toward the 1950's, the U.S. military displaced a quarter million Okinawans or half the population from their land. This forced human beings to be in refugee camps and shipped thousands of them off to Bolivia. This was where land and money were promised, but they were not delivered. In 1953, the United States made a deal with Denmark. The deal was to remove 150 Inughuit people form Thule, Greenland, giving them four days to get our or face bulldozers. There is the story of Deigo Garcia that has been mentioned in David Vine's book entitled, "Island of Shame." Between 1968 and 1973, the U.S. and Great Britain exiled all 1,500 to 2,000 inhabitants form the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The folks were ordered onto overcrowded ships and dumped them on docks in Mauritius and the Seychelles. Foreign and distant including unwelcoming lands for the indigenous population were found in Mauritius and the Seychelles. This was sweeping. This act was illegal and barbaric. The Queen of England and her Privy Council bypassed Parliament.  The Pentagon lied to Congress and hid its payments to the British from Congress.  The planners even lied to themselves.  Having originally envisioned a communications station, they concluded that advances in technology had rendered that unhelpful.  So, Navy schemers decided that a fueling station for ships might offer a “suitable justification” for building a base that was actually a purposeless end in itself.  But the Pentagon ended up telling a reluctant Congress that the base would be a communications station, because that was something Congress would approve. The evictors lied and said that the people were migrant workers not native to Diego Garcia. Sir Paul Gore-Booth, Permanent Under Secretary in the Foreign Office of the U.K., dismissed the island’s people in bigoted terms. On January 24, 1971, remaining inhabitants of Diego Garcia were told they’d need to leave or be shot.  Dogs were rounded up and killed in a gas chamber as they watched. Folks took a small box of possession to leave. The land became a military base. Some prisoners kept there were treated as bad as Guantanamo Bay. Red Cross journalists didn't visit. The United States has de facto control of Diego Garcia, while the U.K. has technical ownership.  The Pentagon is not interested in allowing the island’s people to return. The U.S. Navy made the South Korean government to devastate a village (including its coast and 130 acres of farmland on Jeju Island with a massive military base).  This story is best told in Regis Tremblay’s new film The Ghosts of Jeju.  This is not a tragedy from the past to be remedied but a tragedy of this moment to be halted in its tracks. Tremblay's film exposes the abuse of the human beings of Jeju. There is a resistance movement in the military occupation of the location. There are still those fighting in the anti-base efforts of Jeju Island. Even now, the U.S. funds, arms, and protects the Israeli policy of displacement of the Palestinians and the denial of the right to return. The struggle continues and evil displacement should be exposed fully.

 

In our lifetime, laissez faire capitalism has been exposed like no other time in human history. The great recent recession and the circumstances going on make everyone aware of the evils of economic exploitation. The nations of the world have become rich with deception, but in the future, the crimes of the super-rich will be readily known by the entire world. The system of laissez faire capitalism believes in social Darwinism and even the view that you can love the world with all of your heart (and you can do what you want to do). Even the Scriptures are correct on the point that we should not love the things of this world since the wickedness of the world surely is a sole function of the establishment. Now, the modern day merchants include numerous billionaires and the over 1200 wealthiest capitalists that rule over the global marketplace. In America, there are over 400 billionaires, which is the highest number in any nation on Earth. Now, we realize that modern society loves money and uses capitalism like a religion as a means to gain control over the inhabitants of the world. The lust for money relates directly to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. These words outline the composition of post-modern Western society completely. The global elite love their gold, silver, clothes, and linen. Yet, there will come a time when all of them will take into account of their lives and their duties on this Earth. The usage of a radical consumer culture and corporate dictates much of the modern capitalist economy. That is why the essence of an evil system is the making of man's desires (in the realms of lust, greed, etc.) superior to human needs. We know that the modern system is in love with glorifying dangerous foods, drunkenness, drug addiction, commodities, violence, wealth, power, and unnecessary prestige. The world today is heavily commercialized. The Golden Rule refutes the notion of the obsession with love of money and the pursuit of wickedness, because treating my neighbor as myself will have far more moral & spiritual benefits among all parties involved. The rabid capitalist extremist and Austrian Freidrich Hayek wrote in his book called The Fatal Conceit on pg. 13 rejected the notion of treating all men as neighbors as being restrictive to economic growth. The transformation of total freedom for markets and making everything like a commodity will grow economic inequality and maintain huge levels of unemployment. Altruism is superior to altruism. Allow and extreme version of a competitive ethic for every man for himself is very detriment to the ethic of humans working together for the common cause of building up the whole community. Society truly must act like a revolutionary community in that humans are respected as equals not as automatons. Even Ludwig Mises was forced to admit the following: "...A living Christianity cannot exist side by side with, and within, Capitalism." (Gemeinwirtschaft (Socialism), 1st ed., p. 421, as quoted by Jorg Guido Hulsman in Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism, 2007, Kindle edition, location 5476). Far too often, mammoth industries of the military industrial complex relate to imperialism. Imperialism is a sin since it denies the dignity and equal value of foreign peoples. It is immoral since it involves the undue domination of countries by an oppressive, militaristic power base. Therefore, love and freedom must deal with social justice and human value not the excesses of consumerism. At the end of the day, I will never bow to Mammon at all.
  

The U.S. and China held a two day discussion about issues in California. The Chinese leader, who met with President Barack Obama, is President Xi Jinping. There have been recent U.S./China tensions for a while now. Washington has accused China of cyber warfare against America. Some extremists want to have conflict with Beijing over the hegemony in Asian territories. That is why the Obama administration is using basing deals, military exercises, shows of force, and other diplomatic machinations in the Asia-Pacific region. Former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger spoke about President Barack Obama meeting with Xi. He said the following words in the summit at the Asia Forum last Tuesday with these words: "...We are in a situation that we have a common set of problems, if we don’t solve them jointly, the whole world will be divided in every part between people who have been pressed to join one model or another. That will be a disaster for the two countries and for the world.” The U.S. wants to have the U.S. economic and strategic pressure. Obama wants Beijing to comply with what he feels is economic fairness in the world. That means China must accept U.S. currency manipulation and U.S. corporations to influence Chinese economic services. America wanted Beijing to have the pretext of discussing the Pentagon's allegations (of China and the People's Liberation Army hacking U.S. government including military facilities). Washington has not shown conclusive evidence to prove their allegations. America wants Beijing to follow more economic and strategic concessions. Strangely, America has been involved in cyber-espionage, targeted malware attacks, and online surveillance. The West allowed the Stuxnet computer worm to attack Iran's nuclear facilities. The U.S. surveillance state wiretapped the Associated Press. It has collected the phone records of tens of millions of Americans. It has tapped directly into the central servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple to collect personal user data. Unsubstantiated US allegations of cybercrimes against China pale before this onslaught. The U.S. wants national security and intelligence officials to use U.S. cyber-attacks. These actions are to advance: "...US national objectives around the world.” The directive stated: “The secretary of defense, the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], and the director of the CIA … shall prepare for approval by the president through the National Security Advisor a plan that identifies potential systems, processes and infrastructure against which the United States should establish and maintain OCEO [Offensive Cyber Effects Operations] capabilities.” These are pre-emptive attacks against foreign countries. The domestic cyber-attack would require the authorization of the President except in the case of an emergency. There is the issue of North Korea. Washington is using bluster at North Korea as a means to increase its pivot to Asia. That is why in March; the U.S. used practice bombing runs with nuclear capable B-52 and B-2 bombers near North Korea. North Korea responded with a missile launch. Washington increased its military presence in the region, expanded its anti-ballistic missile system, and wanted Beijing to break economic including political ties with Pyongyang. China used North Korea as a buffer state between itself and South Korea (or the U.S. ally in the region). Some in China distanced themselves from North Korea, because they did not want America to escalate its military presence in East Asia. China even cut off financial ties with North Korea's largest foreign exchange bank. They leaked contingency plans for the replacement of Kim Jong-Un to the German press. North Korea now wanted talks with Seoul and reopened the hotline which was shut down during the March stand-off. The Pentagon will have joint exercises in Japan in of southern California. China wanted these exercises to be called off. The USA refused to do so. Imperialism by the West is still common. China also needs to stop forced abortions, restrictions on the Internet, the evil one child policy, and other violations to human liberties as well. So, both nations need to clean their own houses.

 

In our generation, we have a clearer view of Yeshua Ben Yoseph or the Natzorean. Yeshua's apostles were 12 in number. Some of the most famous ones was Simeon bar Levi (Peter), Yokanon (St. John), and Yaakov (James, the brother of Yeshua). Yeshua was not into Eurocentric Christianity. He was an Afro-Asiatic Judean Israelite. He believed in the Torah, but he knew that the prophet Jeremiah predicted that new law will arise in the world. That prophecy was fulfilled in the days of the Roman Empire. So, the New Testament did include some of Old Testament Law, but not all of it (like the High priest since the Messiah is our new and permanent High priest). Now, Yosafe or Yeshua's father was of the Royal Davidic line. His mother Miriam was of the Levitical/Priestly line. Yeshua's ministry was after the Order of Meliki-tsadek or the King of Righteousness. He or Meliki-stadek was the first major High priest of the Bible and the King of Jerusalem, who blessed Abraham. We know that Yeshua was never born in December 25th too. Yeshua had other brothers like Yosay (Joses), Simeon, and Yehuda (Judah) including other sisters. Yeshua was never married and he lived his life in opposition to the decadence of the Roman Empire. The Last Supper was a Passover Meal. Yeshua was executed on the Roman Imperial Governor of Judas or on Pontius Pilate's orders. He died and rose again. Paul was not the original apostle and he was once a chief inquisitor for the Sanhedrin [who handed Yeshua over to the Roman Governor of Judea- Pontius Pilate, to be executed] - who in fact zealously persecuted Yeshua’s Judean followers. Paul soon woke up and became a follower of the Gospel of Yeshua. The major pillars of the early Christian movement after Yeshua was Yokhanon, Simon bar Levi, and the other apostles. Ancient churches grew and flourished. Modern Eurocentric Christianity came in ca. 325 A.D. under the actions of Roman Emperor Constantine and his mother Helena. The faux version of Christianity continued to embraced heresies like calling Mary the Mother of God, venerating statues, having crucifixes, and believing that Yeshua was a blond haired blue eyed man (which is historically inaccurate to the fullest extent. Even ancient images of Jesus Christ and his earthly mother Mary showed a darker skinned image). Eurocentric Christianity was influenced by the Roman Empire, which were the same folks that executed the great prophet & Messiah Yeshua (and persecuted his followers). Numerous mega churches today do not follow the teachings of Yeshua even with their love of non-confrontation toward political injustices and their love of material goods. The fight is still on for the defense of the rights of the homeless, the poor, the workers, and other oppressed people in the globe. Also, we should use religion and true spirituality as a means to fight for real revolutionary changes in society without the need to suppress human rights.  What we Americans need are great jobs, we need quality education that the elite have (without propaganda), we need an end to the attack on civil liberties, and affordable health care for all. There ought to be an end to massive incarceration and the War on Drugs that have ravished communities all over the nation. Human beings need quality, affordable housing and other real actions that will benefit all of humankind. We have to have justice before we have peace.

 

By Timothy