The Surveillance State Did Not Disappear With The Trump Victory: "It Is Still Lurking And Completely Intact"
One of the things Donald Trump has really done correctly is to assess his future arena in the areas of intelligence-gathering and operational security. Trump wants to return to a “courier” method of transmitting sensitive information and classified documents for the purpose of reducing the amount of material that can be hacked or stolen. There is a subtlety about this for a caveat, in case the compliment has bloomed flowers in your thoughts: the NSA $50 billion facility for collection and storage of data in Utah won’t be shutting down anytime soon.
As Snowden’s exposés clearly pointed out, the government has clearly followed Petraeus’ glowing “internet of things” yellow brick road to form an integrated, interconnected surveillance state. All CCTV (closed circuit television) systems, all merchants with cameras, all law enforcement cameras…all of the camera surveillance systems everywhere are either tied into data collection immediately or can be accessed for use at a later time.
The latest “Jason Bourne” movie clearly illustrates how the government can utilize devices such as cellular telephones (especially the ones with cameras) to track movements, record conversations, and be a “piggyback” to relay information to a nearby computer or a camera. This isn’t the future: this is now.
There is an older piece written by Michael Snyder in June of 2013 entitled 27 Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send a Chill Up Your Spine. The information in this article is directly from Edward Snowden that revealed exactly what the government has been doing regarding their total surveillance program. The surveillance did not occur overnight, and in the manner of the “frog in the cold-water kettle” by stretching out the time for putting it all into place, the stultified public’s focus was either diverted or bypassed entirely.
Here are a few other pieces worth reading over regarding the government’s total information awareness and the (ongoing) growth of the surveillance state:
- UPI: U.S. Postal Service logs all mail for law enforcement. (7/4/2013)
- Madison Ruppert, Activist Post: Suitcase sized device can remotely disable phones, intercept communications, record unique ID’s and track you in real time (11/2/2011)
- Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet.com: Federally-Funded Street Lights Capable of Recording Conversations (11/1/2011)
- Tom Simonite, MT Technology Review: Using a Smartphone’s Eyes and Ears to Log Your Every Move (7/4/13)
- Washington’s Blog: Is the Government also Monitoring the CONTENT of Our Phone Calls? (6/6/2013) [Note: This piece really delves into the reasons behind all of the surveillance…straight out of the mouth of the head of the NSA]
- Prison Planet: Diagram: The NSA Unchained (5/24/2012) [Excellent overview of the amendments to FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) enabling domestic agencies to spy on U.S. citizens to catch foreign “bogeymen” and the actual reach of the surveillance]
As can be seen, all of these developments require time, and the bypassing of the public awareness/consciousness. Time is necessary to inculcate these changes; however, time also serves as a tool to insulate their actions from what would normally draw outcry if all the actions were taken at once. A couple of pieces that illustrate this concept are as such:
- Josh Peterson, The Daily Caller: Deadline Approaches for Russia and China-led U.N. Internet takeover (5/24/2012)
- Gordon Crovitz: The U.N.’s Internet Power Grab (6/18/2012)
These two pieces are extremely significant. They show how the transfer of the Internet to U.N. control has been pushed for quite some time, now. Guess what? It has been done. Obama did it in October when he handed off the control (through his Commerce Department) to ICANN, the multinational firm assigning names and numbers to Internet users and controlling content.
See, Obama quietly did this just before the election in November, and barely anyone took notice of it. Now, legislation has been passed to “combat disinformation and ‘false’ news and propaganda,” in essence, targeting independent news media sites. Back in 2012 when those last two cited articles were written, the country had already suffered for four years under Obama with no sign of a let-up. The UN was coming for the guns (John Kerry’s signing the Small Arms Treaty), coming for the wilderness areas (the Agenda 21 and EPA assault on private property and public lands), and now the internet.
It wouldn’t have been tolerated and may have thrown things off for the election in the fall of 2012 for Obama. Quietly in October of 2016, Obama sneaked it through the back door of transferring control to a corporation…the public consciousness is bypassed…and the UN-controlled corporation now has control of the Internet. Now is the time to marginalize and criminalize public and journalist opinion to clamp down on independent thought and alternative news sources.
Obama had an eight-year ride akin to a sled going downhill: unchecked and unstopped, except for his term expiring. Now (just as with the Overton Window principle), the paradigm shift takes a breather with Trump, who will continue the course, but at a slower pace.
The U.S. is still pointed in the direction of losing its national sovereignty and heading toward global governance, but the angle of descent is not so steep or the speed so high: this “deadens” the public’s awareness to lull them into thinking the bad years are behind us and the struggle is done with Trump’s win.
It hasn’t stopped, that sled of paradigm shift: it is still creeping forward. If we are not vigilant, the machine that has come into creation this past decade will tighten its own screws and proceed on the course to global governance quietly, while no one notices.
It is not so much giving the people what they want, as making them believe they’re getting what they want.
Bush Jr. and Obama laid the groundwork, and the surveillance state as exposed by Snowden did not disappear with the Trump victory. It is still lurking, completely intact just below the surface of visibility. Where the ship will be taken will be largely in Trump’s hands, and there will be others that will influence him both where and how to steer the ship. Guess (to paraphrase Pelosi) we’ll have to wait and see where we’ve gone to after the ship has docked.
