You may find this hard to believe, but apparently the Bush administration is using our spy satellites more and more to look down at us patriotic ‘merikins in the good old US of A:
WASHINGTON – A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil.
In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency [abbr. “NGA”], retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission.
(Much, much more below the fold . . . )
Now some use of spy satellites tasked to watch American soil probably makes sense. The good General (and why is it always a military man in charge of these domestic spying missions in the Bush era?) makes note of the good work his little known agency did in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita last year. No doubt such surveillance proved useful. My concern, however, is that like everything else having to do with domestic spying by the Bushies, there always seems to be much more going on than we are initially led to believe.
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.
Clapper says his agency only does big pictures, so concerns about using the NGA’s foreign intelligence apparatus at home doesn’t apply.
I guess we’ll just have to trust him that none of the images captured by the NGA’s spy satellites and stored in the NGA’s databases would ever be abused to wrongfully invade someone’s privacy or otherwise deprive them of their civil liberties.
Yeah, right.
And then there’s this little gem unearthed by Greg Palast (via Digby):
This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration’s Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI — though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.
The leader in the field of what is called “data mining,” is a company, formed , called, “ChoicePoint, Inc,” which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.
Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain’t nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans — and I know they’ve expanded their ops at an explosive rate.
They are paid to keep an eye on you — because the FBI can’t. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you’re suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect if for “commercial” purchases — and under the Bush Administration’s suspect reading of the Patriot Act — our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.
That’s right folks. Private databases containing all your most sensitive financial and medical information are being sold to the Government as part of a scheme to “launder information” that the government is prohibited by law from collecting on its own. Pretty nifty operation. Not only are is our privacy violated by the Government, but private companies get to make a buck out of selling your secrets, as well. And exactly who are these companies? Well, it should come as no surprise to you that they are connected to the Republican party:
ChoicePoint’s board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone — even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.
I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 “felons” that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida’s voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.
That’s right. The same company that manufactured Florida’s felon list for Jeb Bush, helping to swing the state’s electoral votes in 2000 to Dubya’s column, thus effectively handing the White House to the Worst President in History. In other words, the best of the Bush Family’s friends, and one of the worst enemies of We, the People is in charge of much of data mining being done on behalf of the Federal Government.
But hey, don’t think it stops there. Indeed, it only gets worse the deeper you dig:
ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, “hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States …linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]” from medical to voting records.
And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds — but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was “the number one” provider of DNA info to the FBI.
I’ve had gene testing done by the NIH as part of my efforts to find a definitive diagnosis for my autoimmune system disorder. I’m willing to bet that information is already in some Homeland Security databank somewhere. Not to mention all of my other the other medical test results. That scares the hell out of me. It ought to scare the hell out of you, too.
So, just to refresh our collective memory lets summarize what we know about the Bush administration’s campaign to turn this country into a police state.
Wiretaps have been authorized in violation of the federal law (FISA) which requires the federal government to obtain a warrant from the courts. Your phone records and emails are being recorded and stored by the NSA. Spy satellites are looking down at you from space, the same satellites usually employed to watch our foreign adversaries like Iran, North Korea, China and Russia. Furthermore, Bush claims he has the right to indefinitely detain anyone he considers to be a potential terrorist or terrorist associate, and to torture them, all in the name of national security
The Pentagon and local government agencies are keeping files on antiwar and other dissident groups, even to the extent of labeling some peace activists as terrorist threats. Individuals who speak out against the Bush administration are threatened with sedition charges. And whistleblowers are demoted and then declared paranoid psychotics after they expose the truth about the Federal government’s illegal spying programs.
Then, to top it all off, private companies, are at work collecting, and then selling to the Feds, all of your most personal information, even your DNA records, if any exist.
Privacy? Freedom? Civil Liberties? National Security? Kiss them all goodbye everyone. Republicans, led by President Bush, could give a damn about them. What do they give a damn about? Maintaining power and making money. And to get what they want they have shown they are capable of doing anything, whether or not it violates US and international law, and/or rights guaranteed to Americans under the Constitution.
