The Surveillance State is creating new meta-crimes
By Jon Rappoport
The Surveillance State has created an apparatus whose
implications are staggering. It's a different world now. And sometimes
it takes a writer of fiction to flesh out the larger landscape.
Brad Thor's novel, Black List, posits the existence of a
monster corporation, ATS, which stands alongside the NSA in collecting
information on every move we make. ATS' intelligence-gathering
capability is unmatched anywhere in the world.
On pages 117-118 of Black List, Thor makes a stunning inference that, on reflection, is as obvious as the fingers on your hand:
"For years ATS had been using its technological superiority
to conduct massive insider trading. Since the early 1980s, the company
had spied on anyone and everyone in the financial world. They listened
in on phone calls, intercepted faxes, and evolved right along with the
technology, hacking internal computer networks and e-mail accounts. They
created mountains of 'black dollars' for themselves, which they washed
through various programs they were running under secret contract, far
from the prying eyes of financial regulators.
"Those black dollars were invested into hard assets around
the world, as well as in the stock market, through sham, offshore
corporations. They also funneled the money into reams of promising
R&D projects, which eventually would be turned around and sold to
the Pentagon or the CIA.
"In short, ATS had created its own license to print money and had assured itself a place beyond examination or reproach."
In real life, whether the prime criminal source is one
monster corporation or a consortium of companies, or elite banks, or the
NSA itself, the outcome would be the same.
It would be as Thor describes it.
We think about total surveillance as being directed at
private citizens, but the capability has unlimited payoffs when it
targets financial markets and the people who have intimate knowledge of
them.
"Total security awareness" programs of surveillance are ideal
spying ops in the financial arena, designed to suck up millions of bits
of inside information, then utilizing them to make investments and rack
up billions (trillions?) of dollars.
It gives new meaning to "the rich get richer."
Taking the overall scheme to another level, consider this:
those same heavy hitters who have unfettered access to financial
information can also choose, at opportune moments, to expose certain
scandals and crimes (not their own, of course).
In this way, they can, at their whim, cripple governments,
banks, and corporations. They can cripple investment houses, insurance
companies, and hedge funds. Or, alternatively, they can merely blackmail
these organizations.
We think we know how scandals are exposed by the press, but
actually we don't. Tips are given to people who give them to other
people. Usually, the first clue that starts the ball rolling comes from a
source who remains in the shadows.
What we are talking about here is the creation and managing
of realities on all sides, including the choice of when and where and
how to provide a glimpse of a crime or scandal.
It's likely that the probe Ron Paul has been pushing---audit
the Federal Reserve---has already been done by those who control
unlimited global surveillance. They already know far more than any
Congressional investigation will uncover. If they know the deepest
truths, they can use them to blackmail, manipulate, and control the Fed
itself.
The information matrix can be tapped into and plumbed, and it
can also be used to dispense choice clusters of data that end up
constituting the media reality of painted pictures which, every day,
tell billions of people "what's news."
In this global-surveillance world, we need to ask new questions and think along different lines now.
For example, how long before the mortgage-derivative crisis
hit did the Masters of Surveillance know, from spying on bank records,
that insupportable debt was accumulating at a lethal pace? What did they
do with that information?
When did they know that at least a trillion dollars was
missing from Pentagon accounting books (as Donald Rumsfeld eventually
admitted), and what did they do with that information? (Actually, it's
much more than a trillion.)
Did they discover precisely where the trillion dollars went?
Did they discover where billions of dollars, in cash, shipped to
post-war Iraq, disappeared to?
When did they know the details of the Libor rate-fixing
scandal? Press reports indicate that Barclays was trying to rig interest
rates as early as January 2005.
Have they tracked, in detail, the men responsible for
recruiting hired mercenaries and terrorists, who eventually wound up in
Syria pretending to be an authentic rebel force?
Have they discovered the truth about how close or how far away Iran is from producing a nuclear weapon?
Have they collected detailed accounts of the most private plans of Bilderberg, CFR, and Trilateral Commission leaders?
For global surveillance kings, what we think of as the future is, in many respects the present and the past.
It's a new world. These overseers of universal
information-detection can enter and probe the most secret caches of
data, collect, collate, cross reference, and assemble them into vital
bottom-lines. By comparison, an operation like Wikileaks is an old
Model-T Ford puttering down a country road, and Julian Assange is a mere
piker.
Previously, we thought we needed to look over the shoulders
of the men who were committing major crimes out of public view. But now,
if we want to be up to date, we also have to factor in the men who are
spying on those criminals, who are gathering up those secrets and using
them to commit their own brand of meta-crime.
And in the financial arena, that means we think of Goldman
Sachs and JP Morgan as perpetrators, yes, but we also think about the
men who already know everything about GS and Morgan, and are using this
knowledge to steal sums that might make GS and Morgan blush with envy...
No comments:
Post a Comment