{"id":139875,"date":"2014-09-30T18:49:38","date_gmt":"2014-09-30T18:49:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=139875"},"modified":"2014-09-30T18:49:38","modified_gmt":"2014-09-30T18:49:38","slug":"failure-success-us-intelligence-works-21st-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/failure-success-us-intelligence-works-21st-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Failure Is Success: How US Intelligence Works in the 21st Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

What are the odds? You put about $68 billion<\/a> annually into a maze of 17<\/a> major intelligence outfits. You build them glorious headquarters<\/a>. You create a global surveillance state for the ages<\/a>. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph<\/a> into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, lest any Americans betray a penchant for evil deeds while in entertainment mode.<\/p>\n

You collect information on visits<\/a> to porn sites just in case, one day, blackmail might be useful. You pass around naked photos<\/a> of them just for… well, the salacious hell of it. Your employees even use aspects of the system you\u2019ve created to stalk<\/a> former lovers and, within your arcane world, that act of “spycraft” gains its own name: LOVEINT.<\/p>\n

You listen in<\/a> on foreign leaders and politicians across the planet. You bring on boardhundreds of thousands<\/a> of crony corporate employees, creating the sinews<\/a> of an intelligence-corporate complex of the first order. You break into<\/a> the \u201cbackdoors\u201d of the data centers of major Internet outfits to collect user accounts.<\/p>\n

You create new outfits<\/a> within outfits, including an ever-expanding secret military and intelligence crew embedded<\/a> inside the military itself (and not counted among those 17 agencies). Your leaders lie<\/a> to Congress and the American people without, as far as we can tell, a flicker of self-doubt. Your acts are subject to secret courts<\/a>, which only hear your versions of events and regularly rubberstamp<\/a> them — and whose judgments andsubstantial body<\/a> of lawmaking are far too secret for Americans to know about.<\/p>\n

You have put extraordinary effort<\/a> into ensuring that information about your world and the millions of documents you produce doesn\u2019t make it into our world. You even have the legal ability to gag American organizations<\/a> and citizens<\/a> who might speak out on subjects that would displease you (and they can\u2019t say that their mouths have been shut). You undoubtedly<\/a> spy<\/a> on Congress. You hack into<\/a> congressional computer systems.<\/p>\n

And if whistleblowers inside your world try to tell the American public anything unauthorized about what you\u2019re doing, you prosecute<\/a> them under the Espionage Act, as if they were spies for a foreign power (which, in a sense<\/a>, they are, since you treat the American people as if they were a foreign population). You do everything to wreck their lives and — should one escape your grasp — you hunt him\u00a0implacably<\/a> to the ends of the Earth.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What are the odds? You put about $68 billion annually into a maze of 17 major intelligence outfits. You build them glorious headquarters. You create a global surveillance state for the ages. You listen in on your citizenry and gather their communications in staggering quantities. Your employees even morph into avatars and enter video-game landscapes, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":113174,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,1614],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-139875","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-surveillance-big-brother"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139875","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139875"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139875\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139875"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139875"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139875"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}