The Trillion-Dollar Conspiracy (43 page)

Amazing as all this technology may sound, because the government now acknowledges its existence may mean that it is phasing the program out for another technology. The next system that the government uses may be a ground-based technology known as TEMPEST. To prevent your computer from causing static on your neighbor’s TV, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) certifies all electronic and electrical equipment. TEMPEST, or Telecommunications Electronics Material Protected from Emanating Spurious Transmissions, technology stemmed from simply shielding electronic equipment to prevent interference with nearby devices. But in the process of preventing unwanted electronic signals, researchers learned how to pick up signals at a distance. Advances in TEMPEST technology mean that somewhere out there, someone may be able to secretly read the displays on machines like personal computers, cash registers, television sets, and automated teller machines (ATMs) without the person using those machines knowing it.

Jim Wilson wrote that documents now available from foreign governments and older sources clearly show how these systems are used to invade our right to privacy. “We think you will agree it also creates a real and present threat to our freedom.”

In September 2002, the Associated Press obtained U.S. government documents that showed that the Bush administration would create a fund that would combine tax dollars with funds from the technology industry to pay for “Internet security enhancements.” Under the title “Executive Summary for the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace,” the documents discussed “sweeping new obligations on companies, universities, federal agencies and home users” to make the Internet more secure, presumably from terrorists.

This new Internet strategy was headed up by Richard Clarke, formerly a top counterterrorism expert in both the Bush and Clinton administrations, and Howard Schmidt, a former senior executive at Microsoft Corp. When released in 2003, the plan offered more than eighty recommendations for tightening Internet security.

THE CYBERSECURITY ACT OF 2009

O
NE REASON THE GLOBALISTS
want to shut down the free flow of information is that it interferes with their fearmongering and sociopolitical manipulation. With the introduction of Senate Bills No. 773 and 778, by Democratic senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, legislators continued to put the power to shutter free speech into the hands of the executive branch. These bills are part of what is called the Cybersecurity Act of 2009, and they essentially give the president of the United States the power to shut down Internet sites he feels might compromise national security.

The bills put forth the idea of creating a new Office of the National Cybersecurity Advisor to protect the nation from cybercrime, espionage, and attack. The new cybersecurity adviser would report directly to the president. In the event of cyberattack, which is ill defined in the proposed laws, the president, through this national cybersecurity adviser, would have the authority to disconnect “critical infrastructure” from the Internet, which would include citizens’ banking and health records. According to an early draft of the bill, the secretary of commerce would have access to all privately owned information networks deemed critical to the nation “without regard to any provision of law, regulation, rule or policy restricting such access.”

In talks to Congress, Senator Rockefeller warned that “we must protect our critical infrastructure at all costs.” And the bills’ cosponsor, Maine Republican senator Olympia Snowe, said that failure to pass this law would risk a “cyber-Katrina.” However, privacy advocates immediately attacked the legislation. Leslie Harris, president of the Center for Democracy & Technology, stated, “The cybersecurity threat is real, but such a drastic federal intervention in private communications technology and networks could harm both security and privacy.”

Larry Seltzer, a technology writer for the Internet news source eWeek, agreed with Harris. “The whole thing smells bad to me. I don’t like the chances of the government improving this situation by taking it over generally, and I definitely don’t like the idea of politicizing this authority by putting it in the direct control of the president.”

Jennifer Granick, civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that by concentrating Internet control in one individual, the Internet could actually become less safe. When one person can access all information on a network, “it makes it more vulnerable to intruders,” argued Granick. “You’ve basically established a path for the bad guys to skip down.” Granick added that the nonspecific scope of this legislation is “contrary to what the Constitution promises us.” Should the Commerce Department decide to use information gained while accessing “critical infrastructure” on the Net against the user, privacy would be lost. According to Granick, this is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution’s Article IV, which states the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated….”

“Who’s interested in this [legislation]?” asked Granick. “Law enforcement and people in the security industry who want to ensure more government dollars go to them.”

TAKE A NUMBER

W
ITH HIGH-POWERED TECHNOLOGY AND
the right legislation in place, America is coming closer and closer to the totalitarian surveillance society that George Orwell described in
1984
.

Consider how the government has effectively enumerated the American citizenry over fifty years:

1935—Social Security initiated.


1936—The current Social Security numbering system begins.


1962—The IRS starts requiring Social Security numbers on tax returns even though Social Security cards plainly state the number was “Not for Identification.”


1970—All banks require a Social Security number.


1971—Military ID numbers are changed to Social Security numbers.


1982—Anyone receiving government largesse is required to obtain a Social Security number.


1984—Anyone being declared a dependent for IRS tax purposes needs a Social Security number. Within two years, even newborn babies were required to have a Social Security number under penalty of fine.

Free people are individuals. Enslaved serfs are numbered chattel. If Americans are to remain a truly free people, tight restrictions must be placed on the microchipping of the population as well as the frequency of times the State requires one to present a number for identification. At the rate things are going, George Orwell’s
1984
vision of psychological and electronic tyranny is almost upon us.

HOMELAND SECURITY

I
F SURVEILLANCE OF THE
American public is being centralized, then it makes sense that the nation would need a more centralized law enforcement agency—in other words, a national police force.

During his nearly forty-year career as director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover continuously argued against the need for a national police force. This may have been due more to maintaining the independence of his bureau than any personal regard for civil liberties. Yet Hoover’s objection struck a chord with the majority of Americans.

But with the hurried passage of a law creating the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in November 2002, a nationalized police force was formed. This act was the greatest restructuring of the federal government since the National Security Act of 1947, yet this time it didn’t include any of the previous act’s deliberation and review. After 9/11, President Bush argued that this needed to be done rapidly, because the country faced “an urgent need, and [the government needed to move] quickly…before the end of the congressional session.” Thus began the push to create the Department of Homeland Security with Tom Ridge holding a cabinet-level position controlling more than 170,000 federal employees and twenty-two federal agencies.

Despite congressional misgivings, the Homeland Security Act passed speedily through Congress with little or no revision. In the U.S. Senate, the proposal to create the department passed on a 98–1 vote (one senator did not vote). (As a side note: apparently, senators were so confident that they were about to do a genuine service for America that they voted themselves a pay raise for the fourth consecutive year.) The Homeland Security bill was signed into law by President Bush on November 25, 2002.

With the new office, Bush wanted to bring a myriad of government agencies under one central control. The agencies responsible for border, coastline, and transportation security were now under the command of the new office, and Bush remarked, “The continuing threat of terrorism, the threat of mass murder on our own soil, will be met with a unified, effective response.” By 2006, Homeland Security encompassed more than eighty-seven thousand government jurisdictions at both the state and local level, with additional directorates carrying names, both familiar and not, such as Preparedness, Science & Technology, Management, Policy, FEMA, the TSA, Customs, Border Patrol, the INS, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the Secret Service.

Equally disturbing as Homeland Security’s power was the news that the federal General Services Administration (GSA) had asked for $481.6 million in discretionary funds in its fiscal 2009 budget request, constituting a 103 percent increase from the $237.7 million in fiscal 2008. Legislators had earmarked the increase for the initial construction of a new DHS headquarters.

Recently, the DHS announced it will consolidate most of its sixty offices spread across the Washington, D.C., region into a single new headquarters building that should cost $3 billion. The move into the new HQ is scheduled to begin in 2011 with a 1.2-million-square-foot headquarters to be built in southeast Washington on the grounds of the closed St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, ironically a former mental asylum.

The project continued to invite controversy, with opposition coming from numerous area organizations and think tanks. “Aside from the humorous nature of moving perhaps the most helter-skelter of all federal agencies onto the grounds of an old loony bin, this move is so shockingly idiotic that only the DHS could do it,” wrote James Joyner, a former army officer, an editor for a nonpartisan group, and publisher of
Outside the Beltway,
an online journal of politics and foreign affairs analysis. “It was bad enough that the Powers That Be gave in to political pressure and headquartered DHS in D.C. proper rather than out in the much cheaper, more secure space in Chantilly, Virginia as originally planned. But now they’re consolidating their critical functions into a single building?!…Dispersion would save the taxpayer billions in cost of living and inordinately improve the quality of life of most DHS employees.” Joyner added that from a security standpoint, it would seem to be more advantageous to disperse Homeland Security components rather than concentrate them all in one location.

By 2010, the power of Homeland Security was being felt in even small police and sheriffs’ departments across the nation. Tax money flowed into them providing everything from updated—and interlinked—computer systems to bulletproof vests, crowd-control devices, and armored cars and helicopters. More vocal critics were noting the similarities between Homeland Security and the German Gestapo, which by 1935 had brought all of Nazi Germany’s law enforcement agencies under its control and considered any person, regardless of their position in society, suspect.

Could the consolidation of power within Homeland Security be a continuation of a plan to change America from a well-defended constitutional republic to a police state, a reincarnation of the Nazi Gestapo? No one knows for certain. Immediately upon taking office, President Bush ordered all records of former presidents, including Reagan and those of his father, sealed from the public. Under Bush’s executive order, even if an ex-president wants to release his papers to the public, the sitting president has the right to prevent their release.

Although in April 2009, Obama did order some of Reagan’s papers released from the National Archives, many remained kept from the public, including his own birth certificate and school records. He also fought to keep secret his White House visitor list. Due to this failure to act on his campaign pledge of “transparency” in government, by 2010, fears that a police state might be just around the corner were heightened.

None of this is really new. Plans to shift America into a police state date back to 1984, when Reagan’s National Security Council (NSC) drafted a plan to impose martial law in the United States through FEMA. Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North helped author the plan, which in 1987 was leaked to the media.

Arthur Liman, then chief counsel of the Senate Iran-Contra Committee, declared in a memo that North was at the center of what amounted to a “secret government-within-a-government.” Oddly, this is a term similar to Bush’s “shadow government.” At the time, officials said North’s involvement in the proposed plan to radically alter the American government by executive order was proof that he was involved in a wide range of secret activities, foreign and domestic, that went far beyond the Iran-Contra scandal.

North’s shadow-government plan called for suspension of the Constitution and turning control of the government over to the little-known FEMA. Military commanders would be appointed to run state and local governments. In the event of a crisis such as “nuclear war, violent and widespread internal dissent or national opposition to a US military invasion abroad,” the government would declare martial law. When he drafted these plans, North was the NSC’s liaison to FEMA. Many people are bothered by the idea of being placed under martial law in the event of widespread internal dissent, especially when they look at the continuation of many of Bush’s policies under Obama.