NSA Planned To Discredit Radicals Based On Web-Browsing Habits 415
wired_parrot writes "New leaked documents show that the NSA was not only monitoring suspected radical sympathizers, but planned to discredit them based on their web-surfing habits. This includes not only evidence of porn browsing and online sexual activity, but also extortion and blackmail based on inappropriate use of funds. At the same time, the leaked document notes that very few of the targeted contacts were associated with terrorism."
Re:FP (Score:5, Interesting)
first "if you're not doing anything wrong, you've nothing to hide" post!
well, they're just redefining(or thats the way it's always been in usa seemingly) trying to achieve change of system as being radically wrong.
reminds me of this airhead minister we had for a while in finland who remarked that it's preposterous that some people were trying to change the law... which was funny because she worked in the parliament - and the main function for the parliament is to change the laws.
Re:It just keeps getting worse (Score:5, Interesting)
Dang, just used up my mod points (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Opportunities for fabricating evidence (Score:5, Interesting)
People have been gathering the sexual habits of people that they may need to discredit for thousands of years. In the Roman times the Christians accused the Pagan Roman's in charge of having orgy's [cracked.com] and myth sticks around to this day. Mind you having relations with slaves that were children was considered perfectly acceptable by that society so nobody bothered to use it to slander anyone and the result was that people talked freely about it. What they didn't talk freely about was having orgies as they were simply a myth [sydney.edu.au]. In other words this story is as old as prostitutes, politicians and spies, only the names have changed.
Re:And if all else fails, trump up some rape charg (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I was also referring to Dominique Strauss Kahn (seems to be a common tactic these days). Poor boy made the mistake of challenging the supremacy of the U.S. dollar [guardian.co.uk] as IMF chief. Within a few months he was in handcuffs, with the prosecutor announcing a "rock solid" rape case--forcing him to resign. Three days after his successor was sworn in as the new IMF chief, the prosecutor dropped all charges and announced the case had no merit.
I guess the lesson here is, don't fuck with the U.S. government.
Richelieu (Score:5, Interesting)
Arms inspector Scott Ritter, who called Bush and company liars. Immediately monitored to hell and back, reputation ruined by mysterious surveillance forces within months of taking the fight to Bush's people. Being right was no excuse; he was never allowed on Oprah again, or anywhere else. We invaded Iran under false pretense. He's in prison after the second round of surveillance.
As for the charges, which they ultimately nailed him with? Dunno. Why does everyone assume that computers can't lie? Once you set up the premise that we are catching lots of bad men, it's child's play to make you a bad man - just invent some logs, some chat, and boom goes the dynamite. I don't trust electrons when they are under the control of people who would bomb 60,000 people to death for oil and conflating brown people with other brown people.
And talking to girls online is a crime they can hang on a lot of men, anyway. He didn't *do* anything. Except piss the right people off. On the other hand, Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Ashcroft and Rice are rich and free after stealing trillions in oil, starting two endless wars, and killing over a hundred thousand people.
Assume that people are watching you, listening to you - retroactively - if you annoy the right people. They can indeed hang you with six lines. Hell, I do now christen this "Richelieuing".
Tried to do this to Martin Luther KIng (Score:5, Interesting)
The FBI used similar tactics [rawstory.com] on the "most dangerous Negro" aka Martin Luther King -- they bugged his bedroom and then tried to blackmail him with an audiotape of him having sex with women who weren't his wife.
Re:Were they doing anything illegal? (Score:5, Interesting)
There may be a few well meaning members of the power elite here and there that believe in things like the constitution and the rights of the individual but they're few and far between and the mass media, both left and right leaning, go out of their way to portray these people as loons. Most voters eat it up and ask for seconds.
The two party system has all the trappings of professional studio wrestling where we can divide the elements up into good guy/bad guy. 90% of the voters are little more than cheerleaders at the big high school football game. Those on the fringe are just that, the fringe and activities like this are meant to keep them in check. Who's going to stand in the way when all these elements come together in a surreal version of Survivor played with 300+ million contestants?
So I ask again, why would anyone with the power to stop this want to stop this? They have nothing to lose. The same people on the left who wailed in agony when the PATRIOT Act passed are now tightlipped since that power is now theirs to wield. Even the cheerleaders have shut up about such triflings as human rights in lieu of finally getting what they want out of the system. "Doesn't it serve them nasty right-wingers to finally get a taste of their own medicine? After all, they did it first..." And that kind of finger pointing will allow this to go on for as long as the powers that be can maintain balance. For today it seems like that could be generations of power at their disposal with little effort.
And left-wing/right-wing are an illusion in today's government meant to keep you asleep and fighting against your fellow man.
We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. -1984.
And no number of Facebook memes can stop this beast that we've allowed to come to life.
Re:FP (Score:3, Interesting)
well, they're just redefining(or thats the way it's always been in usa seemingly) trying to achieve change of system as being radically wrong.
And then the next moment deciding to create and use a Kompromat database to prevent any undesired changes to the system. A revelation like this leads me to these sorts of philosophical and ethical ponderings- Would the sorts of NSA employees that decided to engage in these sorts of 'political ratfucking campaigns' also have thought that it would have been ethical to- e.g. pay a million dollars to a monica lewinski to seduce a president, in order to discredit him? I mean, after all, it's just a little victimless 'penetration testing' to increase the security of the overall system right? Just like breaking a little law against cruel and unusual punishment of a fellow human being in order to serve a greater good against terrorist criminals? Or would it make a difference depending on whether or not Hillary gave the thumbs up to the operation? Just musings on justice...
Every single one of those women (Score:3, Interesting)
Every single one of those women were having sex with a married man. Adulterously against MLK's wife.
And any of those women married? Don't care.
But cheating on your wife? "Scumbag!".
Re:Porn browsing? (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course if working class Joe Q. Public is in the company of these "escorts" ...
Or if you're going after Countrywide or one of our other esteemed and ever-so-honest financial institutions. Doubleplusbad if the bank was in the habit of giving sweetheart loans to other politicians [cnn.com]. Cue Eliot Spitzer. The guy was an idiot and a hypocrite for using the "escort service" the way he did, but the case is still peculiar. Why was the case never prosecuted? How many other politicos could you catch this way, but somehow never are?
Re:Were they doing anything illegal? (Score:3, Interesting)
One wonders if the beast is an inevitability of technically advanced civilizations. You look at what the people of North Korea or a Belarus tolerate, when all logic says that those regimes are so awful and incompetent that the people should rise up and cast down the tyrants.
As much as I like to think humanity is on an upward course, I'm truly beginning to think the Enlightenment was a brief, anomalous period that, if its effects haven't ended, are on a continuing decline. Science has been brought into disrepute because it disagrees with the the money men. Liberties have been compromised at every turn with excuses that range from "Oh God, Terrorists" or "But what about the children!!!" to the more naked "We do it because we can." Our art has been dumbed down to the point where culture is defined by the latest Lady Gaga wig or some guy throwing his own excrement at at a wall is called art. Sure we have lots of technical advancements, but even there, the drive to fund basic research is dying in the West as short-sighted politicians try direct funding towards limited and specified goals; in no small part, I think, because the money men that own them don't like it when basic research turns up the error of their ways.
I feel like the West is declining, even as Asia and Latin America, however haltingly and unsteadily, are literally shooting for the stars. Sure, they may be a half century behind us in some respects, but they're closing the gap rapidly and seem to have the drive that the West once had. Look at geopolitics. The West decolonized Africa, and now China is recolonizing it.
Maybe that's the natural order. One civilization fades and another takes its place. The West has had its time in the sun, as the Song, Romans, Akkadians, Egyptians and Athenians did in their day, but those outside the walls are quick to learn and have the hunger to use it.
Re:Porn browsing? (Score:3, Interesting)
To paraphrase George Carlin, it's nonsense that something is illegal to sell that you can legally give away for free.
Actually, when you consider that those who are selling it are often coerced into doing so, and those who give it away for free aren't, there is some sense to a law prohibiting sales. There is also the issue of "the rich" being able to afford something that regular mortals cannot, such as would happen with organ donation vs. organ sales. I mean "kidney" type organs, not "Hammond" or "Wurlitzer". We've kinda decided as a society that a rich person low on the list of need being able to get a kidney transplant because he can buy a kidney from someone while someone who is high on the list of need cannot get a free one is a bad thing, and thus selling kidneys is illegal.
Dr. Carlin says a lot of goofy things, by the way. I last paid attention to anything he says the night I saw him launch into a rant about people who suffer from anorexia. His well-educated medical solution to their physical and mental problem: just eat. Thanks, Doc. If they could "just eat" they wouldn't have gotten to 89 pounds and near death.
As you point out, human trafficking occurs despite prostitution laws, but I don't think the failure of the law to stop all bad things it tries to prevent is a reason to repeal the law.
Re:FP (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is you are not a politician running for office on a conservative family ticket. So the NSA/CIA/Corporate Contractors are targeting protesters by blackmailing politicians into writing laws allowing undesirable to be charged and tried for meaningless crimes, where the court case and associated imprisonment are the penalty, as the whoops tee hee let you go after some number of years in prison and on trial, lost job, lost house etc. So it is all about extortion upon a plantery scale targeting anyone and everyone.
Catch, once you become bogged in lies and bullshit and the whole world also knows you have the technical capability of creating digital illusion, actually making up evidence rather than gathering real evidence, everyone just stops believing you. That is the real problem with the illusion of digital evidence, it all can just straight up be made up and no one can tell the difference. Once they have shifted to the dark side with extortion, then they are on the dark side and with that it means that truth and lies have the same value and they use which ever is the most convenient, hence nothing they say can be believed.
I mean gees, Uncle Tom Obama the Choom Gang Coward, how much more obsequious can he be to US intelligence agencies without the American public finally waking up to the idea that the NSA/CIA are blackmailing him into it. Some of the ludicrous crap that has been coming out of that guys mouth recently, surely it must be noticeable that it is a script written by others as it bears little or no relationship to his original speaking style or content during his first years in office. It is pretty bloody obvious that even he doesn't believe half of the stuff that is coming out of his mouth nowadays.