The root issue Snowden exposed: Clapper's Library

[Octafish]

17. Knowledge Is Power

In matters of war and commerce, one piece of information can be all the difference between making a killing and getting fleeced.

Here's a blast from the future readers may want to add to Gen. Clapper's bookshelf:

ECHELON Today: The Evolution of an NSA Black Program

Tom Burghardt
FRIDAY, JULY 12, 2013

EXCERPT...

By 1946, the permanent war economy which later came to be known as the Military-Industrial Complex, a semi-command economy directed by corporate executives, based on military, but also on emerging high-tech industries bolstered by taxpayer-based government investments, was already firmly entrenched and formed the political-economic base on which the so-called "American Century" was constructed.

While resource extraction and export market domination remained the primary goal of successive US administrations (best summarized by the slogan, "the business of government is business&quot , advances in technology in general and telecommunications in particular, meant that the system's overlords required an intelligence apparatus that was always "on" as it "captured" the flood of electronic signals coursing across the planet.

The secret British and US agencies responsible for cracking German, Japanese and Russian codes during the war found themselves in a quandary. Should they declare victory and go home or train their sights on the new (old) adversary--their former ally, the Soviet Union--but also on home grown and indigenous communist and socialist movements more generally?

In opting for the latter, the UK-US wartime partnership evolved into a broad agreement to share signals and communications intelligence (SIGINT and COMINT), a set-up which persists today.

In 1946, Britain and the United States signed the United Kingdom-United States of America Agreement (UKUSA), a multilateral treaty to share signals intelligence amongst the two nations and Britain's Commonwealth partners, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Known as the "Five Eyes" agreement, the treaty was such a closely-guarded secret that Australia's Prime Minister was kept in the dark until 1973!

SNIP...

Amid serious charges that "Five Eyes" were illegally seizing industrial and trade secrets from "3rd party" European partners such as France and Germany, detailed in the European Parliament's 2001 ECHELON report, it should be clear by now that since its launch in 1968 when satellite communications became a practical reality, ECHELON has evolved into a global surveillance complex under US control.

CONTINUED...

http://antifascist-calling.blogspot.ca/2013/07/echelon-today-evolution-of-nsa-black.html

Information. It's what Brazillionaires crave.

Speaking of which...that term you used, "Sticks to my craw." I heard it used the other night watching a cowboy movie, "Open Range." Robert Duvall's character, the Old Cowboy, says it to his right hand man, played by Kevin Costner. I think the movie's five stars. While it's not today's standard Hollywood shoot-em-up, the film tells an excellent story. If it's a metaphor, the townsfolk mean We the People are gonna win.