“Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianis

As social networking becomes a dominant feature of daily life, the secret state is increasingly surveilling electronic media for what it euphemistically calls "actionable intelligence."

Take the case of Elliot Madison. The 41-year-old anarchist was arrested in Pittsburgh September 24 at the height of G20 protests.

Madison, a social worker and volunteer with The People's Law Collective in New York City, was busted by a combined task force led by the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) and Pittsburgh's "finest." The activist was charged with "hindering apprehension or prosecution, criminal use of a communication facility and possession of instruments of crime," according to The New York Times.

Did the cops uncover a secret anarchist weapons' cache? Were Madison and codefendant, Michael Wallschlaeger, a producer with the radio talk show "This Week in Radical History" for the A-Infos Radio Project, about to detonate a "weapon of mass destruction" during last month's capitalist conclave that witnessed the obscene spectacle of our masters avidly conspiring to impoverish billions of the planet's inhabitants?

Hardly! In fact, Madison and Wallschlaeger's "crime" was to set up a communications center in a hotel room that alerted demonstrators to movements by the police, who after all, had viciously attacked protesters - and anyone else nearby - with heavy batons, tear gas and a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), a so-called "non-lethal" weapon.

Kitted-out with police scanners, computers and cell phones, the intrepid activists used a Twitter account to assist protesters eager to elude a thrashing by some 5,000 heavily armed camo-clad cops who had sealed-off downtown Pittsburgh to keep the area safe-from the First Amendment.

Court Tosses NSA Spy Suits, Sides with White House Over Illegal Surveillance

In late January, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General released a report that provided startling new details on illegal operations by the FBI's Communications Analysis Unit (CAU) and America's grifting telecoms.

For years, AT&T, Verizon, MCI and others fed the Bureau phone records of journalists and citizens under the guise of America's endless, and highly profitable, "War on Terror."

Between 2002 and 2007, the FBI illegally collected more than 4,000 U.S. telephone records, citing bogus terrorism threats or simply by persuading telephone companies to hand over the records. Why? Because the FBI could and the telecoms were more than willing to help out a "friend"--and reap profits accrued by shredding the Constitution in the process.

So egregious had these practices become that "based on nothing more than e-mail messages or scribbled requests on Post-it notes, the phone employees turned over customer calling records" to the FBI, The New York Times reported...

While corporate media frame these stories as if they were practices of the far-distant Bushist past, former telephone technician and AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, who leaked documents on the existence of secret NSA-controlled spy rooms embedded in AT&T switching offices across the country, believes otherwise.

Klein told Wired journalist David Kravets January 29, that the President's Surveillance Program (PSP) and internal AT&T documents suggest that the program "was just the tip of an eavesdropping iceberg."

According to Klein, these programs are not "targeted" against suspected terrorists but rather "show an untargeted, massive vacuum cleaner sweeping up millions of peoples' communications every second automatically."

Repression: A Game the Whole Corporate "Family" Can Play

With their fingers into everything from missile design and satellite surveillance technology to domestic spying or that latest craze consuming Washington, "cybersecurity," Lockheed Martin is, as they say, a "player."

On the domestic spy game front, Lockheed Martin were one of the contractors who supplied intelligence analysts for the Counterintelligence Field Activity office (CIFA), the secretive Rumsfeld-era initiative that spied on antiwar activists and other Pentagon policy critics.

CIFA was tasked with tracking "logical combinations of keywords and personalities" used to estimate current or future threats. When CIFA was shuttered after public outcry, its functions were taken over by the Defense Intelligence Agency, where Lockheed Martin runs a bidding consortium.

But as with CIFA, the DIA's Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, relies heavily on the unproven "science" of data-mining and its offshoot, link analysis.

Data-mining by corporate and secret state agencies such as the FBI seek to uncover "hidden patterns" and "subtle relationships" within disparate data-sets in order to "infer rules that allow for the prediction of future results," according to a 2004 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

Sentinel will undoubtedly deploy data-mining techniques insofar as they are applicable to "managing" alleged foreign "terrorism plots," but also domestic dissidents identified as national security "risks."...

Anyone who doesn't believe that the US is an incipient fascist state needs only to consult the latest assault on civil liberty by Fox News (sic). Instead of informing citizens, Fox News (sic) informs on citizens. Jason Ditz reports (antiwar.com Dec. 28) that Fox News (sic) "no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state," turned in a grandmother to the Department of Homeland Security for making "anti-American comments."

 democracies - Britain and Israel, to name two - are well acquainted with such domestic security measures. But for the United States, the sum of these new activities represents a new level of governmental scrutiny.

This localized intelligence apparatus is part of a larger Top Secret America created since the attacks. In July, The Washington Post described an alternative geography of the United States, one that has grown so large, unwieldy and secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs or how many programs exist within it.

Today's story, along with related material on The Post's Web site, examines how Top Secret America plays out at the local level. It describes a web of 4,058 federal, state and local organizations, each with its own counterterrorism responsibilities and jurisdictions. At least 935 of these organizations have been created since the 2001 attacks or became involved in counterterrorism for the first time after 9/11.

On the Four Georges
"George the First was always reckon'd
Vile - but viler George the Second;
And what mortal ever heard
Any good of George the Third?
When from earth the Fourth descended,
God be praised, the Georges ended."
Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864).