It's a long way down.

The week is closing with a double whammy. This could be a touchstone week; one we will be able to look back on in the upcoming months and years as the week where the tide turned. The real law is being laid out for us and the true nature of our government is crystal clear.

We started the week with our government providing us with the facts of how the laws of the United States really work. There are two sets of rules and laws in this country. One, which applies to the citizens and another, which applies to government and corporations. We have to follow our rules; they have no rules.

By giving the telecom industry total immunity for their complacency in spying on American citizens the government has told us loud and clear that our rights are nothing but a shadow. We have ”rights” as far as the government deems we deserve them and none of them are absolute. The telcos are immune because they were/are in effect, agents of the government by allowing the alphabet agencies into their COs.

I swear, if I could ditch the phone and an Internet connection and all means of communication other than face to face, I would. Why make it easier for the masters to keep tabs on me? Why add more of my data to their database? While I don’t subscribe to the philosophy of removing one’s self entirely from “the grid”, I do believe on lowering your footprint in the grid. Then again, a void of information on a person could, in itself, spark even more curiosity on their part.

Based on this outcome with the telcos, don’t be surprised in the upcoming years when you live down wind of a toxic energy plant, spewing God knows what into the air, and they have immunity from the government for polluting your air because the government deemed it vital. If the government deems it necessary, tough shit for you and me. You and I aren’t the shareholders in this country and we cannot command resources the government deems vital.

The double whammy is rearing it’s head this morning. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have been clinging to life for months, today the shit is hitting the fan in regards to their financial health. Rumors are flying, with even Charles Schumer piping in, that the feds are set to take control of both. When this happens our national debt doubles at the least…least.

What happens if this occurs? We fall off the cliff we have been toeing. All shares of stock in Freddie and Fannie would be worthless with shareholders getting jack shit in return, and who owns this stock? Every financial institution in America. Think the Bank of America buys stocks in $100 blocks? Hell no. They buy stock, bonds, commodities and derivative packages in blocks of hundreds of millions of dollars.

If this happens our government will take every mortgage under these financials into their portfolio. You will be paying your mortgage directly to the Federal Reserve. If this happens our government will double the national debt overnight and the value of the dollar will plummet. Think gas is high now? Wait until these fuckers bail out Freddie and Fannie. Think food is outrageously priced now? Just wait. The dollar and all treasury bonds will truly be Monopoly money at this point.

Who gets fucked? Everyone. Worldwide fucking. The largest owners of US Treasuries are China and Japan, bye bye Asian market values. The majority of OPEC nations peg their currency and the price of oil to the US$, their inflation skyrockets and the price of oil in dollars will inflate like a puff adder about to be stepped on. This snake will bite us all.

Pissed off because the Arab nations have been burning through money like it was cheap generic cigarettes? Don’t worry, they were spending dollars for all these years and Dubai bought the Chrysler Building with those same worthless dollars. If you own the largest pile of horseshit in the world, you might have a lot to spread around, but in the end you own a lot of horseshit.

What happens if Freddie and Fannie collapse with no government intervention? A lot of the same. The government will still take receivership of their assets and try to sell the crap to other financial companies, or like the Bear Stearns sweetheart deal, they’ll fund someone to take over the pieces of the pie that once was Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. We still pay for it, national debt still skyrockets and the dollar still plunges in value.

Time to put on that scratchy old 7” mono copy of Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date”, brace for the fall out and wait for the music to end. It is coming.

Uncle Sam's wire cutters

“To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Oscar Wilde.

In the span of less than a week, four major underwater telecommunications cables have been “cut”. Can you imagine being in a car wreck on Monday and the ambulance you are riding in after the wreck is also involved in a wreck and on Tuesday you wreck the rental car that the insurance company got for you and when you leave the lot with a second rental car, that one gets totaled too? Telecoms, governments and the media all want us to believe the car wreck story. That’s what they are force-feeding us when they aren’t busy trying to ignore the story.

What would be the reasons behind taking down an entire region’s communications grid in this way? There are several possibilities and I think the wilder ones could carry the most weight as this is an extraordinary set of equipment failures.

Some people are postulating that this is an opening salvo before Iran opens its oil Bourse. The latest given date for the opening is February 11th and it will be interesting to see how the communications situation is resolved and if there are other problems popping up when the Bourse opens. It is possible that the cables were taken down as a warning to not only Iran, but also the rest of the world, that their main means of operating in the modern financial world could be taken down with a moment's notice. I think this explanation carries the most weight as the timing and the “signal” of this communications outage is most prescient.

There are a few “I don’t know about that…” twists with a warning shot theory. Namely, the dollar is already being unpegged from Middle East oil producers and let’s face it, the US economy is already fucked six ways to Sunday. Sending some SEALs to the Med and the Gulf, armed with wire cutters and spare air tanks seems a bit like overkill. Then again, subtlety isn’t a trademark of the US Government.

There is also quite a bit of speculation that the outage is a byproduct of the US Government carrying out a large-scale surveillance program. I assume the NSA is capturing data streams en masse and in real time on most if not all international communications lines, so this seems less likely unless there were specific traffic routes that they had no access to. I have wondered, from an IT professional’s perspective, if the cables were cut to corner or head off a stream of communication that had the potential for damage. The idea of taking an all or nothing course of action with a dangerous communications link by cutting all traffic seems more damaging to the overall picture than helpful so I am not crazy about this idea either.

Time will tell what the real deal is behind the communications outage but we should keep in mind that if or when the shit really hits the fan here in the US we would never be able to find out in real time, from alternate sources, what has transpired. If the powers that be decide to pull the plug on our Democracy they’ll do it under the cover of night and we’ll all wake up to a glossy doll’s eyes version of the normal life we have become accustomed to. It will be as though surreal pixies remade our world overnight. The news will report that “something” has happened but we will not be privy to the reality. It will be as though someone snipped our transatlantic cables and satellite communications with the rest of the world. We will be blinded and unable to find content other than what they allow us to view. At this very moment, Iran is in that exact position.

One other thing to consider is the similarities of this outage and what ATT customers experienced during the transition periods when the NSA installed it's equipment in their COs. Add the BellSouth customers who couldn't get email when ATT "transitioned" those customers into their network and you have an interesting case study in how things don't flow when the feds snoop. To this day there are latency issues with email coming from BellSouth where looking at the header info will show an outbound email from a BellSouth customer, bouncing around like a pinball within ATT's network.

Has the President declared the entire US population to be enemies of the state?

A significant and terrifying revelation came to light in this week’s round of testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The revelation is subtle and nuanced and a small amount of decoding is necessary to unravel its meaning, but it is there. Former Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey testified that Chief of Staff Andrew Card and White House Counselor Alberto Gonzales attempted to trick then Attorney General John Ashcroft into reauthorizing a domestic eavesdropping program while he was hospitalized. This, of course, is what was widely reported but the details of that program and the reasons why it was not reauthorized is the actual story.

From statements made by government and White House officials from the President all the way down the chain of command, its obvious that they are talking on one level and we are listening on another. This is being brushed aside by many as classic Orwellian Doublespeak but what they say and how they parse their words, combined with their actions and those of the telecommunications industry point to a much more sinister and frightening reality.

First off, most people assume that the comments made by the President and various government officials about this situation are directly focused on the FISA and warrantless wiretap situation. In actuality, when they testify and comment to the press they are actually referring to other programs being run at this very moment. Let’s look at this item by item:

1) FISA – While the focus of the media, political and conspiracy theory commentators and the average citizen has been placed on FISA there are comments being made by those involved in this scandal that are obviously intended to divert our attention away from the authorization of wiretapping program that circumvented FISA. The question has been “why was FISA circumvented?” when the question should have been, “What program are you using that supersedes FISA and under what authorization?”

2) The AT&T/NSA collusion – No one in the government or the telecommunications industry wants us to know more about the authorization which forced the telcos to allow the US Intelligence Community to literally tap into all data and voice transmissions coming and going from US soil. They are attempting to hide something much deeper than what we see on the surface.

3) The program that the White House was trying to trick Ashcroft into authorizing is not FISA or the AT&T/NSA programs. Comey, Gonzales and Bush have admitted so by deflecting questions or giving misleading answers for.

4) The program that the White House sought approval for from Ashcroft was so illegal and so un-Constitutional that every person who refused to sign off on the program threatened to resign if it were authorized.

5) The details of this program are not yet known, but this much is known: the program was indeed authorized by someone and it allows for spying at levels far beyond what we are being told with sweeping powers far beyond the pale of any program in history.

The press and the rest of us make much of the President’s power grabbing exploits and the un-Constitutional aspects of these powers. One thing has been overlooked. In all cases a justification has been made for their legality by Bush neophytes even if the justification is flawed and self-serving. The actual legality and Constitutional standing of these authorizations have not been contested to date because we have not seen the documents that are allowing the programs in question. What we have seen in the form of FISA, the AT&T/NSA wiretapping and even with the torture authorization scandal are appearing to this blogger to be nothing more than a smokescreen. Something is peering from the cracks that are forming in this smokescreen.

My belief, based on Bush administration history is that there is a massive and all-encompassing surveillance program that has been authorized behind the FISA and AT&T/NSA programs that is beginning to be seen in pieces. The White House is desperate to maintain the FISA and AT&T/NSA facade but their actions and words hint that those two cases are not their central concern. Their actions and words are directed at a program that is sitting directly behind those two cases. This program, a Program X as it were, is so invasive and overwhelming that their greatest fear is that it’s existence will be known.

What could this program entail? At this point all we can do is guess but based on the issues at stake, the methods and means used and the severity of the fallout my guess is this:

The President has secretly declared that all Americans are potential enemies of the state and he has authorized all Intelligence Agencies of the federal government to monitor, classify and identify who we are. To expedite this process, all of the major telecommunications providers, the owners of the backbone, have been federalized. In other words, an undeclared and modified state of martial law is in effect. This explanation would cover the lengths the government has gone to in hiding the details of the FISA and AT&T/NSA scandals. It would also explain the curious Doublespeak being used in discussing these cases. What we see our government doing and what it really is doing are two different things. What we are allowed to know and what is easily discovered by investigative journalists are smokescreens to draw our attention away from what lies behind them.

News - Verizon tells court they were exercising 1st amendment rights in NSA spying scandal.

This will make your head spin. Verizon is claiming that the lawsuit filed against the company for helping the government spy on it's citizens, should be dropped because they were merely exercising their first amendment rights.

The gravamen of plaintiffs records claims is that defendants allegedly communicated information about them to the government namely, that a call was
placed from a certain telephone number to another number. Communicating such
factual information to the government would be speech that is fully protected by the First Amendment.

When the country is engaged in an armed conflict with foreign enemies, that right applies to communicating information that may be useful in defending the country from expected attacks. Based on plaintiffs own allegations, defendants right to communicate such information to the government is fully protected by the Free Speech and Petition Clauses of the First Amendment, and is a privilege and immunity that arises directly under the federal Constitution.

We've seen far too many examples of ideas and words being redefined to suit the wants and needs of the powers that be over the last 6 years but this one is an award winner. I honestly don't know where to begin. This is a prime example of why I absolutely despise the mega-corporations in this country. It's just mind boggling to think that this defense could work for them.

If this doesn't work in the court, the President is ready to push a bill in which there is a section that would grant all telecommunications companies retroactive immunity from any and all legal action by the American public in relation to their efforts to assist the government in spying on us.