This is an editorial by George Phillies in October Liberty for America
It is now revealed by the ACLU that the Federal Government has been using no-fly lists to turn people into Federal spies, planting them in religious institutions and community groups. For much more https://www.aclu.org/unleashed-and-unaccountable
The mechanism is simple. The Federal octopus waits until the victim has flown to a remote foreign place. He is then placed on the no-fly list. In one case, the traveler was in the Yemen, and was given the alternatives of becoming a Federal spy, or being handed over to the Yemeni authorities. In another case “After questioning (the prospective victim) about his religious beliefs and practices, FBI agents told him that is he agreed to serve as an informant for the FBI, his name would be removed from the No Fly List and he would be compensated for his cooperation.”
Decent Americans will recognize this scheme. It’s the recruiting tactic of the East German STASI, now brought to America. The important difference between the STASI and our Federal agen-cies is the spelling of the agency’s name.
The objective of the STASI, limited only by their primitive data handling technology (20 billion sheets of paper), was to build up a complete picture of the social network of every East German. To assist, one East German in seven was an occasional inform-ant. For each citizen, there was a file.
The STASI Social Networking scheme has come to America.
As reported by the New York Times nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/nsa-examines-social-networks-of-us-citizens.html.
The NSA STASI does not use hordes of informers. It uses com-puters. It uses telephone metadata, internet metadata, Facebook profiles, and every other social networking source to connect a social connectivity graph, who you are talking to and interacting with. How many of these graphs can they generate?
There are only 300,000,000 Americans. We interact, most of us, with at most a few thousand people. Storing for each American a list of all the times you have interacted electronically with any other American is a near-trivial programming exercise, requiring a small part of the 5 yottabyte capacity of the Utah Federal terror-ist site. The biggest technical challenge in creating the graphical maps is identifying accurately which American is being refer-enced in a given piece of information. Given the accuracy of the TSA no-fly list, which has identified babes in arms as known terrorists, the accuracy probably leaves something to be desired.
You can read the whole thing here: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/spies-can-now-for-the-first-time-monitor-everything-about-us-and-they-can-do-so-with-a-few-clicks-of-a-mouse-and-to-placate-the-lawyers-a-drop-down-menu-of-justifications.html
For the criminal elements — yes, perjury is a crime — now running our Federal security agencies, lying to Congress has become a habit as addictive as crack cocaine. They’re protect-ed in this by a Federal Court system as compliant as the German WW2 SS courts. For starters, note the FISC decision that swallowed the claim that terrorists use the telephone sys-tem, so everything in the phone system is fair game. http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130917/13395324556
Under the Republican-Democratic enemies of America, our country is going to Hell in a handbasket. And we are the only political party that might stand in their way.
And remember: If they dare to lie to Congress, you can be absolutely positive that they’ll lie on the witness stand without blinking an eyelash, spewing whatever filth is needed to convict their political enemies. That’s us.
George Phillies is a long-time Libertarian activist and a frequent commenter here at IPR. He is the editor and Publisher of Liberty for America