Who will Watch the Watchers?

What was General Keith Alexander, Director of National Security Agency and a four star general, doing at a hackers convention "DefCon" in 2012? You can see this General, usually prim and proper in his military uniform, badges, stripes and medals, in jeans and a t-shirt (with some kind of tree logo on it) lecturing to young hackers about how "life from a hacker to a spy" is "an ideal one"...and can be mutually beneficial. 

Even more startling is his emphasis, during his lecture - which is more like an advertisement and recruitment for the NSA - on the importance of protecting privacy and civil liberties of the people. You can catch his entire lecture at the 20th Def Con at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz0ejKersnM

General Keith Alexander struggled to explain to the Congress yesterday, after Edward Snowden's revelations, how a young man, with poor education, limited training and mere security guard experience, working for a private company Booze Allen, came to have such an easy access, with high security clearance, to highly classified information? Was it because General Keith Alexander and his team were soliciting young, eager to please or eager to show off,  men in places like the hackers' convention for their "dirty work"? 

 Is NSA looking for young computer whizzes (who don't necessarily have to be good in school or college), who can enter the intelligence community, with or without criminal records and with or without criminal intent, to join their spying game more effectively? Has the National Security Agency outsourced a lot of its intelligence work - that is supposed to be about "classified information for national security" - to private companies that remain secret because of the secret work they do? How secure are we if the military, and particularly its intelligence division, has outsourced its most secretive intelligence work to private companies that cannot even be adequately overseen or monitored by the Congress - made up of the representatives of the people?

How does someone that specifically mentions "privacy rights and civil liberties", that have to be protected at all times in accordance with the Constitution, even in "highly classified intelligence work", at a hackers' convention, now explain the breach of those very same rights?  It is disconcerting when it comes from the highest levels of office with the highest level of power with the highest levels of privilege with the highest levels of protections. One hopes all the families of NSA workers realize that many in the offices of their family members with the NSA know a lot about their personal live...including every porno they have watched since they were fifteen, and every intimate conversation they have made in their bedrooms and every face they have made behind somebody's back in anger, annoyance or contempt.  One would also hope that they are afraid, ashamed and will start challenging these family members working for the NSA...and treat them as pariahs (that they have become). It is for these kinds of dysfunctional and morally depraved people that the word pariah should really apply.

If Americans are already concerned about the marriage between Wall Street and Washington...now they have to be horrified at the intimate relationship between the American military and many economically militant private corporations. There is, as Professor Christopher Pyle with Mount Holyoke college in Massachusetts has reiterated, since his exposure of the American domestic spying way back in the 1970s, not only a vast network of growing intelligence gathering machinery (that people have no knowledge about)...but more than 70% of Government budget for intelligence work now goes to private contractors.

As some might say, "How dare you spy on American citizens and legal residents for fear of some remote national security threat...when the very agencies employed in the work of 'intelligence gathering to ensure national security' have put the people and the country at the highest national security risk by outsourcing to private companies with very little transparency, monitoring and accountability?"

In other words, have some of the national security agencies themselves become a national security threat?

In higher places, where insularity and intoxication of power reigns supreme, all kinds of people and perspectives become strange bedfellows...and people cannot see their own contradictions, hypocrisy and at times demonic ways.

Much like the church scandal where the men of cloak, with power and privilege, who preach morality to the public end up molesting children in their own congregation...we now have a military wanting more and more power and money to ensure out national security....while breaching national security through all kinds of private contractors with no oversight - not even from Congress, and are not accountable to anyone. Well, well, well....the cookie monster that is supposed to protect our cookie has eaten all the cookies and is now pretending to go after the "real culprit". 

The genie is out of the bottle, and instead of explaining how an agency entrusted with the job of protecting its citizens and legal residents was now spying on them...like some foreign enemy nation, some within the government and military are now trying to convince the Congress why a domestic spying program is necessary and how it has helped squash numerous terrorist plots. The same agency that could not even stop the Boston marathon bombers, with one of the bombers having a clear known militant connection that had been reported to the military!

Neither could General Alexander explain how a young man like Edward Snowden, without even a college degree, ended up earning $200,000 with a private company doing high level intelligence work which was part of the NSA domestic spying program, with access to highly classified information on what the NSA was secretively doing...while assisting the NSA on doing just that. With that level of power, authority and money given to the NSA how could a Director of the NSA, a four star General, appear this ignorant or dismissive of what his own citizens, and their representatives, are concerned about.

As so many have written on this matter in the last one week alone, the gist of their concerns, paraphrased from what Greenwald, Bamford, Pyle, et al., have written, and condensing it in a single paragraph: "There is no oversight, no accountability and no basic monitoring. We don't know how much money is being spent on these programs, why...what is it really achieving. We don't know what is being collected...how, why and where it will be stored. Like anything that has reached a crisis point we only learn of the truth after a scandal. All this while people's civil rights, privacy and constitutional rights are being blatantly and brazenly violated!"

This "Trust me, trust us or believe us" argument of leaders is no longer going to work. The view that the powers can and possibly will use any information about the public selectively or distort it to ruin an individual’s reputation, career, security and rights is disturbing to say the least. There is no way minorities, immigrants, poor people and liberals (who are now classified as Socialists and Communists in the US these days) are going to get to first base...let alone fifth base. Compliant men and women, those within the system and the conservatives are going to come to power and stay in power. And nobody can touch them. Imagine these folks, in uniforms looking prim and proper, watching gay couples make love, teenagers fooling around, families yelling at each other in anger or being privy to people’s most private or intimate conversations and actions. Yet the public will never know even the name, face or email of those that that do the prying!

According to some, "Should we be surprised with all this abuse and assault in the military? Should the military not be the first place where perverse machismo would be in full display? Is it not the place where hierarchy and patriarchy reaches its maximum structure and function? Authority is to be obeyed...and authority is everywhere. One follows orders...and never questions it. Sometimes questioning orders can get you into trouble, get you reprimanded, thrown out or get you pushed out of your peer trust circles. Is not defending your buddy for everything part of 'unity at all cost' military motto? You defend your buddies in combat...and you defend your buddies when they are accused of sexual assault. Why are we surprised this happens? And what is the ethics of war? Where is the line between clean killing and messy killing? Where is the line between the painful psychological horrors and trauma of long drawn out war and torture?  Shooting a bunch of journalists from a helicopter above is okay...but making prisoners crawl around naked in their cell is not? Ripping a woman's veil off before shooting her is not okay...but shooting her husband and her male kids in front of her is okay? Why is anyone surprised about assault and violence in the military? The military is about killing...organized orderly killing. Just because only a few among these well trained official killers going on a killing rampage where the targets become their own citizens or peers...should we forget that the military is a highly hierarchical patriarchal system...not always stable though well structured! And without oversight, and frequent evaluations and accountability...it is prone to going out of control!"

Without oversight, frequent evaluations and proper accountability mechanism the NSA too can go out of control...and some have begun to admit...it is "already out of control".

The military overwhelmingly prefers Conservative Presidents and members of Congress...And this has forced many Democrats, like John Kerry, to behave just like the Republicans.  The men at the top are never going to go away unless they are removed by the democratic process and brought to heel by the justice system.

Tyrants love illiterate people, ignorant people, clueless people, weak people, passive people, perverted people, compliant people, congenial people, exhausted people, sick people and scared people. That is how the tyrants stay in power.

What we perceive is a system of men, given authority and power, to do the right thing because they are supposed to have that brain power, thinking power, intuitive power, judgment power, and moral and ethical principles, that will help manage privacy and security well - not 100%...but well enough to not let privacy rights completely disappear. Unfortunately that is not what has happened!

In a country where many Americans are too afraid to call out those Republican members of Congress who make derogatory and disgusting statements (not rooted in science or facts) about women and their reproductive system ..., can one possibly expect that these people are going to take on the NSA, Cyber Intelligence, etc., led by four star generals? Like that toxic blue lagoon the common man keeps jumping into...over and over again – and exclaiming each time that he or she was poisoned!