Spying and Mass Surveillance

"Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them." : Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), 34th US President, WWII General - Source: Reader’s Digest, December 1963

"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.":  David Hume - (1711-1776) Scottish philosopher, historian and economist

"Any excuse will serve a tyrant." :  Aesop - (c. 550 B.C.) legendary Greek fabulist Source: The Wolf and the Lamb

Lisa attempted to understand why governments increasingly spied upon its citizens. Terms such as war on terror which ushered in laws designed to restrict speech, movement, association and liberties of non terrorist citizens were in direct contradiction of the alleged goals being pursued.

Programs to spy on citizens within countries’ own borders are commonplace and the billions of dollars being spent annually far outweigh any rational motive or connection to terrorism. Certainly there were vast profits to be made for the controlling perpetrators of such systems but to Lisa she felt something else.

One of the earliest secret plots to spy that was initially strongly denied is the Echelon Program, and its own name screams elitism over others. Once again the endless lying and refuting was exposed when it became undeniable.

The collusion of four empirical states occurred in 1947 between the US and four partners - the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Subsequently more countries have been enlisted into the system so that at present, within Europe and all other countries, all email, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted by the United States National Security Agency and each of the participants spy agencies. Very few signals escape the system's electronic eavesdropping and key words and complex algorithms capture any desired information being sent. One of the aims of the program is to capture every cell phone call and by utilizing voice recognition software, it allows commercial, political and private monitoring far outside the scope of any so-called terrorist communications.

And any efforts to introduce democratic oversights into the echelon program are vigorously defended despite being in direct contravention of many existing privacy laws. The fanatical secrecy surrounding nearly all current governmental and military programs gave Lisa a powerful insight into just how self serving and corrupt many agencies now have become whilst holding themselves totally above any laws.

And in being so, the use of tax monies is therefore highly illegal also. The fact that Echelon was born in 1947 gives a powerful hint to the technologies available in that time that were kept secret once again from the people who paid for it.

Lisa discovered another spy program called Advise. Its primary roll is to monitor people’s movements to their activities... It monitors what people buy and where they shop, it tracks schooling and collects data on amounts and values being consumed and expended. But the reasoning and justification for this program to protect citizens fails miserably when events such as 911 weren’t caught up in the monitoring. And the plausible reasoning is that the experts were not and are not looking at terrorism activities in the slightest.

So what are the spies trying to find? What is it they wish to know? It is well known that certain countries display a very high level of paranoia that would normally result in an individual to be locked away in an asylum. These countries are only reflections of the mind sets of their leaders and controllers.

Is all this spying designed to instill fear and in turn control the population? Is it a system in waiting ready to be activated for another purpose entirely and so is really a smoke screen akin to HAARP?

Lisa pressed on.