KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

Data & Information Manipulation

by Alex Hutchins

On August 17, 1975, Sen. Frank Church appeared on “Meet the Press” to discuss his investigations into the surveillance capabilities of America’s intelligence agencies, particularly the National Security Agency.

Sen. Church stated that the technology the government had access to was astounding and cautioned that if the NSA ever turned its giant listening ears inward upon the United States, any semblance of privacy we ever expected to have would evaporate…  Once this happened, he predicted we would no longer be able to control our government. It, instead, would control us…

…  But in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the NSA did just what Church had worried about — it turned its giant listening ears inward and every single American citizen became a potential suspect. Our “digital exhaust” — phone calls, emails, web searches, credit card transactions, text messages, etc. — began to be stored, sifted and analyzed. The volume of data was so overwhelming that the NSA rapidly outgrew its facility at Ft. Meade, Md., and has spent more than $2 billion building a brand new facility in the desert outside Salt Lake City.

Utah Data Center for NSA

With the Federal Aviation Administration’s projection that we’ll have 30,000 drones over the U.S. in the next eight years, the Department of Homeland Security’s soon-to-launch laser that will secretly scan people in airports (down to a molecular level) from 160 feet away...

The technology being used to watch all of us, every minute of every day, is both troubling and fascinating. When combined with the warnings of Sen. Church, it has the potential even to be frightening.  

These statements are part of a review for a new novel by Brad Thor entitled, Black List.

Canadian Shadow Warriors

When I taught Economics classes to students about 10 years ago, one of the questions that I would ask them on the first day of class was:

ARE YOU A BOILING FROG?

And, while their responses varied, all of them basically said NO. 

Here is the story of a boiling frog.

If one attempts to put a frog into a pot of boiling water, immediately after the frog defecates and/or micturate in your hands, will make a feeble attempt at escaping; however, if one were to put a frog in a pot of lukewarm water, the frog will quietly allow itself to be placed down inside the pot and when the temperature in increased, will not notice the change and will literally allow itself to be boiled to death.

As an analogy, 99% of the American population has been sitting in pots of lukewarm water since 1975, allowing the Federal Government, Businesses, Banks, Investment Brokers to gradually turn up the heat affectively keeping us away from noticing and/or caring about what it is that they are systematically doing to us.

It is somewhat of an irony

 how “us”

also stands for

 U. S.