“Collect it All” is NSA Director Keith Alexander’s motto – meaning he intends to get every bit of your personal information and everyone else’s and permanently store it.
The NSA has been pursuing this goal relentlessly, recklessly and in direct, knowing and deliberate violation of our US Constitutional Rights for years, if not decades. Two law professors call it “criminal” in a New York Times Commentary
So with all that worldwide information at their disposal and all their spying power wouldn’t you expect they could track President Obama’s #1 enemy these days in multiple ways with complete accuracy? By that I mean track Privacy Rights Hero Edward Snowden.
NSA’s General Alexander Can’t Find his Own Nose
Well, apparently NSA can’t track a man who is practically in plain sight (and was on the cover of every world newspaper) with any accuracy or competence. Even though they knew where he was living to within 100 meters !
Lets rewind a couple of months to when Mr Snowden was stuck in the Moscou Airport terminal at the same time he was granted Political Asylum in Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua. A few days later the Bolivian President’s plane was forced down in Austria as though the Bolivian President was a terrorist.
Although Obama tried to cover up his outrageous demand to all European nations to force the plane down, no one believes him because the real reason the plane was forced down and searched was that Obama thought Whistleblower Snowden was on board.
But Snowden wasn’t on the plane.
Bolivia officially says their (democratically elected) President’s kidnapping was orchestrated by President Obama. Guess who was responsible for this unprecedented violation of international law that has infuriated the combined South American Countries against the US ?
Keith Alexander’s NSA – whose crack(pot) data gathering and analysis team made this teensy error.
Oops.
Team Obama-Alexander’sNSA-Blackwater screws up another one.
General Alexander also failed to anticipate or stop the USS Cole attack in 2000 when he was in charge of military intelligence. And lets try to forget the colossal 9/11 intelligence failures.
I shouldn’t remind you that NSA can’t search its own emails . . .
Perhaps the biggest damage they’ve done is to unleash Stuxnet. This is a computer virus that does something new and deeply frightening – it destroys physical machinery things – not just data.
Gosh, where is Felix Leiter when you need him?
Why should any one trust the NSA to do anything when they screw up such standard jobs like those and do such far reaching damage?
There’s a wise old saying in competitive circles “Doing Nothing Always Beats Doing Wrong.”
Elected officials rarely get this. Obama certainly doesn’t. Or does he?
Trouble is we know Obama is not that stupid, and that Alexander is politically powerful and charming. Alexander is also known for persuading people of his sincerity. But remember George Burns’ quip —
“The key to acting is sincerity.
Once you can fake that – you’ve got it made.”
But that still doesn’t explain why Obama bends over backwards to give NSA’s Alexander more than everything he demands.
Perhaps we also have to consider the credible information that the NSA wiretapped Senator Obama in 2004
Is it possible NSA found out something so awful, that Obama has given up and is willing to do anything NSA demands?
Or is the NSA just Monumentally and Dangerously incompetent?
In the words of President Jimmy Carter discussing the NSA
“America does not have a functioning democracy at this point in time.”
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References:
Cowboy of the NSA, Foreign Policy, Shane Harris, Sept 9, 2013
Time to tame the NSA behemoth trampling our rights, Yochai Benkler, Guardian.com, 13 September 2013
Privacy Rights Law Model Provisions – You Own Your Personal Information, David Dilworth, Deep Politics Weblog, June 2013
Did Stuxnet’s Deliberate Physical Damage of War Machines Violate War Powers Act?, David Dilworth, June 2012