R.K.: Anything that we haven't covered yet? We have got to wrap this up. Anything that we haven't covered that's really important that you would like the listeners to know about?
W.B.: Just that my major concern isn't with NSA having access to this data or having this data, it's the use of it and once they get it and store it, being used by law enforcement and our law enforcement is spreading that around the world to other law enforcement and so it's corrupting not just our democracy, we're becoming a police state because of this but it's also corrupting the countries around the world so it's really endangering the democratic process and the court systems that we have established. That is really destroying our society. We may not know it yet but eventually it'll get to all of us.
R.K.: Bad news. So you told me that you're going to spend the rest of your life on this.
W.B.: Yes. Until my government basically starts to do the right thing, and that means become a constitutionally based operating government.
R.K.: Do you see any ideological or party differences in the way this is being handled?
W.B.: Actually no. I think they're all basically the same. They've been, I mean for example you know Bush would refer to have acquired the terrorists, captured them, put them in to torture them to get information; whereas Obama would kill them with a drone. So it's the same principle, I mean they're just doing whatever they want, there are no limits to what they want to do. Especially the latest NDAA that talks about giving the president the power to declare anybody, any US Citizen even in this country a terrorist and have the military pick them up, take them off the street, incarcerate them indefinitely, and give them no due process.
That to me is executing something very similar to what the Nazis did in 1933, Special Order 48, that did exactly the same thing. And that's how they got rid of all of their opposition. All the communists and anybody else that opposed them. But I mean they sent them to the concentration camps. So far we have not been sending them to the concentration camps but they'll do things like send the FBI after you or maybe attempt to put you in jail like they tried to do with a number of us.
So they're not as radical yet but the problem is that when you give people that kind of power or they hold that kind of power, sooner or later, they're going to use it. One way or another.
R.K.: You know it seems to me that the same applies to technology. If the technology is available or if it can be developed they're going to develop it and they're going to use it.
The elimination of political opponents and crushing of dissent is essential for authoritarian regimes which is the way that we are now headed. It is notable that it was Justice Scalia, a Ronald Reagan appointee who brought up the internment camps in American's future for it was another former Reagan official, Lt. Colonel Oliver North whose REX 84 program was similarly targeting political dissidents and using the aforementioned PROMIS software to do so. I excerpt from a 1990s WIRED magazine piece "The Inslaw Octopus" by Richard Fricker:
Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ's command center.
Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States as part of a domestic emergency preparedness program, commissioned under Reagan's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to sources and published reports. Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude. This operation was so sensitive that when Rep. Jack Brooks asked North about it during the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearing was immediately suspended pending an executive (secret) conference. When the hearings were reconvened, the issue of North's FEMA dealings was dropped.
The greatest and yet to be asked question about the ongoing surveillance programs, given the comments by Scalia is not how much has yet to be revealed but when did it all begin in the first place?
This is a relevant question indeed since the legal foundation for the current NSA surveillance and data-collection operations were cemented into place by Reagan's own Executive Order 12333 issued back in 1981. That particular administration served as an incubator for many of the same neocons who would later reemerge during the Bush regime and with the drug-running, arms-dealing uber-patriot Ollie North having been using a mysterious and powerful advanced computer program to dabble in martial law it could serve as a historical point of reference for all that is being exposed now - at least in terms of research purposes. The Reagan administration, with the Gipper's anti-Communist mania and backing of rogue armies of thugs and murderers in Latin America, the deep state/shadow government that birthed Iran-Contra and the order to justify all of what was to come haunts us all to this day. Particularly with the newly invigorated neocons now having what appears to be firm control of foreign policy with the fascist, and neo-Nazi assisted coup d'etat in Kiev and the renewed hostilities with 'the bear' surely providing a gateway to upcoming wars in Iran and Syria. That will provide the perfect climate for the crackdown and crushing of dissent in The Homeland. Thanks to Barack Obama's historic failure to roll back the evisceration of the constitution under his predecessor there is now the infrastructure to permanently render obsolete any concept of freedom that ever existed in this country.
The data-mining and and storage of everything in facilities such as that one that sits in Bluffdale, Utah and the ability to selectively target political opponents of the war machine for silencing would have been Ollie North's wet dream, or Stalin's, or to invoke the favorite bogeyman of the neocons- a guy named Hitler.
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