Welcome To The Age Of The Information-Industrial Complex

Authored by James Cobett via The Corbett Report,

When WWII ended and the American deep state welded the national security establishment into place with the National Security Act, the world entered into a new era: the era of the military-industrial complex.

But when the Cold War ended and the “Clash of Civilizations” became the new existential threat, the deep state found an opening for another paradigm shift. As the all-pervasive threat of terrorism became the carte blanche for total surveillance, the powers-that-shouldn’t-be found the organizing principal of our age would not be military hardware, but data itself. Welcome to the age of the information-industrial complex.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

It is not difficult to see why these words passed so quickly into the political lexicon. Think of their explanatory power.

Why did the US use inflated estimates of Russian missile capabilities to justify stockpiling a nuclear arsenal that was more than sufficient to destroy the planet several times over?

The military-industrial complex.

Why did America send 50,000 of its own to fight and die in the jungles of Vietnam, killing untold millions of Vietnamese (not to mention Cambodians)?

The military-industrial complex.

Why did the US use the public’s fear and anger over 9/11 and a phony panic over non-existent weapons of mass destruction to justify the illegal invasion and trillion-dollar occupation of Iraq?

The military-industrial complex.

Why did Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama expand the fictitious “war on terror” into Pakistan and Yemen and Somalia, refuse to close Guantanamo despite his earlier promises to the contrary, commit US forces to “kinetic military action” in Libya without so much as seeking Congressional approval, and launch a new era of covert drone warfare?

The military-industrial complex.

Why has Trump not only continued but further expanded the US military presence in Africa, increased US aid to Israel and Saudi Arabia, actively enabled the war crimes in Yemen that have led to the largest cholera outbreak in human history, and killed more civilians in his first six months in office than former drone-king Obama killed in his entire eight-year presidency?

The military-industrial complex.

When you think about it, it’s rather remarkable that such a phrase was ever uttered by a President of the United States, much less a former five-star general. Could you imagine any modern-day President talking about something like the “military-industrial complex” and its attempted “acquisition of unwarranted influence” without immediately dismissing the idea as a conspiracy theory? Over the decades there has been much speculation about Eisenhower’s use of the phrase, and what precisely he was warning against. Some have argued that the phrase was prompted by Eisenhower’s discovery that the Rand Corporation was grossly misrepresenting the Soviet’s military capabilities to John F. Kennedy, who ended up using the Rand invented (and completely fictitious) “missile gap” threat as a cornerstone of his 1960 presidential election campaign.

Whatever the case, it is perhaps time to revisit Eisenhower’s most famous speech. What Eisenhower is ultimately describing is the rise of American fascism; the merger of government and corporate power. What term can better capture the nature of early 21st century American political life? Is there any longer any doubt that the military-industrial complex has reached its ultimate expression in firms like Blackwater (aka “Xe” aka “Academi”) and its military contractor brethren? Is there any other word but “fascism” to describe a state of affairs when a Secretary of Defense can commission a study from a private contractor to examine whether the US military should be using more private contractors, only for that same Secretary of Defense to leave office and become president of the company that conducted the study, only to leave that company to become Vice President of the US and begin waging a war that relies heavily on no-bid contracts awarded to that same company based on the recommendation that it made in its original study? Yet this is precisely the case of Dick Cheney and Halliburton. It would be difficult to think of a more blatant example of the military-industrial complex fascism that Eisenhower was warning of.

But as it turns out, there was another warning about fascism embedded in that farewell address that has received far less attention than the “military-industrial complex” formulation, perhaps because there is no catchphrase hook to describe it:

“Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.”

Given that this warning came in 1961, before the age of communications satellites or personal computers or the internet, it was a remarkably prescient observation. If scientific research half a century ago was dominated by federal grants and expensive computer equipment, how much more true is that for us today, half a century later?

So what is the problem with this? As Ike explained:

“Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Here, again, the warning is of fascism. But instead of the military-industrial fascism that dominated so much of the 20th century, he was describing here a new fascistic paradigm that was but barely visible at the time that he gave his address: a scientific-technological one. Once again, the threat is that the industry that grows up around this government-sponsored activity will, just like the military-industrial complex, begin to take over and shape the actions of that same government. In this case, the warning is not one of bombs and bullets but bits and bytes, not tanks and fighter jets but hard drives and routers. Today we know this new fascism by its innocuous sounding title “Big Data,” but in keeping with the spirit of Eisenhower’s remarks, perhaps it would be more fitting to call it the “information-industrial complex.”

The concept of an information-industrial complex holds equally explanatory power for our current day and age as the military-industrial complex hypothesis held in Eisenhower’s time.

Why is a company like Google going to such lengths to capture, track and database all information on the planet?

The information-industrial complex.

Why were all major telecom providers and internet service providers mandated by federal law to hardwire in back door access to American intelligence agencies for the purpose of spying on all electronic communications?

The information-industrial complex.

Why would government after government around the world target encryption as a key threat to their national security, and why would banker after banker call for bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to be banned even as they plan to set up their own, central bank-administered digital currencies?

The information-industrial complex.

The effects of this synthesis are more and more felt in our everyday lives. Every single day hundreds of millions of people around the world are interfacing with Microsoft software or Apple hardware or Amazon cloud services running on chips and processors supplied by Intel or other Silicon Valley stalwarts. Google has become so ubiquitous that its very name has become a verb meaning “to search for something on the internet.” The 21st century version of the American dream is encapsulated in the story of Mark Zuckerberg, a typical Harvard whizkid whose atypical rise to the status of multi-billionaire was enabled by a social networking tool by the name of “Facebook” that he developed.

But how many people know the flip side of this coin, the one that demonstrates the pervasive government influence in shaping and directing these companies’ rise to success, and the companies’ efforts to aid the government in collecting data on its own citizens? How many know, for instance, that Google has a publicly acknowledged relationship with the NSA? Or that a federal judge has ruled that the public does not have the right to know the details of that relationship? Or that Google Earth was originally the brainchild of Keyhole Inc., a company that was set up by the CIA’s own venture capital firm, In-Q-Tel, using satellite data harvested from government Keyhole-class reconnaissance satellites? Or that the former CEO of In-Q-Tel, Gilman Louie, sat on the board of the National Venture Capital Association with Jim Breyer, head of Accel Partners, who provided $12 million of seed money for Facebook? Or that, in 1999, a back door for NSA access was discovered in Microsoft’s Windows operating system source code? Or that Apple founder Steve Jobs was granted security clearance by the Department of Defense for still-undisclosed reasons while heading Pixar in 1988, as was the former head of AT&T and numerous others in the tech industry?

The connections between the IT world and the government’s military and intelligence apparatus run deep. In fact, the development of the IT industry is intimately intertwined with the US Air Force, the Department of Defense and its various branches (including, famously, DARPA), and, of course, the CIA. A cursory glance at the history of the rise of companies like Mitre Corporation, Oracle, and other household electronics and software firms should suffice to expose the extent of these relations and the existence of what we might dub an “information-industrial complex.”

But what does this mean? What are the ramifications of such a relationship?

Although the signs have been there for decades, perhaps the most startling example of what lies at the heart of this relationship has been revealed by the whistleblowers at the heart of the National Security Agency, one of the most secretive arms of the American intelligence apparatus. While Edward Snowden has received the most attention with his “revelation” of the PRISM program, much of the information about the NSA’s ability to surveil all electronic communications has been revealed over the past decade by NSA whistleblowers like Russ Tice, William Binney, Thomas Drake and J. Kirk Wiebe, third-party contractors like Snowden and AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, and independent journalists like James Bamford. Together, the story they tell is of a truly Orwellian society in which all communications are being captured and analyzed by the NSA, and, with the advent of facilities like the new data center in Utah, presumably stored indefinitely for use at any future time in any future investigation for any pretense by anyone with authorization to access that data. According to Snowden, this includes lowly third-party contractors like himself operating at NSA subcontractors like Booz Allen Hamilton in the vast (and expanding) private intelligence industry that has grown up around the information-industrial complex in the exact same way as private military contractors like Blackwater formed around the military-industrial complex.

In some ways, this information-industrial complex is even more insidious than its military-industrial counterpart. For all of the ills caused by the military-industrial complex (and there are many), at the very least it required some sort of excuse to drain the American people’s resources, and its failures (like the Vietnam quagmire or the debacle in Iraq) happened in the clear light of day. In the information-industrial complex, where vast spying programs happen in the shadows and under the cover of “national security,” it takes whistleblowers and insiders willing to risk it all even to find out what is being done by these shadowy agencies and their private-sector contractors. Even worse, the entire Orwellian spy grid is being run on the flimsiest of pretenses (the “war on terror”) that has no defined end point, and “justifies” turning that spy grid inward, on the American people themselves.

Surely Eisenhower never envisaged the monstrosity that this information-industrial complex has become, but the foresight he had in identifying its early stages over half a century ago is remarkable. The problem is that we are even further away from heeding the warning that he delivered in that 1961 address than we were at that time:

“It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system—ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”

If only this were the rhetoric that was shaping today’s debate on the issue, instead of the well-worn canard that we must “strike a balance” between freedom and security. Sadly, until such time as the National Security Act of 1947 is repealed and the cover of national security is lifted from the dark actors that populate this sector, the information-industrial complex is unlikely to be quashed—or even hampered—anytime soon.

Rocket-Launcher Turned In During San Francisco Gun Buyback

Over the weekend, it was supposed to be just another gun buyback event for San Francisco police, but that wasn’t the case at all.

In total, 280 firearms were exchanged for cash by officers, however, one individual took advantage of the “ask no questions” policy and handed over an M136 AT4 Anti-tank rocket launcher.

Yes, a rocket launcher, this deadly device is made by Saab and it’s used to blow up heavily armored tanks.

A picture on social media has surfaced showing one confused officer looking down at the weapon. Apparently, he is having flashbacks to the final shootout scene in Rambo IV.

In the first 30 minutes of the gun buyback event, 83 guns were turned into authorities...

83 guns turned over in the first 30 min of @UP4LIFE gun buy-back! Get to 1038 Howard Street to drop off firearms- no questions asked. #SFPD pic.twitter.com/6vHdS5Qxl4

— SFPDCares (@SFPDCares) December 16, 2017

Progressing 90-minutes into the gun buyback event, 142 guns were turned in plus the rocket launcher...

A bazooka among the 142 firearms turned over in first 90 min of @UP4LIFE gun buy back. Turn in at 1038 Howard Street- no questions asked. pic.twitter.com/0U7NKUoJ9U

— SFPDCares (@SFPDCares) December 16, 2017

In all, “271 guns, rifles, and assault weapons” and let’s not forget the rocket launcher were turned into San Francisco police...

Thanks to everyone who made the @UP4LIFE gun buy-back a huge success! Approximately 271 guns, rifles & assault weapons were turned in today. pic.twitter.com/ahtTHPbGKU

— SFPDCares (@SFPDCares) December 16, 2017

San Francisco police and United Playaz, a violence prevention group, hosted the event on Saturday, which officers exchanged firearms for cash on an anonymous basis. Individuals who turned in a handgun received $100 or $2oo for an assault rifle. There are mixed reports regarding how much the SFPD forked out for the rocket launcher.

“I am not against the Second Amendment but I am against senseless gun violence,” said United Playaz executive director Rudi Corpuz Jr.

What about senseless rocket launchers on the streets of San Francisco? A discussion that is rarely spoken about...

A United Playaz event organizer told SFGate that December is a great time for gun buybacks programs, as the broke consumer has to decide between the right to bear arms or extra cash for holiday shopping.

Internet sleuths voiced their concerns speculating that the AT4 is a “training aid” and the SFPD should not have paid more than $15 for the device.

The one question we ask: how does someone conceal a rocket launcher on the streets of San Francisco? 

* * *

Nevertheless, here is the AT4 in action...

The Deep State"s Christmas Present To America: Surveillance That Never Ends

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

Just in time for Christmas, the Deep State wants to give America the gift that keeps on giving: never-ending mass surveillance.

I’m not referring to the kind of surveillance carried out by that all-knowing and all-seeing Jolly Old St. Nick and his informant the Elf on the Shelf (although, to be fair, they have helped to acclimate us to a world in which we’re always being watched and judged by higher authorities).

No, this particular bit of Yuletide gift-giving comes courtesy of the Deep State (a.k.a. the Surveillance State, Police State, Shadow Government and black-ops spy agencies).

If this power-hungry cabal gets its way, the government’s power to spy on its citizens will soon be all-encompassing and permanent.

As it now stands, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the legal basis for two of the National Security Agency’s largest mass surveillance programs, “PRISM” and “Upstream”—is set to expire at the end of 2017.

“PRISM” lets the NSA access emails, video chats, instant messages, and other content sent via Facebook, Google, Apple and others. “Upstream” lets the NSA worm its way into the internet backbone—the cables and switches owned by private corporations like AT&T that make the internet into a global network—and scan traffic for the communications of tens of thousands of individuals labeled “targets.”

Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution to allow the government to collect the actual content of Americans’ emails, phone calls, text messages and other electronic communication without a warrant.

Under Section 702, the government collects and analyzes over 250 million internet communications every year. There are estimates that at least half of these contain information about U.S. residents, many of whom have done nothing wrong. This information is then shared with law enforcement and “routinely used for purposes unrelated to national security.”

Mind you, Section 702 gives the government access to the very content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats), your photographs, your emails.

So beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead.

For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government.

This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military. It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful. It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.

The government’s “technotyranny” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins.

The short answer: they have become one and the same entity.

The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.

This hasn’t fazed President Trump who, much like his predecessors, has thus far marched in lockstep with the dictates of the police state.

For months, the Trump Administration has been actively lobbying Congress to reauthorize Section 702 in its entirety. Now, according to The Intercept, Trump is actively considering a proposal to establish his own global, private spy network that would circumvent official U.S. intelligence agencies and answer directly to the White House.

If approved, this would be yet another secret government agency carrying out secret surveillance and counterintelligence, funded by a secret black ops budget that by its very nature does away with transparency, bypasses accountability and completely eludes any form of constitutionality.

As if we weren’t being spied on enough already.

On any given day, the average American is now monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and ears.

Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

Talk about a system rife for abuse.

Ask the government why it’s carrying out this warrantless surveillance on American citizens, and you’ll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting out since 9/11 to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.

Yet warrantless mass surveillance by the government and its corporate cohorts hasn’t made America any safer. And it certainly isn’t helping to preserve our freedoms. Frankly, America will never be safe as long as the U.S. government is allowed to shred the Constitution.

Now the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they’re only looking to get the “bad” guys who are overseas.

Don’t believe it.

Warrantless mass surveillance of American citizens is wrong, un-American, and unconstitutional.

Clearly, the outlook for reforming the government’s unconstitutional surveillance programs does not look good.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, whenever the rights of the American people are pitted against the interests of the military/corporate/security complex, “we the people” lose. Unless Congress develops a conscience—or suddenly remembers that they owe their allegiance to the citizenry and not the corporate state—we’re about to lose big.

It’s time to let Section 702 expire or reform the law to ensure that millions and millions of Americans are not being victimized by a government that no longer respects its constitutional limits.

Mark my words: if Congress votes to make the NSA’s vast spying powers permanent, it will be yet another brick in the wall imprisoning us within an electronic concentration camp from which there is no escape.

Arizona Citizens Tracked In Facial Recognition Database In First Step For "REAL ID" Implementation

Authored by Aaron Kesel via ActivistPost.com,

Arizona citizens are now in a government database that uses facial recognition technology to track them simply for getting a driver’s license.

This allows federal and local law enforcement to use the “perpetual lineup” of suspects not accused of a crime to see if someone is wanted for a crime, Arizona Capitol Times reported.

The state says that the program is to prevent identity theft and fraud. Here’s how it works according to Arizona Capitol Times.

After someone at the Motor Vehicle Division takes your photo, your face is scanned by a system based on a proprietary algorithm that analyzes facial features.

 

The system compares your face against the 19 million photos in the state’s driver’s license database to look for similarities. If an image is similar enough, the system will flag it for further review.

The program is an effort that is part of a nationwide initiative called the REAL ID Act that was created by Congress in 2005 as a response to the September 11th terror attacks. The system allows the state to comply with the federal act, which increased standards for identification documents. Although the REAL ID Act does not explicitly call for facial recognition, it does maintain that states need to take measures to reduce fraud.

The Arizona Department of Transportation (ADOT) already has publicly boasted about the success with more than 100 cases it has taken to court for fraud using the technology, which has been in place since early 2015.

But the use of the system to prevent identity theft isn’t what people are worried about; the problem is the lack of oversight in government programs that allows anyone with access to look into the database. As such, state-run facial recognition databases are dangerous and can lead down a slippery slope to allow other operations the technology wasn’t intended for.

The other key issue is the fact that residents in Arizona aren’t even being told that this is going on – coupled with the lack of oversight and disclosure, it becomes a nightmare for privacy rights advocates.

“If you don’t know that a system is in place, you actually don’t have the choice of consenting to it or not,” said Clare Garvie who authored the “perpetual line-up” study.

Jim Dempsey, the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, also had some reservations about the lack of disclosure currently in effect.

Informed consent, through giving notice to people that their faces will be matched up against millions of others when they apply for a license, is a basic tenet of privacy, Jim Dempsey, the executive director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, said.

 

Even if notice is given, it’s unlikely that people would opt out of getting a license because facial recognition technology is used because people will decide driving a car and having a legal ID outweigh the risks, Dempsey said.

 

“It’s an important element. The lack of it is an issue, but it’s one that should be corrected and would be easy to correct,” he said.

Both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) have voiced their concerns about state facial recognition databases and how this could be tied into the push by the federal government to use these databases in airports and border checkpoints creating a dystopian Orwellian surveillance state.

“DMV photo databases are probably the most comprehensive databases in existence,” which means they’re “very, very powerful” tools for potential surveillance, something the ACLU worries could be a “next step,” Jay Stanley a senior policy analyst at ACLU said.

One of the main pitfalls of such a system is not only the lack of oversight on the program by any government watchdog, but the fact that there are no laws to justify the collections, or a court between law enforcement and access to millions of people’s identities.

The only requirement for those that search is that it must involve people suspected of committing a crime or “who law enforcement may suspect is about to commit a crime.” People could also be involved in activities that are threats to public safety, sought as part of a criminal investigation or “intelligence-gathering effort.”

Such extremely broad terms for using this technology is extremely worrying and has a high potential for abuse.

“There should at the very least be a court involved before law enforcement can access millions of unwitting people’s identities,” EFF staff attorney, Adam Schwartz, said.

 

“It’s really hard to function in a car-based society without a driver’s license, and people shouldn’t be subjected to an invasive technology when they decide to follow the law and get a legal document that allows them to drive,” he added. “It’s a misuse of data to collect data, in this case images, for one thing and use them for other purposes.”

Schwartz added that

in many states, including Arizona, agencies have started using facial recognition technology outside of any formal approval from the public and its representatives, state lawmakers.”

 

“Before government starts using powerful technology to surveil the public, there ought to be a more open and transparent process where the public controls whether or not this is picked up.

All in all, this could set a larger precedent for the surveillance state that the DHS wants in the country under its REAL ID program.

States must adopt REAL ID standards by Oct. 1, 2020, or their residents will need alternate identification to travel which may include carrying a passport domestically, Daily Mail reported.

The Surveillance State: An Inexorable March Toward Totalitarianism

Authored by Jeremiah Johnson (nom de plume of a retired Green Beret of the United States Army Special Forces) via SHTFplan.com,

The Surveillance State has slowed down its rate of growth since the President took office, however, it has not halted that growth. Instead, it lies festering below the veneer of daily events, inexorably growing its tentacles and extending their reach.

Akin to an infestation of weeds, the roots are deep within the fabric of our communications networks: telephones, CCTV (Closed-Circuit Television) cameras, the Internet…all are thoroughly permeated.

Gizmodo released an article entitled “US Homeland Security Wants Facial Recognition to Identify People in Moving Cars,” on 11/2/17 by Matt Novak. Here is an excerpt from that article:

The proposed program would allow Homeland Security to maintain a database of everyone who leaves and enters the US that would now include photos taken by spying robot-cameras at every border crossing.

 

Not only does DHS want this new facial recognition program to work without anyone having to exit their vehicle, the agency wants it to work even if the travelers are wearing things like sunglasses and hats. DHS also wants it to work without cars having to stop.

Seems they really want our information for their database. There is something more. One of the readers on the article’s website who uses the handle “Artiofab” posted this comment that is important, as he lives on the Texas border with Mexico:

 “11/02/17 12:31pm  Hi everybody I live near the US-MX border so I’m happy to give informed opinions on this topic, since I know that a lot of the audience at Gizmodo dot com apparently lives closer to the US-CA border.

 

Near the US-MX border along major US highways there are these interior checkpoints. If you’re traveling “into” the US (e.g., if you’re in New Mexico and you’re driving north) you stop your car, a USBP agent asks if you’re all US citizens, you say yes, they let you keep going.

 

(I have no personal anecdote about what happens if you don’t say yes. I have some secondhand anecdote about what happens if you are transporting a small amount of substances that the US considers illegal. But that’s tangential…)  If you’re traveling “towards” Mexico, you don’t have to stop. Instead you drive past one of these.

 

 

Yes, those are cameras and lights that take images of your car as you drive past them. What does the USBP do with the images? Great question! I don’t know the answer. But I imagine that they might really like some facial recognition software to do some biometric data-gathering on anyone passing past those cameras.”

This is interesting. Illegal aliens (yes, the Mexicans and foreigners who cross the border illegally are aliens: foreigners entering the United States illegally) are crossing our borders every day. These measures are not to keep the illegal aliens out.

These measures are to keep the subjects (taxpaying American citizen-slaves) in.

Why else would they be requiring the use of a passport starting next year on domestic flights? This is the internal passport system of the former Soviet Union, materializing before our eyes. They will not need the “Mark of the Beast” implanted or bar-coded…they have the cellular telephones.

The taxpayer slave-serfs carry these around…willingly, of their own free will…to transmit their every activity and location every four seconds…events that are all recorded for future use in whatever capacity the rulers see fit.

China has been the “testing ground” ever since free trade with them was initiated along with NAFTA (George H.W. Bush created this: Clinton just signed it into law). There is another revelatory article about the increase in surveillance technology in China. Entitled “This is What a 21^st Century Police State Really Looks Like,” by Megha Rajagopalan for Buzz Feed News, released 10/17/17. 

Here is an excerpt from that important article:

For millions of people in China’s remote far west, this dystopian future is already here. China, which has already deployed the world’s most sophisticated internet censorship system, is building a surveillance state in Xinjiang, a four-hour flight from Beijing, that uses both the newest technology and human policing to keep tabs on every aspect of citizens’ daily lives.

 

The region is home to a Muslim ethnic minority called the Uighurs, who China has blamed for forming separatist groups and fueling terrorism. Since this spring, thousands of Uighurs and other ethnic minorities have disappeared into so-called political education centers, apparently for offenses from using Western social media apps to studying abroad in Muslim countries, according to relatives of those detained.

The reason the article is important is that Miss Rajagopalan was in the area for two months, accumulating firsthand interviews, reports, and photos. Here’s the big news. The Chinese have devices that allow them to scan cell phones and laptops from a distance at any time. They have biometric facial scanners they employ when stopping individuals on the street. The photos are a must-see: it shows an almost cowed populace infringed upon in every area of life.

That is the type of life coming to the United States, and soon.

In an article by the Wall Street Journal entitled, “Who Wants to Supply China’s Surveillance State?  The West,” by Dan Strumpf on 11/1/17.  This excerpt reveals the meaning of the article’s title:

Companies from across the globe packed one of the world’s biggest surveillance trade shows to demonstrate the latest gizmos and algorithms powering the high-tech revolution in the industry, of which China is on the vanguard. Tools being hawked included facial-recognition cameras, iris scanners, software that can read a subject’s mood and cameras that can scan license plates in the dark.  The surveillance-equipment market in China was valued at $6.4 billion last year, according to IHS Markit .

 

China is a big buyer of surveillance technology as Beijing steps up its efforts to better monitor its 1.4 billion people. That is providing a boon for equipment makers, who are looking to export their gear abroad. But it has also sparked concern from rights activists about how the authoritarian government is using the souped-up “Big Brother” technology.

China is the testing ground for the eventual use of this surveillance technology in the United States. An article posted on 11/6/17 shows us just how far the police state has come along toward completion. “Texas National Guard Using Cellphone Spy Tech on Surveillance Planes,” is the article’s title, by Michael Thalen of Info Wars.  The Texas National Guard is using technology to mimic cell phone towers and capture locations of thousands at a time. Here is part of the article:

The devices, purchased with drug-asset forfeiture money from Maryland-based Digital Receiver Technology Inc. (DRT), are designed to locate cellphones within a certain range by emulating a cell tower.  The specific model obtained by the Texas National Guard, known as the DRT 1301C, is even capable of intercepting and recording phone calls in real-time. A leaked U.S. government catalogue of cellphone surveillance devices obtained by The Intercept in 2015 also notes the ability of the DRT 1301C, nicknamed the “dirt box,” to “locate up to 10,000 targets and can process multiple analog and digital wireless devices all at the same time.”

There is a large question as to whether a National Guard Unit is allowed to take on the role of a police force. That question has already been covered under legislation and executive orders passed under the Color of Law that basically has thrown the rulebook out the window. Posse Comitatus has been supplanted by the Warner Defense Act of 2006, and the NDAA’s and accompanying Executive Orders under Obama have all but federalized both Active Duty military forces and National Guard troops in the never-ending “War on Terror.”

As can be seen with these articles, the U.S. government has a new President and a new “pitch,” but many things are not changing, or if so…it is for the worse. The increasing surveillance is tightening of the noose around the necks of the American citizens.

The surveillance state is growing more powerful and thanks to legislation, is becoming more invulnerable to challenges to its supremacy. Soon its inexorable march will be irreversible. Totalitarian control will be in place, and most of the citizens are either unaware of such, or they do not care that it is so.

Censorship In The Digital Age

Authord by Jason Hirthler via CounterPunch.org,

The grand experiment with western democracy, badly listing thanks to broadsides from profiteering oligarchs, may finally run ashore on the rocks of thought crime. In the uneven Steven Spielberg project Minority Report, starring excitable scientologist Tom Cruise, Cruise plays a futuristic policeman who investigates pre-crimes and stops them before they happen. The police owe their ability to see the criminal plots developing to characters called pre-cognitives, or pre-cogs, kind of autistic prophets who see the future and lie sleeping in sterile pools of water inside the police department. Of course, it turns out that precogs can pre-visualize different futures, a hastily hidden flaw that threatens to jeopardize the profits of the pre-crime project. Here is the crux of the story: thought control is driven by a profit motive at bottom. As it turns out, just like real life.

Now, the British government has decided to prosecute pre-crime but has done away with the clunky plot device of the pre-cogs, opting rather to rely on a hazy sense of higher probability to justify surveilling, nabbing, convicting, and imprisoning British citizens. The crime? Looking at radical content on the Internet. What is considered radical will naturally be defined by the state police who will doubtless be personally incentivized by pre-crime quotas, and institutionally shaped to criminalize trains of thought that threaten to destabilize a criminal status quo. You know, the unregulated monopoly capitalist regime that cuts wages, costs, and all other forms of overhead with psychopathic glee. Even a Grenfell Towers disaster is regarded more as a question of how to remove the story from public consciousness than rectify its wrongs.

The Triple Evils

Martin Luther King, Jr. famously, or infamously, depending on whether you are a penthouse mandarin or garden-variety prole, linked the triple evils of poverty, racism, and militarism. These evils are as yet unaddressed in our society, as we are daily shown on the media mouthpieces of imperial capitalism. Wars must be waged. Victims of social injustice must be incarcerated. Society itself must be made poor to ensure higher profits.

Yet there is another set of evils that are primarily used to mask the original trifecta outlined by King. In fact, the connection between propaganda, surveillance, and censorship is clear and inseparable. Take as your initial premise that imperial capitalists want to control the world. Not an unjustified claim. As an imperial capitalist, you are part of a privileged minority whose objective is to further exploit the disenfranchised whose only recourse is the resources you are pillaging. War, be it with bombs or sanctions or special forces or proxies, is immensely profitable to the capitalists. Arms makers make money. Chemical companies make money. Energy companies make money. Media companies make money. Presidents not only make money, they also make history. But the workers, the poor, and the downtrodden pay the price. That’s why they won’t be happy to hear of your plans. Therefore, they must be lied to, lied to so convincingly and comprehensively that they accept, without a second thought, the plans you have laid out before them.

This convincing requires three decisive actions: propaganda, surveillance, and censorship. The first is the official lie you craft to convince them to believe you. The second is the dragnet of digital observation by which you assess whether or not they do believe you. The third is the coercive methods by which you punish those that don’t believe you (justified by the imperial tale you first wove).

The official interpretation of reality is already in place: western civilization is beset on all sides by maniacs that want to take away our freedoms. The surveillance is already in place through programs like the Five Eyes alliance and ECHELON, PRISM, Boundless Informant, FISA, Stellar Wind, and many others. What remains is to tighten the noose of censorship around the neck of our open western societies.

Idiots Abroad

To that end, British Home Secretary Amber Rudd recently announced that citizens that view too much extremist material online could face up to 15 years in jail. Rudd related,

“I want to make sure those who view despicable terrorist content online, including jihadi websites, far-right propaganda and bomb-making instructions, face the full force of the law.”

This flaxen cipher of totalitarian control opened by tabulating some 67,000 tweets by ISIS, along with 44,000 links to ISIS propaganda, had been generated in the last year. Already, Section 58 of the Terrorist Act 2000 criminalized the possession of information that might be useful to a terrorist. But this is not enough for 10 Downing Street. Rudd is taking that law of possession and expanding it into a law of perception. It is now enough to simply watch extremist content. You needn’t download it, distribute it, or otherwise act on it. You need only see it more than once. At that point, by Rudd’s surely flawlessly calculated probabilities, you have become an existential threat to the state, or rather, to national security. You are more likely to commit acts of terror than those who have not seen the extremist content. Pre-crime without the pre-cogs.

But Rudd’s was another step in a long line of encroachments peddled by fascist-minded western governments. Theresa May, the reviled Thatcherite epigone, wants to play a paternal role in preventing citizens from even having the chance to view extremist content. The Tory manifesto tells us, “Some people say that it is not for government to regulate when it comes to technology and the internet. We disagree.” Britain plans, quite proudly it seems, to become the “global leader” in the regulation of the Internet. Just before these announcements were made, Britain had passed the Investigatory Powers Act, which lets the government sweep up user browsing histories. So the surveillance data authorities would use to implement Rudd’s plan is already there. Want to read that eloquent jeremiad against the Tories? Sorry, that was just labeled hate speech. Want to visit your favorite leftist forum? Apologies, mate, but that was deemed a “safe space” for extremist speech and shut down. Want to watch some attractive young people copulate? No problem. Just submit a request to your local minister outlining your precise reasons for wanting access to such nominally proscribed content. Otherwise, forget it.

The Germans aren’t far behind. The so-called Network Enforcement Act is said to create a framework for managing Internet activity, particularly in social media. The act is part of the country’s fake fight against fake news and hate speech, or rather its quite real fight against progressive, leftist, or communist thought and expression. This law demands, on pain of a fifty million euro penalty, that companies with two million or more web visitors must, on receipt of complaint, remove “unlawful content” from their sites. Facebook has opened a new data center in Germany to deal with removal requests, sure to be flooding in from the Bundestag. As the World Socialist Web Site makes clear, if your fake news promotes war (Iraq 2003), mischaracterizes coup d’états (Ukraine 2014), or spreads anti-immigrant hysteria (Cologne 2015), then you’ve got nothing to fear. Of course, it falls to the government itself to decide what is and what isn’t extremist content, no doubt a comforting thought for myriad Der Spiegel loyalists. And, of course, the erstwhile European Commission, destroyer of Greece and perpetrator of other ills, has published guidelines to help member states remove “illegal” content. Even the Russians have joined in, promoting legislation designed to curtail digital freedoms.

Stateside Schlemiels

None of this would be news to Barack Obama, whose own legacy of crumpled writs of habeas corpus, worthless privacy platitudes, and high-altitude wetwork, sits like a canker on the body politic. On his way out the door, through the turnstile of public weal into private gain, he provided the deep state with millions of dollars when he added the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act to the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which consecrates black budgets, cost overruns, price gouging, and all other manner of insecurity practiced by the Pentagon and its parasitic defense contractor community. The CDPA, if that’s how it will eventually be known, will effectively pay people to generate officially sanctioned narratives. The U.S. government is fighting fact by calling it propaganda and then producing its own propaganda and calling it fact.

Thanks in part to pressure from Congressional Senate Intelligence Committee that, and the indefatigable efforts of Democrats Adam Schiff and Mark Warner, major brands have been hopping on the clanging tumbrel of Russiagate, as it wheels unsteadily through the digital space, collecting the corpses of freethinkers. Facebook is now blocking “fake news” from its ads. YouTube has begun to fetter content producers with a more restrictive ad network and murky review policies. Google has tweaked its algorithm to keep “fake news” from surfacing high in Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPS.

What precisely constitutes fake news is evidently up to the Zuckerbergs and Schmidts of the world. For Google, it has decidedly meant suppressing progressive and left-wing content, as plummeting traffic numbers have indicated. Of course, it won’t mean suppressing the fake news produced by the CIA or Mi5 or the standard state-fluffing smorgasbord of lies, deceits and hit jobs offered up by the so-called mainstream media.

The always sharp Glen Ford at Black Agenda Report writes that the FBI has created a fresh construct to deal with African-American unrest, called, “Black Identity Extremism,” already truncated into another mind-murdering acronym, BIE. (As though an acronym adds just the note of tenability required to pass off a fatuity on a mal-educated populace.) Foreign Policy, in an otherwise surprisingly liberal-minded story, suggests the construct risks reviving the racism the agency has worked so hard to overcome. Ford drily notes the overlooked matter of J. Edgar Hoover targeting blacks since the 1920s, not to mention COINTELPRO and attacks on the Black Panthers. Regardless, in the eyes of the FBI, blacks angry about police abuses, persistent economic inequalities, and the New Jim Crow, are little more than “identity extremists,” a danger to national security, notably the security of the white plutocracy which it serves.

(Fore) Closing Thoughts

Remember that much of this apparatus of thought control has been applied beneath the banner of the fake Russia hacking story. That story, created by the Clinton camp to distract from the DNC email revelations provided by WikiLeaks, at first blamed Russia for hacking into “our democracy”, then suggested Donald Trump had colluded with Russia to swing the election, and then emphasized that Russia had launched an “influence campaign” designed to swing the election, with the focus subtly shifting from hacking to collusion to influence. At each turn, the evidence proves paltry, the claims absurd, and the virtue signaling nauseating. The bar is being progressively lowered until it meets a threshold of credibility by which the Senate Intel Committee can prosecute Donald Trump or justify some sort of punitive measures against Russia.

The story is so transparently false, from the technical detail to the geopolitical motive, that it is only sustained by the permanent - or deep state - elements of the foreign policy community that need a means by which to control and direct the Trump administration. Russia collusion served as an ideal pretext to force Trump away from campaign-trail odes to conciliation and toward a continuation of the hostile foreign policies glibly enabled and advanced by Barack Obama. The comedy of it all is that Facebook found ‘incriminating’ ads that amounted to less than one percent of the Facebook total ad buys. Congress would like to ban RT, which has ratings that are 0.3 percent of Judge Judy’s. And the infamous hack has been shown to be a leak. What are we left with? A grandiose deceit based on a need to sustain a brutal ideology of oppression, austerity, and war.

But this is how the imperialists do it. They organize globally to oppress locally. That’s why they’ve been rightly rebranded as ‘the globalists’. The workers always trail behind, left to cope with recently discovered alliances of institutional powers collaborating to fence in the prospects for economic equality, social justice, and the fair distribution of a nation’s wealth. We find ourselves beneath the a pregnant cloud of metastasizing repression, conceived and constructed beneath our own gaze. In his recent novel Purity, one of author Jonathan Franzen’s characters, a famous East German exile and whistleblower extraordinaire (a more charismatic Assange), finds himself a global celebrity, the subject of countless interviews wherein,

“…he’d taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of.”

Whether it is too late for a world of working class people and the ubiquitous poor to opt out of the globalized imperium dreamed up by our post-war planners, is hard to say. But if you think there’s still time, be extremely careful, since the pre-crime police are nearly omnipresent, and they might overhear you quoting Marx or see you scrawling ideas about redistribution on the walls of some abandoned underpass. Just imagine some future advertisement for the pre-crime program, a glistening LCD ad floating between skyscrapers, a smiling family at play, a nation secure, and an omniscient narrator softly reminding you, “Don’t forget—it’s the thought that counts.”

Apple's New "FaceID" Could Be A Powerful Mass Spying Tool

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

On Tuesday, Apple revealed their newest phone. The new line was anticipated by Apple users and is another cult favorite.  But many are rightly skeptical of the “FaceID” feature.

FaceID, is a tool that would use facial recognition to identify individuals and unlock their phones for use. Unsurprisingly, this has generated some major anxiety about mass spying and privacy concerns. Retailers already have a desire for facial recognition technology. They want to monitor consumers, and without legally binding terms and Apple could use FaceID to track consumer patterns at its stores or develop and sell data to others.

That seems minor on the surface, but the ramifications could be enormous. 

It’s also highly possible that police would be able to more easily unlock phones without consent by simply holding an individual’s phone up to his or her face, violating the rights of the person to privacy.

But FaceID should create fear about another form of government surveillance too. And this one is a rights violation of every person on earth: mass scans to identify individuals based on face profiles. Law enforcement is rapidly increasing their use of facial recognition; one in two American adults are already enrolled in a law enforcement facial recognition network, and at least one in four police departments has the capability to run face recognition searches. This could make Apple the target for a new mass surveillance order.

While Facebook has a powerful facial recognition system, it doesn’t maintain the operating systems that control the cameras on phones, tablets, and laptops that stare at us every day.

Apple’s new system completely changes that. For the first time, a company will have a facial recognition system with millions of profiles, and the hardware to scan and identify faces throughout the world.

According to Wired, this is a system already ripe for government abuse. The government could issue an order to Apple with a set of targets and instructions to scan iPhones, iPads, and Macs to search for specific targets based on FaceID, and then Apple would provide the government with those targets’ location based on the GPS data of devices’ that receive a match. Apple has a good record of fighting for user privacy, but there’s only so much the company could do if its objections to an order are turned down by the courts. And the government is already looking into how this could benefit them, but are hiding behind the guise of “privacy.” On Wednesday Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) released a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook, asking how the company will handle the technology’s security and privacy implications.

But this type of sleazy “Big Brother” activity by the government is not new.

Over the last decade the government has increasingly embraced this type of mass scan method. Edward Snowden’s disclosures revealed the existence of Upstream, a program under FISA Section 702 (set to expire in just a few months). With Upstream, the NSA scans all internet communications going into and out of the United States for surveillance targets’ emails, as well as IP addresses and what the agency has called cybersignatures. And last year Reuters revealed that Yahoo, in compliance with a government order, built custom software to scan hundreds of millions of email accounts for content that contained a digital signature used by surveillance targets. –Wired

Mass facial recognition scans are unconstitutional and a gross violation of human privacy rights. But that has yet to stop the overreaching government from its pursuit of an even more effective method of their goal of dystopian mass surveillance.

Legal Round Up: 3 Articles on the Law, and Fighting Back

Via The Daily Bell

In China, Foreigners Can Buy a Marriage

China is a dystopian nightmare for many who live there. Yet even the hardcore communist regime cannot keep a little freedom off the black market.

For many immigrants and foreign workers in China, they are even lower on the social ladder than the peasants. These people cannot own property, and often their children are not allowed to attend school.

But someone found a solution. Fake marriages. Foreigners in China are “marrying” Chinese citizens, even when the foreigner is sometimes already married. This helps foreigners living in Beijing buy property there. It also helps migrant workers send their kids to school and meld into a normal life.

This arrangement has increased since China responded to crowded conditions with more restrictions on foreigners. It sounds a lot like foreigners in America who get married in order to obtain a green card.

Governments just can’t keep creative black market businesses from flourishing when their restrictions leave no other choice.

We’ve even heard of straight men in the military marrying other men to take advantage of the benefits.

Prison Time for Thwarting Emissions Regulations

Volkswagen found that they could not design a diesel engine that would meet federal pollution requirements. So instead, they created software that would cheat the regulations.

Now, a Volkswagon engineer has been sentenced to 40 months in prison for his role in faking the emissions standards.

His crime is basically trying to continue doing business while being obstructed by the government. Is America a free country? They arbitrarily limit the products companies can create. Then they throw a man in prison for breaking their stupid rules.

Courts Actually Holding Police Accountable

Let’s end on a positive note. An appeals court has issued a ruling that protects two important ways of holding police accountable.

First, it should be a little harder for police to charge everything that moves with “obstruction.” The court ruling that says the First Amendment protects speech critical of police officers.

The case stemmed from a man who stepped onto his porch while the police arrested his wife in their driveway. He came outside to yell to them that they were overreacting to her failure to obey orders to walk backwards towards them. She was partially handicapped and could not easily comply.

When the man did not go back into his house he was arrested. He never even moved towards the police. He simply spoke to them while they were trying to arrest his wife. That was enough for them to charge him with obstruction.

Turns out they didn’t even have cause to arrest the wife either. She was the passenger in a car which crossed the center line of the road, and then drove for 40 whole seconds before pulling over, into the woman’s driveway.

So the courts said the lawsuit against the officers on Constitutional rights violations may move forward. The court found no reason for them to be granted sovereign immunity, and be shielded from lawsuits.

Unfortunately, the decision was not unanimous. A dissenting judge said he thinks holding police accountable for their actions will make it harder for them to do their jobs.

More bad news: this judge was considered by Trump for the Supreme Court.

Where Private Security Outnumbers The Police

Private security guards have become a common sight across our society, whether they"re escorting cash in transit, patrolling shopping malls, conducting screening at airports or protecting VIPs. In many places, the guards dress like police officers and are equipped with firearms.

As Statista"s Niall McCarthy notes, private security is booming and the sector is worth approximately $180 billion, a number that"s expected to increase to $240 billion by 2020. That"s greater than the GDPs of 100 countries including Portugal, Romania and Hungary. An estimated 20 million workers are employed in the private security sector while its biggest company, G4S, has 585,000 employees and revenues of nearly $10 billion.

Research conducted by the Guardian has found that half of the planet"s population lives in countries where there are more private security workers than police officers.

You will find more statistics at Statista

India and South Africa have glaring disparities while in the U.S., there are over 1.1 million private security guards compared to 666,000 police officers.

Things are far more even in Germany, though private security still has a slight edge over the Polizei by a margin of 2,000.

When companies like Blackwater (now called Academi) flocked to Iraq more than a decade ago to fulfill lucrative contracts, the industry really started flourishing.

However, increasing levels of wealth and growing global inequality have proven the real driving forces behind its inexorable rise. The global pool of super rich individuals is bigger than ever, resulting in heavy demand for services like alarm monitoring and armored transport. That demand isn"t going to slacken anytime soon with the private security sector growing 6 percent every year.

UK: 23,000 Terrorists And Counting

Authored by Denis MacEoin via The Gatestone Institute,

• Theresa May herself is also not entirely to be trusted in this area. Despite her calls for no tolerance for extremism, she has recently been widely criticized for blocking publication of a major report into foreign funding of extremist Muslim groups.


• For years now, radical preachers, terrorist recruiters, and fundamentalists who openly hate this country, its democratic values, and its tolerance for all faiths, have walked British streets, campaigned on university campuses, and converted and radicalised young men and women.


• What seems not to be understood about "the religion of peace" is that "peace" comes only after the entire world has been converted to Islam so that a "Dar al-Harb", the "Abode of War," will no longer even exist.


• Since the beginning of March, 17,393 people have been listed as terror suspects. — French Senate report: "Prevention of Radicalism and Regional Authorities", April 2017.

On May 26, four days after the major terrorist attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, British intelligence officials stated that they had identified 23,000 jihadist extremists living in the UK, all of them considered potential terrorist attackers. According to The Times,

About 3,000 people from the total group are judged to pose a threat and are under investigation or active monitoring in 500 operations being run by police and intelligence services. The 20,000 others have featured in previous inquiries and are categorised as posing a "residual risk".

The two terrorists who have struck in Britain this year — Salman Abedi, the Manchester bomber, and Khalid Masood, the Westminster killer — were in the pool of "former subjects of interest" and no longer subject to any surveillance.

A police officer stands guard near the Manchester Arena on May 23, 2017, following a suicide bombing by an Islamic terrorist who murdered 22 concert-goers. (Photo by Dave Thompson/Getty Images)

The report adds that the two men who beheaded British soldier Lee Rigby in London, in 2013, had been known to the security services, just as Abedi and Masood were, but had been dropped to low priority.

David Anderson, QC, the former reviewer of anti-terrorism laws, noted concerns in his 2015 report about the "speed with which things can change" around suspects and "the difficulties in knowing how best to prioritise limited surveillance resources". Senior police have also spoken of the difficulty in identifying the triggers that might "reactivate" extremist behaviour.

Others had expressed similar concerns about how the jihadi ideology, based in radical religious belief, is so intensely ingrained that it never leaves individuals and may easily reactivate a desire to commit atrocities.

Ben Wallace, Minister of State for Security at the Home Office, told The Times that the existence of a database of thousands of potential attackers clearly indicates just how serious the threat has become: "This reveals the scale of the challenge from terrorism in the 21st century," he said. "Never has it been more important to invest in intelligence-led policing."

One problem is that the police and MI5 lack enough resources to investigate any more than 3,000 suspects at a time, leaving the other 20,000 free to pass without surveillance and under the radar. According to a report issued this year by Her Majesty"s Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), and detailed in The Guardian, budget cuts to the police forces in England and Wales have left law enforcement inadequately prepared:

In a stark message about the current state of policing, Zoë Billingham, Her Majesty"s Inspector of Constabulary, said the "disturbing" practices did not apply to the majority of forces but the watchdog could see the problems spreading if action was not taken.

"We"re leading to a very serious conclusion regarding the potentially perilous state of policing," she said. "It"s a red flag that we"re raising at this stage. A large red flag."

Ironically, this austerity-produced situation stands in stark contradiction to comments by one of the country"s leading security experts:

Anthony Glees, head of security and intelligence studies at the University of Buckingham, said: "To have 23,000 potential killers in our midst is horrifying. We should double the size of MI5, as we did in World War Two, and expand the number of intelligence-led police by thousands. We can"t go on as if this wasn"t happening."

In April, as Islamic State was facing defeat in Mosul and Raqqa, a small national study found that many young British Muslims believed that jihadists returning from Syria to the UK should be given a "second chance" and should "reintegrate" within society. This is estimated to be around 800 or 850 individuals. One person interviewed argued that:

When people feel isolated and angry because they are not being treated with respect and if they go out and fight in Syria and when they come back there is no help, then I promise you, you will see more terrorism because these young people will think why should I do anything when my own Government don"t care about me.

That appears to be a threat that ignores completely what sorts of crimes returnees may have committed abroad. As such individuals do return, they may well add significantly to the list of potential terrorists living in a country they had already found occasion to hate. In 2016, "the Government admitted [that] just 14 of nearly 400 returnee fighters have been jailed, raising fears the rest are living off the radar and may be vulnerable to radicalisation."

Adam Deen of London"s anti-radical Quilliam Foundation stated that:

What is important here is that the more Isis are under siege and the more territory they"re losing, the more they"re going to channel their efforts and energies into terrorism," he said in an interview with The Independent.

Those individuals that have managed to get back into the country will be activated or will be conspiring to commit some kind of terrorist act. That"s a major concern.

Britain is not alone in facing such potential threats, but it may have the largest population of potential terrorists.

There is confusion in Germany, for example, as to how many such individuals there are. According to a report from the Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt), the number of suspects is on the rise, but they list only 657 people as capable of carrying out an attack, alongside another 388 "relevant persons" who might lend assistance to perpetrators. Separate information, however, from the country"s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for Protection of the Constitution (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz), stated that the number of radical Salafists in Germany had risen from 8,350 in 2015 to 10,100 in 2016 (with 680 classified as "dangerous"), and that hundreds of jihadis entered among the more than one million migrants welcomed into the country during the two previous years. Overall, however, the same agency estimates that 24,400 Islamists are active in Germany, a figures similar to that of the UK.

Things are little better in France, which, according to Gatestone author Yves Mamou, has a large but never-quantified Muslim population of at least six million. In April 2017, the French Senate published its "Prevention of Radicalism and Regional Authorities" report, showing that since the beginning of March, 17,393 people had been listed as terror suspects. As in Britain, French authorities said that not all suspects are being constantly monitored; smaller numbers are investigated at regular intervals.

In May, the general secretariat of the international police organization, Interpol, published a list of Islamic State fighters who were thought to have already returned to Europe and may be planning suicide attacks in different countries:

Interpol has circulated a list of 173 Islamic State fighters it believes could have been trained to mount suicide attacks in Europe in revenge for the group"s military defeats in the Middle East.

The global crime fighting agency"s list was drawn up by US intelligence from information captured during the assault on Isis territories in Syria and Iraq

European counter-terror networks are concerned that as the Isis "caliphate" collapses, there is an increasing risk of determined suicide bombers seeking to come to Europe, probably operating alone.

The situation in the UK is, in some ways, the most alarming, not only because of cuts to the police budget. Cuts have also been made to the security and intelligence services, even more sharply since the June general election. Prior to that, on June 4, Prime Minister Theresa May delivered a speech the day after the London Bridge attack. Her speech included strong promises to tackle terrorism by introducing fresh measures to strengthen existing legislation.

While we have made significant progress in recent years, there is – to be frank – far too much tolerance of extremism in our country. So we need to become far more robust in identifying it and stamping it out across the public sector and across society. That will require some difficult, and often embarrassing, conversations.

Since the emergence of the threat from Islamist-inspired terrorism, our country has made significant progress in disrupting plots and protecting the public. But it is time to say "Enough is enough".

She even named the ideological basis for the attacks:

while the recent attacks are not connected by common networks, they are connected in one important sense. They are bound together by the single evil ideology of Islamist extremism that preaches hatred, sows division and promotes sectarianism.

This was progress. Three days after that, May presented proposals for fresh legislation to clamp down hard on Islamic extremism. They included amendments to Britain"s 1998 Human Rights Act, which protects potential terrorists; tougher Terrorism Prevention Investigation Measures based on a 2011 Act, but in 2016 only used for six individuals; more deportations of suspects, and longer prison sentences, even though much radicalization takes place in prisons.

That was one day before the June 8 general election. May, overly confident that she would win handily and increase her majority in parliament, led a disastrous campaign that left her with a much reduced majority, forcing her to make an alliance with Northern Ireland"s controversial Democratic Unionist Party. Tim Worstall, writing for Forbes magazine, wrote:

"It would be both reasonable and fair to say that Theresa May has just run the worst British election campaign of modern times... Theresa May has in fact achieved something that no one in modern times has managed, to start a general election campaign 20 percentage points up and then arrive without even a parliamentary majority for her party. There simply isn"t anything to compare with this in the annals".

To make matters worse, the Labour party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, came close to winning the election and performed considerately better than anyone might have thought a month earlier. Corbyn and his increasingly far-left party had been considered unelectable. Now, they were a force to contend with in the House of Commons.

Corbyn is the last person to be entrusted with Britain"s security. Addressing a Stop The War Coalition conference in 2011, he told the crowd: "I"ve been involved in opposing anti-terror legislation ever since I first went into Parliament in 1983". He has also opposed the UK"s involvement in all foreign wars: Sir Gerald Howarth, the former Tory defence minister, said: "Jeremy Corbyn has opposed every British military intervention and represents complete capitulation and weakness". He refused for many years to condemn IRA terrorism, preferring to condemn the British army posted there. He called terrorist groups Hamas and Hizbullah his "friends"; refused to denounce them as late as 2016, and only said he regretted his support for them after heavy pressure was put on him.

Since the election, Labour has made it clear that it opposes any changes in current human rights legislation, and claims that terrorism can be tackled through the laws presently in force. Given the strains the British government is now under, especially with weak negotiations for Brexit and May"s increasing unpopularity even within her party, the strong opposition within parliament is certain to weaken further attempts to block radicalism and terrorism, particularly where action against both involves (as it inevitably will) Muslims from various ethnic minority groups.

There has already been vehement opposition to the government"s core anti-radicalization program, Prevent, with schoolteachers, students, and others claiming it snoops on Muslim communities. Within the Labour party, Corbyn"s radical followers in the Momentum Movement are already planning to force the deselection of members of parliament who oppose Corbyn, unless the such MPs "get on board" by wholeheartedly supporting the leader and his far-left policies. As this takes place, the hard left will strengthen its grip on parliament and make it even more difficult for strong new legislation to be passed.

Theresa May herself is also not entirely to be trusted in this area. Despite her calls for no tolerance for extremism, she has recently been widely criticized for blocking publication of a major report into foreign funding of extremist Muslim groups. Following an enquiry commissioned by May"s predecessor David Cameron, the report was due for publication in 2016, but is unlikely now to be revealed for public scrutiny because it is deemed too "sensitive". The sensitivity derives from Saudi Arabia being exposed as a major financier of Islamic extremism worldwide, yet May and the UK government depend heavily on selling arms and other things to the Wahhabi kingdom.

According to the London-based Henry Jackson Society, in its short report on foreign funding of extremism,

The foreign funding for Islamist extremism in Britain primarily comes from governments and government linked foundations based in the Gulf, as well as Iran. Foremost among these has been Saudi Arabia, which since the 1960s has sponsored a multimillion dollar effort to export Wahhabi Islam across the Islamic world, including to Muslim communities in the West.

In the UK this funding has primarily taken the form of endowments to mosques and Islamic educational institutions, which have in turn played host to extremist preachers and the distribution of extremist literature. Influence has also been exerted through the training of British Muslim religious leaders in Saudi Arabia, as well as the use of Saudi textbooks in a number of the UK"s independent Islamic schools.

A number of Britain"s most serious Islamist hate preachers sit within the Salafi-Wahhabi ideology and are linked to extremism sponsored from overseas, either by having studied in Saudi Arabia as part of scholarship programmes, or by having been provided with extreme literature and material within the UK itself.

If the British government itself prefers to cover up such ties, opting to rescue its trade balance at the cost of endangering the lives of its own citizens, our concern for the future security of the country deepens immeasurably. The UK, like much of Western Europe and Scandinavia, stands at a crossroads. For years now, radical preachers, terrorist recruiters, and fundamentalists who openly hate this country, its democratic values, and its tolerance for all faiths, have walked British streets, campaigned on university campuses, and converted and radicalized young men and women. Sometimes they have been watched, but almost none has been deported, almost none has been imprisoned, and almost none has been singled out, due to the pretense that "Islam is a religion of peace". In Islam, the whole world is divided into two parts" the Dar al-Islam [Abode of Islam] and the Dar al-Harb [Abode of War]. What seems not to be understood about "the religion of peace" is that "peace" comes only after the entire world has been converted to Islam so that a "Dar al-Harb", the "Abode of War," will no longer even exist.

Theresa May"s promise of tightened legislation to protect the British public was the right response to three major recent terror attacks. Yet fall-out from the election and May"s own wish to protect Saudi Arabia from scrutiny are likely to guarantee that the serious measures we so much need may never be implemented. When there are further attacks and more people die, who will step forward to give us the protection we need? Or by then will it be too late?