Saturday, December 17, 2005

Phone and Fax protocols in the age of Bush

The recent revelations concerning the monitoring of all US citizens overseas phone calls by the analysts at the Puzzle Factory, The National Security Agency [NSA] should not have come as any surprise. Even 60 minutes years ago did a piece on "Echelon"; which is the project supported by the US Government, in league with the British, Australian, and other Western allies to monitor all transmissions. The British listening post is located on the Western coast near the Irish Sea and has a well guarded perimeter. These Big Brother ears guarantee that anything you say, fax or share will be taped, monitored for key words and phrases, and identified for future use without any respect for your civil or human rights.

The question is how should one deport themselves with the Ft. Meade operators listening in by the use of massive computers buried in the Maryland countryside along the beltway. These new protocols have been utilized for a long time by any of us that have international relationships, support any efforts for self determination in foreign lands, or honestly respect movements for freedom and democratic elections. What might these efforts or struggles be? Let's at least include Anti Apartheid, the Irish Good Friday Agreement, and the moral and religious work of CISPES in that list of americans wanting to export true democracy rather that the WTO version of economic dominance. Also we can definitely include those who realize that "democratic elections" held under the guns of an occupying force, whether British, American, South African, or in the past Russian gives room for international scepticism.

The protocols are simple. They already know you are the caller/sender; they can identify the recipient or the location of the receiving phone/fax/ip address. Have the discipline to not mention third persons accept by oblique references, ie. how are our friends on the Jersey shore, or some other arcane reference that is not easily recognized. Whatever your adjusted phone protocols become; remember the axiom that just because you are feeling paranoid does not mean you aren't being followed, watched or listened to. We are living in a George Orwell world peopled by the likes of Admiral Poindexter, of Iran Contra fame, whose wish is to catalog, and monitor everything we free citizens may be reading, discussing or if he could thinking.

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