Senior NSA Executive: We’re In a Police State

[poncho]

“We Have a Significant Element of Our Government In League With Corporations and Other Unelected Officials Who’ve Decided That The Constitution Is Essentially Null And Void”

Thomas Drake is a decorated Air Force and Navy veteran, who has been awarded numerous medals including:

Meritorious Service Medal

Air Medal

Air Force Commendation Medal

Ridenhour prize

Sam Adams Award

Drake was a member of the Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service.

With a strong technical background in surveillance and computers, Drake was also one of the top NSA executives, and was Senior Change Leader within the NSA.

To get a sense of who Drake is, watch this recent PBS interview.

Washington’s Blog asked Drake if America is drifting towards tyranny.

WASHINGTON’S BLOG: Senator Frank Church – who chaired the famous “Church Committee” on the unlawful FBI Cointel program, and who chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee – said in 1975:

“Th[e National Security Agency's] capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.“

Is the NSA turning its capability around on the American people, as Senator Church warned?

Read More At: http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/06/senior-nsa-manager-police-state-worse-stasi-east-germany.html

 

[poncho]

Has the dept. Of homeland security become america’s standing army?

“A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty.”—James Madison

“Here [in New Mexico], we are moving more toward a national police force. Homeland Security is involved with a lot of little things around town. Somebody in Washington needs to call a timeout.”—Dan Klein, retired Albuquerque Police Department sergeant

If the United States is a police state, then the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its national police force, with all the brutality, ineptitude and corruption such a role implies. In fact, although the DHS’ governmental bureaucracy may at times appear to be inept and bungling, it is ruthlessly efficient when it comes to building what the Founders feared most—a standing army on American soil.

The third largest federal agency behind the Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense, the DHS—with its 240,000 full-time workers, $61 billion budget and sub-agencies that include the Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—has been aptly dubbed a “runaway train.”

In the 12 years since it was established to “prevent terrorist attacks within the United States,” the DHS has grown from a post-9/11 knee-jerk reaction to a leviathan with tentacles in every aspect of American life. With good reason, a bipartisan bill to provide greater oversight and accountability into the DHS’ purchasing process has been making its way through Congress.

A better plan would be to abolish the DHS altogether. In making the case for shutting down the de facto national police agency, analyst Charles Kenny offers the following six reasons: one, the agency lacks leadership; two, terrorism is far less of a threat than it is made out to be; three, the FBI has actually stopped more alleged terrorist attacks than DHS; four, the agency wastes exorbitant amounts of money with little to show for it; five, “An overweight DHS gets a free pass to infringe civil liberties without a shred of economic justification”; and six, the agency is just plain bloated.

To Kenny’s list, I will add the following:

Read More At: http://www.infowars.com/has-the-dept-of-homeland-security-become-americas-standing-army/