Main Core – database of US citizens believed to be threats to national security
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
1 - Utilize the fear of external entities (Iraq, terrorism, etc.) to channel away anxiety from domestic issues.
2 - pre-occupy the public, reality shows, sports, etc.
3 - Focus the problem on individuals to provide the election as a escape valve (Bush, Obama, etc.)
4 - Quickly stop or discredit any movement before it catches on like wild fire.
5 - Identify potential instigators and defuse them early if needed (shutdown bank account, credit card, ATM) terminate their phones and Internet-which is why you need this list. , etc-which is why you need this list.
Edit:fixed formatting
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2013/jun/13...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/23/fbi-occupy-wall-str...
Americans called the IRA freedom fighters. We Brits call them terrorists.
South Africans called the ANC terrorists. Now look at Mandela.
sigh
Assad is not that good himself, but the "freedom fighters" are just a bunch of muslim fundamendalists that have slaughtered innocent people and have little popular support.
The Syria situation is not like Egypt or Turkey.
Americans seemed to have lost their free spirit. Back in the 60s - that was a real movement. Real actions. Real spirit. Right now, most people, especially young (what's saddening), are conformists and as long as they feel relatively safe and well fed, they won't go far than writing a comment on HN... like this one :)
I think that one of the huge problems of the modernist approach is that it supposes that the only levels are the individuals and the state. Family and community are seen as things to liberate people from. In the end, though, self-employment, family, and community are the ties that if we take care of them, they create the best options for the survival of a free state.
I think you're watching the wrong people.
> Right now, most people, especially young (what's saddening), are conformists and as long as they feel relatively safe and well fed, they won't go far than writing a comment on HN... like this one :)
This has always been the case - it's human nature. It was true in 1775, it was true in the 60's and it's true today. It's the minority who stand up that change the world.
If our government threatened to limit sales of alcohol (as in Turkey), among other extremely conservative laws, that would probably create a big reaction and protesting.
Which is the entire point of the American Constitution. It was created by political malcontents for political malcontents.
Having suffered under the brutality of the King, the Colonists drafted a document that would prevent such abuses in the future by enshrining it in law. That millions and millions of people who would "get along" under any regime (see North Korea today) benefited is strictly a collateral effect.
That no one seems to understand the original point of it all is why we're going down this greased slide to hell today. And hell it will be.
What outcome do you expect from this?
I can't find the link to that study anymore, so can't back this up.
While widespread starvation might not have existed, it was certainly the threat of economic issues that sparked both conflicts.
There was a mother nursing her baby while trying to get some work done on her laptop. Did she care if the NSA is watching her? Probably not. She just had too much shit to think about. She was worried that her baby seemed to be getting sick. She was worried about being able to finish the report that was due the next day at work. She was worried about what she was going to cook for dinner that night, and whether her husband was able to catch his connecting flight in Chicago earlier.
There was the overworked barrista, who was really busy trying to process the orders from a long line of customers. Did she care if the NSA was watching her? Probably not. She had been working non-stop for the past six hours, and half an hour before the end of her shift she suddenly had to deal with a large group of new customers, each of whom was cranky because they needed their fix of caffeine. She was thinking about whether the guy she gave her number to at the bar the previous night was going to text/call her soon, because he was really cute. She was thinking about whether she would be able to make it home in time to catch the latest episode of her favorite TV show.
There were two guys sharing the table next to mine. One of them was wearing a full suit, and the other was in business casual. Judging by the bits of conversation I overheard, it was an informal job interview. Did the interviewee care if the NSA was watching him? Probably not. He was worried about a ton of other things, like being under-dressed for the interview and his growing need to use the restroom really badly. He was worried about whether the interviewer would hire him, because his bills were at serious risk of running overdue. His wife had also been texting him for the past half hour complaining about the dishwasher that stopped working.
Now, these were just my guesses about these people, and they were most likely wrong. But in the grand scheme of things, I think my point stands: people are so fucking obsessed with their own little lives that they cannot raise their heads and look at - much less critically think about and analyze - what is going on around them. They don't have the type of mental bandwidth to even try to process the big picture. Their own piece of the puzzle and the immediate surrounding pieces are what demand their attention.
I was talking to my roommate this past weekend as the NSA scandal was unfolding, and I asked her if she had heard. She said no. I was appalled. I wanted to scream at her "ARE YOU LIVING UNDER A ROCK?!?" But I couldn't. She works 12+ hour days, plus a 2 hour commute, and the rest of her time is taken up by volunteer projects she's leading in our neighborhood. How can I blame her for not having heard of some invisible party listening in on all her emails and phone calls and social media conversations? How can I blame her for not being worried about the insane implications of this surveillance and what it means for her country?
I know! Why doesn't everyone just drop everything and pay attention to the stuff that you are interested in? Seriously, do you know how ridiculously egotistical you sound? You have no idea what those people do with their lives when they leave the coffeeshop, or indeed everything that's going on in the coffeeshop. The lady with the baby might just as easily be writing a book. The barista might hate TV and be looking forward to her cello lesson or some other factor. You're judging, and dismissing, people based on your completely uninformed guesses about what their lives must be like. This is as foolish as me suggesting that you don't value the perspective of the young mom because you're incapable of forming a relationship and starting a family.
You are drowning in your own hubris, and haven't stopped to consider the possibility that that your conclusions are not well-founded. There are insane implications to lots of things, like having enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on earth many times over. And yet we've managed to avoid doing so. Spy satellites gather up enough data to map our every move, but when we look at how much imagery there is that helps to re-establish a sense of perspective. I suggest you ask your roommate why devotes time to volunteer projects instead of posting paranoid screeds on HN; you might learn something useful.
I'm printing this out and framing it in my office.
>>I know! Why doesn't everyone just drop everything and pay attention to the stuff that you are interested in?
It is not stuff I am interested in. It is something everyone should be interested in. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT PEOPLE'S FREEDOM. Why is that not something everyone should drop everything and fight for?
It is something everyone should be interested in.
Really? Who put you in charge of how people should order their priorities, or made you the arbiter of how people gauge their freedom? I understand that you find the NSA monitoring intolerable and consider it an imposition upon your freedom, but you seem baffled by the idea that anyone might have come to a different conclusion from you about this. You assume that it must be because their minds are taken up with other matters which you consider trivial, and that they simply don't have the 'mental bandwidth' to understand what's going on, unlike yourself.
Now, granted that this is true of some people, and there are a good many people out there that have simply never thought about these issues. But there are others (such as myself) that have thought about them and don't share your views. Historically it seems to me that the trend has been towards greater transparency, more responsive government, and a greater degree of individual autonomy. I hold this view in spite of the fact that I assumed the NSA was accumulating data on a vast scale before these revelations (both because it was obvious that the Patriot Act was designed to facilitate such information-gathering, and because of the existence of other systems that already existed for that purpose).
I have no expectation or especial desire to convert you to my point of view; you're perfectly free to disagree with it. What I object to is your assumption that there's no possible way that anyone could understand what's going on and not share your view. Posting in all caps doesn't make your argument any clearer, it just tells me that you're feeling frustrated by the discovery that there are people who don't share your perspective.
If you have time, I invite you to read this essay, 'The paranoid Style in American Politics,' which was written in 1965 but still remains entirely relevant today: http://archive.harpers.org/1964/11/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1964-... I offer it not to suggest that you are paranoid, but because it effectively sketches out the limiting nature of discourse based around Manichean assumptions and zero-sum representations of what are complex and multi-faceted issues.
I've reread his post 3 or so times, and I never came to the conclusion that he had this belief.
"and that they simply don't have the 'mental bandwidth' to understand what's going on, unlike yourself."
If you lead a busy life, you won't have time, motivation, or enough attention to consider outside affairs. Is that false? What's the big deal?
'People are so fucking obsessed with their little lives' is a dismissive statement, suggesting that the (imagined) concerns of others are too small to deserve the attention people give to them.
If you lead a busy life, you won't have time, motivation, or enough attention to consider outside affairs. Is that false?
Yes, I do think that's false. Being busy can crowd out all other considerations due to fatigue or necessity, but not necessarily so. To stick with the coffeeshop example, is it not just as possible that the busy barista spends her evening studying to be a civil rights lawyer or some other socially responsible task as she does mooning over a hypothetical boyfriend? People are quite adept at dividing their time, in my experience.
This is just one of the many misunderstandings you have about what I wrote earlier.
I did not say there is no possible way that anyone could understand what is going on. I said people seem to have no desire to understand it and make sense of it because they are, to put it bluntly, too self-absorbed. Some of this is due to choice, and some of it is due to circumstance.
Out of these two categories, I gladly and righteously pass value judgment on the former - I believe it is everyone's civic duty to care about what is going on in their country. If one makes the choice to not perform that duty, that means they are taking what they have (i.e. their freedoms) for granted, and that is the most disadvantageous thing they can do if the ultimate goal is for them to keep what they have. Thomas Jefferson said it himself: the price of freedom is constant vigilance. If you don't pay that price, you don't deserve your freedoms.
For the latter category, I cannot pass judgment because a lot of people do not have the means to determine their circumstance. If one has to work sixteen hours to pay the bills, then they won't have any energy to think about much else. I gave my own roommate as an example. Could she quit her well-paying job and become an activist? Sure. Is it reasonable to expect her to? Not really. But it would be reasonable to expect her to watch less TV, for example, to be able to pay attention to the important issues of our time.
Nor did I attribute such a view to you. I said you assumed there's no possible way anyone could understand what's going on and not share your view. Omitting that last clause completely changes the meaning of the sentence.
Let me word it another way: I think you assume that anyone who does understand what's going on would, as a matter of course, share your opinion. I think a person could be just as well-informed as you are but hold an opinion that differs from yours. I hope that's clearer than my previous statement.
But, looking around, people are way, way more obsessed with the latest episode of Game of Thrones, for example, than the fact that they are being watched. And the reason is that they aren't even aware of the latter. They have shut it out.
I have a lot of things on my plate (job, baby, etc), but I've though about the NSA spying, and guess what: I'm okay with it! After the Guardian walked back its initial claims and we saw what the NSA was actually up to, it amounted to:
1) FISC warrants to gather call detail records at Verizon;
2) A mechanism for Google, Facebook, etc, to easily transfer customer data to the government pursuant to valid legal processes.
It looks to me like the government took care to structure the scheme to stay within the bounds of the law, both statutory and Constitutional.
Would I prefer less data collection and stronger privacy protections? Sure. I'd also prefer universal healthcare and a reforms in federal educational funding. But I'm not going to rant and rave about the END OF DEMOCRACY if I don't get those things right now. And I didn't come to these conclusions because I don't have the "mental bandwidth" to juggle work and kids and also evaluate what I think about my government's actions.
The part where your analogy breaks down is that not having universal healthcare or reforms to federal educational funding are not things that infringe on people's freedoms.
All that call data could be misused for oppressive purposes. But you haven't offered any evidence that it is, other than your apparent conviction that all government ultimately ends up as tyrannical and oppressive, a conviction which I absolutely do not share.
So very true.
Of course, graduating into a life of debt, being forced to go to work to get affordable healthcare, working 50+ hours a week and constantly being distracted by shiny new expensive things to buy will amplify this exponentially.
Not all countries are like that.
What do you think 2008 was about?
Can you point out as single mistruth in his works?
Can you point out where he has not been academic where he should have been?
He might very well produce the most academic political writings ever.
Seriously...
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Gish_Gallop
Just because someone sticks in a heap of footnotes doesn't validate their claims. Climate-change denialists do this as a matter of course, but that doesn't make their work academically rigorous. Facts and data points taken out of context can be enormously misleading.
He might very well produce the most academic political writings ever.
LOL no. I read legal opinions and law review articles for fun. I have an intense dislike of Chomsky because I am the sort of person who reads all the footnotes and consults the cited reference works, and doing so on Chomsky's writings has led me in every instance to conclude that he habitually misrepresents his source material by selective quotation and omission of equally important countervailing facts.
When I first encountered Chomsky's writings I was tremendously excited, thinking that this was a guy who Tells It Like It Is. But the more I read and analyzed, the more disappointed I became. Not being American, I wasn't bothered by his challenges to conventional wisdom or the fact that he held a radical viewpoint. What bothered me was his near-constant manipulation of his readers.
But his views on politics and world affairs are extremely eccentric, and have remained on the fringe for a reason.
Yea, for the same reason people who claimed the US was spying on everyone remained on the fringe.... until we had a bunch of evidence of it dropped on us.
Edit: I can not over emphasize 'incredible amount of evidence.'
They have remained on the fringe because most people would rather tell themselves that things are generally okay.
Chomsky is a legendary linguist, a rightly deserved reputation, but that doesn't give him automatic credibility outside of linguistics.
Hello admins, this would be a good time to click that hell-ban button next to samstave ;)
http://web.archive.org/web/20080831101327/http://www.radaron...
Main Core theory is the source for such speculation that they are after people and keep a list of who to stop from spreading truth.
† I am not trying to be a dick I really do mean respectfully. At a time like this I think it is important to not get carried away with wild speculation. Privacy has not gotten this much attention in a long time. I think we should strive to make the best use of this opportunity as possible.
- that the U.S. government has been developing Main Core and martial law plans since at least the 1980s, and
- that they might use a major terrorist attack, involving the death of thousands of people, as an excuse to implement those plans.
Of course we already did have such a terrorist attack, and martial law was not declared, and 8 million Americans were not rounded up into FEMA detention camps.
One of the usual arguments against "conspiracy" theories is that apparently it over estimates how clever and organised a government can be.
"Oh, don't be so silly, a government could never keep all that quiet, you silly little conspiracy theorist." Then as an aside, often talking tot the interviewer or audience, in a getting you on side tone, " Such poor weak people need to know that governments control everything. There is comfort in that for them".
Heard that kind of patronising put down before, used against people trying to be heard? Note how with the statements from both US and UK governments, they also avoid the direct answers? Same as google, FB, etc? "Trust us, we are only after the bad guys, and if you have nothing to fear..."
Hmmm, well, until a whistle blower spoke out, all that surveillance was conspiracy theory. Any one who spoke out or claimed it was happening was put down, patronised or accused of being a foil hatted nutter.
Except, it turned out to be true.
Or think back to how the illegal extraordinary rendition story broke. Rumours of secret night flights carrying kidnapped people and delivering them to off limits secret torture prisons in places out of jurisdiction. A very evil setup, denied left right and centre by the US government. Accusers were openly mocked. All until some UK plane spotters started taking down plane numbers and looking them up, connecting the dots.
So, yes, if you criticise the government or the power that be you are almost programmed to feel like a "wing nut", etc, etc. Just like you are made to feel "unpatriotic" or worse still, "traitorous".
Trust us, the are nukes in Iraq, we must invade......
A reasonable common-sense question is also - what use is a database with 8 million records in a situation dire enough to necessitate invoking continuity-of-government procedures/martial law/etc. Who exactly is going to go out and check up on 8 million 'potential threats' in case of, say, a nuclear attack?
History and psychology prove power in the hands of the few corrupts. The only difference this time is the technology being used - the goal is the same as it was in every other case, control of dissenters of the imposed status quo.
I would take care to stay focused on the actual issue and not get distracted by conspiracy theory bullshit. PRISM is bad enough. When our wingnuts start babbling about how this is just like <insert conspiracy theorist bullshit here> and trying to "demand answers" there, they weaken our position. The feeling you have now thanks to PRISM is, apparently, addictive. But the last thing you want to do is align your position with a bunch of easily dismissed nonsense. Attack the problem you know about first. Discover more problems later.
One thing that I am pretty certain about: blame is not the appropriate response; particularly as far as the security services are concerned. Assuming there were no procedural abuses (a big assumption), one has a great deal of sympathy for the difficult position the security services were in: asked to solve an (almost if not actually) impossible problem, they reached for exactly the same tools and techniques that I would have done, were I in the same situation. Given the same task, and the same constraints, I cannot see how I would have reacted differently.
For me, the real question is whether they should have been given that task in the first place. Intuitively, the answer seems to be an obvious and resounding "No"; although I do acknowledge that the problem is a difficult and nuanced one. The temptation to blame Bush for the whole thing is quite strong, although as I mentioned; I am sure that the debate is difficult and nuanced, and we do not have all the facts (although the trust that we might use in place of the facts is in precious thin supply).
Trust me - you'll like it.
Millions of US citizens believed to be threats to national security? Paranoid much, US government? I don't see much of a reason tot trust that government; it seems they don't trust you, anyway.
This is so paranoid that it is hard to comprehend. If you think that 2.5% of the population is out to get you, then you should probably be very carefully considering the possibility that the problem is actually you.
But consider the political monitoring - certainly a vastly higher number were likely considered potential risks to be registered "just in case" under Stalins regime as wel.
I don't know if there are any estimates of the number of people under active surveillance and "on lists" in the Soviet Union, but consider the East German Stasi, which at one point at least had 2.5% of the population of DDR acting as informants (this is a reasonably conservative estimate), and had files on about 1/3 of the total population of the DDR.
Indeed older people often form the intellectual leadership for all sorts of movements/organisations, good and bad. Especially in cultures that have maintained their respect for elders.
In Norway it turned into a major scandal in the 90's when it was revealed the security services had lists of people to be considered detained in the case of war (implicitly the assumption was a war with the Soviet Union, since the list only had left wing activists though it indiscriminately included left wing activists who where aggressively anti-Soviet, which tells you something of the mindset), and plans for using sports arenas or other suitably large enclosed spaces to lock in such high risk people as Berge Furre, a lecturer in theology, historian and MP for the Socialist Left party ("left wing" reformists/social democrats rather than revolutionaries) - not exactly a hardened revolutionary.
When the government started investigating this along with widespread illegal surveillance, he was a member of the commission in charge of the investigation (the Lund commission), and it was soon uncovered that the security services again started illegally investigating him while he was investigating them. Shows just how little respect you can expect organisations like this to have for law and democracy.
Of course, not everyone agreed: Jefferson opposed that clause in the Constitution. But Samuel Adams would've gone further and prescribed the death penalty for anyone rebelling against the United States, drawing a distinction between rebellion against monarchical governments, which he felt was justified, and rebellion against republics, which he felt was not.
Sir, your people is a great beast. -- a.h.
Then I get bummed that after the Newtown shooting all the politicians who wanted to enact tighter gun restrictions kept saying that you don't need an assault rifle to hunt. I don't see anything about hunting in the 2nd amendment. I always thought the second amendment was about preventing tyranny, in which case a fully automatic weapon would be very useful.
But, the second amendment is probably more about state organized militias in a time when the feds didn't maintain a standing army. I guess I'm going to have to give up this idle revolution fantasy. It would probably suck anyhow -- there's no way more people will be fed than are now, wealth would be distributed more equally, or due process would be better respected, after an armed revolution.
Anyway the reason I can't get rilled up is that I was during the Bush years. In the first few years after 9/11 I was seriously concerned that he would round all the muslims up and intern them (ala the US citizens of Japanese orgion during WWII), but even back then when there might have been sufficient political will to do that it wasn't going to happen, why should it happen now?
(Hence my previous straw-man reactionary paranoid collaboration).
Well, if Main Core is correct, these people have to go somewhere. If the prison camps are only in the imagination of loon conspiracy theorists, where would these 8 million go?
Strikes me the US, probably my lot in the UK too, needs a truth and reconciliation commission.
Really, this is first rate nutty stuff. Did you know the U.S. government has a database containing records on hundreds of millions of its citizens (and even some non-citizens!)? It contains records of where you live, which causes you support and how much money you make. Some people in this database are flagged for "special attention" by government agents who conduct an even more thorough trawl through personal lives.
Of course, that's the IRS. Maybe some of us would prefer a taxation scheme that didn't require all this infrastructure, but there's nothing deeply nefarious about it.
It's one thing to be unhappy or disturbed by the alleged degree of NSA data collection on U.S. citizens, but when you start speculating about FEMA prison camps you've gone over the edge.
By alan_cx's logic, we can't call people who think there are frozen aliens at Area 51 "conspiracy theorists" either.
Well, as a possible consequence.
If you're planning for Continuity of Government you aren't looking to handle detaining whole swathes of your surviving population. However you may want a database to be able to check people coming forwards to be involved in civil society after such an event.
Surely there are enough people on here who have watched Jericho and Revolution to understand that civil society is really vulnerable in the aftermath of a catastrophic event.
(1) Just file a request with FEMA, DHS, or the FBI.
(2) Presto! Doing so will mark you as suspicious, and subject to surveillance, questioning, and/or internment during times of national crisis.
That being said, that doesn't mean it's good. How "dirty" is that data set, for starters?
Another Wikipedia article to check out is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarran_Internal_Security_Act#... . The provisions of that act are more-or-less the same thing - a reversal of the idea of habeas corpus. It grants the executive branch power to indefinitely detain masses of political dissenters without trial. The provision that allows this was proposed by the champion of US liberalism at the time, Hubert Humphrey.
That 1950 list is the 1982 list and is also the current list. Of course the names change as times go by, but the purpose is the same. For the government it is a good idea - it worked pretty well for Germany and Italy - you get rid of troublesome nationalities and political dissenters. It works well and makes a lot of sense for them. Of course I myself don't condone it.