An acquired taste

Yes, there are all kinds of acquired tastes, but for many the one that comes from the intelligence dish is rounded a weird taste. Ask any tom, dick and harry and they all claim to be Sean who finds the taste disgusting. You see there is something afoot in the OK corral and it isn’t the lawmakers. The BBC gives us ‘Lawmakers allege ‘secret’ CIA spying on unwitting Americans’ (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-60351768). And before we go into the article, there is a view you need to consider. Would you rather deal with the FBI or the CIA? Or Perhaps the CII (Central Intelligence Investigations), the CBI (Central Bureau of Investigations) and there are two more to consider. The point is that the stage (and pissing contest) of the CIA and FBI is out of whack. The larger problem is not that the CIA has to deal with terrorists, it has to deal with some of them IN THE USA. The problems isn’t the funders, it is that the funders are American, or foreigners based and housed in the US. This setting continues on several fronts and I get it, the CIA keeps a tight lid on its intelligence data (as does the FBI), but the two stages are folly, the transgressor sees no borders it sees opportunities and they do not rely on borders. There is a larger failing here, but I am not certain it is the failing of the CIA. 

The article gives us “The agency has “secretly” conducted warrantless surveillance through a newly disclosed programme, Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich alleged”, as well as “A Washington Post analysis of the Snowden leak found some 90% of those being monitored were ordinary Americans “caught in a net the National Security Agency had cast for somebody else”.

Top officials had until then denied – and even lied under oath to Congress – that they were knowingly collecting such data. The programme, known as Prism, was later ruled unlawful by a US court”, the problem is that the terrorists know this feud is going on and they make sure it is brought to light so that they can continue unabated. The problem is not that Americans were caught in a net, the question becomes did the NSA get the end result right? So when we are given “declined to declassify the other, citing the need to protect “sensitive tradecraft methods and operational sources”” so is the story that the CIA is pushing away democracy, or is it that that Senators Wyden and Heinrich are endangering American lives? I leave it up to you to decide, and please do not become the one moron that relies on Benjamin Franklin’s “Those who give up liberty for security deserve neither.”, Franklin actually said “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” Yet that stage was specific and it was on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor. “The letter was a salvo in a power struggle between the governor and the assembly over funding for security on the frontier, one in which the assembly wished to tax the lands of the Penn family,” it was 1755. In a stage where the frontiers of war were 250 years apart and the stage was unaware of terrorists, it had its saboteurs but the stage was different. In today’s world the CIA and NSA have to deal with bitcoin transfers that tend to remain off books, stakeholders that claim to be on the American side but seem to drive Iranian needs for a price and there are chaotic people doping whatever they can to get a bitcoin or two and it is in a day and age that America can no longer trust the diplomatic words of MANY nations, each nation having its own legitimate national needs, but those needs do not adhere to American National security. I do not think THAT is the point, because EVERY nation has its valid needs, yet some pucker up to Iran at a moment notice (example: Turkey), so how many turks are there in America? The intelligence gathering field is a minefield to say the least. In that atmosphere the CIA and NSA need to fight off all enemies of America both foreign and domestic, they have to because the entanglement of foreign people in America has become too great a consideration and the FBI has nowhere near the resources to do all that. 

Yet the old setting of domestic (FBI) and foreign (NSA, CIA) is a much larger folly. That level of distinction implies that too many people get to play their game with American security at their own convenience and that does not sit well with the people in the American intelligence branch. Moreover as the American military (DIA, NIA et al) cannot really operate on American soil (outside of the military. And now two democrats are asking questions. They were valid in the 60’s and 70’s, but now, in a stage where the wrong chaos could topple the entire American finance sector, it has become too dangerous. Do not get me wrong, it will topple soon enough by its own accord, we do not need lone wolf actions and foreign based actions to help that process along. And that is merely the stage we can see. You see there are 18,925,137 bitcoins in existence, representing $806,210,836,200 dollars. Consider that 10,000 bitcoins could destroy US manufacturing needs on several levels, now consider that most bitcoins are out in the open and there are close to no way of tracking it all. Do you think that the people out to actually hurt the US will declare untraceable funds? You have got to be joking. And in all this the US is not alone, a similar danger is with the UK, France, Germany and a lot more industrial nations. I reckon that the FBI, CIA and NSA need a very different charter and consider that what I state here is known with people like Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich. I get it, some politicians are real devoted democrats, but this reminds me of the person who was worried about a proper shave 2 hours before his head got cut off by the guillotine.
We understand that in the final hours when the last act is a proper one, the quality of that shave means a great deal, but is it that time yet? And can the US afford the setting it is now boasting about?

I let you consider that stage.