All Hail the Surveillance Leviathan

All Hail the Surveillance Leviathan

There is now no question that we the "paranoid" were not paranoid enough. A year of Snowden publications underscores that we will never have enough tinfoil. 

The deep state is midwifing a global panopticon. Future historians, if there are future historians, will record that this decade witnessed a newborn technology that is more dangerous than the atom bomb. Nuclear weapons can eradicate all life on the planet, except for insects: the surveillance Leviathan can enslave us all.

The only purpose that a transnational panopticon can serve is a despotic totalitarianism that is worldwide in scope. I am not the first to make this observation. That honor goes to Mr. William Binney, veteran of 32 years of service with NSA, designer of THINTHREAD, who warned mankind about the behemoth rising for years before any of us heard the name Snowden. Mr. Binney was the first to describe the surveillance Leviathan in terms of despotism and totalitarianism. The fact that few of us know Mr. Binney's name, despite thousands of news reports and articles that cite him, betrays the effectiveness of our systems of mass control. Mankind is hypnotized. We are entranced, in a form of slavery. Within our collective nightmare some of us know it.

As our collective consciousness recoils from this technology, as some of us struggle to snap out of our daze, we are confronted by our own image in a mirror which mercilessly reflects our worst attributes: this technology of mass surveillance is agnostic, it can be used for good, or for evil, but because our civilization can never return to our blissful prelapsarian state of ignorance, we are doomed to occupy ringside seats to the subjugation of humanity. It is happening right now, in our lifetimes, as we dance to the tedious metronome of our waking trance. We did this to ourselves. Our mirror does not lie.

We cannot unlearn this technology, nor can we hoard it, nor monopolize it, though we will try. Other governments now understand that this technology exists in nascent form. It can be recreated. It can be rediscovered. In a misdeed that echoes the Promethean revelation of fire, what NSA and GCHQ did is they imagined the irreversible machinery of mass surveillance, and over time, given the massive resources of the US government and the liberty afforded by classified budgets, they built it. NSA and GCHQ changed everything. Then Binney blew NSA's cover. He was ignored. Years later, Snowden flew to Hong Kong, and he blew the cover of FVEYs. Snowden was not ignored.

Now the governments of the world covet the technology. And not just governments. Mafias. Hackers. Private corporations. Indeed, much of this technology is owned by private corporations. That we do not know which ones, and to what degree, illustrates our peril. Does anyone doubt that the future belongs to descendants of Google and Akamai? No elected representative of the people, as irrelevant as they are in the waning days of the American empire, has any oversight of the board meetings of Google. Most of us have not heard of Akamai.

This technology can be stolen, its software can be transmitted, its hardware can be purchased from private firms, and as Snowden proved in an act that will reverberate down the ages, its catalogues, its user manuals, its PowerPoint stacks, all can be purloined. The only way that we can turn back the clock now is if the Holy Mother of All EMPs fuses all the circuits and melts all the ubiquitous electronics of modern society into slag. Or if a benevolent architect of the universe takes pity on us and provokes sterilizing sunspots that relapse us back to a pre-historic state of grace. No legislation will save us. No politician, no judicial oversight, no human agency can impose transparency, as the surveillance Leviathan serves itself, and it shrugs off all efforts to bridle it. This genie is out of the bottle. Failing an apocalypse that demolishes civilization, it cannot be reversed, thwarted, or contained.

Know this: The deep state must function within the void created by our ignorance. Classification regimes are abused to thwart effective oversight, to embargo entire categories of human knowledge, and to abet governments that wield the power of information to rule. State secrecy seeks to prevent mankind from understanding the concentric characteristics, capabilities and dimensions of a system principally comprised of FVEYs, with NSA at its heart. NSA does not want you peeking beyond the veil. Knowledge is reserved for those with clearances, for those with a need to know that perpetuates the system. And we consent. Humanity is easily led, we focus on daily tasks, we forget quickly, and we are readily diverted by bread and circuses. The problem for the deep state is, if enough of us awake and recognize what is happening, the danger exists that we will seek to unplug the system. NSA's mortal fear is that its tyranny will engender yet another potentially fatal heretic, another Snowden. We foes of the surveillance Leviathan await him, our next prophet.

This is why NSA wants you focused on Snowden, that imperfect messenger who again rang the alarm first set off by William Binney. And this is why you must forget Snowden. If you wish to wake up, you must read the heretical texts, you must read the Snowden documents, and you must draw the inescapable conclusions that they reveal to you for yourself. Fear not. There is redemption on the far side of the Snowden exegesis. As you read them, the shock of recognition that you experience is the sensation of your consciousness awakening. Suddenly you hear the music. You understand that you are hypnotized. You realize that you exist in a dream state, you suddenly know that mass media orchestrates our societies, all for the benefit of a system that serves only itself. 

This is why I believe that the Snowden texts must ultimately be published in their entirety, without redactions. This means you, Mr. Greenwald. All of them. They are the patrimony of humanity, and you are only a steward. You are a good steward, and I thank God that destiny in the form of Snowden chose you, but when you ask yourself who and what you are protecting by a piecemeal release of redacted data over a protracted period, you soon realize that you are defending evil. Our Republic has been hijacked. America is all but lost. Absent a Second American Revolution, we may not be able to save her. In the meantime, humanity is naked before the looming shadow of the surveillance Leviathan.

Mass surveillance is implemented for purposes of control. Populations, entire societies, are its targets. This is why the collection systems are principally pointed at the domestic populations of the FVEY consortium, and only secondarily at actual terrorists, or foreign governments, or targets pertaining to hostile intelligence services. More Americans and other Westerners are under surveillance by the NSA / FBI and FVEYs than the combined populations of North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Russia and China. NSA and GCHQ are looking at us. Not at them. On those rare occasions when actual perpetrators are apprehended or interdicted by the systems, the acolytes that run them, the elite caste of SIGINT analysts that are anointed to run the searches, they celebrate, and they tell themselves that they are protecting our society while they are complicit in our enslavement. 

The systems silently continue collecting, insatiably, without pause, storing everything in databases that will soon be comprehensive and permanent, as enduring as anything made by the hands of man. The Constitution, the Fourth Amendment, are ignored, the DIRNSA and the DNI lie, the Attorney General lies, our President lies, and the body politic of the Republic sickens. The omniscient eyeball does not blink. When sufficient storage comes online, NSA will achieve its heart's desire of collecting everything and saving everything, forever. The new NSA center in Utah is merely the first repository that will retain every quotidian and digital detail of the minutiae of our lives. The acolytes of this system, we can call them the priests of the panopticon, they will do anything to prevent the system from going dark. They believe in the surveillance Leviathan. 

The global panopticon is not yet complete, it is in its infancy, but as it absorbs new capabilities through bilateral agreements with the national SIGINT agencies of countries worldwide, the surveillance Leviathan creeps closer to the ultimate irrelevance of the Westphalian nation state. It is transnational. It is Leviathan. Black budgets will build more data centers. It will be abused. Because it exists, and because mankind is fallen, the technology will be adapted for evil and control. 

Nothing digital or electronic is off limits to this transnational meta organization. It will enable instantaneous and comprehensive scrutiny of every human on the planet. Omniscience, in short. 

"Dystopia" does not quite cover what we have done to ourselves.