Protect & Defend

To keep the NSA’s peeping toms & prying eyes out of our private lives, and to protect & defend all lawful political opponents.

(Note: underlined words/phrases correspond to links.)

The following is a continuation of the reasoning & rationale for the Bill-Request begun at Main Street Gov, summarized here.

This Bill-Request asks that the Federal Surveillance State put the totality of its Surveillance Apparatus and all its means, methods, and mechanisms, under the oversight of not just the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence, but also under the intensive scrutiny of an amply-funded outside Special Inspector General for Surveillance Systems Compliance (SIGSUR).

Moreover, to ensure that US-based or foreign-based Intelligence units, engaged in domestic espionage of law-abiding American citizens, do not in any way, shape, or form, target peaceful political opponents of the Establishment, be they writers and bloggers and journalists of a Free Press, or founders and organizers and candidates of a new Party, in efforts to contain and control such opposition, it is further asked in this Bill-Request that Congress explicitly empower the SIGSUR with armed authority to arrest violators, irrespective of their seniority in Government or proximity to the President, and make criminal referrals of their violation(s), in order to protect such peaceful and law-abiding challengers to the Status Quo from any and all acts of suppression, repression, and extrajudicial persecution, and to preserve their sustenance and well-being.

As of this writing, there is an Inspector General of the Intelligence Community (I.C.I.G.) whose name is Irvin Charles McCullough III. Problem is, ICIG McCullough works inside the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, with his cubicle effectively inside Lieutenant General James R. Clapper’s compound, making him (potentially) a creature of that compound. Furthermore, having been nominated by former University of Chicago Constitutional Law ‘lecturer-in-chief’ Barack Obama, and approved by N.S.A. Queen Bee Diane Feinstein, Mr. McCullough — a career intel insider that played a significant role in drafting the Patriot Act and setting up the Department of Homeland Security — does NOT fit the bill as an independent IG, obviously. This Bill-Request asks that the SIGSUR be a consummate intel outsider.

This Bill-Request also asks that the reports of the SIGSUR be made available, uncensored, to the whole of the United States Congress and all its 535 members, in order to widen the extent of examination and supervision to as large a number of the elected as possible, so as to ensure that the National Security State, and its many layers of unelected military command, shall not in any way infringe upon the liberties and rights of the People as set forth in the US Constitution. That every elected official on Capitol Hill becomes privy to the findings this Special Inspector General will, we believe, enhance their transparency and augment their seriousness, their gravitas.

Recognizing Freedom of Speech to be an inalienable Right of the People, and Freedom of Speech on any medium to be inherent in that Right, let it be acknowledged by all 535 Congressional Overseers of this hyper cyber complex that there will never be universal restrictions placed on internet service on domestic soil, or targeted ones aimed specifically at select law-abiding citizens, in times of political strife or financial crisis, no matter the severity of its depiction by the Authorities, under any pretext or guise including Constitutional Authority, Executive Order, Presidential Directive, Emergency Power, or Martial Law. (Never forget former Goldman Sachs CEO, and then Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, threatening specific Members of Congress, like Rep. Brad Sherman from California, of Martial Law on the streets of America, in 2008, if the bailouts of Wall Street — including the bailout of Paulson’s former employer — were not approved, pronto!)

For there to be true Freedom of Expression, the reliability and dependability, integrity and incorruptibility, continuity and non-deniability, of internet services and its myriad resources, are integral. This Bill-Request seeks to cement that verity in Law.

Now, for those who’ll claim a SIGSUR would inhibit the NSA’s anti-terror programs, here’s a substantive response to that:

On June 5 2013, the Chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Diane Feinstein, flew to a colleague’s funeral in New Jersey. And, four days later, in defense of the eavesdropping dragnet hanging over America like an electromagnetic blanket, she thought it relevant to reveal to George Stephanopoulos of ABC News what she saw out her little oval window on that flight: “I flew over World Trade Center going to Senator Lautenberg’s funeral, and in the distance was the Statue of Liberty. And I thought of those bodies jumping out of that building, hitting the canopy.”

For sure (and we repeat: for sure) domestic metadata collection and PRISM etc is not all that much about catching bad guys — irrespective of whether those bad guys make “bodies” jump out of buildings to hit canopies or not — because, if they were, the NSA would’ve uncovered the conversion of Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev to an Islamic radical on US soil long before the Russian intelligence services figured it out from thousands of miles away, and informed US authorities, as far back as 2011.

If the government’s gadgetry was all about catching terrorists before they terrorized, Tamerlan Tsarnaev would have been held at the first point of U.S. entry on July 17 2012, when the lead perpetrator of the Boston bombing came waltzing through the airport, sporting a 6-month old jihadi beard that first started sprouting within days of associating with seasoned terrorists in training camps in the mountains of Dagestan. Instead, what did the elder Tsarnaev brother find going through U.S. Immigration after 180-days of vacationing with Islamic militants in extremist hotbeds of the North Caucasus? How about a federal Border Control agent asking the terror troll for his customs declaration and whether, perhaps, he’d come in contact with livestock, maybe a mad cow or two, during his travels through Terroristan.

If the government’s gadgetry was all about catching terrorists before they terrorized, Tamerlan Tsarnaev would have been held at the first point of U.S. entry on July 17 2012, when the lead perpetrator of the Boston bombing came waltzing through the airport, sporting a 6-month old jihadi beard that first started sprouting within days of associating with seasoned terrorists in training camps in the mountains of Dagestan. Instead, what did the elder Tsarnaev brother find going through U.S. Immigration after 180-days of vacationing with Islamic militants in extremist hotbeds of the North Caucasus? How about a federal Border Control agent asking the terror troll for his customs declaration and whether, perhaps, he’d come in contact with livestock, maybe a mad cow or two during his travels through Terroristan.

If Feinstein’s spy-bots were indeed programmed to “keeping Americans safe” and intercepting bomb-makers as they surfed the internet on home-based computers, we would think they could at least have caught up with Tamerlan’s YouTube channel with playlist links to videos tagged under “Terrorists” including one linked to Dagestani jihadist Amir Abu Dujana just 9 months before the bombing.

Were the NSA’s complex in Utah and elsewhere all about terminating terror, we would think Tamerlan heading out of his home on the day of the marathon (April 15 2013) with brother Dzhokhar in tow, carrying backpacks, should’ve been take-down day or put-down day on no further than the sidewalk in front. Because: the elder Tsarnaev did everything but walk around with a picture of bin Laden in one hand, and a Rocket Propelled Grenade in the other, for near 2 years leading up to that fateful hour. (Matter of fact, brother Dzhokhar would post-apprehension express astonishment to having time to plan the production of even more bombs, and bombings, in the days after the Marathon bombing, before the heat finally caught up to them.)

Now, for a public response to a series of private letters we received from scientists…

Yes, we’ve encountered the allegation — from a number of physicists who’d studied the dynamics of the barely-registered Sep 11 2001 evening-time collapse of little-known World Trade Center #7 — that the so-called intelligence ‘failures’ leading up to the Boston bombing may have been anything but.

Yes, we’ve noticed the parallels of 4/15/2013 to 9/11/2001, in terms of the mind-boggling intelligence failures that preceded each attack:

In July 2001, two months prior to the 9/11 attacks, agents of the FBI in a Phoenix Arizona field office became rightfully suspicious of Arab men seeking airport operations, airport security, and pilot training in flight schools in the area. So they wrote a memo to FBI headquarters that then got forwarded to counter-terrorism officials in Washington DC and New York, stating:

“FBIHQ should discuss this matter with other elements of the U.S. intelligence community and task the community for any information that supports Phoenix’s suspicions … FBIHQ should consider seeking the necessary authority to obtain visa information from the USDOS (Department of State) on individuals obtaining visas to attend these types of schools and notify the appropriate FBI field office when these individuals are scheduled to arrive in their area of responsibility.”

In Aug 2001, one month prior to the 9/11 attacks, Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the prospective hijackers attending flight school in Minnesota, was arrested on an immigration violation — although it would take a muppet to believe that it was Moussaoui’s visa that got him arrested.

Before he somehow got into the United States, Moussaoui had quite a résumé: He’d been kicked out of a mosque in London for espousing extremist views. (Expulsion from a mosque in the U.K. for harboring jihadi sentiments, is a rather hard thing to pull off, by the way.) Considering his radical views, it would be logical to assume he was on the radar of British authorities — after all, across the English channel, French authorities were actively monitoring Moussaoui for association with British extremists, apparently.

In the early months of 2001, Moussaoui attended flight school in Oklahoma and, despite several dozens of hours of training, failed his flight lessons. So much money and effort going into something that someone sucks at, is a red flag already, especially if that someone is friends with all the wrong people and it happens to be piloting that he sucks at. But then transferring from Oklahoma to Minnesota, to continue that ‘passion’ for piloting, should’ve been the reddest flag of all.

After being cuffed in August 2001, Moussaoui could’ve been extraordinarily renditioned and promptly waterboarded, Dick Cheney style. No doubt that would’ve extracted Moussaoui of every morsel of information he had, including stuff he never knew he had.

Whether that was done or not by our champions for torture, depends — did Moussaoui have something to offer, or did he not, i.e. was what he knew, already known?

In the week leading up to 9/11, communications “chatter” (picked up by counterterrorism listening devices) allegedly reached record levels, then a crescendo just before 9/11. And that’s not to mention all the intel misses of the intervening years leading up to 9/11. Between the mid-1990s and the start of 2001, the number of intel misses appear to be so many, a book could potentially have been written around them.

Heck, even the former chairman of Princeton Economics International, the insightful Martin Armstrong, holed up in a federal correctional facility in Manhattan with some of America’s most notorious Islamic extremists — on what appears to be bogus charges leveled against him — would, in the year 2000 (in the year before the 9/11 attacks) see drawings of commercial airliners hurtling toward the twin towers, drawn by terrorists on the wall of the cell he co-inhabited with terrorists, a prison space that had to be among the most federally monitored in the nation. You’ll see Mr. Armstrong talk about those drawings at the 8 minute and 31 second mark in this video:

That said…

• Yes, we know that 7 World Trade Center, verifiably a modern highrise un-compromised by any jet-fueled avionic collision, and a steel-framed structure of 47 floors suffering only collateral, partial, and asymmetric damage from (allegedly) the destruction of the twin towers, went into uncharacteristic, symmetric, and visibly resistance-less gravitational free-fall, unto its own footprint, at ~5.20 pm EST, approximately 7.5 hours after the collapse of the South tower and approximately 7 hours after the collapse of the North tower;
• yes, we know that the official cause of 7 WTC’s collapse was “fires fueled by office furnishings” meaning no explosives were brought to bear on the building crashing, and the U.S. Commerce Department’s lead investigator, Shyam Sunder of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (N.I.S.T.) said as much;
• yes, we know that N.I.S.T. (by its own admission) had not tested for residue or remnants of explosives to arrive at that conclusion, a positively startling admission for any responsible agency, even one that had something to hide;
• and, yes, we know that WTC #7 thus became the first ever steel-frame high-rise structure of its kind to be brought down by localized office fires, anywhere in the world, at anytime.

And so a number of professionals in the business of putting up buildings, or bringing them down — two leading experts in controlled demolition included — have asked us to introduce Bill-Requests seeking “independent investigations” into the possibility that some acts of terrorism, on our soil, may have been aided and abetted (if not enhanced) by “domestic actors” acting in an “official capacity.”

They’ve asked us to consider the chances, however remote, that the “enhanced destructive effect” of 9/11 could have been used to “turbocharge” the passage of the Patriot Act, the activation and mobilization of the War Machine, and the monetization of the concomitant War Means Money Machine.

Pointing to the large and lethal proliferation of private-label military contractors worldwide in the post 9/11 universe, they’ve asked us to not dismiss outright their hypotheses, no matter how surreal they would sound to the common citizen.

Our answer to them was, and remains: False-flag-attack theory and all its forlorn variants are NOT something we’d like to get into on Main Street Gov for the simple reason that we do not want to overcrowd an already crowded plate. On that plate, rests our core convictions, embodied in the 22 Bill-Requests currently served.

One of the letters to us was titled: “9/11 — The Connection To The Saudi Royal Family & That Family’s Connection To U.S. Actors Acting In An Official Capacity.” Were we to sidetrack into something as deep and cavernous as that, we’d risk failure on everything else.

Our steadfast motto for Main Street Gov remains: “Failure is NOT an Option!” and that cannot be allowed to fall by the wayside. Thus, your call to action in all the letters we received, was not our calling. Sorry.

Let’s now fast forward to Sep-Oct 2013, to listen to a few inconvenient admissions made to Congress, by NSA deputy director John Inglis, his boss General Keith Alexander, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper…

First, Inglis would admit that bulk data collection had resulted in just one minor terror-financing activity being thwarted, that being the attempted transfer of $8500 by Basaaly Moalin, a Somali cab driver from San Diego, to a Somali outfit intent on overthrowing the Somali government, called al-Shabaab. (Note: intent on overthrowing the Somali government, not any strategic U.S. government interest.)

Next, Alexander tried to one-up that admission of a single incident thwarted to perhaps two being thwarted. But that didn’t quite go over well, as do most most things that are grounded on conjecture vs fact.

Then, Clapper went to the rescue of perhaps two, with an attempt to up the tally to maybe three, with:

(quote) “There’s another metric I would use — let’s call it the ‘peace of mind’ metric. In the case of the Boston Marathon bomber, we were able to use these tools to determine whether there was, or was not, a subsequent plot in New York City.”

So, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Yep, the metadata did not foil the Boston attack, but it might’ve stopped a New York attack if it existed.

Wow. That’s serious “peace of mind”.

Unfortunately, no one in Congress took Clapper up on his “metric” in a serious way, but had a member of the Economic Party been there to take him up on it, we assure you it would’ve been one helluva head-spinning ride for our wannabe director of celestial mind-peace.

The national security surveillance matrix, we all know, began long ago under the Clinton Administration.

Post 9/11, under the Bush Administration, it expanded to a supermatrix.

Under the Obama Administration, it fattened up, then bloated and distended itself into a hypermatrix, and a susceptible and vulnerable one at that, as 29 year old Ed Snowden illustrated with ease.

The distention under Mr. Obama is notable considering the admission by Michael Hayden, NSA Director 1999–2005, that Barack Obama the President “expanded” the very surveillance that Barack Obama the Senator protested against in 2006, when the junior Senator from Illinois and aspiring Leader of the Free World voted against Hayden’s appointment to become Director of Central Intelligence, precisely because Hayden was spying on Americans in the 6 years before.

Obama, a Senate freshman at the time, knew Hayden had the aye votes in the Senate to cruise to confirmation, but the Obama (that America first got to get a glance at) still cast his nay, in symbolic defiance. Admirable, had it lasted, to when it mattered most. Admirable, had the original act not been theatrical. (But, then again, a few of us at Main Street Gov have a different take on all this — that, like all Presidents before him, President Barack Obama had no choice on the matter; that, like all Presidents before him, he had to do as the Intelligence Community demanded of him, or else. More on that in our High Time bill-request.)

Per the logic we expressed in reference to the Boston Marathon bombing, we would submit that the NSA’s zettabytes of data collection, on American as well as foreign communications, are there to serve a range of strategic purposes, trapping terror being only a tiny subset of them.

We now live in an era of banks not trusting the P&L’s and balance sheets of other banks, of American banks not trusting the books of foreign banks especially. We would think, therefore, that American cyber surveillance has a substantial subset of its resources devoted to political and financial espionage of foreign leaders, foreign banks, foreign regulators, and un-accommodative central bank holdouts like the Bundesbank, throughout the Euro-Zone in particular.

Recent news to that effect, that America’s been spying on its most loyal allies in Europe, on the European Commission in Brussels, on Berlin, should not therefore surprise anyone. Clapper’s insinuation that the NSA’s machinery was also there to serve as an Early Warning System to protect Wall Street from financial crises, suggests it’s also there to let Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley know, in advance, that a Banco Santander or a Deutsche Bank was on its way to receivership within days.

We would submit that Top Secret surveillance systems, and their processed output, constitute a vital input to those privates who are the most politically connected, and those corporate that are most politically protected.

Moreover, in the event of another financial and economic crisis, order — and specifically the containment of disorder — will most certainly be at the spear-tip of any crisis management by Homeland Security, FEMA, or whoever.

Dissent, in normal times, is tolerated by officialdom. In abnormal times, however, dissent towards the official position can get quite intolerable.

In the thick of a severe financial crisis, deeply underwater homeowners might not want to pay their real estate taxes to an increasingly bankrupt state that they believe is incorrectly appraising the value of their home. In the thick of a severe financial crisis, mortgaged homeowners in years-long default might refuse to be evicted from their mortgaged property by mortgage-servicing banks. In the thick of a severe financial crisis, protests might sprout up to disrupt meetings (and meetings of business leaders with government leaders in particular), banks and bankers might get blockaded in their high-rise luxury condominiums and places of work, and the internet could light-up to foment more of the disturbance.

In such times, order — and the containment of disorder — in both the real and virtual space, become paramount to any system hell-bent on preserving the status quo of Government-to-High-Finance intertwine.

In Brazil, in Spain, in Italy, we’ve seen some such disturbances already. And, history teaches us, this type of civil unrest has a natural human tendency to spread, across borders (and oceans) if need be.

By Dec 2013, Spain’s elites responded to their own spate of disturbances by introducing draft legislation to criminalize dissent, something the Spanish government could not get done through the Justice system, including Spain’s Tribunal Supremo, the nation’s highest Court.

With an Act entitled “Protection of Public Safety” introduced that December, the Spanish government looked to effectively outlaw a fundamental human right that the Spanish took for granted because it was contained in their constitution, and that we Americans take for granted because it is enshrined in our Constitution. Per news service El Pais, the legislative move sought to “put a stop to practices that, despite the best efforts of the government, have not been deemed worthy of penal censure in the courts.”

Containing some 55 articles, the Act looked to deny freedom of assembly, including congregation in police-designated “security zones” — security zones that included banker offices and banker domiciles. The Act sought to punish photography of police officers and private security guards in the conduct of their policing activities no matter how abusive. It sought to ban insults directed at the police and private security services, and impose fines of €30,000+ upon violators of the law, with those levies extending all the way up to €600,000 to anyone who ‘disrespected or demeaned the state, its rulers, its monarchy.’

Spain does not have the money to build even a fraction of what the NSA has built. But if it did have anything remotely comparable, it could nip protests at the bud by intercepting and neutering their organizers & financiers before any of the organizing & financing can initiate. It could suppress both political opponents and new political parties opposed to the ways of the elites and their Eurocracy. It could target and, if necessary, implicate someone of wrongdoing (or outright illegality) by planting manufactured evidence on his or her computer.

In Dec 2013, it got widely reported that Angela Merkel had, in a heated exchange with Barack Obama, compared NSA actions to those once taken by the communist East German secret police, known as Stasi. The NSA may not have crossed very many of the lines that the East Berlin based Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit did in the period between 1950 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, including state-sponsored evidence tampering, state-authorized fabrication of false witness, state-endorsed malicious prosecution, state-enforced wrongful imprisonment, and that recourse of last resort: state-sanctioned murder, but — the fact remains — any adequately-funded national security agency can cross those lines easily, if left unchecked.

In conclusion, we leave you with quotes related to the curious case of “The Newburgh Four” and the May 20 2009 apprehension of four African American men, led by James Cromitie, in New York State on terrorism charges. Called a “textbook example of how a major investigation should be conducted” by then-Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, the arrests would garner a different take by Michael German, a former agent with the FBI, who’d instead tell Kate Davis and David Heilbroner, film-makers of the documentary “The Newburgh Sting” the following:

“Were they [the four men] the best people in society? No. But they weren’t terrorists, and this government operation over the course of the year was specifically designed to turn them into terrorists.”

(Which was true, even in the eyes of the federal judge presiding over the trial, the Hon. Colleen McMahon.)

Here’s what the judge had to say, sourced from here, here, here, and here:

“[Mr. Cromitie] was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own.” It was the FBI that “created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true … I suspect that real terrorists would not have bothered themselves with a person who was so utterly inept … Only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.”

“[Mr. Cromitie] had successfully resisted going too far for eight months,” and went along only after “the Government dangled what had to be almost irresistible temptation in front of an impoverished man” — that being: $250,000 in cash.

Also in the bait used to lure Cromitie in: rent and food money, a BMW, vacations to Puerto Rico, and a small business in the form of a barbershop.

It was the FBI’s own informant that “was the prime mover and instigator of all the criminal activity that occurred.” That prime mover/instigator being Pakistani-born Shahed Hussain, who’d been pimped-up to impress Cromitie & Co on the taxpayers’ dime. Hussain, desperate to avoid deportation by the FBI for his own criminal activity, agreed to turn informant for the FBI. In short order, he’d be flashing fancy threads and hot wheels at the Newburgh Four, while pretending to be a deep-pocketed recruiter for Pakistan’s terrorist outfit, Laiksh-e-Mohammed.

Judge McMahon would add:

“As it turns out, the Government did absolutely everything that the defense predicted in its previous motion to dismiss the indictment. The Government indisputably “manufactured” the crimes of which defendants stand convicted … The Government invented all of the details of the scheme — many of them, such as the trip to Connecticut and the inclusion of Stewart Air Force Base as a target, for specific legal purposes of which the defendants could not possibly have been aware … [crossing New York into Connecticut made the matter interstate and gave rise to federal jurisdiction over the ‘crime’, and the ‘targeting’ of a military facility mandated a 25 year minimum sentence]

“The Government selected the targets. The Government designed and built the phony ordnance that the defendants planted (or planned to plant) at Government-selected targets. The Government provided every item used in the plot: cameras, cell phones, cars, maps and even a gun. The Government did all the driving (as none of the defendants had a car or a driver’s license). The Government funded the entire project. And the Government, through its agent, offered the defendants large sums of money, contingent on their participation in the heinous scheme.

“Additionally, before deciding that the defendants presented any real danger, the Government appears to have done minimal due diligence, relying instead on reports from its Confidential Informant, who passed on information about Cromitie — information that could easily have been verified (or refuted, since much of it was untrue). [In short, the Government had a offered] a jihadist opportunity to a man who had no contact with any extremist groups, and no history of anything other than drug crimes … There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that James Cromitie could never have dreamed up the scenario in which he actually became involved. And if by some chance he had, he would not have had the slightest idea how to make it happen.”

“Cromitie, who was desperately poor, accepted meals and rent money from [the informant] … he repeatedly backed away from his violent statements when it came time to act on them, [and went along] only when the offers became outrageously high — and when Cromitie was particularly vulnerable to them — because he had lost his job. [Only then] did he finally succumb.”

That Ray Kelly — a Senior Managing Director for Corporate Security at Bear Stearns at the beginning of the new millennium, and the choice of CEO Jamie Dimon to run corporate security at JP Morgan Chase in 2014 — would list all of the aforementioned in the category of “textbook example of how a major investigation should be conducted” kind of makes us relieved that he did not become head of Homeland Security the way Barack Obama, Wall Street, and many in Washington DC wanted.)

One of the co-defendants, David Williams, would on FBI surveillance say: “We don’t want to hurt nobody. We want to just destroy property. We don’t want to take no lives.” Entrapped by the feds or not, any innocent person would resist bombing anything for any amount of money, but still does “don’t won’t to hurt nobody … don’t want to take no lives” sound like the words of a terrorist? Don’t terrorists thirst for blood, much more than they hunger for property damage? At least we thought so.

Seeking life sentences for the co-conspirators, Assistant U.S. Attorney David Raskin would before sentencing issue this assessment of the magnitude of the conspiracy: “This would have been a colossal terrorist attack and the fact that it was fake doesn’t matter.”

Earlier, we told you how Lt. General James Clapper had surmised that all his metadata collection might not have foiled the Boston Marathon bombing, but it might’ve stopped a New York attack if it existed. Clearly, Raskin and Clapper have attended the same seminar at the N.S.A. and most probably sat right next to each other holding hands.

Facing the prospect of spending perhaps the rest of his natural life behind bars, James Cromitie would for his part issue this half-baked apology of sorts: “I am not a violent person. I’ve never been a terrorist and I never will be. Everyone in this courtroom knows that. I got myself into this stupid mess. I know I said a lot of stupid stuff.”

Yes, you did, Mr. Cromitie — and in the worst of times possible for especially a pathetic pawn like you. In a time when a terrorism scare is needed every now and then to justify the surveillance state remaining not just intact, but growing ever more invasive, the stupid stuff you said could not have been stupider.

As there are no higher rights bestowed on the American people than their Constitutional Rights, this Bill-Request calls for the appointment of a Special Inspector General for Surveillance Systems Compliance (SIGSUR) so that we are all protected from not just entrapment but something vastly worse: being setup for a crime that we did not and would not commit — and if you think that’s too outlandish to think even possible in a good and decent nation like ours, we remind you of what we wrote on Main Street Gov, under “A Word Of Vigilance” … that the N.S.A.’s playbook lists “Setup a Honey-Trap” as a means to discredit someone the Agency does not like. If an intelligence service is willing to do that kind of “setup” to destroy a marriage and a family, it can very easily graduate to any “setup” it wants, especially if left unchecked by someone like a SIGSUR.

An article related to all of the above, can be found HERE.