Trooper
Shooter
I didn't say that work was being done only in the 70s.
LBJ had Army CI agents going after the anti war movement in the late 1960s.
Read the Church commission report.
I didn't say that work was being done only in the 70s.
It's way more simple than that, I'm betting. They simply need way to be able to sift through the data to find what they want. Kinda like a library. You want a book on dinosaurs? Step this way. How to knit? That's over here. Except that with computational capabilities these days, you don't even have to organize the data any particular way. You just have to be able to create a program that can read the data in the format in which it's stored. A simple search function based on key words, dates, phrases, names, numbers.The real question is whether there is enough manpower to even analyze most of what they have gathered. Obama is gutting the Intelligence agencies. Over a million intelligence analysts have been let go. DIA has lost 80% of their manpower. CIA has lost about 30% and NSA about 40%.
Wait a minute? Are you saying that intel prior to the 70's was military? That there was no non-military intelligence gathering machine in place?After Vietnam, most of the Army's intel assets were disbanded. A lot had to do with the Church commission. LBJ abused the Intel community, using it for political purposes. Especially Counter Intel agents (HUMINT).
Up until the mid '70s, soldiers did everything.
How bad the cuts in the IC have been
Clapper: Sequester cuts could leave US intel blind to next attack - The Hill's DEFCON Hill
Clapper: Sequester cuts could leave US intel blind to next attack
Cuts Make Intelligence Failures Likely, Top Intel Official Says Defense.gov News Article: Cuts Make Intelligence Failures Likely, Top Intel Official Says
There is even more.
It's way more simple than that, I'm betting. They simply need way to be able to sift through the data to find what they want. Kinda like a library. You want a book on dinosaurs? Step this way. How to knit? That's over here. Except that with computational capabilities these days, you don't even have to organize the data any particular way. You just have to be able to create a program that can read the data in the format in which it's stored. A simple search function based on key words, dates, phrases, names, numbers.
Wait a minute? Are you saying that intel prior to the 70's was military? That there was no non-military intelligence gathering machine in place?
The sequester cuts are a joke. They are not real cuts, only cuts in the rate of growth. And the federal government decides what is cut. Cutting White House tours while giving billions in weapons and aircraft to the muslim brotherhood regime in Egypt? Wake up. Their own OIG reports hundreds of billions of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse in the executive branch alone every year. Don't fall for the sequester narrative the lamestream media (thanks Sara Palin for that term) puts out there, it is a fraud.
No, I am saying that the military did everything in-house. No civil servants, no contractors. It was self contained. After Vietnam, much of the duties of the military were given over to civil service then to contractors. Now days the cooks, the mechanics, the supply techs, and just about anything in electronics is done by a contractor. yes, there are military trained to those jobs, they are often not allowed to do them.
As for the the sorting, yes the machine does that well. but it still takes a trained analyst to see the patterns. Also to do the fusion (interpretation of the various INTs).
Okay. I'm with ya now. That makes sense. All good.
I suppose if one thought that the intelligence gathering being conducted in violation of the law and for political purposes was done for anything other than identifying political enemies, you might have a point. Frankly, I think this is all done for the sake of creating one gigantic database that will act as a de facto registration for whatever identifying detail they want to target.
In other words, if they really were trying to catch bona fide criminals, terrorists, and the like, it might be necessary to establish relationships, patterns, and histories. But since I don't see this as anything more than large-scale cataloguing of the U.S. population, I don't really see a need for analysis. Input: search term; Output: all individuals with positive status for search term.
Then why is Obama cutting the military by a third? That is not rate of growth. And the Intel community is facing 40% cuts across the board, some agencies harder than others.
Is it to weaken the country? Or shift the money to Obamacare? Or both?
Mr Snowden is screwed, both parties want his head for treason, even if they havent said treason yet.
Mirth McConnel said something similar earlier too.
We all decry the oath breakers in Congress and the White House and hold this oath breaker up as a hero?
....and what makes anyone think the Chinese would have to kidnap him and "force" him to tell what he knows?
Let's see, Boehner, Mccain, Graham, and Mcconnel say he is a traitor. I don't have to know anything about the man to deduce that he is a hero. You can't go wrong taking the opposite side as that group of losers.
....If you have not seen it, you should really watch this 12-minute video to get a sense of the man and his answers to questions about why he did what he did, and how he could have made a lot of money selling information to our enemies, but chose not to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kaRvzQ887HM