Linux-fueled Thoughts Unhinged

Since I'm probably on multiple FBI watchlists and NSA blacklists for looking up Tails and Qubes OS, I might as well start taking note(s that I won't go back to) on various surveillance programs in the U.S.

In honor of the new CIA surveillance reveal in early 2022 (which is worse than the NSA's surveillance under FISA, because the CIA's program was basically not governed by any statutory law and oversight — unlike the NSA's programs under FISA, despite the fact that FISA is empirically unenforceable), let's go over U.S. surveillance programs in no particular order.

Not to have too much ennui, the U.S. has been creating surveillance programs since approximately the Second Red Scare (McCarthyism, I think? I never did complete a proper U.S. history course in high school, but that hasn't stopped Edward Snowden from making one of the most compelling historical retrospectives of post-9/11 America of the 2010s in Permanent Record, has it? Not like I'll get any more significant levels of “truth” with a A.B. in history from Harvard or anything... yes, I had to use the typographically correct Latin abbreviation, instead of the pleb version of a B.A.)

• Operation CHAOS, from the CIA
• ECHELON, grew with mission scope creep from its first intended Cold War purpose to store and share information about everyone within the IC's of the Five Eyes.
• Project SHAMROCK had no legal oversight.
  • This observes that the direct ancestor of the NSA and the NSA had direct access to all Western Union telegrams. This would eventually lead to the NSA keeping financial tabs on everyone in the 1970s, as stated in the piece “So, You Want To Be a Darknet Drug Lord...”, which I discovered after reading about Doxbin.
    • I assure you that I'm barely competent enough to even administer my own NextCloud instance, so get rid of the notion that I'd even try to buy anything from a darknet marketplace. Haven't you watched the Aria episode from Darside Diaries?
• Project MINARET was a sister project to Project SHAMROCK. This was the entire precursor and infrastructure set up to the practically warrantless wiretapping that happens under FISA post 9/11. The project involved domestic surveillance. FISA was created in 1978, but we know it basically has minimal bark (if any) and no real bite at all.
• The FBI Index (the plural form should be “Indices”, not “Indexes” — but that's the mathematician in me after working with too many discrete summations in partial differential equations...) is most likely what people mean by “FBI watchlists”. At least one real list is the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB). No one knows what its rules and conditions are, no one knows how you end up on the TSDB, and I'm pretty sure no one really knows how to get yourself off the list while still remaining alive... no, there's no guarantee that you'll be taken off the list even after your death. The best part is that the FBI Index is partially shared across the world to other international intelligence agencies.
  • Not to be a stupid loudmouth about this, but I'm pretty sure I'm on some FBI watchlist, simply for reading articles about Tor Browser, Tails, and Qubes OS — but I mostly blame the NSA for that, which would then be disseminated to the CIA and FBI.
• The Project Megiddo report from the FBI was... unintentionally educational. I doubt the FBI is actually taking meaningful countermeasures against most of the groups named in the report, but at least I got to learn the etymology of the word “Armageddon” from a direct block quote. Cool, I guess.
  • I'll have to cite Project Megiddo as a source for a... certain auteur project I want to make in the future as inspiration for a cult — even though the report specifically identifies apocalyptic cults.
    • Getting flashbacks to the mysterious VHS video from Barely Sociable, no?
• Project Mockingbird was a wiretapping operation started by JFK to identify sources of government leaks by surveilling journalists' communications.
  • This is the kind of bullcrap that would reduce my shock at JFK's assassination, in retrospect. I might trigger some people if I say JKF deserved it just for this alone (and hardly justified — yet), but if you combine this with the motivation behind the assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm, I can't say I'm too surprised at what came around to JFK.
    • The same people who would probably get triggered are the uneducated sheeple who think that the U.S. actually won the Vietnam War (where your sources at, bro? 4chan or 8kun? Get out of here!) and probably will raise children to believe that the U.S. also won the Afghanistan War. To keep uttering “Remember 9/11” but then have no awareness of the ramifications of the PATRIOT Act that we still have today (which is thoroughly explained in Edward Snowden's Permanent Record) know is an objective crime against humanity — a subtle one even more damaging more than even being a stupid institutional stan for the DNC or being a MAGA Trumper.
• I'm well aware that many who stand close to the edge between the fabricated stage of world events and the curtain that hides the ones who play God without permission can easily stage my death as a unfortunate suicide, like Iris Chang who wrote The Rape of Nanking.
  • But I know that I won't stop until the job is done, which I have yet to discover. However, I know at least it falls under the S.M.A.R.T. (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timebound) goal guidelines, which is the inherent hamartia plaguing nearly all significant long-term goals the American IC agency will ever create, just like a fatal and incurable genetic disease.