Building America's secret surveillance state … "God we trust," goes an old National Security Agency joke. "All others we monitor. Given the revelations last week about the NSA's domestic spying activities, the saying seems more prophecy than humor. First, the Guardian reported details on a domestic telephone dragnet in which Verizon was forced to give the NSA details about all domestic, and even local, telephone calls. Then the Guardian and the Washington Post revealed another massive NSA surveillance program, called Prism, that required the country's major Internet companies to secretly pass along data including email, photos, videos, chat services, file transfers, stored data, log-ins and video conferencing. While the Obama administration and Senate intelligence committee members defend the spying as crucial in its fight against terrorism, this is only the latest chapter in nearly a century of pressure on telecommunications companies to secretly cooperate with NSA and its predecessors. – Reuters

Dominant Social Theme: Reuters weighs in on the erosion of Western freedoms.

Free-Market Analysis: This is a factual article about the erosion of Western freedoms over the past 100 years. Even now, however, it does not mention the proximate cause for this erosion is central banking and the ability of a privileged few to control entire economies via money printing.

There was only a handful of central banks 100 years ago and now there perhaps 150. The rise of the surveillance state has virtually tracked the expansion of monopoly money-from-nothing.

The Reuters article doesn't mention this parallelism. You won't find any such analysis elsewhere, either, or not for long. The mainstream media is run by the same globalist groups running central banking. Honest reporting is almost beyond them.

An honest report would explain how what is obviously one of the biggest stories of the modern era has gone unreported by Reuters and by the mainstream media in general.

An honest report would address the aggregate courage of the alternative media in covering the rise of the surveillance state while being marginalized by the formal media and disparaged as being agents of "conspiracy theories."

But instead, we get articles like this one, reporting that is good and serious as far as it goes … but it surely doesn't go very far. What's needed is investigate reporting. Instead, we are presented with a kind of catalogue. Here's more:

But as stunning technology advances allow more and more personal information to pass across those links, the dangers of the United States turning into a secret surveillance state increase exponentially. The NSA was so flooded with billions of dollars from post-Sept. 11, 2001 budget increases that it went on a building spree and also expanded its eavesdropping capabilities enormously.

Secret rooms were built in giant telecom facilities, such as AT&T's 10-story "switch" in San Francisco. There, mirror copies of incoming data and telephone cables are routed into rooms filled with special hardware and software to filter out email and phone calls for transmission to NSA for analysis. New spy satellites were launched and new listening posts were built – such as the recently opened operations center near Augusta, Ga. Designed to hold more than 4,000 earphone-clad eavesdroppers, it is the largest electronic spy base in the world.

Meanwhile, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where top-secret work was done on the atomic bomb during World War II, the NSA is secretly building the world's fastest and most powerful computer. Designed to run at exaflop speed, executing a million trillion operations per second, it will be able to sift through enormous quantities of data – for example, all the phone numbers dialed in the United States every day. Today the NSA is the world's largest spy organization, encompassing tens of thousands of employees and occupying a city-size headquarters complex on Fort Meade in Maryland.

But in 1920, its earliest predecessor, known as the Black Chamber, fit into a slim townhouse on Manhattan's East 37th Street. World War One had recently ended, along with official censorship, and the Radio Communication Act of 1912 was again in effect. This legislation guaranteed the secrecy of electronic communications and meted out harsh penalties for any telegraph company employee who divulged the contents of a message.

… Secret agreements between intelligence agencies and communications companies should not be allowed in a democracy. There is too much at risk. In a dusty corner of Utah, NSA is now completing construction of a mammoth new building, a one-million-square foot data warehouse for storing the billions of communications it is intercepting.

If the century-old custom of secret back-room deals between NSA and the telecoms is permitted to continue, all of us may digitally end up there.

This sounds rather grim, but let us grant that it at least is a truthful assessment of what has gone wrong in the past century when it comes to freedom and the ability to create civil society within entrepreneurial parameters.

At the same time, let us repeat what remains troublesome when it comes to the mainstream media (among other things) … Why is this creeping totalitarianism only now coming to light as a major news story when it's been tracked and reported on alternative networks for several decades?

Perhaps this is why the mainstream media is collapsing even as alternative media continues to gain traction. In fact, the current attention has a contrived feel to it.

Perhaps the intention is that once these issues have been aired in the mainstream it will be time to "move on."

But not so fast.

We think that this sort of "limited hangout" is a calculated gamble to blunt the growing knowledge of how Western societies are really organized and who is benefiting.

As believers in the Internet Reformation, we're not sure it will work.