Institutionalized Conspiracy

In most of its operations, the CIA is by definition a conspiracy, using covert actions and secret plans, many of which are of the most unsavory kind. What are covert operations if not conspiracies? At the same time, the CIA is an institution, a structural part of the national security state. In sum, the agency is an institutionalized conspiracy.

Official seal of the IAO, complete with Masonic eye-in-pyramid blasting a sci-fi death ray across the globe and Latin maxim, "knowledge is power."

But it’s not only the CIA. The Information Awareness Office and Information Exploitation Office were opened in 2001 with former Iran-Contra conspirator and Reagan Security Advisor John Poindexter at the helm. Their stated goal is that of “Total Information Awareness.”¹ Although the IAO’s funding was terminated in a motion by Senator Russ Feingold in 2004, their projects were expressly allowed to continue, under a black budget.² Since then, the Information Exploitation Office has renamed itself the “Information Processing Techniques Office“ and Total Information Awareness has been rechristened “Terrorist Information Awareness.”

But it isn’t only the CIA, IAO, IEO, and TIA. It’s also the NSA & CSS, GCHQ, CSE, DSD, GCSB, FSB, SIS, BND, and ISI. It’s the global ECHELON surveillance network run by the world’s most powerful governments,³ the NarusInsight supercomputing mass surveillance system available for use only by government contract,⁴ secret patents granted under gag order that never expire,⁵ and the mysterious radomes that appear on restricted areas on every continent.⁶

According to Donald Rumsfeld in 2001, the Pentagon “cannot track” $2.3 trillion dollars of its own transactions,⁷ a number which is 2.5 times larger than that year’s total estimated defense budget⁸ and 1.5 times larger than 2010′s entire estimated federal budget⁹.

Suddenly, a global conspiracy isn’t such a crazy idea. In fact, it’s a public institution paid for by your tax dollars.

1. The original website hosted by DARPA has been destroyed, these are two mirrors. [HTML1] [HTML2] [↩]
2. “Total/Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA): Is it Truly Dead?”, published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. [HTML] [↩]
3. The UK-USA alliance is an intelligence sharing community formed between five English-speaking nations of the 1st world during the Cold War. [↩]
4. Quoted from Wikipedia’s Narus article: “[Narus] is notable for being the creator of NarusInsight, a supercomputer system which is used by the NSA and other bodies to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of citizens’ and corporations’ Internet communications in real-time, and whose installation in AT&T’s San Francisco Internet backbone gave rise to a 2006 class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T, Hepting v. AT&T.” [↩]
5. Quoted from Wikipedia’s NSA article: “NSA has the ability to file for a patent from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office under gag order. Unlike normal patents, these are not revealed to the public and do not expire. However, if the Patent Office receives an application for an identical patent from a third party, they will reveal NSA’s patent and officially grant it to NSA for the full term on that date.^[12]“ The Wikipedia article gives an example for one of the NSA’s officially published patents. [HTML] Alternatively, cryptome.org hosts a number of leaked NSA documents including those regarding secret patents, such as “Ion trap in a semiconductor chip patent”, granted December 1, 2009. [HTML] [↩]
6. Radomes are on the front page of the GCSB website.

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7. “The War on Waste”, published by CBS Evening News. [HTML] [VIDEO] [↩]
8. According to page 4 of the National Defense Budget Estimates for FY 2001, published by Office of the Comptroller of Defense in 2000 [PDF], total obligational authority + total budget authority + total outlays equals approximately $888 billion. 2.3/0.888 equals 2.59 [↩]
9. “Death and Taxes”, by Jess Bachman. [JPG] [↩]