Organizing Notes

Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. He offers his own reflections on organizing and the state of America's declining empire....

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The collapsing US military & economic empire is making Washington & NATO even more dangerous. US could not beat the Taliban but thinks it can take on China-Russia-Iran...a sign of psychopathology for sure. We must all do more to help stop this western corporate arrogance that puts the future generations lives in despair. @BruceKGagnon

Wednesday, February 09, 2022

'Robotic Information Regime' aimed at all of us

 


Latest video made by Will Griffin (Global Network board member and Iraq & Afghanistan war veteran).
 
He reviews the history of US surveillance with the help of writings from Alfred McCoy. (McCoy is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He specializes in the history of the Philippines, foreign policy of the United States, European colonisation of Southeast Asia, illegal drug trade, and CIA covert operations.)
 
Will then takes us to the present moment where military intelligence and surveillance has been turned into a wide-ranging surveillance program aimed at the global public.
 
Today it is called the 'Robotic Information Regime' which includes the Pentagon's Cyber Command.
 
The intelligence collection industry is a threat to all of us around the world. This information collection cadre is made up of 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances.

 


Shadows of the American Century
 
Historian Alfred McCoy has tracked the origins and development of the current global surveillance apparatus and provides us a framework to help us understand this complex set of state institutions and corporate monopolies. In his book, In the Shadows of the American Century, he tracks the origin point and development of what he calls ‘information regimes’.
 
Starting about 150 years ago, new technologies arose which provided the ruling classes of the US the methods to begin surveilling, tracking, spying and collecting information in a highly organized way. Since then, McCoy states that there have been 3 information regimes: the manual information regime, the computerized information regime, and the robotic information regime.
 



The citizens are now the enemy
 
With two major interventions raging, in Iraq and Afghanistan, Washington accelerated its development of electronic surveillance, biometric identification, and unmanned aerial vehicles. These new technologies and methods are now creating a new, third robotic information regime. Some have argued that a “fourth branch” of government has been created, the Intelligence Branch.
 
The intelligence apparatus has massively grown in the past one hundred years, from 1917, when Van Deman first established the Military Intelligence Division with 1,400 personnel to today where nearly one million employees carry top secret security clearances. By 2010, over 854,000 employees across the country held top secret security clearances.

 
Read the full text from Will's video here

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