Comments by Coleen Rowley on “F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds” in the New York Times

Published on June 13, 2011 by WAMM Today

By Coleen Rowley

It’s not the poor agents’ fault. They got to keep busy to earn their pay, don’t they?! Or at least show they are keeping busy even if it’s dirty business going through banana peels, coffee grounds and used sanitary napkins. It’s dirty business but someone has to do it, right?

By the way, this is all history repeating as these same job pressures made for all the worthless surveillance’s and papered up “domestic security” files during the decades of McCarthyism to COINTELPRO which were predicated on the similarly-hyped threat of Communism.

No one knows the amount of tax money being poured into “Top Secret America” to fund the 1200 public security agencies and 1900 private contractors/consultants, but I can make an educated guess given that the roughly 12,000 FBI agents?out of the estimated 854,000 agents, operatives, analysts, contractors and consultants with “top secret” clearance and an estimated 2.5 million with plain security clearance?each makes somewhere between $90,000 to $100,000 per year on salaries alone.

It’s quite likely therefore that a trillion dollars has gone into the creation of the “Military Industrial Complex’s” new little brother, the National Security-Surveillance Complex with its mission of massive data collection. “Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency alone intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications” and the NSA is just one of the 3000 top secret data collection agencies. All the agencies are in fierce competition for their share of the big money pie.

Can you imagine the funny cartoons of six-figure salaried agents digging through people’s trash “without any firm reason” just because that’s how they collect their paychecks in this brave new world where they have all been assigned to pre-empt future acts of “terrorism”? All they had to do was tell the truth from the outset, explain how that notion of “pre-emption” is just fiction and not possible, but they went along with the “Minority Report” farce because that’s what the fearful citizenry wants to believe and it’s now where the big money comes from.

Meanwhile what the fearful citizenry should be afraid of is the waste of their tax dollars while the country is on the verge of going bankrupt, setting a new $16 trillion debt limit to pay for this internal rot and corruption borne of this lunacy.

Read the New York Times article “F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds”