The big question: Why didn’t NSA spying stop the Boston bombing?

Digital Journal – by Ralph Lopez

The Obama administration and the NSA have gone into full spin mode trumpeting its victories in the plots that didn’t happen while conveniently ignoring the one that did.

Not only did the “don’t worry if you’ve done nothing wrong” Big Brother government not stop the Boston Marathon suspects, it knew who they were. It knew where they lived (190 Norfolk Street, Cambridge.) If they didn’t know, they could have asked me, and I’d have looked it up for them in public court records from Tamerlan’s 2009 domestic violence charge.  

Oh yes, they were on the welfare records too. They weren’t exactly leading a desperado life underground.

If we are to believe the FBI’s own words, Dzhokhar, the younger brother, said they downloaded the plans for the bombs from the Internet.

Long before that, no less than the full apparatus of Russian intelligence made the determination that the US should be warned about Boston suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and it did. Many times.

Yet the NSA now heralds that it has stopped plots in as many as 20 countries. But that’s not what they get paid to do. They get paid to stop them right here. Right there, in front of the Boston Public Library. I’ve been there many times. Right where dozens of people lost limbs, some of them double amputations.

Yea, that’s it guys. Don’t give me that dumb look. Right there.

Does this get any worse? Yes it does. Even after the bombing, Frick and Frack at the NSA, Justice Department, and the Department of Homeland Security couldn’t figure out who the suspects were from close-up pictures, and had to ask the public for help in identifying them. Some people even say that the FBI was putting on a show, because they must have known who the suspects were. You know, law enforcement and public working together, culminating with the Big Lockdown, and then the people once again safe thanks to total submission to authority (horay!)

Except that big show might have cost a good man his life, by tipping off the suspects that they were wanted men. If we are to believe the FBI’s own words that the Boston suspects were behind the murder of MIT officer Sean Collier, would it not have been better to not put their faces on TV, and instead try to surround the house and take them by surprise? Then they wouldn’t have had time to panic and allegedly run across town killing police officers.

Which proves one thing: the NSA surveillance has nothing to do with our safety. If Boston doesn’t prove the point, how about this: sweeping NSA surveillance started seven months before 9/11.

This is according to the CEO of Qwest, one of the telecommunications companies approached by the Bush administration to solicit cooperation in its new surveillance scheme. That’s right, i said seven months before 9/11.

So if it was seven months before 9/11, what does all this have to do with national security? Does anyone else see something fraudulent about the NSA’s claims that this is all about our safety? Or is it just me?

Jeff Baumer (remember him?) is just learning how to live his life all over again, minus his legs. The FBI said that Dzhokhar told them that they downloaded the bomb plans from the website “Inspire.” He allegedly had it on his computer.

As long as you are reading our emails and texts for signs that we might be thinking of doing wrong, NSA guys, and that includes you General Alexander (I know you are listening,) as long as you are titillating over our lovers quarrels with our wives and girlfriends, then why the hell didn’t you read that?

We have seen seen this before. Prior to the American Revolution, a man named James Otis Jr., one of the Founding Fathers, took on one of the King’s most hated prerogatives, that of searching through a man’s home, letters, or personal effects for any reason, or no reason at all. The British General Warrant was the exact equivalent of the unfettered license now claimed by the NSA and the Executive Branch to listen in on conversations presumed private, and otherwise read one’s communications and track one’s activities .

Otis thundered in his speeches that “a man’s house is his castle,” and that giving government bureaucrats this power without the oversight of the courts amounted to “tyranny, ” for then every man with this power “may be a tyrant…a tyrant in a legal manner.” Otis argued that every such man would be “accountable to no person for his doings,” and would “reign secure in his petty tyranny, and spread terror and desolation around him.”

Otis railed that this power would be abused by the underlings of higher-ranking bureaucrats, putting us at the mercy of “menial servants.”

“What is this but to have the curse of Canaan with a witness on us: to be the servants of servants, the most despicable of God’s creation?” – Otis raged.

Otis predicted that this power, run rampant, would have little to do with legitimate law enforcement, just as the Boston Marathon and the implementation of NSA spying seven months before 9/11 bear out. Moreover, though it would still be years before the first shots of the American Revolution were fired, it was after Otis’ fiery “a man’s house is his castle” speech, in February 1761, that john Adams wrote: “the child independence was then and there born.”

Read more: http://digitaljournal.com/article/353215#ixzz2XSnb1hCE