Population Surveillance

What every regime, regardless of ideology, fears the most is the people. In this respect Uncle Sam is no different from North Korea or East Germany, as evidenced by actions taken against its population: targetting peace activists, labor unions, students, etc. Today American citizens are the most spied on in the world, but this massive surveillance operation is nothing new...

"In a secret program called HTLINGUAL, the CIA screened more than 28 million first-class letters and opened 215,000 of them between 1953 and 1973, even though the Supreme Court held as far back as 1878 in Ex parte Jackson and reaffirmed in 1970 in U.S. v. Van Leeuwen that the Fourth Amendment bars third parties from opening first-class mail without a warrant. The program's stated purpose was to obtain foreign intelligence, but it targeted domestic peace and civil rights activists as well. In a 1962 memo to the director of the CIA's Office of Security, the deputy chief of the counterintelligence staff warned that the program could lead 'to grave charges of criminal misuse of the mails' and therefore U.S. intelligence agencies must 'vigorously deny' HTLINGUAL, which should be "relatively easy to 'hush up.'"

From: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/The-CIA-Burglar-Who-Went-Rogue-169800816.html?c=y&page=2



SpyWriter Jack King, the author of:
Agents of Change, WikiJustice, The Black Vault, and The Fifth Internationale.
Coming soon:


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A Stasi informant in every family

"This week, the commission for the Stasi files will publish a handbook on the HVA, the Stasi branch that handled foreign intelligence and was run by legendary spymaster Markus Wolf. The book offers new insight into the Stasi's work in West Germany, making clear for the first time just how purposefully and extensively the East German intelligence service had West German politics and society in its sights.

It's now possible to reconstruct in unprecedented detail where and how the Stasi cast its nets. The organization had 149 informants active just in Bonn, the former West German capital. There were 542 in West Berlin.

It seems the HVA recruited most of these spies from industrial sectors, as a way of obtaining Western technological knowledge. It also maintained excellent connections in the center-left Social Democratic Party, where 78 unofficial collaborators and other contacts kept East Berlin up to date, 13 of them serving as sources of information on activities within the party's executive committee. The Stasi was also well informed on internal matters in unions, churches and universities."

Read More: http://m.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-799335.html#spRedirectedFrom=www

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Cold War's unintended consequences

Some day I'll tell you how I used to cross the Cold War borders of various Eastern Bloc countries, including Soviet Russia, armed with ... a chocolate bar.

Meanwhile, enjoy this interesting, if sad tale of Cold War's unintended victims... the Red Deer:

Ahornia inhabits the thickly wooded mountains along what once was the fortified border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia. At the height of the Cold War, a high electric fence, barbed wire and machine-gun-carrying guards cut off Eastern Europe from the Western world. The barriers severed the herds of deer on the two sides as well.

The fence is long gone, and the no-man's land where it stood now is part of Europe's biggest nature preserve. The once-deadly border area is alive with songbirds nesting in crumbling watchtowers, foxes hiding in weedy fortifications and animals not seen here for years, such as elk and lynx.

But one species is boycotting the reunified animal kingdom: red deer. Herds of them roam both sides of the old NATO-Warsaw Pact border here but mysteriously turn around when they approach it. This although the deer alive today have no memory of the ominous fence.

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