How Many Watchers?

As I was travelling this past weekend, and spending time sitting in airports, I started thinking about Anonymous Conservatives many comments on domestic surveillance. If you spend any time reading the postings from the Anonymous Conservative, you will quickly notice that a fair share of his comments are about "the Surveillance"--his term for the large number of people working for some secret combination or agency that, so to speak, is the real power behind the throne. He often talks about this operating even at the level of individual neighborhoods and in individual high schools.  

    It is not unknown for governments to use underhanded or secretive methods to manipulate the public. As we have learned, the whole Russian dossier story involving Trump was a product of the FBI and CIA in an attempt to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, and was expanded into the Russian collusion probe used to try and bring Trump down during his presidency and prevent his reelection. 

    I think most of my readers are familiar with Operation Northwoods which proposed using "CIA operatives to both stage and commit acts of violent terrorism against American military and civilian targets, blaming them on the Cuban government, and using it to justify a war against Cuba." It was purportedly after a briefing on the proposal the President Kennedy vowed to get rid of the CIA. Unfortunately, he was assassinated before he could do so. While Operation Northwoods was never implemented in the United States, a very similar operation--Operation Gladio--was used in Europe where "the CIA, MI6 and NATO trained and directed an underground army of fascist paramilitary units across Europe, deploying its assets to undermine political opponents, including through false flag terror attacks." 

    Gladio consisted of a constellation of “stay behind” anti-communist partisan armies whose ostensible mission was to fend off the Red Army in the event of Soviet invasion. In reality, these forces committed countless violent and criminal acts as part of a “strategy of tension” designed to discredit the left and justify a security state clampdown.

    As Vincenzo Vinciguerra, a Gladio operative jailed for life in 1984 for a car bombing in Italy that killed three police officers and injured two, explained:

“You were supposed to attack civilians, women, children, innocent people from outside the political arena. The reason was simple, force the public to turn to the state and ask for greater security…People would willingly trade their freedom for the security of being able to walk the streets, go on trains or enter a bank. This was the political logic behind the bombings. They remain unpunished because the state cannot condemn itself.”

    The scandal triggered in Western capitals by the exposure of Gladio dominated mainstream headlines for months. The European parliament responded by passing a resolution condemning the existence of a “clandestine parallel intelligence and armed operations organization [which] escaped all democratic controls, may have interfered illegally in the internal political affairs of member states [and] have at their disposal independent arsenals and military resources…thereby jeopardizing the democratic structures of the countries in which they are operating.”

    The resolution called for independent judicial and parliamentary investigations into Gladio in every European state. But aside from inquiries in Belgium, Italy, and Switzerland, nothing of substance materialized. What’s more, investigators heavily redacted their findings while avoiding having them translated them into English. This may help explain why the historic scandal has been largely forgotten.

Makes the 9/11 conspiracy theories more believable now, doesn't it. Or even that the J6 protests were fomented by government agents. Or makes you wonder why the FBI never allowed the ATF to inspect the interior of the weapons used in the Mandalay Bay shooting to see if the weapons had been illegally modified to shoot full auto (as opposed to using the usually unreliable--except for that night--bumpstocks).

    The problem for most people in contemplating such a scenario is imagining the sheer number of people that would have to be involved to make it work. Could you ever get enough people to participate in such a program?

    While we obviously would not have records from most countries as to how this would work, the sudden collapse of the Soviet Empire and rapid reunification of Eastern and Western Germany gave us an unprecedented look into how a secret police agency operated when West German was able to obtain most of the records of the East German Ministry for State Security (STASI). Wikipedia relates (footnotes omitted):

By the time that East Germany collapsed in 1989, the Stasi employed 91,015 employees and 173,081 informants. About one out of every 63 East Germans collaborated with the Stasi. By at least one estimate, the Stasi maintained greater surveillance over its own people than any secret police force in history. The Stasi employed one secret policeman for every 166 East Germans.

 The article also adds that "[a]s ubiquitous as this was, the ratios swelled when informers were factored in: counting part-time informers, the Stasi had one agent per 6.5 people." This is because (footnotes omitted):

By 1995, some 174,000 inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (IMs) Stasi informants had been identified, almost 2.5% of East Germany's population between the ages of 18 and 60. 10,000 IMs were under 18 years of age. According to an interview with Joachim Gauck, there could have been as many as 500,000 informers. A former Stasi colonel who served in the counterintelligence directorate estimated that the figure could be as high as 2 million if occasional informants were included.

 And what type of people were informants?

    Full-time officers were posted to all major industrial plants (the extent of any surveillance largely depended on how valuable a product was to the economy) and one tenant in every apartment building was designated as a watchdog reporting to an area representative of the Volkspolizei (Vopo). Spies reported every relative or friend who stayed the night at another's apartment. Tiny holes were drilled in apartment and hotel room walls through which Stasi agents filmed citizens with special video cameras. Schools, universities, and hospitals were extensively infiltrated, as were organizations, such as computer clubs where teenagers exchanged Western video games.

    The Stasi had formal categorizations of each type of informant, and had official guidelines on how to extract information from, and control, those with whom they came into contact. The roles of informants ranged from those already in some way involved in state security (such as the police and the armed services) to those in the dissident movements (such as in the arts and the Protestant Church). Information gathered about the latter groups was frequently used to divide or discredit members. Informants were made to feel important, given material or social incentives, and were imbued with a sense of adventure, and only around 7.7%, according to official figures, were coerced into cooperating. A significant proportion of those informing were members of the SED. Use of some form of blackmail was not uncommon. A large number of Stasi informants were tram conductors, janitors, doctors, nurses and teachers. Mielke believed that the best informants were those whose jobs entailed frequent contact with the public.

(footnotes omitted). 

    So, with all that in mind, is it surprising that we discover FBI and intelligence agents were (and still are) embedded in Facekbook, Instagram, and Twitter? Is it surprising that the FBI has formal arrangements with banks for banks to turn over information on their customers? That the FBI has formal arrangements with large corporations to vet their employees? 

    Is it surprising that we have memes circulating that warn that if you belong to certain groups, the one (or more) member(s) urging violence or crime is (are) the FBI informant(s)?

    Is it surprising that Epstein, whose predilections made him perfect for collecting blackmail, was in 2007 given a sweetheart by Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami, because, per Acosta, he was told to back off, "that Epstein was above his pay grade" and "belonged to intelligence". (Steven Hoffenberg, an Epstein associate, has told reporters that Epstein claimed to move in intelligence circles; other clues indicate that he had ties to Israeli intelligence which is unsurprising given his ethnic background). Should be be surprised that the guards that were supposed to make sure that Epstein was not killed while in jail had charged against them dropped even though they were blatantly in dereliction of their duties?

    Should be surprised that our intelligence agencies have conspired with other intelligence agencies (e.g., Five Eyes) to conduct domestic spying for a member when that member is forbidden by law to conduct such intelligence gathering itself?

    While we may find it incredulous that a significant portion of the population might be engaged in surveillance, the Stasi records prove that the type of surveillance that Anonymous Conservative describes, at least as to the number of people involved, is certainly doable. Even taking the most conservative numbers, which resulted in one secret policeman for every 166 East Germans (and ignoring informal informers), there could easily be at least one for larger church congregations, one or more in every medium sized employer, and so on. In a large gathering--imagine a rally, a professional ball game, or large concert--there could be so many that they would be stumbling over each other constantly. Factoring in informal informants, you can see how you could easily have one for every neighborhood, every apartment complex, or every school.