Prism and Verizon surveillance discussion thread

[Cain]

Little known fact: the CIA surveillance programs that grew out of MH-CHAOS and the whole "Rampart" affair (ie; the infiltration and control of the antiwar press and student movements in the 60s and 70s) was explained in the Nixon years with terrorism as the chief justification.

As leaks started to plague Nixon's presidency, Ober was brought into a special White House intelligence outfit led by John Dean, which included officials from the National Security Agency, FBI, Pentagon and Secret Service. On orders from Nixon, the task force was asked to draw up a program to stop the leaks and frighten and punish whistleblowers. Ober took charge of the report, which drew on his experience fighting leakers that began with "Ramparts," and had now mushroomed into the CIA's MH-CHAOS program. Ober's top secret report, titled "The Unauthorized Disclosure of Classified Information," noted that the key problem was that there was no uniformity across federal agencies on protecting secrets and punishing whistleblowers. To change this, Ober's report recommended:

    Restricting and recording all contacts between federal officials and journalists, and issu[ing] uniform and clearly defined procedures;
    Centralizing each federal agency's office that records all contacts between federal officials and journalists;
    Pursuing, punishing and firing all leakers;
    Enacting laws punishing and criminalizing unauthorized disclosures.

Those recommendations, along with Ober's emphasis on getting employees to sign secrecy contracts, became the national security state's blueprint model to protect its secrets — "the foundation for the largest peacetime secrecy-and-censorship apparatus the United States has ever known," in the words of former UC Berkeley journalism teacher Angus MacKenzie. The secrecy apparatus had to wait for Reagan to take office in 1981 — the 70s was a bitch for national security state apparatchiks.

Ober's operation was also one of the earliest examples of how the national security state shifted its rationale from combating domestic leftwing dissidents to combating something newer, more amorphous and more credibly scary: International Terrorism.

After the Watergate break-in in 1972, Ober's bosses in the CIA grew even more nervous about having their secret illegal domestic spy operation exposed. So they redefined the rationale for spying on Americans. On December 5, 1972, Richard Helms told Ober that from now on, they should say that the purpose of the MH-CHAOS program was to combat international terrorism, rather than domestic Communist subversives. Helms whipped out a final policy memo to his future replacement, Bill Colby:

    To a [sic] maximum extent possible, Ober should become identified with the subject of terrorism inside the Agency as well as in the Intelligence Community.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

RELATED: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/27/us-usa-security-ecuador-idUSBRE95Q0L820130627

US to Ecuador: "You better give up Snowden or we'll cut our 23 million per year in foreign aid to your country."

Ecuador: "How about you go fuck yourself instead, and we give YOU 23 million per year for human rights training?"

[Left]

RELATED: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/27/us-usa-security-ecuador-idUSBRE95Q0L820130627

US to Ecuador: "You better give up Snowden or we'll cut our 23 million per year in foreign aid to your country."

Ecuador: "How about you go fuck yourself instead, and we give YOU 23 million per year for human rights training?"

[Cain]

The Guardian revelations keep on coming

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-data-mining-authorised-obama

The Obama administration for more than two years permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and internet usage of Americans, according to secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The documents indicate that under the program, launched in 2001, a federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata "every 90 days". A senior administration official confirmed the program, stating that it ended in 2011.

The collection of these records began under the Bush administration's wide-ranging warrantless surveillance program, collectively known by the NSA codename Stellar Wind.

According to a top-secret draft report by the NSA's inspector general – published for the first time today by the Guardian – the agency began "collection of bulk internet metadata" involving "communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States".

Eventually, the NSA gained authority to "analyze communications metadata associated with United States persons and persons believed to be in the United States", according to a 2007 Justice Department memo, which is marked secret.

This is the same "Stellar Wind" program which was used to out Elliot Spitzer's liasons with escorts.  So, you know, obviously only being used to investigate terrorism and national security threats 

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

THIS IS THE CHANGE WE DEMANDED. 

[Doktor Howl]

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/06/27/19177709-army-reportedly-blocking-military-access-to-guardian-coverage-of-nsa-leaks

ALL THE HORSES ARE OUT!  LOCK UP THE BARN!
\

[Cain]

https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/half-baked-revolution/ (behind a paywall)

I've been patiently enduring all the heavy-handed blather about Snowden and Greenwald as American heroes and historical figures, and aren't we lucky to behold these heroes in our own lifetimes. I might've been able to suppress my own doubts and questions awhile longer if Snowden hadn't gone to Russia. The problem is I know Russia a little too well to pretend it doesn't matter in this story. And I've seen heroes there in Russia, real heroes, in a serious world where they play for keeps. So every time I read another delusional description of Snowden and Greenwald as "heroes" I can't help thinking about Vasya and Limonov, the real things — Russians who faced down the full brunt of Putin's police state.

Four years later, in 2008, I was home in California visiting my father after he'd suffered a stroke, when my newspaper's manager emailed me a fax they'd received from a Kremlin agency announcing an "editorial audit" under suspicions that The eXile disseminated "political extremism," "pornography," "encouraged the use of drugs," and "incited ethnic hatred." The last three were aimed at our satire — South Park had at one time been accused of inciting ethnic hatred as well — but the real problem was the accusation of political extremism. That's akin to terrorism, and it's been used in the provinces to threaten, ruin, and jail pro-democracy opponents of Putin.

It's hard to convey how surreal and frightening it was to get this notice, timed as it was for when I'd left the country. Exiled Russians I knew agreed that this was a classic Kremlin tactic — generally they'd rather avoid a public fight, so they scare you when you're away, and give you a chance to save yourself. If you come back and face it, you're challenging the police state authority, and that usually ends badly, particularly for Russians.

So I flew back to Moscow, exactly what you're not supposed to do when you get your Kremlin threat while out of the country, adrenaline pumping, all pistons go; I led our newspaper team when the four Kremlin officials came to our offices to "audit" our newspaper. In a blur, I lost my investors, and my newspaper. I went public to the Russian and Western press to tell our story, and it created a shitstorm the same week President Medvedev held an international conference in Moscow promoting his new vision of a freer media. Russian newspapers and online media headlines attacked: "Under Medvedev's 'Openness' even American Newspapers Are Forced To Close"...

Finally, after a crypto-fascist in the Duma named Robert Schlegel screamed on live radio calling me an "extremist" who deserved worse than just losing his newspaper, I had to leave. The newspaper was gone; there wasn't anything to protect. The Russian reporters were safe, the whole attack was now centered on me. "Friends" told me to take a light bag to Sheremetyevo, buy a one-way ticket to a Western city in an airport kiosk, and stay out of Russia until things cooled down, or forever.

Which brings me to Edward Snowden, who's still lurking in Sheremetyevo's transit zone as I write this.

As I've made clear, I'm a big supporter of his leaks. I don't see how any of it endangers Americans — the biggest "victims" are the secrecy apparatus and the private contractors who profit off secrecy, surveillance and fear.

That's my opinion as a journalist and as someone who supports fighting power. But I've been frustrated as Hell watching Snowden's politics, and the politics of his diehard supporters, and the strategically flawed, manipulative decision by his handlers at the Guardian to preemptively convince the public that Snowden is a hero, an infallible "historical" figure who must be worshipped by anyone who considers themselves aligned with history.

I've made clear my support for what Snowden. For journalism purposes, it wouldn't even be much of an issue if the Guardian hadn't forced it — as far as I'm concerned, the leaks remind me a lot of the late Yeltsin years, when Russia's oligarchy split into two violently opposed camps, each side leaking incredible (and mostly factual) stories to their friendly media sources on TV and in print. There was a time, from 1997 through 1999, when the public was bombarded with about five Pentagon Papers a week, ripping open the public facade of powerful politicians and oligarchs, and showing how they actually stole the national wealth, what they said to each other in phone calls, how they manipulated and plundered. The journalists who fashioned those high-level leaks into stories weren't heroes; whoever leaked those bank details and recorded phone calls and auction fixing schemes wasn't necessarily a hero; but the information they dumped was incredibly valuable.

So for me, the importance of what we've learned about the NSA spying programs doesn't hinge on whether or not I have a cult-like faith in Snowden's and Greenwald's "heroism" as "true patriots" unlike the other team's guys. But the problem has been, from the start, that Snowden's and Greenwald's network of supporters created this false consensus, and thought-policed anyone who dared deviate or think for themselves. I have a natural aversion to Stalinist self-censorship; if I'm going to keep my mouth shut or pretend, it better be over something really important, not hero-worshipping some confused, half-baked libertarian whistleblower who can't get his own story straight, just because his handler tells us we have to or else we're Obamabots or fascists.

I'm told that Snowden is a hero for exposing the leaks, and that his fleeing from the all-important political crisis that he sparked was none of my business — allowing myself to feel bothered by it was thought-heresy. We're told we have to have pure faith in Snowden's historical heroism, but when his behavior is un-heroic, we're shouted down because "it's not about Snowden"; we're told Snowden is driven by the force of his deeply held convictions to fight police state surveillance and power over the citizenry, but we're told that the fact he took refuge in some of the world's worst police states is "not the issue" and "for another time" and "irrelevant." We're told to censor ourselves of thoughts and concerns impossible to purge. The manipulative rationalizations and thought-policing quickly degenerate from the Obamabot playbook of hypocrisy to something like Scientology thought-policing, self-censorship, and abuse.

The politics, half-baked from the start, are imploding in a steaming shitheap.

Now they're smearing Greenwald's sordid, unseemly history as a petty porn profiteer. With anyone else, it'd be funny. But Greenwald has spent years promoting and enforcing an image of himself as an infallible crusader and arbiter of big words like "heroism," "patriotism," "ethical," "transparency," "liberty" and the like. He's not much fun; not fun to read, not fun to listen to. Not unless you like fire-and-brimstone Secular Sunday Sermons that make you feel awful and increasingly panicked about the police state Armageddon that's we're always on the precipice of. Greenwald is good on some issues, particularly exposing Israel's crimes; and when it comes to his own restricted, libertarian understanding of what constitutes "civil liberties" — part of it good, when calling out government-sanctioned torture and surveillance; part of it atrocious, such as Greenwald's support for Citizens United and corporations-as-people, and his failure to include labor rights as one of those civil liberties he professes to protect.

The same week Greenwald reported to his readers as fact that Snowden is a historical hero and infallible figure, he let the Guardian up the hero-worship stakes by holding a crowd-sourcing contest for readers to tell the world just how awesome and infallible Glenn Greenwald is. He set himself up for the porn-peddler knee-capping. I don't know what the fuck Greenwald was thinking, but my sense is that he fell for his own bullshit.

I'd be more sympathetic to Greenwald at this moment — or rather, I'm more sympathetic than I should be — if he hadn't smeared my reporting, attacked me in defense of his fellow libertarian Joshua Foust, and sicc'd his cult worshippers after me to smear me by twisting my old eXile satire around to label me as a "child rapist."

My problems started with Greenwald in November 2010, after Yasha and I co-wrote a story on the brief media hysteria that month over TSA "police state" attacks on Americans' liberties, which, we reported for the Nation, was being led by armies of Koch-linked libertarians, some of whom were caught faking their outrage. I didn't know much about Greenwald before reading his bizarre, hysterical smears against our journalism and our credibility on behalf of another Greenwald "hero" — this time, it was "Don't Touch My Junk" anti-TSA guy John Tyner. Greenwald demanded that everyone agree Tyner was a hero; and anyone who questioned the anti-TSA hysteria was a government operative enforcing two-party tyranny.

What we didn't know at the time was that Greenwald was coaching Tyner behind the scenes and acting as his "litigator" to use Greenwald's definition of his journalism; we also didn't know at that time that John Tyner has worked for years now for one of the San Diego area's leading military-intelligence contractors, ViaSat, which contracts with the NSA, CIA, Homeland Security and the US military making key communications components and software for spy satellites, battlefield communications networks, and video guidance systems for Predator drones which deployed for both surveillance and combat in war zones including Afghanistan and elsewhere. Greenwald attacked our journalism credibility and forced The Nation to apologize to a military-intelligence contractor who deceived the public about who he was, a deception made possible thanks to Greenwald's advocacy.

I've made a career out of calling bullshit on people, and after his second attack on me, I decided that Greenwald was going to be on my radar for awhile. So a few months ago, when Hugo Chavez died and Greenwald made a big show of acting outraged over New York Times editorials against Chavez in 2002, I tweeted out Glenn's own insane far-right attacks on Chavez in 2005. I got the usual pushback from his cult followers, for whom Glenn must be infallible, and his infallibility must be protected at all costs.

And then on April 2, when the AP made news by banning the expression "illegal immigrant" from their stylebook, I tweeted out through our eXile account a link to a Greenwald article denouncing what he called "The parade of evils caused by illegal immigration." That's a fact. Greenwald wasn't joking. He claims he's changed now.

Almost immediately after I tweeted that out, Greenwald sicced his substitute columnist Charles Davis to smear me. Davis, a graduate from a high school "capitalism camp" program in Pennsylvania and Ron Paul fanatic, responded to my factual link to Greenwald's anti-immigrant article by tweeting:

    Periodic reminder that frat boy leftist Mark Ames is a boorish misogynist who used his trust fund to sleep with kids

Immediately after tweeting this out, Davis, backed by a twitter mob of Greenwald cultists, twitter-stalked my boss trying to get me fired, smearing me again as a child rapist:

    C'mon, when defending your rapist Senior Editor, at least try to be witty! https://twitter.com/paulcarr/status/319946735327801345 ...

When he failed to turn my publisher against me, Davis and the Greenwald twitter mob turned their sights on him smearing him as a misogynist and child-rapist accessory:

    Contra @paulcarr, when Mark Ames talks about fucking children, he wants you to know: "This is a work of nonfiction."

and:

    @paulcarr Go publish some more rapists, bro

The following morning, sizing up his cultists smears on me, Greenwald tweeted his approval, and suggested they format it in such a way that it would reach a wider audience and hurt me more:

    @epmurph @ohtarzie @charliearchy @firetomfriedman Someone should write up a step-by-step on what happened there, for those who missed it

One of the cultists in Greenwald's twitter feed told his Master,

    @ohtarzie It's been a while since I felt that proud and happy to be part of that sector.

If I hadn't been baptized in the far-fiercer fire of post-Soviet Russia — and if I didn't have a boss who also comes from a satire and controversy background in journalism — who knows, I might have been devastated.

Everything and everyone is a victim in a sense of our rotten times — Greenwald is no Seymour Hersh; Snowden is no Ellsberg; Rand Paul is not Frank Church, and Wydall is not Gravel; and we are weaker than our fathers, Dupree. We look so much better than them when they were our age — and yet we're so much weaker.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Hmmm, very interesting.

[Cain]

America: a more accomplished surveillance state than EAST GERMANY:

"You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true," he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country's secret police, the Stasi.

In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.

"So much information, on so many people," he said.

East Germany's Stasi has long been considered the standard of police state surveillance during the Cold War years, a monitoring regime so vile and so intrusive that agents even noted when their subjects were overheard engaging in sexual intercourse. Against that backdrop, Germans have greeted with disappointment, verging on anger, the news that somewhere in a U.S. government databank are the records of where millions of people were when they made phone calls or what video content they streamed on their computers in the privacy of their homes.

Even Schmidt, 73, who headed one of the more infamous departments in the infamous Stasi, called himself appalled. The dark side to gathering such a broad, seemingly untargeted, amount of information is obvious, he said.

"It is the height of naivete to think that once collected this information won't be used," he said. "This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people's privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place."

So, it's bad enough to make a former Stasi officer appalled.

[Cain]

Kevin Flaherty at Cryptogon has some interesting speculation that is probably worth considering:

My now familiar and broken-record-response to this thing is to go back to Room 641A last decade if you want a real thrill.

They have beam splitters installed at the peering points. NSA is getting everything. The end.

The media's repeated ramblings/mantras about the FISA court and protections for Americans are absurd.

For Prism to be a big deal, you'd have to have amnesia, or not understand the implications of those beam splitters. Querying structured data from the regime's collaborators (Prism) is a tiny piece of what they're doing.

Ok, so what are some other aspects of the wider surveillance story that I would like to know more about?

One of my long standing theories is that the NSA intercepts represent the front end of something like Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation system. What are they doing with these simulations?

I would like to know more about MAIN CORE.

I'm pretty confident that realtime geolocation data from mobile phones/license plate readers/cameras/??? are being used as a sort of invisible tripwire. If people on the MAIN CORE list happen to stray too close to certain physical locations (critical infrastructure, corporate headquarters, government installations, etc.), that could trigger... shall we say, a variety of responses. This would be very, very trivial to implement.

Is there an automatic mechanism that adds individuals to MAIN CORE? Book purchases, Google searches, websites visited, movie or television watching habits, the number of firearms at a residence???

What is the nature of the quantum computing systems to which NSA has access? Are these one-trick-ponies, like the D-Wave system, or are they the real deal.

The article has the hyperlinks, but if you want them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency that commenced operations in 2003 and was exposed in 2006

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam_splitter

A beam splitter is an optical device that splits a beam of light in two. It is the crucial part of most interferometers.

http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=956

Simulex Inc.'s Synthetic Environments for Analysis and Simulation system is almost certainly how the priests of the technocracy are now maintaining "normal" operations.

The system allows for terra scale datasets with granularity of results down to one node (individual). It has a physics engine for tracking any number of people (or other elements) in virtual cities or spaces. It can correlate any amount of social, economic, political, environmental or other data with the behavior of groups or individuals on the ground. The U.S. Government, and some of the most powerful corporations on the planet are using the SEAS system.

http://www.cryptogon.com/?p=2590

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." [See: AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance]

He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Just a reminder that's it not all about PRISM alone.  It's how PRISM feeds into, and helps correlate, with other tools of the national security state.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

I think this is why it's important when talking with the public to demand an end to unconstitutional spying and not specifically the PRISM program or what have you. Just in the last couple weeks we've had tons more names of different branches of the project leak, but it all comes down to the government collecting the haystack and saying that's not against the rules because fuck you that's why.

[Junkenstein]

NSFWcorp article is excellent, cuts through a lot of bullshit around the affair. A quick Wikipedia cascade (opening 2 dozen tabs) links into a whole ton of court cases that end suddenly and the supreme court does not want to know. Shows the creeping nature of the system I guess. Even with these leaks, there's a ton of precedent which seems to pretty much decide the future of relevant court cases. Ties back in to the attention on Snowden. Keeping it about him stops attention going towards the involved parties and their constant run of judicial favour.

Example:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewel_v._NSA

It seems it's more a question now of what isn't being monitored. And when other nation's programs of a similar nature will be revealed. GCHQ's being hushed up quite well, but it can't just be the UK/US pulling this shit. 

[Cain]

Traditionally, especially in the case of ECHELON, the main quartet are named as the UK, the USA, Australia and New Zealand.

However, what everyone forgets is that the NSA is a branch of the Department of Defense.  Military.  Meaning chances are every NATO nation and major US military ally besides also has programs being run in their country.

[I_Kicked_Kennedy]

Now, I'm not trying to introduce another tangent in this, but I had an interesting idea while I was jerking off today:

Remember when the MPAA rolled out some torrent seeds of one of their major blockbuster films, and they used it to track and later prosecute the people who downloaded and shared these items? Let's take this PRISM program, consider the metaphor of an actual prism, and pretend for a moment that the parties behind this are 10x as evil as we feared...

What is a prism? Well, light comes in one side, and it is split into its colors on the other. So, what we picture them as doing is taking information from all different areas (colors) and constructing a database out of it (pulling it into one bank). But a prism goes in the opposite direction. What if they're taking all of this info, and categorizing us into different banks; realms of concern. Remember looking up how to make hash that time when you were wondering what the heck your college roommate was smoking? Well, you're in the narcotics category. Remember downloading that weird porn from Taiwan? Well, you're in "fucked up dude" category. Remember downloading the Anarchist Cookbook? That's right, you're now a potential terrorist.

All the while, they keep passing confusing laws that turn pretty much any abnormal Internet act into a crime. A while ago, they passed the Federal Analog Act, which criminalizes substances that could theoretically be used to manufacture certain scheduled compounds, or non-scheduled material that could potentially have similar effects as those compounds, if they are used outside of their intended method.  In other words, if you purchase Morning Glory seeds for your grandmother, and earlier that day you were on Bluedot or something, they could say "Yep, it's apparent he wanted to get LSA out of 'em. We know that a few days earlier he bought Zippo fluid."

Let's also look at something else...

http://www.sfgate.com/local/article/FBI-shared-child-porn-to-nab-pedophiles-4552044.php

The Bureau ran the service for two weeks while attempting to identify more than 5,000 customers, according to a Seattle FBI agent's statements to the court. Court records indicate the site continued to distribute child pornography online while under FBI control; the Seattle-based special agent, a specialist in online crimes against children, detailed the investigation earlier this month in a statement to the court.

Yeah. So let's consider how many of those porn sites out there disseminate obscene amounts of, well, obscene material for free. Why are some of these sites giving away so much free porn? There's no reason to actually get a subscription. Do you think they're making it all back in ads?

What if a number of those items feature underage girls who look over 18. Like the iTunes agreement, are you going to the trouble of checking the age documentation of each video you stream? Well, guess what....? You're now on a list. You start getting ideas about organizing a political party, or protesting Monsanto, or whatever, and several men in dark sunglasses show up at your door.

Man 1: "Hello, IKK. You are going to be an informant for us, now."
Me: "I don't wanna."
Man 2: "See these video links? You downloaded underage pornography, and you know this will result in the loss of your job, marriage, children, and you'll be outcast from society to the point where suicide is the only option. Unless, of course, you give us a reason to look the other way...."

Maybe even not to that level. How 'bout...

Man 1: "Rmemeber when Cain posted that RAR of all those books? Well, the publishing company has the lawsuit ready in the holster, and they will hit you up for tens of thousands of dollars you don't have. Or, you know, you could play ball..."

Even with the Stasi, it was admitted they made no effort to quietly persecute. Why? Half of their operational intent was to make you fear being monitored, whether you were, or not. What was one of the reasons why so very few Stasi members were prosecuted after the fall of the GDR? Well, they were in powerful positions of the judiciary and government, and in many situations, bringing charges against them are abandoned because it would require the introduction of the collected intelligence as evidence. Perhaps the intelligence was an extramarital affair with someone embarrassing...

What should scare the shit out of people is the fact that with data as extensive as this, whether you are a criminal, or you truly aren't and have made every effort to follow the straight and narrow, it is assured that something in your digital past could be used for nefarious purposes by an unethical power. Think about how many people have been out on death row by an overzealous police detective, and even with DNA exonerating them, how many are still in prison? Plus, are you keeping thorough logs of your activity and data? So, when they take you to court, they could manufacture evidence, and what do you have to counter their claims? Character witnesses? Bah!

But this is why people like me fully intend to eventually bury our heads in the sand and hope it either goes away, or someone else fixes it for us. I have kids and a mortgage to worry about, and I don't want to be thrown in prison before the next season of House of Cards, thankyouverymuch.

[Cain]

I am fairly sure that is where all this is headed...only more along the lines of the law constricting the "legitimate" scope of inquiry to account for why all this information doesn't simply sit in one giant, vast database.

If you look at the future strategic forecasting by the UK and USA, you'll notice it tends to preoccupy itself with a few key topics:

- resource scarcity
- urbanization
- destabilizing influence of social networks formed online
- the possibility of radical alliances between the newly urbanized working and university educated but underemployed middle classes to challenge the existing status quo

And furthermore, these issues will act in tandem, on a regional basis.

How do you deal with international problems?  You come up with an international regime.  How do you deal with an uprising?  You subvert, intimidate and brutalise the opposition via the security services.  How do you deal with an international uprising?  Well...