One brief Shannon moment
In Feb 73, Computers and Automation republished an article on NSA from Ramparts. It's an interview with a former NSA guy, who (for fucking once) seems to have been genuinely former. He's telling the interviewer facts that are NOT generally known. He's providing Shannon information. He served in Turkey and Europe around 1967, so that's his main focus.

From the intro written by Ramparts:

Taken altogether, the experience of our informant in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Indochina bears witness to the aggressive posture of the United States in the late 1960s. It is hard to see anything defensive about it. Our policy makers are well-informed by the intelligence community of the defensive nature of our antagonists' military operations. The NSA operations here described reflect the drive of a nation to control as much of the world as possible; whose leaders trust no one and are forced to spy on their closest allies in violation of treaties they initiated themselves; leaders, moreover, for whom all nations are, in the intelligence idiom, "targets", and who maintain the U.S. imperium around the world in large part through threat of actual physical annihilation.

At home, however, the favored weapon employed is ignorance rather than fear. Like NSA headquarters itself, the United States is surrounded by barriers -- barriers of ignorance that keep its citizens prisoners of the cold war. The first obstacle is formed by the myths propagated about communism and about its aggressive designs on America. The second, and dependent for its rationale on the first, is the incredible barrier of governmental secrecy that keeps the most questionable U.S. aggressive activities hidden not from our "enemies", who are the knowledgeable victims, but from the American people themselves.

Nothing has changed. Ever since 1918, we've been attacking Russia and blaming Russia for our sins.

And I'm fully guilty of joining the ignorance. You can see it clearly in this blog. From the start in 2005 until I threw away the TV in 2011, I was blaming "Soviet agents" for "subversion". This is especially egregious because I had known the truth in the '60s and early '70s. The propaganda machine broke my early EXPERIENTIAL learning and replaced it by standard neocon shit.

From the interview with the former NSA dude:

Q. The implications of what you're saying are very serious. In effect, it means that based on your knowledge there is no real "balance of terror" in the world. Theoretically, if we know where every Soviet missile installation, military aircraft and missile submarine is at any given moment, we are much closer than anyone realizes to a first-strike capacity that would cripple their ability to respond.

A. Check.

Q. All this time, the Soviets must be doing intelligence against us too. What is its scope?

A. Actually, they don't get that much. They aren't able to break our advanced computer generated scrambler system, which accounts for most of the information we transmit. They do a lot of work to determine what our radar is like, and they try to find out things by working on some of the lower level codes used by countries like Germany and the Scandinavian countries we deal with. Their SIGINT operation is run by the KGB. The key to it is that we have a ring of bases around them. They try to make up for the lack of bases by using trawlers for gathering data, but it's not the same. They're on the defensive.

Q. What do you mean by that?

A. That they're on the defensive? Well, one of the things you discover pretty early is that the whole thing of containing the communist menace for expansion is nonsense. The entire Soviet outlook of their military and their intelligence was totally different from ours. They were totally geared up for defense and to meet some kind of attack. Other than strategic capacities relating to the ultimate nuclear balance, their air capabilities are solidly built around defending themselves from penetration. They've set up the "forward" area - our term for the socalled bloc countries of eastern Europe - less as a launching pad into Europe than as a buffer zone. The only Soviet forces there are are air defense forces, security forces. Put it this way: their whole technology is not of an offensive nature, simply, don't have the kind of potential for a tactical offensive that we do.

Nothing has changed since 1918.

The big picture here is epistemology. As fucking always, the leaders on all sides know the truth. Russian leaders are more honest with their own people, letting them know that their task is defensive. US leaders keep our people in total panic, constantly creating fake "attacks" from every conceivable and inconceivable source. We believe our aggression against Russia and Muslims and Rednecks and Antivaxers is justified because those enemies are attacking us. In fact the enemies are just trying to escape from our tyranny.

THEY KNOW IT'S A HOAX BECAUSE THEY CREATED THE HOAX.

= = = = =

Footnote 1: The interview continues in the next issue, with Shannon info about Vietnam and Israel and the size of NSA's domestic and foreign facilities, but less of the big picture.

Footnote 2: I halfway remember Ramparts but didn't read it regularly in those days, and didn't keep track of it later. Did it ever join the high-status hippie crowd and converge to Deepstate? The Wikipedia article clearly says NO. Ramparts began as a left-Catholic magazine in '67 then broadened its range. It was constantly in financial trouble, never found a steady subsidizer, and finally quit in '75. Media without a patron is probably clean. Several of its writers and editors are still active. Some converged to "progressive" Deepstate, others switched to Libertarian, which is the real Deepstate now.

Labels: #WholeOfSociety, epistemology

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