Why Did 9/11 Happen in 2001?

An article entitled, “Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research grants for mass surveillance,” discusses the extensive cooperation—read: “funding” and “research for hire”—between the “intelligence community” and computer scientists:

In the mid 1990s, the intelligence community in America began to realize that they had an opportunity. The supercomputing community was just beginning to migrate from university settings into the private sector …[The intelligence community’s] research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could “birds of a feather” be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?

By working with emerging commercial-data companies, [the intelligence community’s] intent was to track like-minded groups of people across the internet and identify them from the digital fingerprints they left behind, much like forensic scientists use fingerprint smudges to identify criminals….

Intriguing, isn’t it, that 9/11 transpired only a few years after this “collaboration” had resulted in tracking so comprehensive virtually no one anywhere escapes the Feds’ surveillance? As if the “intelligence community” created an emergency that would test its new abilities and legitimate its grabbing all of our data. And indeed, over at the NSA in the months preceding September 2001, the war-criminal Michael Hayden was quashing attempts to monitor only foreign “terrorists” (remember that America’s terrorists are other countries’ patriots) in favor of spying on everyone, 24/7.

Such a fascinating intersection of crisis with technical powers in search of legality…

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5:20 pm on December 8, 2017