Security is when everything is settled, when nothing can happen to you; security is the denial of life. Germaine Greer
Operating in the shadows men trained to kill without leaving any trace. Who are these secret forces? And what are their covert methods? America’s Book of Secrets s3e5: America’s Secret Armies, History 2014
Who exactly is in control? ibid.
Secret war is being raged over the internet. ibid.
Cyber warfare. A deadly airborne virus. The list of modern doomsday scenarios can be terrifying ... Why are the plans being kept so secret? America’s Book of Secrets s3e10: America’s Doomsday
The shadow government was set up to safeguard American citizens. ibid. commentary
More than three million Americans consider themselves Survivalists or Preppers. ibid.
I’m afraid based on my own experience that fascism will come to America in the name of national security. Jim Garrison
We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set; we’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded. Barack Obama
All the security around the American president is just to make sure the man who shoots him gets caught. Norman Mailer, cited Sunday Telegraph 4th March 1990
If we continue these policies to rob ourselves in order to feed this national security monster we are going to continue to degrade American life. That’s national security. Roger Wilkins, open government campaigner
Putting surveillance states, putting cameras everywhere, putting helicopters over my head, putting surveillance on you; soon it’s gonna be ID cards; for school-kids they’ve got to get fingerprints to get food. This is becoming a dictatorship, totalitarian state. Everywhere you look it’s governance, governance, governance, and our rights have been taken away. Ethan Cruise, campaigner & researcher, televised interview drowned by circling helicopter
October 4 2001: America’s new wall of homeland security is creating a big demand for calls to hold suspects and illegal aliens who might be rounded up. Stocks of private companies that build and operate prisons for governments have zoomed as high as 300% in anticipation of internment camps and new prisons.
‘Unfortunately, these are becoming good investments,’ said James McDonald, a private security analyst at First Analyst Securities. New York Post online article Paul Tharp
Russia: By 1999 there were more than 1,500 registered ‘private security firms’, employing more than 800,000 people. Of these, almost 200,000 had licences to carry guns. The Russian Interior Ministry has estimated that there were at least half as many again that remained unregistered. Misha Glenny, McMafia
Almost all major oligarchs and business empires started to employ former KGB men to advise them on security. ibid.
The death of Alexander Litvinenko, the former senior KGB officer poisoned in his London exile in late 2006, revealed how confused the relationship between the KGB and private security services had become. ibid.
Where would South Africa be without its ARUs? For every member of the South Africa Police Service, there are four and a half private security personnel in the country. Licensed to use firearms, these men’s primary task is to protect the white middle classes from burglary and assault. The latter live in stupendously affluent districts characterised by high walls, high-voltage electronic fences and high levels of anxiety. ibid.
For the past century Russian history has also been the history of its security services. They were used by the Soviet state to crush dissent. But while many things may have changed in today’s Russia, its security network is arguably stronger than ever. And the reason behind that is the rise of a lowly Lieutenant-Colonel to president of this vast country. This is the story of the KGB. KGB: The Sword & The Shield, History 2019
Enemies have been a preoccupation throughout Russian history. ibid.
The first head of the secret police was the son of a Polish Catholic aristocrat – Feliz Dzerzhinsky – he soon earned the name Iron Felix. ibid.
Much of Soviet modernisation was achieved on the back of Gulag slavery. ibid.
It was execution on an industrial scale. ibid.
Nowhere would prove more important to Soviet Intelligence than a leafy English university town … The Soviets recruited the most notorious spy ring in history – the Cambridge Five. From 1940 these five Cambridge spies began to leak details of an American project to build a super-weapon. KGB: The Sword & The Shield II: Berija & Co
Khrushchev set out to reposition the communist party as the true defender of the people. ibid.
Philby would go on to serve the KGB as a trainer. ibid.
Andropov set about reversing many of the freedoms gained under Khrushchev. ibid.
The KGB had a mole somewhere at the very top of the CIA. No-one had a clue who he was. ibid.
In the summer of 1991 secret orders were sent out from KGB headquarters to field officers throughout the Soviet Union. The chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, had ordered a quarter of a million pairs of handcuffs and three hundred thousand arrest warrants, and cancelled all KGB leave. Citizens of Moscow knew nothing of all this until tanks were on the streets. The announcement didn’t reveal that President Gorbachev was under house arrest in his dacha in the Crimea. KGB: The Sword & The Shield III, BBC 2019
Yeltzin now had control of the security apparatus. ibid.
Just one month after he [Putin] took office, four apartment blocks in major Russian cities were bombed. The outrage was attributed to Chechen rebels. ibid.
The poison attack was a warning to others: if you step out of line, there is no safe refuge. Radioactive polonium destroyed Alexander Litvinenko over 22 agonising days. ibid.
One year after the annexation of Crimea, a protest march was organised in Moscow by opposition leader Boris Nemtsov. On the even of the march, Nemtsov was murdered within sight of the Kremlin. He was shot four times in the head, heart, liver and stomach. All the CCTV cameras in the area were switched off for maintenance. ibid.
The security service has a state. ibid.
The age that we have just left – the 45 years since the end of the Second World War, was overshadowed by a strange partnership between Science and Fear. It began with a weapon created by scientists that threatened to destroy the world. But then a group of men who were convinced they could control the new danger began to gain influence in America. They would manipulate terror; to do so they would use the methods of science. Out of this would come a new age free from the chaos and uncertainties that had led to terrible wars in the past. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box II: To the Brink of Eternity, BBC 1992
Research and Development: RAND was funded by the air force, but staffed by young academics who believed the scientific method could help bring the Cold War back under America’s control. ibid.
They were no longer advisers to the military, they had become the masters. ibid.
In a controlled nuclear war populations of cities would become like pawns in a game of bargaining with nuclear weapons. So the strategists persuaded America’s leaders to take civil defense seriously. ibid.
In the end President Kennedy ignored any idea of controlled war. Instead, he told the Russians that if they launched one missile from Cuba, he would retaliate with America’s entire arsenal. To the strategists, this threat was irrational and humiliating. ibid.
The systems and numbers approach dominated the Pentagon. McNamara’s wizzkids were convinced that the battle against the Viet-Cong could be managed in a rational, scientific way. ibid.
What they [the Strategists] left behind was MAD – mutual assured destruction – a giant system of nuclear defence with the two sides locked together, watching each other for the slightest move. But by the mid-’70s it seemed to have become an end in itself. ibid.
The system of deterrents had begun as rational. It now seemed a dangerous trap. ibid.
In the late 1940s George Orwell imagined a dystopian future where a global surveillance system was used to monitor and control all citizens, independent thinking was censored, and holding unorthodox or controversial thoughts opposing or questioning those in power was considered a criminal act: a Thoughtcrime.
The classified information leaked by former CIA employee Edward Snowden in 2013 not only shocked the public opinion but also showed the disturbing and frightening similarities between the world we live in today and that of Orwell’s fiction. Thoughtcrime, captions, Amazon 2017
The United States only uses signals intelligence for legitimate national security purposes. ibid. Obama
Mass surveillance has never been established as effective for counter-terrorism … They are about power. ibid. Snowden
The absence of privacy is not the presence of security; and the presence of security is not the absence of privacy. ibid.