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This is a typical "shadow government" symptom. You have forces working within the government that 1) have their own agendas; 2) have connection to international
by markus_zhang 5y ago
This is a typical "shadow government" symptom. You have forces working within the government that 1) have their own agendas; 2) have connection to international communities, usually military-intelligence ones; 3) have almost zero regulation; 4) even many high ranking government officials don't know about them because they are brotherhood-like closed circles.
This reminds me of Operation Gladio or Propaganda Due but domestic. Same playbook, different players.
- zaphirplane 5y agoThere is nothing supporting the theory or conclusion
- colordrops 5y agoWhat are you trying to suggest? It's just a typical reflexive reactive response to any comment that the government acts in ways other than presented to you by corporate media. It only takes 3 minutes of google searches or even a daily scan of Hacker News to see endless examples of government corruption and malfeasance. Government employees are only human after all, and there are millions of them. To think this sort of activity ends once you become an agent of the government is absurd.
- zaphirplane 5y agoTrying to suggest nothing, I am explicitly saying there is nothing in the article to lead a reasonable person down the shadow government and deep state path It seems vanilla spying or vanilla state backed industrial espionage
- WFHRenaissance 5y ago> Government employees are only human after all This weekend I was traveling and I put the stray $20 from my pocket in the bin at the TSA checkpoint. An agent quickly pulled it out and handed it back to me. He then said "a lot of good people work here, but they're still human". It's kind of wild that we endure that level of complacency here in the States.
- jacquesm 5y agoThat's a pretty weird statement, if one of his colleagues would swipe cash that travelers put in the bins then they should fire their ass and move them to the 'not good people' column. Stealing isn't something that defines you as human.
- smabie 5y agoI think pretty much everyone has stolen something before, right?
- jacquesm 5y agoThat says more about you than it does about humans in general.
- smabie 5y agoTrue, but what I've done should say a lot about humans in general right? I'm told I'm human, after all.
- jacquesm 5y agoNo, you can't generalize like that.
- WFHRenaissance 5y agoI think the point the employee was making was that there is a lot of financial desperation among TSA employees, and also minimal supervision. This is pretty well-documented in the news media as well.
- tsol 5y agoI don't think he has the power to fire his colleagues. I think that's reading too much into it, for a lot of people 20 is a lot and for a lot of people you just don't trust others with stray cash laying around. It doesn't say much about humans, except that a small portion of people are willing to commit crime and that's why we have to protect ourselves
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- azernik 5y agoNo. Israel has zero interest in spying on random embassy employees in Uganda who are working with protesters there. This is purely mercenary stuff, and the US is annoyed that a podunk nowhere country got its hands on first-rate tools.
- dqpb 5y ago> 3) have almost zero regulation; What would shadow government regulation look like?
- linschn 5y agoMaybe stop funding them, for a start? Congressional oversight used to be a thing. Snowden showed the NSA lied to congress. No heads rolled.
- throaway46546 5y agoImagine all the dirt the NSA has on congress.
- cwkoss 5y agoImagine how much society would improve if all the dirt got aired. Hiding this information is trading the wellbeing of the country for the NSA's own internal goals and power.
- gunfighthacksaw 5y agoDangerously based and you’re-about-to-commit-suicide-with-two-gunshots-to-the-head pilled
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mcbutterbunz 5y ago> Imagine how much society would improve if all the dirt got aired. Depends on the dirt. Some of it might be private and personal stuff, such as infidelity. That type of stuff, while blackmailable, doesn't really benefit the public much.
- Eelongate 5y agoThe public's elected representatives being easily blackmailable is obviously of great concern to the public, I don't know why you're downplaying this.
- KennyBlanken 5y agoImplying that Israeli spying on the US is some fringe "shadow government" sub-group of the Israeli government is strange given a long, long history of high profile Israeli spying incidents against the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Franklin_espionage_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Franklin_espionage_sc... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Pollard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Ami_Kadish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben-Ami_Kadish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Parsons_(rocket_engineer) Then there's the time they stole nuclear material from us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apollo_Affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apollo_Affair Then there's the time they slaughtered several dozen US navy and NSA personnel with repeated attacks on an unarmed vessel because they didn't like that we were watching them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
- markus_zhang 5y agoBy saying "shadow government" I mean groups within the US government that has connection to say NOS. Again I don't have concrete proofs so I could be 100% wrong. But reading world history especially cold war history makes me be sceptical to certain things.
- BoardsOfCanada 5y agoHilarious that anyone thought you were talking about an Israeli shadow government.
- enkid 5y agoSo you are making blind accusations when there is a better explanation, i.e., it was the Israelis.
- keewee7 5y agoThe USS Liberty incident happened 52 years ago. >because they didn't like that we were watching them That is the American conspiracy theorist interpretation of the incident that (understandably) also gained traction among a few of the survivors. The Israelis disagree. It was most likely a case of mistaken identity. Just like friendly fire incidents. Friendly fire incidents happen all the time, including between US forces in the recent Iraq and Afghanistan conflict.
- pstuart 5y ago5) many high ranking government officials do nothing about this because they're being blackmailed by the spooks. Tinfoil hat territory? Sure. Plausible and possible? Sure.
- runarberg 5y agoI think it is more likely that 5) many high ranking government officials have sympathetic views with said forces and don’t mind the “occasional incident” as long as said forces are working towards their common goal (whatever that goal might be; but it is probably Islamophobia, settler colonialism and exploitative capitalism).
- pstuart 5y agoI won't contest that. I recognize that my post was a bit dramatic but it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable knowing what we do know about past behaviors. So you can be #5 and I'll be #6 :-)
- zionic 5y agoWhat happened to the “spooks” that hacked the intelligence oversight committee computers? You know, the people who are supposed to watch them?
- wolverine876 5y ago> Plausible and possible? By that standard, we should post every conspiracy theory ever created.
- refurb 5y ago“Shadow government” = “Deep state”?
- ddddq 5y agoYes, basically a state organization that the public has no control over it and is following its own goals, often against the goals of organizations under the control of the public. It's often taught in political classes and it isn't a conspiracy that there exists a "deep state" or "shadow goverment". For example, the roman elite troop, the Praetorian Guards, can be classified as a "deep state", as they had their own goals and if they were not meet, then they would just kill the emperor. At the same time, the emporer and the senat had almost no control over the Praetorian Guard.
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoPretty much. Not sure why the terminology changed between the Bush years and the Trump administration.
- dundarious 5y agoThey're both somewhat vague phrases that are heavily context-dependent and have somewhat different connotations, but yes. There's nothing wrong with the phrase "deep state". If you're concerned about associations with Trump (which I think you should not be), you can use a former Obama official's favored term, "the blob". Both, and many other similar phrases, are common in the foreign policy literature. I think the first time I heard the phrase "shadow government" was in connection to Iran-Contra, where it described Oliver North and the small group in charge or those operations, but it's a phrase with many uses. I can't remember when I first heard of the "deep state", but I'd be fairly certain it was before Trump or anyone connected to him started using it.
- badRNG 5y agoRegardless of the terminology, the supposed "deep state" is often a fill-in for one's own personal misunderstanding of institutional momentum and basic functions of the government. "The Government" isn't really a single institution, but a surprisingly loose collection of various institutions that all have some level of momentum guiding the direction they move in. It's critical to note that these institutions may have interests that harshly conflict with one another. Even the intelligence community, insular as it is, cannot be thought of as a monolith, but as various institutions with various priorities, some which conflict with the interests of other government institutions. When the government does something we dislike politically, or does something we don't understand, it's "the deep state" or "the shadow government" which betrays a deep misunderstanding of what the government is. There's no central, shadowy cabal controlling the affairs of "the government" from behind the scenes, the various institutions that comprise the government maintain momentum and do what is in furtherance of their particular interests.