Extinction Threats Tips Website vs. Government Failures

We probably cannot prevent an extinction event within Earth's biosphere, but can delay one perhaps long enough for the creation of self-sufficient space colonies.

There are great threats to the world which need to be dealt with by highly competent and effective security services which actually do their job well. The problem is that present day government security services have been unwilling and unable to even deal with many national threats. They are self-perpetuating bureaucracies which secretly serve their own selfish interests, for the most part, and secretly corrupt as hell. Abuses of power are common, and they often act with impunity.

Who is interested in INTERnational security, or the extinction issues of our species?

Of course, they are generally disinterested in the welfare of the environment on Earth. Big warships patrol waters around fossil fuels which cause global warming, but any illegal whaling or dragnet fishing ships are ignored.

It is common sense that there will be terrorists as well as other threats for as long as there are humans on this planet, so that we need good intelligence and security services.

We should not try to live without security services, and there will always be tradeoffs between privacy and security. Absolute privacy would allow some of the greatest threats to our existence to go undetected until it is too late, whereby there may be no second chance to learn from this mistake and adjust.

Both government agencies and the politicians who are supposed to be implementing oversight have shown themselves to be unwilling and unable to reform intelligence services in most countries, especially the US. Indeed, in the US, they try to prosecute whistleblowers severely.

International agencies such as the United Nations and Interpol have been very limited in their abilities to do much, needing to work thru national security services.

The bureaucracies are opaque and have proven themselves inadequate countless times, against less sophisticated and larger threats which should have been more detectable.

In this internet age, it is time that security also made its way into crowdsourced, peer to peer networks.

To some extent, it already has, with Wikileaks, OpenLeaks, and others. However, we need a non-governmental, public, internet based tips website and network to deal specifically with extinction related developments, in both the public and private sectors.

This author has personally witnessed awesome corruption and ineptitude among government institutions, which I do not intend to air on this website if anywhere at all, as it's not necessary nor prudent. Instead, all that is necessary is already out there from whistleblowers, and what's needed is to piece together these pieces of the puzzle to show the big picture, because if you don't understand that, and if you leave human existential matters in the hands of government officials, that's a recipe for disaster.

Whether it's Hurricane Katrina, or 9/11, or Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, or understanding of large Middle East groups, the "experts" have repeatedly come up way short of even modest expectations. Add on the farce of the 54 terrorist plots that the NSA claimed it prevented, and the subsequent revelations about those claims, it's no wonder that the general public wonders what's really going on in our national security bureaucracies.

An understandable amount of corruption does not bother me, knowing human nature, as long as people are doing their jobs and trying to fulfill their responsibilities. It's when they don't try to fulfill their responsibilities, due to individual or special interest benefits, carelessness cronyism, and/or ineptitude, in vital roles, that we need to step up and do something ourselves.

As part of the generation going thru the technological time of potential extinction, we are all responsible.

American Government "Intelligence" Corruption and Ineptitude

Understanding what has happened with the world's only remaining superpower is critical, if we are to have any hope of competently addressing extinction risks, because it shows the need for internet citizen activism to operate separately.

While Edward Snowden got the most press for leaking illegal NSA spying, simply because he showed documents with "Top Secret" at the top, Snowden's case is not the one which should be the biggest. (Snowden's leaks arguably hurt our ability to detect extinction threats, by alerting bad guys of government surveillance capabilities.) There are several other people which should have received a whole lot more press, for reform, such as:

• Sybil Edmonds, a former FBI translator and whistleblower, in 2012 published a book titled "Classified Woman" which is the single most significant revelation of how corrupted, careless, and incompetent the American government is at dealing with threats to national security. Edmonds went thru all the official channels to report extremely serious wrongdoing, only to run up against a combination of careless bureaucrats and judges, and attacks back on her full of lies and deceit. Her evidence was repeatedly blocked from being presented by "State Secret Privilege" to the point where even her name, birth date, and other personal information were classified, hence the name of her book. An intelligence plutocracy has stacked both the judiciary and other government positions with cronies.

  "Classified Woman" is required reading of anybody who wants to understand just how extensively corrupt, careless, and evil the national security apparatus has become. Yet, I don't see it on the bookshelves of bookstore after bookstore, even though it is extremely relevant to the current national debate on the NSA and other elements of the police state, and was published in 2012. There are a lot of humdrum history books on the shelves of bookstores such as Barnes & Noble, so why isn't this book there? Read the book and you can start to understand why:

  Buy Classified Woman on Amazon

• Russell Tice was another former high level NSA person who tried to blow the whistle on the NSA's illegal spying on its citizens going back to around 2003, as he handled requests from his superiors to spy on uprising American politicians (including Barack Obama before he was even a senator), judges, powerful Congressmen and their staffers (especially those associated with the intelligence community), military people, high level businesspeople, and others. Tice confirmed with other NSA people that they were being instructed likewise in their compartments. Tice has stated his belief that this information was collected to find things which could be used to blackmail and control people. I think it was also used to choose which federal judges to promote, which politicians to allow to rise up, and so on. (Many media outlets were threatened when they prepared to convey Tice's allegations, and Tice has been constantly harrassed by intelligence operatives.)

  Tice does not seem to understand why they were spying on businesspeople, but he is apparently a retired government worker, not a businessperson. There is immense value is spying on investors and business people, if just to make money oneself based on what they're doing. You have to wonder whether this is why many people don't do their jobs well in the security services, because they're too busy enriching themselves. How much are they living beyond the means of their government salaries?

Like so many others, both Tice and Edmonds tried to go thru official whistleblower channels first. Only as a last resort did they finally go public.

The US government has harrassed and prosecuted whistleblowers to the maximum. An example is the highly accomplished John Kiriakou, who first revealed the waterboarding torture by the CIA, who was jailed in 2013. A short summary of this event is the short Wikipedia summary article.

One thing which is clear from all of this is that the US government's security state has already stacked the system so that it has become a shadow government. President Obama, despite praising whistleblowers before being elected, has prosecuted whistleblowers worse than any other president. You have to wonder what dirt they have on Obama.

When I was in Washington, D.C., back before 1994, one of my associates told me that the balance of power is mutually assured blackmail. Russell Tice has speculated likewise.

The extreme prosecution of whistleblowers like Kiriakou and Snowden, and attempted prosecution of other whistleblowers (sorry, it's not appropriate to make this page too long), tells us one thing: They prosecute in order to try to deter additional people from being whistleblowers.

Meanwhile, who gets prosecuted for abuses of power? Just like bankers not being prosecuted, the national security apparatus gets paraded for being naughty but nothing happens.

Indeed, Obama's Director of National Intelligence (DNI), James Clapper, engaged in perjury in Congress. "Senator Wyden then asked Clapper, 'Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?' He responded 'No, sir.' Wyden asked 'It does not?' and Clapper said 'Not wittingly. There are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly.'" ^{DNI-Clapper   Forbes}

Shortly after that, Clapper admitted to his perjury, saying it was the "least untruthful" answer.

Yet, unlike other perjurors, he was not prosecuted. While an outrage with many, Clapper has continued in his job up thru the time of this writing (mid-2015).

"When Edward Snowden was asked during his January 26, 2014 TV interview in Moscow what the decisive moment was or why he blew the whistle, he replied: 'Sort of the breaking point was seeing the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, directly lie under oath to Congress. … Seeing that really meant for me there was no going back.'" ^{DNI-Clapper   NDR.de}

The result is that the US has a totally corrupt national security state which does not serve very well the greater moral interests of the country, much less the world.

Money is the root of most evil. The human instincts of comfort, indulgence, and social status (ego) drive individuals to seek out positions of power and control, often for their own self interest, or that of their tribe, without sacrificing for the greater good. If you do not go along with the white color gang, you're unlikely to get promoted much, especially into the centers of power.

(They have lots of great assignments to remote places where you can do the hard and often dangerous work while others back in the bureaucracy take credit and derive benefits. When things go well, everybody tries to take credit. When they go wrong, it's fingerpointing the other ways.)

Washington, D.C., like many other places, attracts people who seek power and status. It's not a place where people take risks or make personal sacrifices much for the greater good. It's a place where image and public relations are performed with high skill on one side, but secret deals to the contrary for individual and special interest group benefits go on in secrecy.

Having worked and lived there for 10 years, well networked, these are my own observations, but I think you can also piece this together from what's out in the press from a small number of whistleblowers.

What is most remarkable is what an extremely tiny percentage of people will actually risk sacrificing their personal career, wellbeing, and family benefits to blow the whistle on extremely serious wrongdoing. We're not talking about just pettiness or money, we are talking about dereliction of duty and gross irresponsibility, for individual personal gain.

We are a dangerous and often ugly species.

The best protection we can create is an open source tips website for extinction threats, run by citizens around the world, for the sake of "international" security, rather than "national" security interests, or crony interests.

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Unfortunately, it's not enough to just know that this is what we need to do, and then not participate oneself, just surf on to the next cool and interesting thing, and let our species continue on towards extinction.

Likewise, when there were whistleblowers in the US, the result was mainly just be a lot of sensational press with negative attention to the agencies which resulted in little more than entertaining the readership, who tend to have a short attention span. Abuses have been exposed before in history, but Congress obviously hasn't instituted enough reforms and oversight to prevent them from happening again. This phase will probably pass, too. People will cheer the whistleblowers, some token reforms will be announced with fanfare, but in the end it will all eventually blow over and things will return to "business as usual" for the most part. What's to make us think it will be any different this time?

From the interview of Edward Snowden by Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong:

"The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests."

A similar thing applies here. The greatest risk is that so many people know about the risks to us, but in the end "won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things" but will just move on to their next cool distractions with a short attention span, and not play a role in our generation to help humanity solve this problem.

Meanwhile, too many voters may just put into Congress and the White House the next round of demagogue who convince the masses that they will be the better one to improve the economy. It's still all about money?

As Ray McGovern said, his organization doesn't give awards to people for predicting the rain, they give rewards for building arks.

What we need is solutions, implemented to completion. Not just talking the talk, but walking the walk.

The solution, in my opinion, is to set up some kind of international "intelligence" non-governmental organization (NGO) consisting of people from many different countries all over the world, screened and vetted for reliability as well as minimization of potential conflicts of interest, trained in confidentiality and compartmentalization, having a democratic system for promotions, as well as a checks and balances system, and with a public relations arm, in order to diligently research allegations of threats in the world, counter fear mongering false allegations, and make sure that governments don't miss and really do follow up on the real threats.

America cannot be the policeman of the world. In fact, people around the world are trusting the American intelligence agencies less and less, as well as many other national intelligence organizations. We need an alternative, international NGO.

This needs to go beyond just terrorist threats. It should be expanded to include threats to the environment of our planet in this era of mass extinctions, including pollution, illegal bulk fishing in international waters, and other threats to the security and well being of other life on this planet, in addition to our own.

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This website is about
realistic human extinction
threats in our generation,
mainly genetics,
biotechnology, and
nanotechnology.
It also discusses the
realities of Artificial
General Intelligence
by computer advances
in 20-30 years, the
so-called Singularity.