U.S. spy program is war on the African community!

 
On June 6, 2013, National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked documents to the media exposing the existence of a U.S. government program called PRISM, a secret, so-called "national security" electronic surveillance program run by the NSA since roughly 2007.
 
For African people colonized inside the U.S. and around the word, the issue of whose data is mined, who is profiled and who is targeted in U.S. political surveillance and counterinsurgency programs long pre-dates the digital age.
 
The recent revelations of massive U.S. surveillance systems must be understood in the context of the U.S. government’s brutal counterinsurgency program (COINTELPRO) and other colonial covert programs that assassinated our African revolutionary leaders, imprisoned our activists and pushed back our organizational capacity to struggle for our liberation.
 
From COINTELPRO to PRISM
 
Representatives of Microsoft called this practice of collecting data "Hoovering"—named after J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director from the 1960s who created COINTELPRO, the counterinsurgency program designed to destroy the Black Revolution of the 1960s.
 
COINTELPRO, was a comprehensive secret war of the FBI and other agencies of the U.S. government created with the express purpose of discrediting, neutralizing and destroying the rise of the Black Power Movement.
 
COINTELPRO’s goals stated:
 
     Prevent the coalition of militant black nationalist groups.
 
     Prevent the rise of a black messiah who could unify and electrify the black nationalist movement.
 
     Prevent violence on the part of black nationalist groups.
 
     Prevent militant black nationalist leaders from gaining respectability.
 
     Prevent the long-range growth of militant black nationalist groups, especially among the youth.
 
COINTELPRO involved massive surveillance through wiretapping, infiltration of black revolutionary groups and outright assassinations, such as the brutal murders of Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
 
The struggle for the liberation of Africa and African people everywhere under the leadership of the African working class is the only means to end this terror imposed upon us by U.S. and European imperialism whose wealth and power have been built on our backs for the past 600 years.
 
It is no coincidence that only a few weeks ago the neocolonial U.S. president Barack Hussein Obama named Assata Shakur to the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list and the State of New Jersey increased the bounty placed on her head from $1 million to $2 million.
 
Our comrade and freedom fighter Assata lives in political asylum in Cuba.
 
The attack on Assata is an attack on the African Liberation Movement.
 
While the U.S. government uses the term “terrorism” to criminalize African people and other oppressed peoples who fight for our freedom, we recognize that it is Obama and the U.S. government who are the real terrorists whose very existence is sustained on constant war, genocide and terror waged against the vast majority of the people on this planet.
 
What is PRISM?
 
PRISM stands for Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management.
 
It is operated under the auspices of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
 
U.S. president Barack Hussein Obama’s Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) cited PRISM data as a source in 1,477 items in the year 2012.
 
The existence of PRISM was leaked one day after the story broke that the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Court had been requiring the telecommunications company Verizon turn over to the NSA logs tracking all of its customers' telephone calls on an ongoing, daily basis.
 
Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, Google, Apple, PalTalk, YouTube and Skype all work closely with PRISM. Dropbox is allegedly "coming soon."
 
Ninety-eight percent of PRISM data comes from Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft.
 
According to the New York Times, in at least two cases, the companies discussed creating secure digital drop-boxes where information sought by the NSA could be electronically deposited.
 
Facebook has already built such a system.
 
Interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while PRISM has attracted recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive surveillance effort by the U.S. government.
 
In addition to PRISM, the NSA has a program that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone.
 
That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.
 
PRISM works in a way that its name suggests: Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.
 
Every year, the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.
 
By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.
 
A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.
 
With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information.
 
While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company.
 
They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.
 
On June 11, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the NSA citing that PRISM "violates Americans' constitutional rights of free speech, association, and privacy."
 
While the exposure of PRISM sparked some public outrage from the North American public, polls show that more than half of the U.S. population reports that they are OK with having their phone, email and internet records monitored by the government.
 
PRISM continues the counterinsurgency against the African community
 
A cursory glance at the history of NSA surveillance reveals that PRISM is only the latest in a long line of government surveillance programs that work closely with tech companies. The NSA has made alliances with over 100 "trusted" U.S. companies since the 1970s.
 
A similar counterinsurgency program called the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" was implemented after 9/11 by former U.S. president George W. Bush.
 
Other white imperialist countries whose intelligence apparatuses have collaborated with PRISM include Australia, Canada, Israel and the United Kingdom.
 
Obama and the bourgeois media have tried to soothe the anxiety of the white population of the U.S. by stating that PRISM only focuses on so-called "foreigners" and not on so-called "American citizens."
 
In Berlin, Germany this week, Obama attempted to tamp down outrage expressed in Europe by assuring German chancellor Angela Merkel that PRISM is a “circumscribed and limited” spy program.
 
Neocolonial president Obama has stated, "You can't have 100 percent security and then also have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. You know, we're going to have to make some choices as a society."
 
The white ruling class has long made that choice for us.
 
Stop the U.S. government’s war on the African community!

Obama and the U.S. government are the real terrorists!

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