Excerpt: Some of President Reagan’s top advisers have operated a virtual parallel government outside the traditional Cabinet departments and agencies for almost the day Reagan took office, congressional investigators and administration officials have concluded.

Excerpt: There appears to have been no formal directive for the advisers’ activities, which knowledgeable sources described as a parallel government.

Excerpt: This…secret government-within-a-government, operated…with its own army, air force, diplomatic agents, intelligence operative and appropriations capacity…

Excerpt: [A] secret contingency plan…called for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis.

“The plan did not define national crisis…

Excerpt: The CIA has released its so-called family jewels—nearly 700 pages of documents detailing some if its most infamous and illegal operations dating back to the 1950s. These include assassination plots against foreign leaders, drugs tests on unwitting citizens, wiretapping of U.S. journalists, spying on activists, opening mail, break-ins at the homes of ex-CIA employees and more.

Excerpt: Actually, until the Central Intelligence Agency, America had never had a peacetime intelligence organization. And it was created in the aftermath of World War II. And one of the things about World War II was the very sinister and scary idea of having Gestapo, having a secret police with those kinds of powers monitoring over a citizenry. So when the issue of creating a peacetime intelligence organization was posed, one of the points of discussion was this question of what kind of police powers the agency would have. And the congressional and senatorial figures who were central in passing this legislation that created the CIA were squarely against the agency having any kind of a police function, so that when the charter of the Central Intelligence Agency was written into the National Security Act of 1947, it explicitly gave the agency no police powers, and it implicitly prohibited the agency from carrying out activities inside the United States.

Excerpt: First-class mail is sacrosanct under US legal provisions. Therefore, it was illegal to open this mail in the first place. They [the CIA] would open the mail and photograph the letters, before resealing the envelopes and sending them on their way. So they actually had files of American citizens’ mail to and from whoever it was they had decided that they would collect on.

Excerpt: You know, we’re having the military do the surveillance. We’re having the NSA collect everybody’s phone calls. So we’ve taken it away from these guys [the CIA] that are by law not supposed to be doing American stuff. We’ve shifted the playing field, if you like.

Excerpt: According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as an emergency internal security database system designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.

Excerpt: The Justice Department officials who objected to the legal basis for the surveillance program—former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel—testified before Congress last year about the 2004 showdown with the White House. Although they refused to discuss the highly classified details behind their concerns, the New York Times later reported that they were objecting to a program that involved computer searches through massive electronic databases containing records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans.

Excerpt: Dan Murphy, a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA. Murphy, who died shortly after his meeting with Hamilton, did not specifically mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSA's use of PROMIS involved something so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem, Hamilton told me.

Excerpt: An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect and, in the event of a national emergency, could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention.

Excerpt: Main Core may be the contemporary incarnation of a government watch list system that was part of a highly classified Continuity of Government program created by the Reagan administration to keep the U.S. government functioning in the event of a nuclear attack. Under a 1982 presidential directive, the outbreak of war could trigger the proclamation of martial law nationwide, giving the military the authority to use its domestic database to round up citizens and residents considered to be threats to national security. The emergency measures for domestic security were to be carried out by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army.

Excerpt: Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

“An estimated 854,000 people…hold top-secret security clearances.

Excerpt: In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities.

Excerpt: Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications.

Excerpt: Many of the newest buildings are not just utilitarian offices but also edifices on the order of the pyramids, in the words of one senior military intelligence officer.

Excerpt: Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.

“You can't find a four-star general without a security detail, said one three-star general… Then comes, If he has one, then I have to have one. It's become a status symbol.

Excerpt: At its best, analysis melds cultural understanding with snippets of conversations, coded dialogue, anonymous tips, even scraps of trash…

Excerpt: Contract analysts are often straight out of college…

Excerpt: In a secure office in Washington, a senior intelligence officer was dealing with his own frustration. Seated at his computer, he began scrolling through some of the classified information he is expected to read every day: CIA World Intelligence Review, WIRe-CIA, Spot Intelligence Report, Daily Intelligence Summary, Weekly Intelligence Forecast, Weekly Warning Forecast, IC Terrorist Threat Assessments, NCTC Terrorism Dispatch, NCTC Spotlight…

Excerpt: To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called inherently government functions. But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

Excerpt: The Post's estimate of 265,000 contractors doing top-secret work…includes 1,931 companies that perform work at the top-secret level. … Most are thriving even as the rest of the United States struggles with bankruptcies, unemployment and foreclosures.

Excerpt: The privatization of national security work has been made possible by a nine-year gusher of money, as Gates recently described national security spending…

Excerpt: It's about how many studies you can orchestrate, how many people you can fly all over the place. Everybody's just on a spending spree. We don't need all these people doing all this stuff.

Excerpt: The investigation focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret level is too large to accurately track.

Excerpt: A 2008 study published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that contractors made up 29 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies but cost the equivalent of 49 percent of their personnel budgets.

Excerpt: Such coziness worries other officials who believe the…defense-intelligence-corporate relationship has become, as one senior military intelligence officer described it, a self-licking ice cream cone.

Excerpt: Another official…described it as a living, breathing organism impossible to control or curtail. How much money has been involved is just mind-boggling…

Excerpt: The brick warehouse is not just a warehouse. Drive through the gate and around back, and there, hidden away, is someone's personal security detail: a fleet of black SUVs that have been armored up to withstand explosions and gunfire.

Excerpt: Beyond all those obstacles loom huge buildings with row after row of opaque, blast-resistant windows, and behind those are an estimated 30,000 people, many of them reading, listening to and analyzing an endless flood of intercepted conversations 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

“From the road, it's impossible to tell how large the NSA has become, even though its buildings occupy 6.3 million square feet - about the size of the Pentagon - and are surrounded by 112 acres of parking spaces. As massive as that might seem, documents indicate that the NSA is only going to get bigger: 10,000 more workers over the next 15 years; $2 billion to pay for just the first phase of expansion; an overall increase in size that will bring its building space throughout the Fort Meade cluster to nearly 14 million square feet.

Excerpt: Inside the locations are employees who must submit to strict, intrusive rules. They take lie-detector tests routinely, sign nondisclosure forms… They are coached on how to deal with nosy neighbors and curious friends. Some are trained to assume false identities.

Excerpt: The schools…are adopting a curriculum this fall that will teach students as young as 10 what kind of lifestyle it takes to get a security clearance and what kind of behavior would disqualify them.

Excerpt: Loudoun County, ranked as the wealthiest county in the country, helps supply the workforce of the nearby National Reconnaissance Office headquarters… Fairfax County, the second-wealthiest, is home to the NRO, the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. … And Howard County, ranked third, is home to 8,000 NSA employees.

Excerpt: [T]he NSA…now ingests 1.7 billion pieces of intercepted communications every 24 hours: e-mails, bulletin board postings, instant messages, IP addresses, phone numbers, telephone calls and cellphone conversations.

Excerpt: Burns, a businesswoman in the Fort Meade cluster, is having a drink one night after work and gesturing toward some men standing in another part of the bar.

“I can spot them, she says. The suit. The haircut. The demeanor. They have a haunted look, like they're afraid someone is going to ask them something about themselves.

“Undercover agents come in here, too, she whispers, to watch the same people, to make sure no one is saying too much.

Excerpt: Scientists at the Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment (DACA) are using a thermal-imaging camera to measure changes in facial temperature, which can help determine whether a person is lying. Some data suggests that a person who is lying may register a temperature increase near the inside corner of the eye. The scientists hope to use such cameras for security screenings at airports, train stations, border crossings, stadiums or large events.

Excerpt: Scientists at Draper Laboratories are using an ocular scanner, a thermal camera, a laser and a fidget meter to try to correlate physiological data with a subject's emotional and mental states. Working with the Department of Homeland Security, Draper scientists are using the instruments to collect data on heart rate, pulse, body temperature, pupil dilation, and eye and foot movement. The goal is to be able to compile physiological data to identify people who intend to commit a crime, such as terrorism.

Excerpt: The DHS has given $31 billion in grants since 2003 to state and local governments for homeland security… At least four other federal departments also contribute to local efforts. But the bulk of the spending every year comes from state and local budgets that are too disparately recorded to aggregate into an overall total.

Excerpt: Napolitano has taken her See Something, Say Something campaign far beyond the traffic signs that ask drivers coming into the nation's capital for Terror Tips and to Report Suspicious Activity.

“She recently enlisted the help of Wal-Mart, Amtrak, major sports leagues, hotel chains and metro riders.

Excerpt: On a recent night in Memphis, a patrol car rolled slowly through a parking lot in a run-down section of town. The military-grade infrared camera on its hood moved robotically from left to right, snapping digital images of one license plate after another and analyzing each almost instantly.

“Suddenly, a red light flashed on the car's screen along with the word warrant.

Excerpt: Hand-held, wireless fingerprint scanners were carried by U.S. troops during the insurgency in Iraq to register residents of entire neighborhoods. L-1 Identity Solutions is selling the same type of equipment to police departments to check motorists' identities.

“In Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Facial Recognition Unit, using a type of equipment prevalent in war zones, records 9,000 biometric digital mug shots a month.

Excerpt: The special operations units deployed overseas to kill the al-Qaeda leadership drove technological advances that are now expanding in use across the United States. On the front lines, those advances allowed the rapid fusing of biometric identification, captured computer records and cellphone numbers so troops could launch the next surprise raid.

“Here at home, it's the DHS that is enamored with collecting photos, video images and other personal information about U.S. residents…

Excerpt: This information would help the crime intelligence analysts…figure out what neighborhoods to swarm with officers and surveillance cameras.

Excerpt: There are 96 million sets of fingerprints in Clarksburg, a volume that government officials view not as daunting but as an opportunity.

Excerpt: At the same time that the FBI is expanding its West Virginia database, it is building a vast repository… This one stores the profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime. What they have done is appear to be acting suspiciously to a town sheriff, a traffic cop or even a neighbor.

Excerpt: The effectiveness of this database depends, in fact, on collecting the identities of people who are not known criminals or terrorists - and on being able to quickly compile in-depth profiles of them.

Excerpt: State intelligence analysts and FBI investigators use the reports to determine whether a person is buying fertilizer…to plant tomatoes; whether she is…studying for a metallurgy test…

Excerpt: Or, as most often happens, it could make no specific determination, which would mean that Suspicious Activity Report N03821 would sit in limbo for as long as five years, during which time many other pieces of information about the man photographing a boat on a Sunday morning could be added to his file: employment, financial and residential histories; multiple phone numbers; audio files;…and anything else in government or commercial databases that adds value…

Excerpt: As of December, there were 161,948 suspicious activity files… Some 890 state and local agencies have sent in 7,197 reports so far.

“Of those, 103 have become full investigations… There have been no convictions…

Excerpt: In Virginia, the state's fusion center published a terrorism threat assessment in 2009 naming historically black colleges as potential hubs for terrorism.

“From 2005 to 2007, the Maryland State Police went even further, infiltrating and labeling as terrorists local groups devoted to human rights, antiwar causes and bike lanes.

“And in Pennsylvania this year, a local contractor hired to write intelligence bulletins filled them with information about lawful meetings as varied as Pennsylvania Tea Party Patriots Coalition gatherings, antiwar protests and an event at which environmental activists dressed up as Santa Claus…

Excerpt: A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools.

Excerpt: A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a threat and one of more than 1,500 suspicious incidents across the country over a recent 10-month period.

Excerpt: The DOD database obtained by NBC News includes nearly four dozen anti-war meetings or protests, including some that have taken place far from any military installation, post or recruitment center.

Excerpt: The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again…

Excerpt: Two years ago, the Defense Department directed a little known agency, Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, to establish and maintain a domestic law enforcement database that includes information related to potential terrorist threats directed against the Department of Defense. Then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz also established a new reporting mechanism known as a TALON or Threat and Local Observation Notice report. TALONs now provide non-validated domestic threat information from military units throughout the United States that are collected and retained in a CIFA database. The reports include details on potential surveillance of military bases, stolen vehicles, bomb threats and planned anti-war protests. In the program’s first year, the agency received more than 5,000 TALON reports.

Excerpt: One of the CIFA-funded database projects being developed by Northrop Grumman and dubbed Person Search, is designed to provide comprehensive information about people of interest. It will include the ability to search government as well as commercial databases. Another project, The Insider Threat Initiative, intends to develop systems able to detect, mitigate and investigate insider threats, as well as the ability to identify and document normal and abnormal activities and behaviors, according to the Computer Sciences Corp. contract. A separate CIFA contract with a small Virginia-based defense contractor seeks to develop methodsto track and monitor activities of suspect individuals.

Excerpt: Bert Tussing, director of Homeland Defense and Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College and a former Marine, says there is very little that could justify the collection of domestic intelligence by the Unites States military. If we start going down this slippery slope it would be too easy to go back to a place we never want to see again…

Excerpt: The Supreme Court on Monday let stand a federal court ruling that allows for the government to secretly arrest and detain people inside the United States.

Excerpt: The justice department rounded up 1,000 people because they were Arabs or Muslims, and arrested them in secret. Jailed them without charges. Kept them incommunicado and now we discovered as we suspected and feared all along that they were beaten up when they were in prison.

Excerpt: A few of them were citizens. … Usually the Justice Department calls a press conference and says—or Ashcroft does and says, oh, we have arrested so and so. And here’s what we are charging him with or not charging him with, and here’s the evidence against him. Only in the instance of these people have they said, oh, we cannot tell you anything about them. And what we know now—which we gathered from a piece of information here or there, and through the inspector general at the Justice Department is that they had nothing on them. … The government never put in an affidavit saying that there were links between these individuals and terrorism. Even though the justice—even though the Attorney General in his public speeches gives that impression over an over again.

Excerpt: Those three chapters really represent a kind of political testament that are outlined by Malcolm X, and to make a long story short, they’re in a safe of a Detroit attorney by the name of Greg Reed. … Since that time, no historian, or at least I suppose I’m the exception, very few people have actually had a chance to see the raw material that was going to comprise these three chapters. The missing political testament that should have been in the autobiography, but isn’t.

Excerpt: I think that Malcolm was envisioning, even while he was in the Nation of Islam, a black nationalist progressive strategy toward uniting black people across ideological, class lines, denominational religious lines, Christians, as well as Muslims, to build a strong movement for justice and for empowerment. And I think that that is what frightened the FBI, and that is what frightened the CIA. That is what they had to stop, and if one thinks about it, those listeners and our viewers who know the history of COINTELPRO, the counter intelligence program of the FBI that occurred in the 1960s and 70s, that in 1965 or 6, that J. Edgar Hoover wrote an infamous memo called the Black Messiah Memo. He said, We must stop the rise of a black messiah. That was the concern that the FBI had more than anything else… So, Malcolm had a clear vision and an understanding that we were—that he was a part of a broad freedom struggle. As his vision became more internationalist and pan-African, as he began, especially in 1964, after seeing the example of anti-colonial revolutions abroad and began to articulate and incorporate a socialist analysis economically into his program, he clearly became a threat to the US state.

Excerpt: The first group, obviously, is the NYPD, the New York Police Department. They had their own red squad, which was called BOSS, the Bureau of Special Services. They had managed to infiltrate Malcolm’s organization and the nation of Islam. And, of course, the FBI. There were over 40,000 pages of FBI documents of which only about half are currently available to scholars and researchers. … So that—I believe that the FBI clearly was concerned, wanted to monitor and disrupt Malcolm wherever possible. Gene Roberts, one of Malcolm’s chiefs of security, was an NYPD undercover cop. He later went on to bigger things by being a disruptive force inside of the Black Panther Party.

Excerpt: We know from Talmadge Hayer, one of the men who carried out the assassination, who was shot by Reuben X as he tried to flee the Audubon after shooting Malcolm X, we know that Hayer confessed years later to his Imam in prison that there had been a walk-through a week prior to February 21st at the Audubon Ballroom.

Excerpt: The NYPD was ubiquitous. They were always around Malcolm. Whenever Malcolm spoke, there would be one or two dozen cops all over the place. On this day, the cops were nowhere to be seen.

Excerpt: [W]e later learned from unredacted FBI files…that there were at least, according to the district attorney, at least three undercover cops who were at the ballroom that day. We know one of their names… Gene Roberts, who was depicted giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to Malcolm…was an undercover cop, but who were the others? Two of the three men, who were imprisoned, Norman Butler and Robert 15x Johnson, convicted and given life sentences, I’m absolutely convinced were innocent. The real murderers of Malcolm X have not been caught or punished.

Excerpt: Can you imagine the media circus that would occur if a few thousand of the nation’s top government officials (including Presidents), media executives, and business leaders from the most powerful sectors of our society met together for days on end and attended a ceremony where they ritualistically sacrificed and burned an effigy of a human child? That would be the media circus to end all media circuses. You would think!

“Well, in fact, that meeting happens every year—and has for over a hundred years. But have you even heard a peep about it from the mainstream media? I know I haven’t. Given the perception of a free press in the United States, you’d think that it would be absolutely impossible for such meetings to take place. That they do is quite a telling statement about the mainstream media.

“Every midsummer in northern California, the people who essentially run the nation meet in the Bohemian Grove. What these people did there was a big mystery, until July 15th, 2000. That’s when Alex Jones secretly infiltrated and videotaped their most sacred ceremony—the Cremation of Care—in his groundbreaking expose: Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove.

“From analyzing this ceremony, here’s essentially what these people—who, in status and in function, are definitely different from the rest of us—believe:

Our God is Nature, and we see other people as Nature’s enemy. Hence, we view care for them as malevolent, dangerous, and hellish. Our joy comes from striving to become perfectly compassionless sociopaths, so we can best distract, blind, and sacrifice other people for Nature.

Excerpt: This is Database Technologies. This is the company that the state of Florida hired to remove the names of people who committed serious crimes from the voter lists. I have obtained a document marked confidential and trade secret. It says the company was paid millions of dollars to make telephone calls to verify they got the right names - but they didn't. There is nothing in the state of Florida files that says they made these telephone calls. So the question remains, why did the Republican leaders of this state pay millions for a list that stopped thousands of innocent Democrats from voting? The first list from DBT included 8,000 names from Texas supplied by George Bush's state officials. They said they were all felons, serious criminals barred from voting. As it turns out, almost none were. Local officials raised a ruckus and DBT issued a new list naming 58,000 felons. But the one county which went through the whole expensive process of checking the new list name by name found it was still 95% wrong.

Excerpt: Altogether, it looks like this cost the Democrats about 22,000 votes in Florida, which George Bush won by only 537 votes.

Excerpt: …Palm Beach voting machines misread 27,000 ballots. Jeb Bush's Secretary of State, Katharine Harris, stopped them counting these votes by hand. She did the same to Gadstone, one of Florida's blackest, poorest and most Democrat counties, where machines failed to count one in eight ballots. Again Harris stopped the hand count.

Excerpt: Harris was a busy woman. In charge of Florida's vote count and co-chair of Bush's presidential campaign.

Excerpt: Ohio’s top election official, Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, announced Friday that the voting systems that decided the 2004 election in Ohio were rife with critical security failures.

Excerpt: Any—basically what she says was, you could have manipulated the 2004 election results with a Blackberry. You know, the Conyers report basically said all you had to do was drive by with a Wi-Fi. And she comes up and says there are very simple ways the 2004 election could have been flipped just like that.

Excerpt: We are guaranteed certain that John Kerry won Ohio in 2004. The election—the exit polls showed him winning. There was a flip of 6.7% in the exit polls from the official vote count. You know, my favorite, in Youngstown and in Franklin County in Columbus, in the inner city, people went in, and they hit touch-screen machines, and they pushed Kerry, and Bush lit up. How do you invent that? How do you make that up? We had votes that were taken away in a county in southeastern Ohio. They proclaimed a Homeland Security alert. Nobody knows where this came from. The FBI, the Homeland Security agency, they never called a Homeland Security alert, but suddenly—They locked down. They kept out the media. Suddenly the ballots disappeared.

“And most importantly—and this, Jennifer Brunner did not discuss—I am party to a lawsuit. We filed a civil rights lawsuit. We won. The federal election law says the ballots were supposed—had to be protected, under federal law. We got an overlapping decision from a federal judge to preserve, for our civil rights suit, the preservation of these ballots. Fifty-six of eighty-eight counties in Ohio destroyed their election ballots, destroyed all their election records, or most of them, making a pure recount impossible. This is in direct violation of a federal court injunction and standing federal law. So far, nobody has been prosecuted. What kind of country are we living in?