UNITED STATES OF SECRETS!

UNITED STATES OF SECRETS!

FRAZER CHRONICLE

(All the News That Nobody Else Will Print)

 

I don’t particularly care for authority figures in my life and I’m pretty sure most Americans feel the same. I’m old enough, and wise enough to govern myself…..I don’t need the man looking over my shoulder, either telling me or reminding me of how to conduct my life so as not to infringe on my fellow citizens and neighbors rights.

However that said, I realize that some people do need watching and reminded that other people do have rights, and ill-moral, uncaring, and just plain unethical behavior does happen on a almost daily basis…..so we do need authority figures. These authority types do remind some of us that carrying on unethically, or committing stupid acts will not be tolerated and that there are consequences to these silly, stupid, and unethical practices.

The actions of a relatively few U.S. citizens has opened up the doors for those in federal government who hunger after authority positions. It actually is their dreams…..to be in a position to mete out punishment for their perception of wrongdoing, or to track those people who are deemed as threats to the American people and our way of life.

Today it’s called monitoring, surveillance, and it’s absolutely nothing that is new, the practice of government keeping track of its citizens without warrants, uncontrolled, and answerable to no one except their immediate superiors is standard operating procedure. The feds enlisting the help of U.S. communication companies for almost a century has only expanded the numbers of people that can be accessed by these government watch dogs that do their jobs under the guise of citizen protection.

THE BLACK CHAMBER

Romantic…..not really, exotic sounding names…..well, I’ve gotta give ‘em that, a surveillance organization with a moniker like the BLACK CHAMBER can do that. Created after the conclusion of World War I, in May of 1919, the Black Chamber, known as the Cipher Bureau was the United States first peacetime cryptanalytic organization, and a forerunner of today’s National Security Agency (NSA).    There were only intermittent efforts to intercept and break codes by the United States, no matter their success, the Armed Forces and/or government agencies always abandoned the attempts.

Duel funding by the Army and State Department established a clandestine disguised company, New York City Commercial Code Company; it actually produced and sold such codes for business use. Its true mission however, was to break communications of other nations. One of it’s known successes was during the Washington Naval Conference during which it aided American negotiators considerably by providing them with decrypted traffic of many of the Conference delegations, most notably the Japanese.

What the Black Chamber did was to replace the Military Intelligence Agency (M1-8) that was in operation during World War I. Disbanded directly after the war, there were military as well as civilian authority that felt it necessary to create something after the war to help protect the United States from the new enemies that had been created by the U.S. allegiance during the war years.

In a turbulent financial period that gripped the U.S. as well as world from late 1929, until the outbreak of hostilities in Europe in the middle 1930’s, the priorities of the United States had changed…..and they seemed to be epitomized in Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson’s memoirs: “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

In 1931, in need of money, Herbert O. Yardley wrote a book about the Cipher Bureau, which actually was another cover name for the Black Chamber and entitled it The American Black Chamber. There is no record of how successful the book was, but the phrase “whistle blower” comes to mind.  

Codes and code breakers have been around for hundreds of years, in 1590 a so called cabinet noir was established by King Henry IV of France to open, read, and then reseal correspondence of his perceived enemies. In the process, a system was developed of encrypting the correspondence, and a system to decrypt was also developed, giving birth to modern systematic scientific code breaking.

THE FATHER OF SPOOKING

Herbert O. Yardley was by far the most influential early espionage (or cryptology) agent and operator in the United States and was, by far, the most misunderstood of any federal official. Born in 1889 in Washington, Indiana, a graduate of high school, and one year of college education (University of Chicago) in English, was the extent of his education.

In 1912 Yardley became a $900 per year code and telegrapher in the State Department’s Code Room. While working the night shift, he became interested in the construction of State Department codes, and began to try to solve them. According to his own account, it took him less than two hours to solve a 500-word message to President Woodrow Wilson from Colonel Edward M. House, the president’s adviser and confidant, than in Europe.

In 1917 Yardley submitted 100 page memorandum titled “Solution of American Diplomatic Codes,” which resulted in a new method of encoding State Department messages. Yardley was preparing himself for bigger and better things, and after the United States declared war on Germany, he was commissioned a 1^st lieutenant in the Signal Officer’s Reserve Corp, was ordered to active duty as head of M-I 8 the cryptologic organization of Military Intelligence.

You can imagine what a bombshell Yardley’s book was when he published it in 1931. Unemployed, with no civil service status, or retirement benefits…..and a stock market that had yet to bottom out, Herbert O Yardley was soon to be destitute. He had little choice, he could write, and knew that he had been involved with an interesting and provocative life…..and saw no alternative…..self preservation took over, and in short order he wrote a 375 page entitled The American Black Chamber.

Yardley was born 75 years too early; his marketing skills would be more accepted in today’s business world. He marketed his book first with small excerpts in the Saturday Evening Post, the leading magazine of the time. Without exception, the United States State Department denied every claim that Yardley had made, and in fact some Washington officials stated that they had never heard of such a department.

YARDLEY MUST BE FLIPPING OVER IN HIS GRAVE

Herbert O. Yardley really was the precursor to almost every spy agency that the United States has perceived since 1919. Today we have Herbert Osborne Yardley to thank for most of the atmosphere and the attitudes that have driven the development of at least 25 security and intelligence agencies…..and that number does not include the biggest of them all, Homeland Security.

The intelligence community in the United States today is a sprawling bunch of organizations that continually trips over one another’s feet, refuses to cooperate and will not share information. The biggest, and the blackest of marks that was inflicted upon the face of the American intelligence community’s face occurred on September 11, 2001, when the staff of the world’s most technologically sophisticated intelligence agency learned about the United States had been attacked by an enemy on a $300 television set.

Shortly thereafter a transformation began at each and every spook agency in the United States that would put a completely different spin regarding its citizen’s privacy, just as Americans faced choices about what freedoms to sacrifice to prevent more attacks on home soil.

Without exception the intelligence communities had been created in the United States to prevent, or at least blunt exactly what had happened in September 11, 2001. Now with little exception, the entirety of the United States is paying for the failures of the country’s intelligence groups. The United States is peopled by extremes, there never is a “happy medium,” we are an either/or. And how we protect ourselves, and to what degree we allow our freedoms to be abused is truly a study in contrasts.

Yes the National Security Agency or Homeland Security, or any of the hundreds of thousands of agents that roam throughout the United States have been given a free hand in how citizens are dealt with. Our country has been based on individual freedom, but you’d better believe that that is becoming a thing of the past.

Edward Snowden’s admissions about what was going on at the NSA is probably just a “tip of the ice-burg,” we’ll be seeing all sorts of leaks that’ll both surprise and anger us. You really began to wonder exactly what is going on in our world, maybe the intelligence community in the United States is running out of foreign thugs and terrorists…..and have begun to look inward to American citizens…..it would be cheaper to go after people right here in the good old U.S. of A.

 

HAVE A NICE DAY!