February 8, 2008 (#73)
ALAN WATT
"CUTTING THROUGH THE MATRIX"
LIVE ON RBN
Title Copyright Alan Watt February 8, 2008:
"TECHNIQUE OF INTERGENERATIONAL REALITY
ALTERATION AND GUIDANCE -
(a) I KNOW, (b) THAT'S POSSIBLE, (c) I'M NOW UNSURE,
(d) WHAT'S
EVERYONE THINKING? (e) I'LL FOLLOW THEM."
© Alan Watt February 8, 2008
Title & Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - February 8, 2008 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes and Callers' Comments)
WWW.CUTTINGTHROUGHTHEMATRIX.COM
www.alanwattsentientsentinel.eu
"Code of Silence" by Bruce Springsteen
There's a
code of silence that we don't dare speak
There's a wall between us and a river so deep
And we keep pretending that there's nothing wrong
But there's a code of silence and it can't go on
Is the
truth so elusive, so elusive as you can see
that it ain't enough baby
To bridge the distance between you and me
There's a list of grievance 100 miles long
There's a code of silence and it can't go on
Well you
walk with your eyes open
But your lips they remain sealed
While the vows we made are broken
Beneath the truth we fear to reveal
Now I need to know now darlin'
I need to know what's goin' on so c'mon
Hi folks. I'm Alan Watt and this is Cutting Through the Matrix on February 8th, 2008. Newcomers look into the site cuttingthroughthematrix.com and download as much information as you wish, because scattered all through it is lots of little pieces of the puzzle which you can start putting together and you must put it together for yourself; that's the whole key to understanding. You'll put it together in your own fashion that your particular mind can comprehend and make sense of. Otherwise, you're learning by rote and people who learn by rote are just following something or someone else's idea. Look into alanwattsentientsentinel.eu for transcripts which you can download in the various languages of Europe. You can even print them up and pass them around to your friends.
For the last few minutes really, just before the show started, I was wondering what to talk about tonight. That's generally what I do. I'm busy all day long and I sit down for a couple of minutes and ponder, and sure enough, something always pops in and I was thinking about how far back this agenda goes. It's staggering. It's staggering in its complexity and yet the more you understand and learn and study the more understandable it becomes with all of its complexity and you begin to wonder about the use of computers even and how far back they actually go to enable those at the top to bring all of this together so amazingly well.
They've had computers of course much longer than we know of. We were always shown the old big machines. They made sure we saw the big machines on newscasts and so on back in the '60s which were about 6 feet tall with the big reel-to-reel tapes going all the time, but in higher levels they were way beyond that into micro-circuitry, way beyond that. Again, one is to do with presentation how things are presented to a public and how they really are. They're always worlds apart; absolute worlds apart. Well, the music is coming up and I'll be back with more after the following messages.
Hi folks. I'm Alan Watt and we're back Cutting Through the Matrix and just talking about how far back this agenda actually goes and it's interesting living through your own little part of it and I can look back and look at different people I met in my life. I can remember back in the early '70s meeting a fellow who had been involved with some British intelligence agency who had a heart attack when he was about 36 or 37 and he had to go into teaching to survive. A less stressful job he thought at the time, but his specialty it seemed was in planning future societies and the types of citizens that the government wanted to have. What he did tell me was that part of the conditioning or reconditioning of people is to break down the old conditioning, gradually at first and then speed it up, because, he said himself, people are very traditionally minded. We have to realize that up until about the '70's or the '60's anyway, people used to go into a job for life and they had at least that, at least that, if you want to call it comfort, although the jobs were pretty awful, but they had that to fall back on.
He told me, he said eventually things will speed up so quickly that you'll have a whole bunch of jobs throughout your life and companies and corporations will move, he said, they'll go international and move. This was all on the slate back in the '70s. He said there would be massive changes within the way that people looked at society itself because it would be given an upgrade, a kind of conditioning to make them view all different segments of society in different lights and he meant propaganda and reinforcement and repetition.
He also mentioned that to do so, whether it's an individual or entire people, it's necessary to first create a sort of disassociative state within the people themselves. Now that's what they do when they catch a spy or they try to brainwash someone. They have to break down the idea of who you are to yourself. Everything that you think makes up you with your opinions on things, your place in the universe amongst all the people you know, all that has to be broken until you can't trust it yourself anymore; then they can recondition you and feed you new information to make the new you. That was to be done to society and it's been very successful because they'd already been doing that back then with the whole hippy movement. The blending of Eastern religions with the old enforced and reinforced religions and putting them together, something that Blavatsky and others talked about in the 1800's they would do this. They knew they'd do that back then and the reason they picked the ones from India mainly were because if you could convince the public to accept them, the young members of the public (and that was their target), then it's much easier to create a disassociative state where nothing is kind of real or permanent anymore. Everything is partly illusion. You can't trust your own thoughts. It could be all hallucinations for all you know, and half of them back then were certainly having hallucinations will all the LSD that was about at the same time and this was encouraged from the top down.
He also mentioned back then because Britain and most countries even though they were given the postal codes to write on your letters at the end of the address, he said, "you know this won't be used for another 10 or 15 years. They're just training the public to do it automatically before they even have the equipment set up to do it." That's how far ahead they were training the public and he said it would consist mainly of about six and eight letters, two blocks. At first you get one set of letters, maybe three. That would be a postal code. He said that will be your area. He said but eventually they'll give them a second part to that number and that will be a specific residence and it was to be for satellite grid identification. They could actually have you referenced on a satellite, right down pinpointed to where you actually live, that little house or apartment, and that was back in the early '70's from a guy who was in the know.
Now getting back to what he mentioned about the form of disassociation where you create that aspect in a person until they can no longer trust everything that they believed in and even their own place in the world amongst all their friends and all of that. That's your complete "id" as they call it – the complete you, your persona, plus everything else about you and how you relate to everyone else and how you think they relate to you. That was kind of shown in the "Matrix" with a simulation.
Here's part of the further part, the next part of the disassociation process, because this is from a newspaper in the UK. It's called "Metro". I believe it's a free one, website metro.co.uk and this is a tabloid type paper that's given out there free.
It says:
"Tuesday, February 5th, 2008. What if the room you are in, the country you call home, the planet you inhabit, in fact the entire universe were a simulation? What if you are more avatar than individual…"
Alan: This is this virtual – we know what it's about, avatars and so on they're all pushing.
"…the product of an information processor churning out algorithms to create virtual space, time, energy and matter? What if every thought and feeling you experience is actually the by-product of a computer subroutine? It's a daft idea, isn't it? Well, one man doesn't think so. In a paper published by Massey University in New Zealand, Dr Brian Whitworth suggests when looking at the physical laws that govern our universe, the many paradoxes that occur might be best explained if we view ourselves living not in a physical reality but in a virtual reality. In an argument that perhaps sits more comfortably within the realms of philosophy than physics, he asks us to consider simulated reality computer games such as The Sims."
Alan: I don't know which one that is. They love Simpsons and Sims because it's a play on us as being Simians, chimps, apes. We're the apes you see and they love these little puns.
It says here:
"Suppose one day that the computer code that creates The Sims became so complex that some Sims within the simulation began to “think”,' he argues. 'Could they deduce that their world was a virtual world. Would they see their world as we see ours now?' One of the paradoxes he sites as an example is the creation of the universe from nothing and its outward expansion into that nothingness. He believes that just as a computer system must boot up and start running a program, in our 'virtual' universe this boot up was manifested as what we call the Big Bang.
Likewise, he argues that, in computing, all objects that arise from digital processing must made up of units that have a minimum size – pixels or the 1s and 0s of digital code. He argues this is mirrored in our reality and that quanta – the tiny packets of matter that make up or physical world – serve the same function. And why does a photon of light have a finite speed when theoretically it should be able to whizz through the vacuum of space at limitless velocities? If you think of it as a pixel that can cross the computer screen only as fast as its processing power allows, you can see what he is saying. No? Well, don't worry about it. According to Dr Whitworth, there must be some programming geek of a god guiding your every move. So scoff that kebab this weekend – you might just be getting virtually fat."
Alan: That was one little item that came out from this magazine called "Metro." Now what I've noticed down through the years is how we get the same blurb from different sources in different countries at the same time and they're coordinated. That's how you change culture because what he's saying here, this character, has also been said by Nick Bostrom at the Department of Philosophy at Oxford University and the first version he put out was in May 2001. The final version was July 2002, so one guy here in one country has copied the work of another to get a point across that we're supposed to start parroting and use in our conversations.
It says here:
"ABSTRACT - This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a “posthuman” stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation."
Alan: Now this sounds gobbledygook until you think it through. It's meant to create a sort of disassociation within your own mind and have you question reality down to its very, very basics. That's the whole point. As I said at the beginning, the guy who worked in one of the British intelligence agencies basically told me that's how it works. Here you have different professors, different doctors, different universities all saying the same thing in a relatively short span of time from each other, using the same terminology. Even the Big Bang and all the rest of it and trying to say that ancestors eventually will create simulations of us and those simulations made by supercomputers might start thinking they're actually real. Then you'll have little youngsters parroting this stuff and wondering if they are real or simulation because we are all supposed to go into this simulated reality very shortly. When the Pentagon and every other warfare department across the planet have set up the copies of you within simulations using all the info they have on you and your personality, they mean business. They're not doing this for pleasure. This is the Pentagon we're talking about. Back with more after the following messages.
Hi folks. I'm Alan Watt and we're Cutting Through the Matrix and simply showing a little corner – pulling up a corner and letting you see in, as to how we don't simply evolve down through time but how everything is planned on a mass scale. A mass scale, giving the internet to the public didn't happen spontaneously. It was given to the public for specific reasons and that was to bring in a complete system of surveillance and eventually to get everyone so hooked on it they could once again alter the reality and bring them into a virtual reality before they eventually just give you a chip and then anything that happens will happen right inside your head. You won't need a computer at all. Step-by-step programming really and even before they gave the computer to the public, it's amazing how we seem to think there's a big Santa Claus out there that's just works fervently for our happiness and the corporations are somehow part of that. There's nothing further from the truth because we have to remember that during the whole Cold War, books were churned out one after another declaring that whoever had the most science and technology and secrets and technology would win the war.
That meant that big front organizations that became popular, brand names, mainly in electronics, had to be financed into existence and run and guided by MI6 and CIA and sure enough they have been. In other words, during the Cold War they couldn't allow an independent company to come into existence that might discover something that would put them all out of business and take over. They had to have the lead all the time. It was a war of technology. They didn't allow competition. They didn't allow any other innovations or technologies to come into being that could be used by any enemy side and therefore the big corporations that you know today, including all the traditional Windows and Microsoft and all the rest of it, is all part of that structure, just like the VeriChip is as well. It's part of a military-industrial complex that set up a true public private partnership where they create real corporations, real businesses. They make real items but they're staffed by their own people at the top, just like the top media people generally have been trained by your security organizations in every country.
Everything that we take for granted, mainly through repetition. You turn on the news. It's there every night. There's the same guy. Everything you take for granted is only reinforcing it. The repetition reinforces the lie and you don't question it anymore; you trust repetition. It's the same with the companies, the corporations and the products that they dish out to us and they all happen to have the upgrades on the best brand, all the top brands at the same time. They all use the same systems, the new technology in the same systems at the same time.
I used to wonder about the old VHS tapes and how come they always upgraded to a better quality at the same time? Every machine just appeared there. Every brand just appeared with the same technology in it and it's the same with computers. That tells you there's a controlling force behind all of them that guides all of them, in fact, dictates to all of them and dishes out the technology to them at the same time. That's why it happens that way.
Going back to the guy I was talking about that did work for intelligence until he had a heart attack and he didn't live long after that, by the way. He only lasted a couple of years and he was talking about how to disassociate people to get them to question everything, even the very basic foundations that makes you you. A very important part and we know that the top boys used all kinds of things—strobes, white light, lack of sleep, all this stuff—the same things that cults do. Cults do the same thing. They deprive you of sleep. They keep you weak through a certain diet and all the rest of it, and the intelligence agencies were using the same techniques because these were known down through the many centuries of how to break people down and reshape them, remold them into being willing and obedient servants.
Nothing changes. If the method works you don't change it, and yet to see it working on a mass scale is staggering and to actually hear, like Brzezinski said, the people repeating what they're given, the nonsense that they're given under the guise of news. When you hear them repeating it in public to each other the following day it's rather terrifying, especially when they repeat it verbatim. They've added nothing to what they heard. Their opinions that they've been given in fact and they are given opinions. News is supposed to give you commentary on what happened, what was said. They don't do that anymore. They give you opinions. They give you your actual opinion and you hear the public repeating the opinion, telling you that they have no opinions of their own; that's become their opinion. That's terrifying. Brzezinski knew that this would happen. The man who talked about the coming of the internet for instance and what a tool it would be and how the public would perceive it and what its real intent was – completely different again.
Religion has always been used. Religion on a very high scale has been used to control people for social order and for a set, generally a fixed type, of social and class order as well.
Europe, for instance, for many centuries had big curtains. You'll see sometimes where the rods used to go across the top of the arches inside the roof and they had huge curtains where they used to section off the wealthy from the poor, the masses. They didn't want to upset the wealthy as to the miserable state of the poor around above them, so they drew curtains so they wouldn't have to see them. I'll be back with more after the following messages and tell you where it's going.
Hi folks. I'm Alan Watt Cutting Through the Matrix, and I was trying to get down to how societies are controlled down through the ages and as I say religion – what used to be called orthodox religions, was used to the maximum to keep a status quo in place. That was really kings, queens, and all their other offspring and royalty and cousins and so on and lords, et cetera and a middle class – it's more a middle class, and then the peasant class all working along some road that really didn't change too much for many centuries and then along came the industrial revolution. It's called revolution because it changed everything, then suddenly all the people who worked on the farms were pushed off into the cities.
They were pretty well forced through various laws to get into the cities and staff the machines and then of course with the improvement of machines they began to lay-off the people because they didn't need so many because that's what commerce is all about. It's nothing to do with giving you work. That's only a side effect of what they call a "nasty necessity," giving you actually employment to make things, and society was guided along particular routes. That's the era where philosophers came into contact with government officials in how to do real long-term projections as to where all of this would go and they set up foundations and think tanks that were often chartered by royalty. That meant they were funded and given a royal charter to exist, like a license, and you can't use the term "royal" anything without a license from the government. That means you speak basically for the Crown, for the top establishment.
They projected the future and how they would steer it along a particular path and they realized that everything would have to be changed – everything would have to be changed. The old order, the old way of viewing things would have to be changed to adapt because they knew that religion would fall away as life became more miserable for what they call "the masses" who were all working in factories, sometimes 12, 16 hours a day. That was quite common. That was the norm in fact at one time.
They also looked towards a post-industrial stage and they worried about giving even leisure to the masses. Many books were written about it and they expressed their fear at the top of the mischief of the masses if they had leisure time. They might start getting together discussing their problems and perhaps even doing something about it on some grand scale and therefore they decided to turn out what they called "penny books" by the millions. These were novels hastily written but exciting novels to keep them all entertained and they would really fund into existence "vaudeville shows," they called them, theaters for the public where they'd go in and watch sort of bawdy acts. That's B-A-W-D, not b-o-d-y. Bawdy acts where you had laughter and slapsticks of comedy to keep them entertained and they would make sure there were plenty of pubs and bars so that they would have fun rather than become serious and discuss all their problems, form groups and maybe even political powers and do something about the state of affairs.
Therefore, from then on, they were guiding the world along a particular pre-chosen path and yet they knew that in a post-industrial era with even perhaps more leisure time the same problems still haunt them. What will they do with the public? How much entertainment can they give them before they get bored even with that because we get jaded. You can get jaded with anything, too much of anything, and that's when they hit on the idea of importing a religion after studying the world and the obedience of different people or "subjects" as they tend to call them in Britain and seeing what kind of religion worked on the people and why they worked. They found that the religions of the East, that's Hinduism and even Buddhism, creates a form of disassociative state within people until they don't become active in trying to change anything at all, because nothing is really real in the great scheme of things if you're simply a thought in the head of Brahma as he spins round and round and a mirror image of everything that Brahma is doing or thinking. It's a surrealistic way of looking at things and the big things in life, ambitions, fall to the wayside. In fact, that's one of the whole processes as you go towards Atman as all ambitions and ego are dropped and left behind you because you look at the big picture. The big picture is eternity and so you will neglect even the things, even the responsibilities you might have in this life and go off to the mountains and mediate.
Buddhism is very, very similar if you follow it through. Buddhism today is completely remote from its whole foundation because Buddhism like every other religion had its own little conclave. In a little meeting with all the different sects that had appeared over 300 years, a long time ago, they formulated the new ideas and copied Buddhism right back into it – the very thing that the founder was trying to get away from. Religion has always been used for mind control and, as I say, the Western establishment had decided to choose those ones in the late 1800's and began to put out their protégés and their new high priests that would bring the people in to be the nucleus and the start of it. Get followers and give it secrets. Secrets, like Weishaupt said, are guaranteed to bring in converts looking for the answers. Pretend you have secrets and they would eventually adapt the religion of the West, which had now suffered the consequences of decay through industry and a new way of living and it was on the way out, but they could adapt those ideas and join them to Eastern religions and then one day create a form of disassociative state to make the people again more easily managed.
Now people like Gorbachev who claims he's an atheist in his book, "Towards a New Civilization," tells you he's an atheist in the same book but he also tells you, "we're in the process of creating a new religion which will be based on a form of earth worship." He was meaning sustainability, the greening, all that kind of stuff, but they would teach it to the children in school. In order obviously to get them into that state you must do an awful lot of lying as well and bending of facts et cetera because all religions bend lots of facts. The whole greening movement, sustainability and all the rest of it, global warming, has taken tremendous bending of facts to bring into existence. That's why it's not too hard to knock it down if you're a critical thinker. Most people unfortunately are not. They believe, as I say, through repetition. Bertrand Russell kept saying that. "Repetition is the way to get across to the masses and they can be made to believe anything."
Here you are with a new religion being created which also forms a form of disassociative process. The technique again that they use in mind control and brainwashing has been used on great masses of people because today most folk cannot tell the difference between reality and fiction. Jacques Ellul, who was perhaps one of the greatest minds on sociology and the workings of great societies, said that all fiction that has to do with law, courts, lawyers, war, your government, your government's part in war, to do with the law enforcement agencies and armies, are all fictions. They're all propaganda. Propaganda wrapped up with a human interest story of a hero, heroine or whatever to hook the public into it to give you a completely false impression of what that particular agency or outfit is all about and it works. It works so well.
Most police are not hunting down that murderer. Most police are not hunting down the pedophile. Most people are not hunting down whatever. They're out there giving out tickets and bringing in money and keeping their ears open for all kinds of gossip in the area. Most intelligence is gathered by gossip. Ellul goes into that as well. He even mentions a technique used that the public could not be made aware of at that time of writing the book. A lot of it's to do with gossip but part of it is also to do with an association – an association of Masons and Eastern Stars, especially Eastern Stars, who live in all communities and even rural areas and they acquire all the gossip of the area.
I found this at the last place I worked because the Grand Master of the Lodge was always taking these elderly ladies into hospital, doctors appointments and so on. They all belonged to Eastern Star. They were very elderly and they had the jungle drums. They knew everything that was happening to everybody, all the gossip, and he got it all from them. The local police sergeant that ran the area in the next town belonged to that lodge as well, so he passed on information to him. That's how they gather info, just by casual conversation between neighbors or the local store or whatever. Nothing is ever as it seems, nothing at all. That's why you have to always be careful what you say to whom and preferably say very little that matters, ever. Even to people round about you. That's how information is gathered and that's what cops have always done.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police that always pushes an image abroad of riding round in circles with lances and red tunics and hats on in formation, was set up by the British government for Canada as a paramilitary organization. They would go undercover into society to route out communists, not riding about on horses, and the CBC did a documentary special on that a few years ago with a lot of the data on it. However, they put out the propaganda part and that's what you remember, horses, red tunics, nice parades and you clap your hands and so do the children. That's how you're trained to view things, always from a different perspective than its function. That's good propaganda. That's good conditioning. That's good mind alteration of perception and yet we take all this for granted and people question nothing.
The U.S. had a massive overdose with the FBI story and stuff like that in the States for years and the whole point between the FBI was to federalize – another federalization, a centralization of government power over people. Anything that would centralize power, even in Marxist philosophy, remember, was essential. Lincoln got a telegraph from Karl Marx's congratulating him on beating the South and conquering the South because he said centralization of power is essential for a Marxist doctrine, for that particular doctrine. Then after they centralize power they give you a period of nationalization, make you feel proud to be who you are and when you're all doing that, having parades and all the rest of it, your boys at the top in the State Department are signing treaties for internationalization and you don't know anything about it until 20, 30 years later. That's how you manage great herds of people and I say herds because that's what they call us. We are the human herd.
The guy I talked to again back in the '70's and he told me quite a lot because he knew I was interested and keen and had a mind that could function, but he said the same thing that nothing happens by chance. The purpose of big agencies is to ensure that nothing happens on a grand scale by chance. Predictive programming isn't just putting into your mind ideas of how the near future and the distant future will be so that you'll accept it as it comes along. It's also a form of altering and distorting perceptions so that you will think in that mode and you will believe this about this organization or the RCMP or whatever. It works very, very well. Nothing is left to chance.
For a fellow who told me quite a few things that definitely happened 30 years down the road, and they have, he did know his stuff. The sad thing is because the generations are so incredibly separated and that was part of the agenda, to destroy the family unit. That was number one on the list. That was the first thing, priority, destroy the family, especially extended family, grannies, grandmothers and granddads – people with history. People who could teach the children and that's what they used to do. Grandparents used to look after the children. That's where you got a lot of your oral history from, your education. That's been destroyed. We now pop them in homes and they often sign themselves in homes and book themselves in thinking it's all quite normal; and, like Bertrand Russell said, the State gives the children their values, their new values, and the parents are too busy to have time with the children. That's why grandparents were so essential all down through time. Now they've separated the generations it's quite easy to lead each segment of them.
The older ones have their magazines, their TV programming. Every specific age is given it's own particular timeslot on television they look into to keep their reality afloat for them because we like familiarity. We don't like rapid change and the older you get, the more so. They always give you shows that aim at your generation. They've even admitted that things like the Spice Girls and so on were deliberately set up to target a specific age group, and the age group was from about the age of seven years old to about 13, by Madison Avenue, the big advertising companies and so on. The very technique that Bertrand Russell said they would use. They would bring in the big marketing boys, the ones who understood how to manipulate mass herds of people and it's been done. It's been done perfectly.
How much of what you think is real is true? How much to do you carry around in your head of utter fallacy? And then to fall into the next step when you think everything has been shattered, all those things that you were hanging on to, do you go shopping for something else to replace it? That's what most people do. They shop immediately for a new religion, a religion that promises them something and security and peace and tells them that they're special. They go shopping for them and they have apparently a whole range to choose from. I say "apparently" because they're all one and the same and it's called the New Age.
The New Age was given the term by the magazine called "The New Age," which was the name of the Scottish Rite of Freemasons magazine for many years. It was called "The New Age". They talked about bringing in this New Age and blending all of these ideas together for a new religion, a new society. I'll be back with more after the following messages.
Hi folks. I'm Alan Watt and just for the last few minutes of Cutting Through the Matrix, I'm going to jump into something that goes along the lines where you'll see more and more of this totalitarian regime manifest itself into your daily lives, and once again, most folk will adapt to it quite quickly because we're in an age of adaptation. "Adapt or die," as they say, as they put us in flux and there's no normalcy in anything. It constantly changes definitions.
This is from the Progressive Magazine, February 7th, 2008 by Matthew Rothschild. It says:
"The FBI Deputizes Business.
Today, more than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. The members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public does—and, at least on one occasion, before elected officials. In return, they provide information to the government, which alarms the ACLU. But there may be more to it than that. One business executive, who showed me his InfraGard card, told me they have permission to “shoot to kill” in the event of martial law."
Alan: Think about that, for the hard of thinking. "Shoot to kill" in the event of marital law."
"InfraGard is “a child of the FBI,” says Michael Hershman, the chairman of the advisory board of the InfraGard National Members Alliance and CEO of the Fairfax Group, an international consulting firm. InfraGard started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats. “Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years. InfraGard itself is still an FBI operation, with FBI agents in each state overseeing…"
Alan: Overseeing.
"…the local InfraGard chapters…"
Alan: Chapters, interesting, that what they call some of the Masonic lodges.
"(There are now eighty-six of them.) The alliance is a nonprofit organization…"
Alan: NGOs once again.
"…of private sector InfraGard members. “We are the owners, operators, and experts of our critical infrastructure, from the CEO of a large company in agriculture or high finance to the guy who turns the valve at the water utility,” says Schneck, who by day is the vice president of research integration at Secure Computing."
Alan: And you think you're free?
"At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership…"
Alan: A partnership.
"…between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the private sector,” the InfraGard website states. “InfraGard chapters are geographically linked with FBI Field Office territories.” In November 2001, InfraGard had around 1,700 members. As of late January, InfraGard had 23,682 members, according to its website, www.infragard.net, which adds that “350 of our nation’s Fortune 500 have a representative in InfraGard.”
Alan: Well, what a surprise. What a surprise.
"To join, each person must be sponsored by “an existing InfraGard member…"
Alan: Exactly the same as Freemasonry.
"…chapter, or partner organization.” The FBI then vets the applicant. On the application form, prospective members are asked which aspect of the critical infrastructure their organization deals with. These include: agriculture…"
Alan: That's your food.
"…banking and finance, the chemical industry, defense, energy, food, information and telecommunications, law enforcement, public health, and transportation."
Alan: Now they've left it out there, but it's in there too, it's your entertainment. Well, from Hamish and myself, up here in Ontario, Canada, it's good night and may your god or your gods go with you.
(Transcribed by Linda)