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Paul Merrell

Why France Sank an Iran Nuke Deal | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...-france-sank-an-iran-nuke-deal

war & peace Saudis Israel France Egypt Syria

shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • France’s sabotage of a compromise agreement on Iran’s nuclear program is a textbook case of how the new Saudi-Israel alliance can disrupt President Barack Obama’s strategy for resolving Middle East disputes through diplomacy, not war. Over the summer, Saudi officials including intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan visited European capitals dangling financial deals and energy concessions to countries if they would line up behind Saudi and Israeli desires for military intervention in the Syrian civil war and heightened economic warfare against Iran. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius greets U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Paris, France, on Feb. 27, 2013. [State Department photo]The carrots were particularly appealing to the French who are struggling with a sluggish economy, high unemployment and a recent credit downgrade. So, the flash of Saudi petro-dollars got the attention of the French government.
  • Just last month, French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian celebrated the signing of a $1.5 billion deal with Saudi Arabia to overhaul six of its navy ships. In July, Saudi Arabia’s ally, United Arab Emirates, signed a $913 million deal with France to buy two high-resolution Helios military satellites. Other lucrative arms deals are reportedly in the works between France and Saudi Arabia (and its Sunni allies). Saudi Arabia also has deployed its money to bolster France’s sagging agricultural and food sectors, including a Saudi firm buying a major stake in Groupe Doux, Europe’s largest poultry firm based in Brittany. The Saudis, however, had less success with other countries.
  • Putin also stepped up his cooperation with President Obama in searching for negotiated settlements to longstanding disagreements in the Middle East, including a U.S.-Russia-brokered deal to get the Syrian government to give up its chemical weapons, a joint push for Syrian peace talks in Geneva and a plan to resolve the Iranian nuclear dispute. But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Saudi royals favor a more belligerent approach to these conflicts – wanting the United States to bomb Syria and “degrade” its military, demanding the immediate removal of Syrian President Assad, and insisting on a complete capitulation by Iran under threat of crippling economic sanctions or a U.S.-Israeli aerial bombardment. Last weekend – as an interim agreement with Iran was about to be signed by the five United Nations Security Council members plus Germany – the French rushed to the rescue of the Israeli-Saudi alliance, showing up at the last minute to unravel the deal that had been painstakingly knitted together. To the apparent surprise of the Obama administration, the Russians and other governments working on a compromise with Iran over its nuclear program, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius joined the talks late and prevented the accord from being signed.
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  • Much of the subsequent commentary has focused on why the French were coming to the aid of the Israelis in blocking the interim agreement that Netanyahu has denounced in apocalyptic terms. But France’s interest in undercutting the deal can perhaps best be understood by factoring in the Saudi money. Indeed, the logic behind the behind-the-scenes Saudi-Israeli alliance has been that the two former adversaries now view their interests as mostly aligning, especially their contempt for Iran’s Shiite government and its influence extending along the Shiite Crescent from Tehran through Baghdad and Damascus to Beirut. Israel and Saudi Arabia agree that Iran is the greatest threat to their regional interests. Both countries have indicated that they want the Iranian-backed government in Syria to be overthrown even if that means it will be replaced by Saudi-backed Sunni jihadists linked to al-Qaeda. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Israel Sides with Syrian Jihadists.”]
  • Israel and Saudi Arabia also took the same side on the Egyptian military coup d’etat which ousted elected President Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. Though the Muslim Brotherhood is Sunni – like the Saudis – it represents a populist movement that the Saudi monarchy considers a threat to its anti-democratic structure. Israel views the Muslim Brotherhood as sympathetic to Hamas in Gaza. But what makes the Saudi-Israeli alliance so influential is the complementary strengths of the two countries. Israel has extraordinary skills at lobbying and propaganda, especially in influencing Official Washington and Capitol Hill. Saudi Arabia has vast financial resources that can turn the heads of defense officials in Paris, oil men in Houston or investment bankers on Wall Street. Together these strengths can make the negotiation of any good-faith compromise with Iran or Syria difficult, if not impossible. Between Netanyahu pulling the strings of his political and media marionettes in Washington and the Saudis manipulating the French government and others with financial inducements, it will take toughness and savvy for the Obama administration to guide the process to a peaceful resolution. And, toughness and savvy are not attributes that the administration is known to have in great supply.
Paul Merrell

As Europe erupts over US spying, NSA chief says government must stop media | Glenn Gree... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ts-nsa-spying-chief-government

surveillance state NSA Alexander censorship suveillance-subject-matter

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • is there any doubt at all that the US government repeatedly tried to mislead the world when insisting that this system of suspicionless surveillance was motivated by an attempt to protect Americans from The Terrorists™? Our reporting has revealed spying on conferences designed to negotiate economic agreements, the Organization of American States, oil companies, ministries that oversee mines and energy resources, the democratically elected leaders of allied states, and entire populations in those states.Can even President Obama and his most devoted loyalists continue to maintain, with a straight face, that this is all about Terrorism? That is what this superb new Foreign Affairs essay by Henry Farrell and Martha Finnemore means when it argues that the Manning and Snowden leaks are putting an end to the ability of the US to use hypocrisy as a key weapon in its soft power.Speaking of an inability to maintain claims with a straight face, how are American and British officials, in light of their conduct in all of this, going to maintain the pretense that they are defenders of press freedoms and are in a position to lecture and condemn others for violations? In what might be the most explicit hostility to such freedoms yet – as well as the most unmistakable evidence of rampant panic – the NSA's director, General Keith Alexander, actually demanded Thursday that the reporting being done by newspapers around the world on this secret surveillance system be halted (Techdirt has the full video here):
  • The head of the embattled National Security Agency, Gen Keith Alexander, is accusing journalists of "selling" his agency's documents and is calling for an end to the steady stream of public disclosures of secrets snatched by former contractor Edward Snowden."I think it's wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000 – whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these – you know it just doesn't make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog."We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don't know how to do that. That's more of the courts and the policy-makers but, from my perspective, it's wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director declared. [My italics]There are 25,000 employees of the NSA (and many tens of thousands more who work for private contracts assigned to the agency). Maybe one of them can tell The General about this thing called "the first amendment".I'd love to know what ways, specifically, General Alexander has in mind for empowering the US government to "come up with a way of stopping" the journalism on this story. Whatever ways those might be, they are deeply hostile to the US constitution – obviously. What kind of person wants the government to forcibly shut down reporting by the press?Whatever kind of person that is, he is not someone to be trusted in instituting and developing a massive bulk-spying system that operates in the dark. For that matter, nobody is.
  • Paul Merrell on 28 Oct 13
     
    Alexander's call for censorship starts at about 21:00 of the video at http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/10/nsa-chief-stop-reporters-selling-spy-documents-175896.html Dear General Alexander: "... we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home." E- Edward R. Murrow, See It Now (9 March 1954), http://tinyurl.com/kzlpm4a
Paul Merrell

From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users' Online Identities - 0 views

theintercept.com/...ck-web-users-online-identities

surveillance state GCHQ Black-Hole

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • HERE WAS A SIMPLE AIM at the heart of the top-secret program: Record the website browsing habits of “every visible user on the Internet.” Before long, billions of digital records about ordinary people’s online activities were being stored every day. Among them were details cataloging visits to porn, social media and news websites, search engines, chat forums, and blogs. The mass surveillance operation — code-named KARMA POLICE — was launched by British spies about seven years ago without any public debate or scrutiny. It was just one part of a giant global Internet spying apparatus built by the United Kingdom’s electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ. The revelations about the scope of the British agency’s surveillance are contained in documents obtained by The Intercept from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. Previous reports based on the leaked files have exposed how GCHQ taps into Internet cables to monitor communications on a vast scale, but many details about what happens to the data after it has been vacuumed up have remained unclear.
  • Amid a renewed push from the U.K. government for more surveillance powers, more than two dozen documents being disclosed today by The Intercept reveal for the first time several major strands of GCHQ’s existing electronic eavesdropping capabilities.
  • The surveillance is underpinned by an opaque legal regime that has authorized GCHQ to sift through huge archives of metadata about the private phone calls, emails and Internet browsing logs of Brits, Americans, and any other citizens — all without a court order or judicial warrant
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  • A huge volume of the Internet data GCHQ collects flows directly into a massive repository named Black Hole, which is at the core of the agency’s online spying operations, storing raw logs of intercepted material before it has been subject to analysis. Black Hole contains data collected by GCHQ as part of bulk “unselected” surveillance, meaning it is not focused on particular “selected” targets and instead includes troves of data indiscriminately swept up about ordinary people’s online activities. Between August 2007 and March 2009, GCHQ documents say that Black Hole was used to store more than 1.1 trillion “events” — a term the agency uses to refer to metadata records — with about 10 billion new entries added every day. As of March 2009, the largest slice of data Black Hole held — 41 percent — was about people’s Internet browsing histories. The rest included a combination of email and instant messenger records, details about search engine queries, information about social media activity, logs related to hacking operations, and data on people’s use of tools to browse the Internet anonymously.
  • Throughout this period, as smartphone sales started to boom, the frequency of people’s Internet use was steadily increasing. In tandem, British spies were working frantically to bolster their spying capabilities, with plans afoot to expand the size of Black Hole and other repositories to handle an avalanche of new data. By 2010, according to the documents, GCHQ was logging 30 billion metadata records per day. By 2012, collection had increased to 50 billion per day, and work was underway to double capacity to 100 billion. The agency was developing “unprecedented” techniques to perform what it called “population-scale” data mining, monitoring all communications across entire countries in an effort to detect patterns or behaviors deemed suspicious. It was creating what it said would be, by 2013, “the world’s biggest” surveillance engine “to run cyber operations and to access better, more valued data for customers to make a real world difference.”
  • A document from the GCHQ target analysis center (GTAC) shows the Black Hole repository’s structure.
  • The data is searched by GCHQ analysts in a hunt for behavior online that could be connected to terrorism or other criminal activity. But it has also served a broader and more controversial purpose — helping the agency hack into European companies’ computer networks. In the lead up to its secret mission targeting Netherlands-based Gemalto, the largest SIM card manufacturer in the world, GCHQ used MUTANT BROTH in an effort to identify the company’s employees so it could hack into their computers. The system helped the agency analyze intercepted Facebook cookies it believed were associated with Gemalto staff located at offices in France and Poland. GCHQ later successfully infiltrated Gemalto’s internal networks, stealing encryption keys produced by the company that protect the privacy of cell phone communications.
  • Similarly, MUTANT BROTH proved integral to GCHQ’s hack of Belgian telecommunications provider Belgacom. The agency entered IP addresses associated with Belgacom into MUTANT BROTH to uncover information about the company’s employees. Cookies associated with the IPs revealed the Google, Yahoo, and LinkedIn accounts of three Belgacom engineers, whose computers were then targeted by the agency and infected with malware. The hacking operation resulted in GCHQ gaining deep access into the most sensitive parts of Belgacom’s internal systems, granting British spies the ability to intercept communications passing through the company’s networks.
  • In March, a U.K. parliamentary committee published the findings of an 18-month review of GCHQ’s operations and called for an overhaul of the laws that regulate the spying. The committee raised concerns about the agency gathering what it described as “bulk personal datasets” being held about “a wide range of people.” However, it censored the section of the report describing what these “datasets” contained, despite acknowledging that they “may be highly intrusive.” The Snowden documents shine light on some of the core GCHQ bulk data-gathering programs that the committee was likely referring to — pulling back the veil of secrecy that has shielded some of the agency’s most controversial surveillance operations from public scrutiny. KARMA POLICE and MUTANT BROTH are among the key bulk collection systems. But they do not operate in isolation — and the scope of GCHQ’s spying extends far beyond them.
  • The agency operates a bewildering array of other eavesdropping systems, each serving its own specific purpose and designated a unique code name, such as: SOCIAL ANTHROPOID, which is used to analyze metadata on emails, instant messenger chats, social media connections and conversations, plus “telephony” metadata about phone calls, cell phone locations, text and multimedia messages; MEMORY HOLE, which logs queries entered into search engines and associates each search with an IP address; MARBLED GECKO, which sifts through details about searches people have entered into Google Maps and Google Earth; and INFINITE MONKEYS, which analyzes data about the usage of online bulletin boards and forums. GCHQ has other programs that it uses to analyze the content of intercepted communications, such as the full written body of emails and the audio of phone calls. One of the most important content collection capabilities is TEMPORA, which mines vast amounts of emails, instant messages, voice calls and other communications and makes them accessible through a Google-style search tool named XKEYSCORE.
  • As of September 2012, TEMPORA was collecting “more than 40 billion pieces of content a day” and it was being used to spy on people across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, according to a top-secret memo outlining the scope of the program. The existence of TEMPORA was first revealed by The Guardian in June 2013. To analyze all of the communications it intercepts and to build a profile of the individuals it is monitoring, GCHQ uses a variety of different tools that can pull together all of the relevant information and make it accessible through a single interface. SAMUEL PEPYS is one such tool, built by the British spies to analyze both the content and metadata of emails, browsing sessions, and instant messages as they are being intercepted in real time. One screenshot of SAMUEL PEPYS in action shows the agency using it to monitor an individual in Sweden who visited a page about GCHQ on the U.S.-based anti-secrecy website Cryptome.
  • Partly due to the U.K.’s geographic location — situated between the United States and the western edge of continental Europe — a large amount of the world’s Internet traffic passes through its territory across international data cables. In 2010, GCHQ noted that what amounted to “25 percent of all Internet traffic” was transiting the U.K. through some 1,600 different cables. The agency said that it could “survey the majority of the 1,600” and “select the most valuable to switch into our processing systems.”
  • According to Joss Wright, a research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, tapping into the cables allows GCHQ to monitor a large portion of foreign communications. But the cables also transport masses of wholly domestic British emails and online chats, because when anyone in the U.K. sends an email or visits a website, their computer will routinely send and receive data from servers that are located overseas. “I could send a message from my computer here [in England] to my wife’s computer in the next room and on its way it could go through the U.S., France, and other countries,” Wright says. “That’s just the way the Internet is designed.” In other words, Wright adds, that means “a lot” of British data and communications transit across international cables daily, and are liable to be swept into GCHQ’s databases.
  • A map from a classified GCHQ presentation about intercepting communications from undersea cables. GCHQ is authorized to conduct dragnet surveillance of the international data cables through so-called external warrants that are signed off by a government minister. The external warrants permit the agency to monitor communications in foreign countries as well as British citizens’ international calls and emails — for example, a call from Islamabad to London. They prohibit GCHQ from reading or listening to the content of “internal” U.K. to U.K. emails and phone calls, which are supposed to be filtered out from GCHQ’s systems if they are inadvertently intercepted unless additional authorization is granted to scrutinize them. However, the same rules do not apply to metadata. A little-known loophole in the law allows GCHQ to use external warrants to collect and analyze bulk metadata about the emails, phone calls, and Internet browsing activities of British people, citizens of closely allied countries, and others, regardless of whether the data is derived from domestic U.K. to U.K. communications and browsing sessions or otherwise. In March, the existence of this loophole was quietly acknowledged by the U.K. parliamentary committee’s surveillance review, which stated in a section of its report that “special protection and additional safeguards” did not apply to metadata swept up using external warrants and that domestic British metadata could therefore be lawfully “returned as a result of searches” conducted by GCHQ.
  • Perhaps unsurprisingly, GCHQ appears to have readily exploited this obscure legal technicality. Secret policy guidance papers issued to the agency’s analysts instruct them that they can sift through huge troves of indiscriminately collected metadata records to spy on anyone regardless of their nationality. The guidance makes clear that there is no exemption or extra privacy protection for British people or citizens from countries that are members of the Five Eyes, a surveillance alliance that the U.K. is part of alongside the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you are searching a purely Events only database such as MUTANT BROTH, the issue of location does not occur,” states one internal GCHQ policy document, which is marked with a “last modified” date of July 2012. The document adds that analysts are free to search the databases for British metadata “without further authorization” by inputing a U.K. “selector,” meaning a unique identifier such as a person’s email or IP address, username, or phone number. Authorization is “not needed for individuals in the U.K.,” another GCHQ document explains, because metadata has been judged “less intrusive than communications content.” All the spies are required to do to mine the metadata troves is write a short “justification” or “reason” for each search they conduct and then click a button on their computer screen.
  • Intelligence GCHQ collects on British persons of interest is shared with domestic security agency MI5, which usually takes the lead on spying operations within the U.K. MI5 conducts its own extensive domestic surveillance as part of a program called DIGINT (digital intelligence).
  • GCHQ’s documents suggest that it typically retains metadata for periods of between 30 days to six months. It stores the content of communications for a shorter period of time, varying between three to 30 days. The retention periods can be extended if deemed necessary for “cyber defense.” One secret policy paper dated from January 2010 lists the wide range of information the agency classes as metadata — including location data that could be used to track your movements, your email, instant messenger, and social networking “buddy lists,” logs showing who you have communicated with by phone or email, the passwords you use to access “communications services” (such as an email account), and information about websites you have viewed.
  • Records showing the full website addresses you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk/what_we_do — are treated as content. But the first part of an address you have visited — for instance, www.gchq.gov.uk — is treated as metadata. In isolation, a single metadata record of a phone call, email, or website visit may not reveal much about a person’s private life, according to Ethan Zuckerman, director of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Civic Media. But if accumulated and analyzed over a period of weeks or months, these details would be “extremely personal,” he told The Intercept, because they could reveal a person’s movements, habits, religious beliefs, political views, relationships, and even sexual preferences. For Zuckerman, who has studied the social and political ramifications of surveillance, the most concerning aspect of large-scale government data collection is that it can be “corrosive towards democracy” — leading to a chilling effect on freedom of expression and communication. “Once we know there’s a reasonable chance that we are being watched in one fashion or another it’s hard for that not to have a ‘panopticon effect,’” he said, “where we think and behave differently based on the assumption that people may be watching and paying attention to what we are doing.”
  • When compared to surveillance rules in place in the U.S., GCHQ notes in one document that the U.K. has “a light oversight regime.” The more lax British spying regulations are reflected in secret internal rules that highlight greater restrictions on how NSA databases can be accessed. The NSA’s troves can be searched for data on British citizens, one document states, but they cannot be mined for information about Americans or other citizens from countries in the Five Eyes alliance. No such constraints are placed on GCHQ’s own databases, which can be sifted for records on the phone calls, emails, and Internet usage of Brits, Americans, and citizens from any other country. The scope of GCHQ’s surveillance powers explain in part why Snowden told The Guardian in June 2013 that U.K. surveillance is “worse than the U.S.” In an interview with Der Spiegel in July 2013, Snowden added that British Internet cables were “radioactive” and joked: “Even the Queen’s selfies to the pool boy get logged.”
  • In recent years, the biggest barrier to GCHQ’s mass collection of data does not appear to have come in the form of legal or policy restrictions. Rather, it is the increased use of encryption technology that protects the privacy of communications that has posed the biggest potential hindrance to the agency’s activities. “The spread of encryption … threatens our ability to do effective target discovery/development,” says a top-secret report co-authored by an official from the British agency and an NSA employee in 2011. “Pertinent metadata events will be locked within the encrypted channels and difficult, if not impossible, to prise out,” the report says, adding that the agencies were working on a plan that would “(hopefully) allow our Internet Exploitation strategy to prevail.”
Paul Merrell

The Perfect Storm In Turkey - Corruption Conflict Conspiracy | Scoop News - 0 views

www.scoop.co.nz/...uption-conflict-conspiracy.htm

Turkey coup NATO al-Qaeda Syria corruption

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • The Republic of Turkey is consumed by intense conflict, conspiracy charges, and underlying financial problems that simply won't go away. A perfect storm is brewing in Turkey.
  • Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government and supporters are charged with a secret gold-for-oil deal with Iran. The deal, in violation of trade sanctions against Iran, enriched the PM's ministers and other key supporters involved (including the PM's son), according to prosecutors. The deal also involved misreporting billions of dollars in trade, which, in turn, resulted in Turkey overstating national income and understating its current account deficit. A more ominous charge focuses on Erdogan's open support of a wealthy Saudi known for funding al Qaeda and the PM's alleged support of Al Qaeda fighters engaged against the Syrian government. Just today, we say this headline: Turkish governor blocks police search on Syria-bound truck reportedly carrying weapons . Erdogan is a strong supporter of the Syrian rebels, assumed recipients of the weapons.The crisis started on December 17, 2013 when dozens of Erdogan's close associates were arrested for corruption. The arrests included the CEO of Turkey's state bank caught with million in euros stuffed in shoeboxes. Charges and arrests continued. Prosecutors and police who handled the case were fired at the behest of the Prime Minister. The Turkish supreme court ruled that the government couldn't interfere with police investigations through firings and intimidation. Undeterred, Erdogan fired more prosecutors claiming the charges were an attack on the Turkish state. To top it all off, authorities banned reporters from police stations and pressured the media to stop focusing on the scandals.
  • The risks to Erdogan are substantial and can impact the entire nation.The two biggest concerns are Erdogan's ongoing support for Syrian rebels, particularly the Islamist jihadists sponsored by Saudi Arabia, the Islamic Front. Critics of the PM are raising his open association with Yasin al-Qadi, an alleged funding source for Al Qaeda and a designated international terrorist by the U.S. government. Erdogan was dismissive of any problems when confronted on the association saying that al-Qadi was "a charitable person who loves Turkey." He may have more explaining to do if investigations continue.Reporting on evidence from prosecutors and first hand witnesses, Michael Rubin found:"According to Turkish interlocutors, there are consistent irregularities in 28 government tenders totaling in the tens of billions of dollars, in which kickbacks and other payments were made, a portion of which Turkish investigators believe ended up with al-Qadi’s funds and charities. These funds and charities were then used to support al-Qaeda affiliates and other radical Islamist groups operating in Syria like the Nusra Front." Dec. 27
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  • "Irregularities" in government tenders is part of a much larger financial crisis brought on by Erdogan's policies. As noted in a an article earlier this week:"While the focus to date has been on charges of personal enrichment by Erdogan’s ministers and associates, the real problem for the current government is financial fraud in reporting its current account deficit and national income. These figures are the basis for access to international financing. Intentional, inaccurate reporting constitutes fraud that understates the risk to lenders and provides a more favorable interest rate for the borrower than is warranted." Michael Collins, Dec 29Mustafa Sonmez detailed the problems in Hurriyet Daily News, an important analysis overshadowed by the more spectacular charges of late. Turkey's secret gold-for-oil deal with Iran distorted financial reporting figure. Debt was understated and income overstated as a result. Turkey's economic success is based on foreign investments. When foreign investors look at the political instability combined with the financial reporting problems, they will vote with their feed. A survey of Middle East fund managers found that none planned to raise investments in Turkey in 2014 and 13% planned to reduce their investments.
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Jan 14
     
    Finally, an article that does a fairly good job of summarizing the situation in Turkey. In a single word, it's a mess. 
Gary Edwards

Judge Rules: Obama Social Security Card Fraud May Finally Get Answers | - 1 views

dcclothesline.com/...-fraud-may-finally-get-answers

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • The reason for the judge’s amendment seems to be a procedural one. Taitz filed suit with the court prior to receiving word back from her Freedom of Information Act request, which she did receive on July 29, 2013 from Dawn S. Wiggins, a Fredom of Information Officer. Wiggins replied to Taitz: I have enclosed a copy of the SS-5s for Mr. Tsarnaev and Ms. Dunham. . . . We were unable to find any information for Mr. Bounel based on the information you provided to us. Mr. Bounel may not have applied for a Social Security number (SSN) or may have given different information on the application for a number.
  • The controversy over Barack Hussein Obama and his past, along with fraudulent documents continues to make headlines. Yet, the items needed to actually verify who Obama is continue to be kept from the public eye. Well, that all may be about to change. Attorney Orly Taitz may have just found a chink in the federal government’s armor in protecting Barack Obama from scrutiny, following a judge’s ruling over her Freedom of Information Act request from the Social Security Administration. Taitz has claimed that Obama uses the Social Security number of Harry Bounel and has submitted several Freedom of Information Act requests for the information from the Social Security Administration. Each time, she has been met with stonewalling by the Social Security Administration. However, Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander has ruled to give Taitz “an opportunity to file a second amended complaint and add allegations of SSA not doing a proper search and withholding records.”
  • Additionally, there is an increased tampering with the web site of Orly Taitz and with her ability to send mass -emails. It seems her private server is somehow affected and Taitz is unable to send mass e-mails on two different programs.
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  • From Taitz’s Press Release: Judge Hollander in Maryland gives Attorney Orly Taitz 21 days to file a second amended complaint and add allegations in regards to an improper withholding by the Social Security Administration of records of Harry Bounel, whose Social security number is being illegally used by Barack Obama. When Taitz filed the complaint, SSA did not respond at all. After the law suit was filed, SSA responded by fraudulently claiming that the records were not found. Taitz responded that this is a fraudulent assertion, since the records were found before and denied to another petitioner due to privacy concerns, however Social Security has no right to claim privacy as according to their own 120 year rule they have a duty to release the records. The judge stated that the plaintiff Taitz might be correct, however at this time she cannot rule in her favor as her original complaint was filed before SSA responded, so the judge gave Taitz an opportunity to refile a second amended complaint and add new allegations, stating the SSA responded but improperly hidden the records . This is a great development. This all but assures that the judge will order the SSA to release the SS-5, Social Security application of resident of CT, Harrison (Harry) Bounel, whose CT SSN 042-68-4425 was stolen by Obama and used in Obama’s 2009 tax returns, which initially were posted on WhiteHouse.gov without proper redaction, without flattening of the file. Taitz will be very careful not to be Breitbarted or Fuddied in the next 21 days.
  • It’s interesting that Taitz points out that she will be “careful not to be Breitbarted or Fuddied,” indicating that she believes that both Andrew Breitbart and Andrew Breitbart and Loretta Fuddy were targeted by Obama for assassination.” Breitbart died on the very day that he said he would begin vetting Obama for the 2012 elections, which raised suspicions. Fuddy, best remembered as being instrumental in issuing the Hawaii long-form birth certificate, was the only person to die aboard a small plane that crashed off the coast of Hawaii last week. Already, there are questions surrounding the narrative of her death.
  • Taitz alleged that Mr. Bounel was born in 1890, and therefore, under the “’120 Year Rule’ implemented by the SSA in 2010,” pertaining to “‘extremely aged individuals,’” Bounel’s “Social Security applications have to be released under FOIA without proof of [his] death . . . .”
  • It appears that once the amendment is submitted, this may force the Social Security Administration to explain exactly what is going on with Barack Obama’s Social Security number. We should know something about the case by the second week in January 2014.
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 13
     
    @ One passage in the article: "It appears that once the amendment is submitted, this may force the Social Security Administration to explain exactly what is going on with Barack Obama's Social Security number." That's far too optimistic, probably reflecting a lack of understanding of Freedom of Information Act and the processing of a FOIA complaint in federal court. I read the judge's opinion. After the amended complaint is filed, the government gets another shot at summary judgment, submitting a new affidavit about the scope of the search that meets the judge's criticism. (The judge did not rule that the search was inadequate, merely that it was inadequately described and might have been inadequate.) That shifts the burden to the plaintiff to prove that the search was inadequate. If she meets that burden, which isn't easy, the government has to do a new search, file a new motion for summary judgment with a new affidavit, rinse, lather, and repeat. So long as someone is willing to sign an affidavit describing the search and stating that nothing was found, the plaintiff will eventually be unable to prove that the search was inadequate and will lose the case. On the other hand, a new search may find the requested record and result in disclosure. But I'm not confident that this case will go very far. From the description of the complaint that the judge ruled on, it was fatally defective anyway, suggesting that the plaintiff doesn't know much about FOIA litigation. The complaint sought an order that the government be required to respond to her FOIA request letter. But once a FOIA request goes unanswered for 20 business days, the request is deemed denied and the plaintiff can file suit to compel disclosure of the records. The FOIA does not provide for lawsuits to compel the agency to answer a FOIA request. So the plaintiff apparenttly obviously does not understand the FOIA, probably making her easy pickings for an Assistant U.S. District Attorney whose specialty
Paul Merrell

UN Report Finds Mass Surveillance Violates International Treaties and Privacy Rights - ... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...ort-condemns-mass-surveillance

surveillance state UN-report digital-privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • The United Nations’ top official for counter-terrorism and human rights (known as the “Special Rapporteur”) issued a formal report to the U.N. General Assembly today that condemns mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions. “The hard truth is that the use of mass surveillance technology effectively does away with the right to privacy of communications on the Internet altogether,” the report concluded. Central to the Rapporteur’s findings is the distinction between “targeted surveillance” — which “depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization” — and “mass surveillance,” whereby “states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites.” In a system of “mass surveillance,” the report explained, “all of this is possible without any prior suspicion related to a specific individual or organization. The communications of literally every Internet user are potentially open for inspection by intelligence and law enforcement agencies in the States concerned.”
  • Mass surveillance thus “amounts to a systematic interference with the right to respect for the privacy of communications,” it declared. As a result, “it is incompatible with existing concepts of privacy for States to collect all communications or metadata all the time indiscriminately.” In concluding that mass surveillance impinges core privacy rights, the report was primarily focused on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a treaty enacted by the General Assembly in 1966, to which all of the members of the “Five Eyes” alliance are signatories. The U.S. ratified the treaty in 1992, albeit with various reservations that allowed for the continuation of the death penalty and which rendered its domestic law supreme. With the exception of the U.S.’s Persian Gulf allies (Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar), virtually every major country has signed the treaty. Article 17 of the Covenant guarantees the right of privacy, the defining protection of which, the report explained, is “that individuals have the right to share information and ideas with one another without interference by the State, secure in the knowledge that their communication will reach and be read by the intended recipients alone.”
  • The report’s key conclusion is that this core right is impinged by mass surveillance programs: “Bulk access technology is indiscriminately corrosive of online privacy and impinges on the very essence of the right guaranteed by article 17. In the absence of a formal derogation from States’ obligations under the Covenant, these programs pose a direct and ongoing challenge to an established norm of international law.” The report recognized that protecting citizens from terrorism attacks is a vital duty of every state, and that the right of privacy is not absolute, as it can be compromised when doing so is “necessary” to serve “compelling” purposes. It noted: “There may be a compelling counter-terrorism justification for the radical re-evaluation of Internet privacy rights that these practices necessitate. ” But the report was adamant that no such justifications have ever been demonstrated by any member state using mass surveillance: “The States engaging in mass surveillance have so far failed to provide a detailed and evidence-based public justification for its necessity, and almost no States have enacted explicit domestic legislation to authorize its use.”
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  • Instead, explained the Rapporteur, states have relied on vague claims whose validity cannot be assessed because of the secrecy behind which these programs are hidden: “The arguments in favor of a complete abrogation of the right to privacy on the Internet have not been made publicly by the States concerned or subjected to informed scrutiny and debate.” About the ongoing secrecy surrounding the programs, the report explained that “states deploying this technology retain a monopoly of information about its impact,” which is “a form of conceptual censorship … that precludes informed debate.” A June report from the High Commissioner for Human Rights similarly noted “the disturbing lack of governmental transparency associated with surveillance policies, laws and practices, which hinders any effort to assess their coherence with international human rights law and to ensure accountability.” The rejection of the “terrorism” justification for mass surveillance as devoid of evidence echoes virtually every other formal investigation into these programs. A federal judge last December found that the U.S. Government was unable to “cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack.” Later that month, President Obama’s own Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies concluded that mass surveillance “was not essential to preventing attacks” and information used to detect plots “could readily have been obtained in a timely manner using conventional [court] orders.”
  • Three Democratic Senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee wrote in The New York Times that “the usefulness of the bulk collection program has been greatly exaggerated” and “we have yet to see any proof that it provides real, unique value in protecting national security.” A study by the centrist New America Foundation found that mass metadata collection “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism” and, where plots were disrupted, “traditional law enforcement and investigative methods provided the tip or evidence to initiate the case.” It labeled the NSA’s claims to the contrary as “overblown and even misleading.” While worthless in counter-terrorism policies, the UN report warned that allowing mass surveillance to persist with no transparency creates “an ever present danger of ‘purpose creep,’ by which measures justified on counter-terrorism grounds are made available for use by public authorities for much less weighty public interest purposes.” Citing the UK as one example, the report warned that, already, “a wide range of public bodies have access to communications data, for a wide variety of purposes, often without judicial authorization or meaningful independent oversight.”
  • The report was most scathing in its rejection of a key argument often made by American defenders of the NSA: that mass surveillance is justified because Americans are given special protections (the requirement of a FISA court order for targeted surveillance) which non-Americans (95% of the world) do not enjoy. Not only does this scheme fail to render mass surveillance legal, but it itself constitutes a separate violation of international treaties (emphasis added): The Special Rapporteur concurs with the High Commissioner for Human Rights that where States penetrate infrastructure located outside their territorial jurisdiction, they remain bound by their obligations under the Covenant. Moreover, article 26 of the Covenant prohibits discrimination on grounds of, inter alia, nationality and citizenship. The Special Rapporteur thus considers that States are legally obliged to afford the same privacy protection for nationals and non-nationals and for those within and outside their jurisdiction. Asymmetrical privacy protection regimes are a clear violation of the requirements of the Covenant.
  • That principle — that the right of internet privacy belongs to all individuals, not just Americans — was invoked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden when he explained in a June, 2013 interview at The Guardian why he disclosed documents showing global surveillance rather than just the surveillance of Americans: “More fundamentally, the ‘US Persons’ protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%.” The U.N. Rapporteur was clear that these systematic privacy violations are the result of a union between governments and tech corporations: “States increasingly rely on the private sector to facilitate digital surveillance. This is not confined to the enactment of mandatory data retention legislation. Corporates [sic] have also been directly complicit in operationalizing bulk access technology through the design of communications infrastructure that facilitates mass surveillance. ”
  • The latest finding adds to the growing number of international formal rulings that the mass surveillance programs of the U.S. and its partners are illegal. In January, the European parliament’s civil liberties committee condemned such programs in “the strongest possible terms.” In April, the European Court of Justice ruled that European legislation on data retention contravened EU privacy rights. A top secret memo from the GCHQ, published last year by The Guardian, explicitly stated that one key reason for concealing these programs was fear of a “damaging public debate” and specifically “legal challenges against the current regime.” The report ended with a call for far greater transparency along with new protections for privacy in the digital age. Continuation of the status quo, it warned, imposes “a risk that systematic interference with the security of digital communications will continue to proliferate without any serious consideration being given to the implications of the wholesale abandonment of the right to online privacy.” The urgency of these reforms is underscored, explained the Rapporteur, by a conclusion of the United States Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board that “permitting the government to routinely collect the calling records of the entire nation fundamentally shifts the balance of power between the state and its citizens.”
Paul Merrell

ISIS: Made in Washington, Riyadh - and Tel Aviv by Justin Raimondo -- Antiwar.com - 0 views

original.antiwar.com/...washington-riyadh-and-tel-aviv

war & peace ISIL U.S.-foreign-policy who-is-ISIL Saudis Israel U.S. Benghazi must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is being touted as the newest "threat" to the American homeland: hysterics have pointed to Chicago as the locus of their interest, and we are told by everyone from the President on down that if we don’t attack them – i.e. go back into Iraq (and even venture into Syria) to root them out – they’ll soon show up on American shores.
  • If we step back from the hysteria generated by the beheading of US journalist James Foley, what’s clear is that this new bogeyman is the creation of the United States and its allies in the region. ISIS didn’t just arise out of the earth like some Islamist variation on the fabled Myrmidons: they needed money, weapons, logistics, propaganda facilities, and international connections to reach the relatively high level of organization and lethality they seem to have achieved in such a short period of time. Where did they get these assets? None of this is any secret: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the rest of the oil-rich Gulf states have been backing them all the way. Prince Bandar al-Sultan, until recently the head of the Kingdom’s intelligence agency – and still the chief of its National Security Council – has been among their biggest backers. Qatar and the Gulf states have also been generous in their support for the Syrian jihadists who were too radical for the US to openly back. Although pressure from Washington – only recently exerted – has reportedly forced them to cut off the aid, ISIS is now an accomplished fact – and how can anyone say that support has entirely evaporated instead of merely going underground?
  • Washington’s responsibility for the success of ISIS is less direct, but no less damning. The US was in a de facto alliance with the groups that merged to form ISIS ever since President Barack Obama declared Syria’s Bashar al-Assad "must go" – and Washington started funding Syrian rebel groups whose composition and leadership kept changing. By funding the Free Syrian Army (FSA), our "vetted" Syrian Islamists, this administration has actively worked to defeat the only forces capable of rooting out ISIS from its Syrian nest – Assad’s Ba’athist government. Millions of dollars in overt aid – and who knows how much covertly? – were pumped into the FSA. How much of that seeped into the coffers of ISIS when constantly forming and re-forming chameleon-like rebel groups defected from the FSA? These defectors didn’t just go away: they joined up with more radical – and militarily effective – Islamist militias, some of which undoubtedly found their way to ISIS. How many ISIS cadres who started out in the FSA were trained and equipped by American "advisors" in neighboring Jordan? We’ll never know the exact answer to that question, but the number is very likely not zero – and this Mother Jones piece shows that, at least under the Clinton-Petraeus duo, the "vetting" process was a joke. Furthermore, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) may have been on to something when he confronted Hillary with the contention that some of the arms looted from Gaddafi’s arsenals may well have reached the Syrian rebels. There was, after all, the question of where that mysterious "charity ship," the Al Entisar, carrying "humanitarian aid" to the Syrian rebels headquartered in Turkey, sailed from.
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  • In a recent public event held at the Aspen Institute, former Israeli ambassador to the US Michael Oren bluntly stated that in any struggle between the Sunni jihadists and their Iranian Shi’ite enemies, the former are the "lesser evil." They’re all "bad guys," says Oren, but "we always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran." Last year, Sima Shine, Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, declared: "The alternative, whereby [Assad falls and] Jihadists flock to Syria, is not good. We have no good options in Syria. But Assad remaining along with the Iranians is worse. His ouster would exert immense pressure on Iran." None of this should come as much of a surprise to anyone who has been following Israel’s machinations in the region. It has long been known that the Israelis have been standing very close to the sidelines of the Syrian civil war, gloating and hoping for "no outcome," as this New York Times piece put it.
  • Secondly, the open backing by the US of particular Syrian rebel groups no doubt discredited them in the eyes of most Islamist types, driving them away from the FSA and into the arms of ISIS. When it became clear Washington wasn’t going to provide air support for rebel actions on the ground, these guys left the FSA in droves – and swelled the ranks of groups that eventually coalesced into ISIS. Thirdly, the one silent partner in all this has been the state of Israel. While there is no evidence of direct Israeli backing, the public statements of some top Israeli officials lead one to believe Tel Aviv has little interest in stopping the ISIS threat – except, of course, to urge Washington to step deeper into the Syrian quagmire.
  • Israel’s goal in the region has been to gin up as much conflict and chaos as possible, keeping its Islamic enemies divided, making it impossible for any credible challenge to arise among its Arab neighbors – and aiming the main blow at Tehran. As Ambassador Oren so brazenly asserted – while paying lip service to the awfulness of ISIS and al-Qaeda – their quarrel isn’t really with the Arabs, anyway – it’s with the Persians, whom they fear and loathe, and whose destruction has been their number one objective since the days of Ariel Sharon. Why anyone is shocked that our Middle Eastern allies have been building up Sunni radicals in the region is beyond me – because this has also been de facto US policy since the Bush administration, which began recruiting American assets in the Sunni region as the linchpin of the Iraqi "surge." This was part and parcel of the so-called "Sunni turn," or "redirection," in Seymour Hersh’s phrase, which, as I warned in 2006, would become Washington’s chosen strategy for dealing with what they called the "Shia crescent" – the crescent-shaped territory spanning Iran, Iraq, Syria, and parts of Lebanon under Hezbollah’s control, which the neocons began pointing to as the Big New Threat shortly after Saddam Hussein’s defeat.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Aug 14
     
    If one were to attempt to write the most damning yet throughly referenced report on U.S. involvement with ISIL, this manuscript would make a very good first draft.  But probably unintentionally, the author gives less credit to Israel than it is due. At least twice (and I think more but would have to check), the Israeli Air Force has struck Syria, destroying Russian heavy weaponry, missiles capable of reaching Israel, being delivered to the Lebanonese Hezbollah in Syria. Hesbollah is fighting side-by-side with the Syrian government forces in Syria. So Israel has had a direct and overt hand in the Syrian war. 
Paul Merrell

Edward Snowden comes forward as source of NSA leaks - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-a73e-826d299ff459_print.html

security state NSA digital surveillance leaks

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • A 29-year-old man who says he is a former undercover CIA employee said Sunday that he was the principal source of recent disclosures about ­top-secret National Security Agency programs, exposing himself to possible prosecution in an acknowledgment that had little if any precedent in the long history of U.S. intelligence leaks. Edward Snowden, a tech specialist who has contracted for the NSA and works for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, unmasked himself as a source after a string of stories in The Washington Post and the Guardian that detailed previously unknown U.S. surveillance programs. He said he disclosed secret documents in response to what he described as the systematic surveillance of innocent citizens.In an interview Sunday, Snowden said he is willing to face the consequences of exposure.“I’m not going to hide,” Snowden told The Post from Hong Kong, where he has been staying. “Allowing the U.S. government to intimidate its people with threats of retaliation for revealing wrongdoing is contrary to the public interest.”
  • Asked whether he believes that his disclosures will change anything, he said: “I think they already have. Everyone everywhere now understands how bad things have gotten — and they’re talking about it. They have the power to decide for themselves whether they are willing to sacrifice their privacy to the surveillance state.”Snowden said nobody had been aware of his actions, including those closest to him. He said there was no single event that spurred his decision to leak the information, but he said President Obama has failed to live up to his pledges of transparency.“My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,” he said in a note that accompanied the first document he leaked to The Post.The Guardian was the first to publicly identify Snowden, at his request.The White House said late Sunday that it would not have any comment on the matter.
  • In a brief statement, a spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said the intelligence community is “reviewing the damage” the leaks have done. “Any person who has a security clearance knows that he or she has an obligation to protect classified information and abide by the law,” said the spokesman, Shawn Turner.Snowden said he is seeking “asylum from any countries that believe in free speech and oppose the victimization of global privacy,” but the law appears to provide for his extradition from Hong Kong, a semiautonomous territory of China, to the United States.
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  • Snowden’s name surfaced as top intelligence officials in the Obama administration and Congress pushed back against the journalists responsible for revealing the existence of sensitive surveillance programs and called for an investigation into the leaks.Clapper, in an interview with NBC that aired Saturday night, condemned the leaker’s actions but also sought to spotlight the journalists who first reported the programs, calling their disclosures irresponsible and full of “hyperbole.” Earlier Saturday, he issued a statement accusing the media of a “rush to publish.”“For me, it is literally — not figuratively — literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities,” Clapper said.
  • A chief critic of the efforts, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), said he is considering filing a lawsuit against the government and called on 10 million Americans to join in.“I’m going to be asking all the Internet providers and all of the phone companies, ask your customers to join me in a class-action lawsuit,” Paul said on “Fox News Sunday.”
  • Paul Merrell on 10 Jun 13
     
    A new national hero springs forth, Edward Snowden. In related news, those who conduct surveillance for the government seem to object for some reason to being surveilled themselves. 
Paul Merrell

Connecting the Dots on PRISM, Phone Surveillance, and the NSA's Massive Spy Center | Th... - 0 views

www.wired.com/...nsa-prism-verizon-surveillance

surveillance state NSA Gen. Alexander lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • As someone who has written many books and articles about the agency, I have seldom seen the NSA in such a state. Like a night prowler with a bag of stolen goods suddenly caught in a powerful Klieg light, it now finds itself under the glare of nonstop press coverage, accused of robbing the public of its right to privacy. Despite the standard denials from the agency’s public relations office, the documents outline a massive operation to secretly keep track of everyone’s phone calls on a daily basis – billions upon billions of private records; and another to reroute the pipes going in and out of Google, Apple, Yahoo, and the other Internet giants through Fort Meade – figuratively if not literally. 
  • But long before Edward Snowden walked out of the NSA with his trove of documents, whistleblowers there had been trying for years to bring attention to the massive turn toward domestic spying that the agency was making.
  • Without documents to prove their claims, the agency simply dismissed them as falsehoods and much of the mainstream press simply accepted that. “We don’t hold data on U.S. citizens,” Alexander said in a talk at the American Enterprise Institute last summer, by which time he had been serving as the head of the NSA for six years. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper made similar claims. At a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee last March, he was asked, “Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” To which Clapper responded, “No, sir.” The documents released by Snowden, pointing to the nationwide collection of telephone data records and not denied by government officials, prove the responses untrue.
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  • The deception by General Alexander is especially troubling. In my new cover story for Wired’s July issue, which will be published online Thursday, I show how he has become the most powerful intelligence chief in the nation’s history. Never before has anyone in America’s intelligence sphere come close to his degree of power, the number of people under his command, the expanse of his rule, the length of his reign, or the depth of his secrecy. A four-star Army general, his authority extends across three domains: He is director of the world’s largest intelligence service, the National Security Agency; chief of the Central Security Service; and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command. As such, he has his own secret military, presiding over the Navy’s 10th Fleet, the 24th Air Force, and the Second Army.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Jun 13
     
    Check the video on CSPAN  linked from the paragraph about NSA head General Keith Alexander's talk at the American Enterprise Institute. In response to a Fox News question, Alexander lied at length and in detail along the theme of "We don't hold data on U.S. citizens." With both Alexander and National Intelligence DIrector James Clapper both now caught flat-out lying about keeping records on Americans, why should any Executive Branch statements about the scope of their domestic spying be trusted in the least, given that any official statement on the topic would have to rely on information provided by these two men. We know that they are perfectly willing to lie to the public on that topic. 
Gary Edwards

Articles: Ruling Class Without a Clue - 0 views

www.americanthinker.com/...ling_class_without_a_clue.html

Angelo-Codevilla ruling-class-elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • We the people want a little free stuff.
  • The ruling class wants to seize and hold political power.
  • Usually, those vote-buying promises result in policies that damage the economy.
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  • Promising free stuff is how you get elected.
  • The result is that politicians and their officials are always involved in trying to band-aid over the distortions and the wounds they have inflicted on the economy in their crude bid for power.
  • That is the way to understand the global economic situation. It is governments trying to paper over their mistakes.
  • In the U.S. the government is trying to paper over a credit system that is still badly holed from the mortgage meltdown.
  • There's only one way that the ruling class knows how to deal with the inevitable consequence of gunning the housing market with mortgage subsidies
  • Print lots of money to float the underwater mortgages.
  • The Fed wants to stop the presses, and it can, it will some day. But it doesn't want to bring on another panic. The trouble is that even talk about ending its quantitative easing leads to a market swoon.
  • In Europe the ruling class is trying to deal with the consequence of its 50-year hubris. The people, they decided after World War II, were a bunch of crypto-Nazis.
  • So the enlightened ruling class would federalize Europe to make sure that aggressive nationalism would never rear its ugly head again.
  • Think of the Chinese ruling class. The Chi-com rulers really want to bring China into the modern era, but they naturally feel that this is only possible under their wise leadership.
  • So they get exactly the crony capitalism we enjoy here in the United States, as the ruling class dribbles subsidies out to its supporters out in the provinces to keep them on-side while they fundamentally transform China.
  • What can we understand from all this news? It stands to reason. These ruling classes don't have a clue what they are doing.
  • As Angelo Codevilla writes, those NSA data mining efforts might really amount to something if the NSA had a clue what it was doing.
  • [T]he aftermath of 9/11, technology, inertia, and allergy to accountability gave the US government the capacity to capture and examine at will well nigh the whole electronic realm. It would very much like to do the protective job that President Obama and Karl Rove claim and may even believe it is doing. But there is no evidence that anyone has figured out how to sidestep the realities that prevent that.
  • In Codevilla's view, the U.S. government is still going what it decided to do in WWII. Collect everything and then decide what to do with it.
  • is the Fed fighting recession or fighting inflation?
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 13
     
    Good bullet analysis of how things work and why governments continue to get it wrong.  It comes as no surprise that the article turns out to be a quick summary of some deep thinking by Angelo Codevilla, the genius who coined the term "Ruling Class".  Linked at:  JUN 23, 2013 The Ruling Class Consensus On Domestic Spying http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/06/23/the-ruling-class-consensus-on-domestic-spying/ At the end of the day, the Ruling Class El;ites hate the American Constitution, and will do whatever it takes to destroy the only Republic ever dedicated to individual liberty, freedom and the rule of law.
Gary Edwards

Here's how big the potential 2013 tax hikes would be « The Enterprise Blog - 1 views

blog.american.com/...ential-2013-tax-hikes-would-be

James-Pethokoukis Federal-Gestapo Charts economic-armageddon tax-hikes Obammunism

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Apr 12
     
    Stunning chart tracking from 1969 to 2013 the percentage of GDP the government seizes. The tax hikes coming in 2013 will seize over 3.5% of GDP. Previous high was in 1969, where the tax man seized 1.7%. Interesting look at the inverse relationship Government seizure of assets and productivity has with the nations economic growth and prosperity. The more the government takes, the less there is for the nation's citizens. Is that a radical economic insight? For the socialist, it's a connection they really don't want the people to make.
Paul Merrell

Faced With The Security State, Groklaw Opts Out | Popehat - 0 views

www.popehat.com/...ecurity-state-groklaw-opts-out

surveillance state NSA NSA-blowback Groklaw

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • For ten years Pamela Jones has run Groklaw, a site collecting, discussing, and explaining legal developments of interest to the open-source software community. Her efforts have, justifiably, won many awards. She's done now.
  • That's not why she's stopping. Pamela Jones is ending Groklaw because she can't trust her government. She's ending it because, in the post-9/11 era, there's no viable and reliable way to assure that our email won't be read by the state — because she can't confidently communicate privately with her readers and tipsters and subjects and friends and family.
  • In making this choice, Jones echoes the words of Lavar Levison, who shut down his encrypted email service Lavabit. Levison said he was doing so rather than "become complicit in crimes against the American people": “I’m taking a break from email,” said Levison. “If you knew what I know about email, you might not use it either.” Lavabit was joined by encryption provider Silent Circle:
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  • The extent of NSA surveillance is unknown, but what little we see is deeply unsettling. What our government says about it can't be believed; the government uses deliberately misleading language or outright lies about the scope of surveillance. So I don't blame Pamela Jones or question her decision. It's not the only way. I don't think it's my way, yet — though I am having some very concerned conversations about whether it's safe, or even ethical, to have confidential attorney-client communications by email.
  • I hope that Pamela's decision will arouse the interest, or attention, or outrage, of a few more people, who will in turn talk and write and advocate to get more people involved. Groklaw was a great resource; citizens will care that it's gone. (The government and its minions won't.) Pamela's choice will likely be met with the usual arguments: the government doesn't care about your emails. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about. This is about protecting us from terrorist attacks, not about snooping into Americans' communications. Don't you remember 9/11? I tire of responding to those. Let me offer one response that applies to all of them: I don't trust my government, I don't trust the people who work for my government, and I believe that the evidence suggests that it's irrational to offer such trust.
Paul Merrell

How The NSA Targets Tor - Slashdot - 0 views

yro.slashdot.org/...how-the-nsa-targets-tor

surveillance state NSA Tor NSA-security

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The Guardian has released new documents from Edward Snowden showing how the U.S. National Security Agency targets internet anonymity tool Tor to gather intelligence. One of the documents, a presentation titled "Tor Stinks," bluntly acknowledges how effective the tool is: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time. With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users, however, no success de-anonymizing a user in response to a TOPI request/on demand." (Other documents: presentation 1, presentation 2.) The NSA is able to extract information sometimes, though, and Bruce Schneier details what we know of that process in an article of his own. "The NSA creates 'fingerprints' that detect http requests from the Tor network to particular servers. These fingerprints are loaded into NSA database systems like XKeyscore, a bespoke collection and analysis tool which NSA boasts allows its analysts to see "almost everything" a target does on the internet. ... After identifying an individual Tor user on the internet, the NSA uses its network of secret internet servers to redirect those users to another set of secret internet servers, with the codename FoxAcid, to infect the user's computer. FoxAcid is an NSA system designed to act as a matchmaker between potential targets and attacks developed by the NSA, giving the agency opportunity to launch prepared attacks against their systems." Schneier explains in a related article why it's important that we figure out exactly what the NSA is doing. "Given how inept the NSA was at protecting its own secrets, it's extremely unlikely that Edward Snowden was the first sysadmin contractor to walk out the door with a boatload of them. And the previous leakers could have easily been working for a foreign government."
  • Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 13
     
    Sorry, added the last one without going to the permalink page.
Paul Merrell

Slashdot (15) - 0 views

slashdot.org

surveillance state NSA Tor NSA-security

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Oct 13 - Cached
  • The Guardian has released new documents from Edward Snowden showing how the U.S. National Security Agency targets internet anonymity tool Tor to gather intelligence. One of the documents, a presentation titled "Tor Stinks," bluntly acknowledges how effective the tool is: "We will never be able to de-anonymize all Tor users all the time. With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users, however, no success de-anonymizing a user in response to a TOPI request/on demand." (Other documents: presentation 1, presentation 2.) The NSA is able to extract information sometimes, though, and Bruce Schneier details what we know of that process in an article of his own. "The NSA creates 'fingerprints' that detect http requests from the Tor network to particular servers. These fingerprints are loaded into NSA database systems like XKeyscore, a bespoke collection and analysis tool which NSA boasts allows its analysts to see "almost everything" a target does on the internet. ... After identifying an individual Tor user on the internet, the NSA uses its network of secret internet servers to redirect those users to another set of secret internet servers, with the codename FoxAcid, to infect the user's computer. FoxAcid is an NSA system designed to act as a matchmaker between potential targets and attacks developed by the NSA, giving the agency opportunity to launch prepared attacks against their systems." Schneier explains in a related article why it's important that we figure out exactly what the NSA is doing. "Given how inept the NSA was at protecting its own secrets, it's extremely unlikely that Edward Snowden was the first sysadmin contractor to walk out the door with a boatload of them. And the previous leakers could have easily been working for a foreign government."
Paul Merrell

NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say - ... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html

surveillance state NSA NSA-targets Google Yahoo must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world, according to documents obtained from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials. By tapping those links, the agency has positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans. The NSA does not keep everything it collects, but it keeps a lot.
  • According to a top-secret accounting dated Jan. 9, 2013, the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. In the preceding 30 days, the report said, field collectors had processed and sent back 181,280,466 new records — including “metadata,” which would indicate who sent or received e-mails and when, as well as content such as text, audio and video.The NSA’s principal tool to exploit the data links is a project called MUSCULAR, operated jointly with the agency’s British counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters . From undisclosed interception points, the NSA and the GCHQ are copying entire data flows across fiber-optic cables that carry information among the data centers of the Silicon Valley giants.
  • The infiltration is especially striking because the NSA, under a separate program known as PRISM, has front-door access to Google and Yahoo user accounts through a court-approved process. The MUSCULAR project appears to be an unusually aggressive use of NSA tradecraft against flagship American companies. The agency is built for high-tech spying, with a wide range of digital tools, but it has not been known to use them routinely against U.S. companies.
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  • In a statement, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the company has “long been concerned about the possibility of this kind of snooping” and has not provided the government with access to its systems.“We are outraged at the lengths to which the government seems to have gone to intercept data from our private fiber networks, and it underscores the need for urgent reform,” he said.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13
     
    It says later in this 3-page article that Google's data centers back up their content to each other in case one goes down. So no question that U.S. citizens' data is collected, I think. See also closely related article, Why the NSA Wanted More Access, http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/30/prism-already-gave-the-nsa-access-to-tech-giants-heres-why-it-wanted-more/ ("Scooping up data is deep in the NSA's DNA, and it may simply have been unable to help itself."). See also http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/world/how-the-nsas-muscular-program-collects-too-much-data-from-yahoo-and-google/543/ (excerpts from documents discussed in the main article). 
Paul Merrell

Intel Contractors Give Millions to Lawmakers Overseeing Government Surveillance | MapLi... - 0 views

maplight.org/73373

surveillance state contractors lobbying donations Congressional-committees

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • In response to documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden, the congressional committees in charge of overseeing the government's intelligence operations have come to the defense of the surveillance and data collection programs, and the agencies that administer them. The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have rejected attempts to reform the programs while advancing legislation to bolster their legal status and providing a funding boost to the National Security Agency (NSA) to protect their secrecy. The U.S. intelligence budget for 2013 is $52.6 billion. According to the Washington Post, "top secret spending" is divided into four main spending categories: data collection, data analysis, management, facilities and support, and data processing and exploitation. Seventy percent of the intelligence budget is used to pay private contractors. Several of the companies receiving intelligence contracts are major donors to members of the intelligence committees, including L-3 Communications, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Honeywell International. Data: MapLight analysis of campaign contributions from political action committees (PACs) and individuals from the top 20 intelligence services contractors working with the Department of Defense, ranked by total value of contracts received, to members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Data source: Federal Election Commission from January 1, 2005 - October 4, 2013. Department of Defense intelligence services contracts source: USASpending (contract totals as of September 26, 2013)
  • In total, members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have received $3.7 million from top intelligence services contractors since January 1, 2005. Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence from Maryland -- home of NSA headquarters -- led the committees in money received from top intelligence contractors. Representative C.A. "Dutch" Ruppersberger, D-Md., is the largest recipient, having received $363,600 since January 1, 2005. Senator Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., is the second largest recipient, having received $210,150. Republican members of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have received $1.86 million since January 1, 2005, while Democrat members have received $1.82 million over the same time period. Members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence have received $2.2 million since January 1, 2005 from top intelligence services contractors, while members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have received $1.5 million. Lockheed Martin has given $798,910 to members the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence since January 1, 2005, more than any of the other top 20 intelligence service contractors. Northrop Grumman has given $753,101, the second highest amount, and Honeywell has given $714,913, the third highest amount.
  • TOP 20 INTELLIGENCE SERVICES CONTRACTORS CONTRIBUTIONS TO CONGRESSIONAL INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEES
Paul Merrell

How NSA Can Secretly Aid Criminal Cases | Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...an-secretly-aid-criminal-cases

surveillance state NSA parallel-construction McGovern

shared by Paul Merrell on 15 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Though the NSA says its mass surveillance of Americans targets only “terrorists,” the spying may turn up evidence of other illegal acts that can get passed on to law enforcement which hides the secret source through a ruse called “parallel construction,” writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern. By Ray McGovern Rarely do you get a chance to ask a just-retired FBI director whether he had “any legal qualms” about what, in football, is called “illegal procedure,” but at the Justice Department is called “parallel construction.” Government wordsmiths have given us this pleasant euphemism to describe the use of the National Security Agency’s illegal eavesdropping on Americans as an investigative tool to pass on tips to law enforcement agencies which then hide the source of the original suspicion and “construct” a case using “parallel” evidence to prosecute the likes of you and me.
  • For those interested in “quaint” things like the protections that used to be afforded us by the Fourth and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution, information about this “parallel construction” has been in the public domain, including the “mainstream media,” for at least a year or so. So, I welcomed the chance to expose this artful practice to still more people with cameras rolling at a large conference on “Ethos & Profession of Intelligence” at Georgetown University on Wednesday, during the Q & A after former FBI Director Robert Mueller spoke. Mueller ducked my question regarding whether he had any “legal qualms” about this “parallel construction” arrangement. He launched into a discursive reply in which he described the various ”authorities” enjoyed by the FBI (and the CIA), which left the clear impression not only that he was without qualms but that he considered the practice of concealing the provenance of illegally acquired tip-off information somehow within those professed “authorities.”
  • Bottom line? Beware, those of you who think you have “nothing to hide” when the NSA scoops up your personal information. You may think that the targets of these searches are just potential “terrorists.” But the FBI, Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Administration and countless other law enforcement bodies are dipping their cursors into the huge pool of mass surveillance.
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  • Former FBI Division Counsel in Minneapolis Coleen Rowley – who, with Jesselyn Radack, Tom Drake and me, visited Snowden in Russia last October – told me of two legal doctrines established many decades ago: the “exclusionary rule” and the rule regarding the “fruit of the poisonous tree.” These were designed to force over-zealous law enforcement officers to adhere to the Constitution by having judges throw out cases derived from improperly obtained evidence. To evade this rule, law enforcement officials who have been on the receiving end of NSA’s wiretap data must conceal what tipped off an investigation.
  • Last week a journalist asked me why I thought Congress’ initial outrage – seemingly genuine in some quarters – over bulk collection of citizens’ metadata had pretty much dissipated in just a few months. What started out as a strong bill upholding Fourth Amendment principles ended up much weakened with only a few significant restraints remaining against NSA’s flaunting of the Constitution? Let me be politically incorrect and mention the possibility of blackmail or at least the fear among some politicians that the NSA has collected information on their personal activities that could be transformed into a devastating scandal if leaked at the right moment. Do not blanch before the likelihood that the NSA has the book on each and every member of Congress, including extramarital affairs and political deal-making. We know that NSA has collected such information on foreign diplomats, including at the United Nations in New York, to influence votes on the Iraq War and other issues important to U.S. “national security.”
  • We also know how the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover used much more rudimentary technology a half century ago to develop dossiers on the personal indiscretions of political and ideological opponents. It makes sense that people with access to the NSA’s modern surveillance tools would be sorely tempted to put these new toys to use in support of their own priorities.
  • We cannot escape some pretty dismal conclusions here. Not only have the Executive and Legislative branches been corrupted by establishing, funding, hiding and promoting unconstitutional surveillance programs for over 12 years, but the Judicial branch has been corrupted, too. The discovery process in criminal cases is now stacked in favor of the government through its devious means for hiding unconstitutional surveillance and using it in ways beyond the narrow declared purpose of thwarting terrorism. Moreover, federal courts at the district, appeals and Supreme Court levels have allowed the government to evade legal accountability by insisting that plaintiffs must be able to prove what often is not provable, that they were surveilled through highly secretive NSA means. And, if the plaintiffs make too much progress, the government can always get a lawsuit thrown out by invoking “state secrets.” The Separation of Powers designed by the Constitution’s Framers to prevent excessive accumulation of power by one of the branches has stopped functioning amid the modern concept of “permanent war” and the unwillingness of all but a few hearty souls to challenge the invocation of “national security.” Plus, the corporate-owned U.S. media, with very few exceptions, is fully complicit.
  • The concept of a “United Stasi of America,” coined by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg a year ago, has been given real meaning by the unconstitutional behavior and dereliction of duty on the part of both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. Just days after the first published disclosure from Snowden, Ellsberg underscored that the NSA, FBI and CIA now have surveillance capabilities that East Germany’s Stasi secret police could scarcely have imagined.
  • Last June, Mathew Schofield of McClatchy conducted an interesting interview of Wolfgang Schmidt, a former lieutenant colonel in the Stasi, in Berlin. With the Snowden revelations beginning to tumble out into the media, Schofield described Schmidt as he pondered the sheer magnitude of domestic spying in the United States.
  • “So much information, on so many people,” says Schmidt who, at that point, volunteers a stern warning for Schofield and the rest of us: “It is the height of naiveté to think that, once collected, this information won’t be used. This is the nature of secret government organizations. The only way to protect the people’s privacy is not to allow the government to collect their information in the first place.”
  • Take note, those of you who may still feel fearless, those of you with “nothing to hide.”
Paul Merrell

DEA Global Surveillance Dragnet Exposed; Access to Data Likely Continues - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...e-phone-records-crisscross-nsa

surveillance state DEA EO-12333 litigation Human-Rights-Watch

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 May 15 - No Cached
  • Secret mass surveillance conducted by the Drug Enforcement Administration is falling under renewed scrutiny after fresh revelations about the broad scope of the agency’s electronic spying. On Tuesday, USA Today reported that for more than two decades, dating back to 1992, the DEA and the Justice Department “amassed logs of virtually all telephone calls from the USA to as many as 116 countries linked to drug trafficking.” Citing anonymous current and former officials “involved with the operation,” USA Today reported that Americans’ calls were logged between the United States and targeted countries and regions including Canada, Mexico, and Central and South America.
  • The DEA’s data dragnet was apparently shut down by Attorney General Eric Holder in September 2013. But on Wednesday, following USA Today’s report, Human Rights Watch launched a lawsuit against the DEA over its bulk collection of phone records and is seeking a retrospective declaration that the surveillance was unlawful. The latest revelations shine more light on the broad scope of the DEA’s involvement in mass surveillance programs, which can be traced back to a secret program named “Project Crisscross” in the early 1990s, as The Intercept previously revealed. Documents from National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, published by The Intercept in August last year, showed that the DEA was involved in collecting and sharing billions of phone records alongside agencies such as the NSA, the CIA and the FBI.
  • The vast program reported on by USA Today shares some of the same hallmarks of Project Crisscross: it began in the early 1990s, was ostensibly aimed at gathering intelligence about drug trafficking, and targeted countries worldwide, with focus on Central and South America. It is also reminiscent of the so-called Hemisphere Project, a DEA operation revealed in September 2013 by The New York Times, which dated as far back as 1987, and used subpoenas to collect vast amounts of international call records every day. There is crossover, too, with a DEA database called DICE, revealed by Reuters in August 2013, which reportedly contains phone and Internet communication records gathered by the DEA through subpoenas and search warrants nationwide. The precise relationship between Crisscross, DICE, Hemisphere and the surveillance program revealed by USA Today is unclear. Whether or not they were part of a single overarching operation, the phone records and other data collected by each were likely accessible to DEA agents through the same computer interfaces and search and analysis tools.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • A Justice Department spokesman told Reuters Wednesday that “all of the information has been deleted” and that the DEA was “no longer collecting bulk telephony metadata from U.S. service providers.” What the spokesman did not say is that the DEA has access to troves of phone records from multiple sources — and not all of them are obtained from U.S. service providers. As The Intercept’s reporting on Project Crisscross revealed, the DEA has had large-scale access to data covertly collected by the NSA, CIA and other agencies for years. According to NSA documents obtained by Snowden, the DEA can sift through billions of metadata records collected by other agencies about emails, phone calls, faxes, Internet chats and text messages using systems named ICREACH and CRISSCROSS/PROTON.
  • Notably, the DEA spying reported by USA Today encompassed phone records collected by the DEA using administrative subpoenas to obtain data from phone companies without the approval of a judge. The phone records collected by the agency as part of Project Hemisphere and the data stored on the DICE system were also collected through subpoenas and warrants. But ICREACH alone was designed to handle two to five billion new records every day — the majority of them not collected using any conventional search warrant or a subpoena. Instead, most of the data accessible to the DEA through ICREACH is vacuumed up by the NSA using Executive Order 12333, a controversial Reagan-era presidential directive that underpins several NSA bulk surveillance operations that monitor communications overseas. The 12333 surveillance takes place with no court oversight and has received minimal Congressional scrutiny because it is targeted at foreign, not domestic, communication networks.
  • This means that some of the DEA’s access to mass surveillance data — records collected in bulk through subpoenas or warrants — may have been shut down by Holder in 2013. But it is likely that the agency still has the ability to tap into other huge data repositories, and questions remain about how that access is being used.
  • Paul Merrell on 09 May 15
     
    How many ways do I love thee? ... Just a few minutes. I have to consult my haystacks.  'Twas on August 20, 1982 when Ronald Reagan formally declered "War on Drugs," thereby sweeping U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration records under the umbrella of "national security" secrets. Concurrently, a document was produced by the White House that mentioned that the forerunners of today's "fusion centers" would be created to begin trawling government databases for information to wage that war, including medical records held by the then-Veterans Administration. I''ve been keeping an eye on those rascals ever since. Believe me, we have merely scratched the surface of a very few of the Feds' "haystacks." There are very many to go before they're all rooted out into the sunlight.  
Paul Merrell

Revealed: NSA pushed 9/11 as key 'sound bite' to justify surveillance | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...bitetojustifysurveillance.html

surveillance state NSA talking-points NSA-records politics of fear lies

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency advised its officials to cite the 9/11 attacks as justification for its mass surveillance activities, according to a master list of NSA talking points. The document, obtained by Al Jazeera through a Freedom of Information Act request, contains talking points and suggested statements for NSA officials (PDF) responding to the fallout from media revelations that originated with former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Invoking the events of 9/11 to justify the controversial NSA programs, which have caused major diplomatic fallout around the world, was the top item on the talking points that agency officials were encouraged to use. Under the subheading “Sound Bites That Resonate,” the document suggests the statement “I much prefer to be here today explaining these programs, than explaining another 9/11 event that we were not able to prevent.”
  • NSA head Gen. Keith Alexander used a slightly different version of that statement when he testified before Congress on June 18 in defense of the agency’s surveillance programs. Asked to comment on the document, NSA media representative Vanee M. Vines pointed Al Jazeera to Alexander’s congressional testimony on Tuesday, and said the agency had no further comment. In keeping with the themes listed in the talking points, the NSA head told legislators that “it is much more important for this country that we defend this nation and take the beatings than it is to give up a program that would result in this nation being attacked.” Critics have long noted the tendency of senior U.S. politicians and security officials to use the fear of attacks like the one that killed almost 3,000 Americans to justify policies ranging from increased defense spending to the invasion of Iraq.
  • Al Jazeera obtained the 27 pages of talking points from the NSA this week in response to a FOIA request filed June 13. The statements had been prepared for agency officials facing questions from Congress or the media over the revelations contained in classified documents that Snowden leaked to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Barton Gellman and others. A letter accompanying the documents notes that the talking points “are prepared and approved for a speaker to use and do not necessarily represent what the speaker actually said at the event.” The NSA has not yet turned over to Al Jazeera the documents the agency used to prepare the talking points, saying those materials require additional review before they can be released.  The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon also appear at the top of another talking-points document titled “Media Leaks One Card,” which contains 13 bullet points to explain the rationale behind the surveillance programs. Those points include “First responsibility is to defend the nation” and “NSA and its partners must make sure we connect the dots so that the nation is never attacked again like it was on 9/11.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The master talking points list goes on to explain, under a subheading titled “We Needed to Connect the Dots,” that “post-9/11 we made several changes and added a number of capabilities to enable us to connect the dots.” Continuing revelations from the Snowden documents reveal surveillance on a scale that appears to go far beyond the scope of monitoring potential attackers, however. The agency’s “head of state collection” program, for example, reportedly included the monitoring of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone. The talking points document advises officials to emphasize the word “lawful” when discussing NSA surveillance programs, and to state that “our allies have benefited … just as we have.” “We believe that over 100 nations are capable of collecting signals intelligence or operating a lawful intercept capability that enable them to monitor communications,” the document continued.
  • Critics have called into question the veracity of the claim that NSA surveillance has thwarted more than 50 “potential” attacks. They claim evidence to support such assertions is lacking. NSA officials are advised to respond to questions about any potential civil liberties violations by citing talking points that say there have not been any “willful violations” and that the NSA is committed to “upholding the privacy and civil liberties of the American people.”
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13
     
    27 pages of talking points appended to the article, plus a two-page cover letter. It's the scripts for just about everything official that's been coming out of NSA and the Administration. Interesting reading; they cover some things that haven't yet come up.   
Paul Merrell

Why Won't the FBI Tell the Public About its Drone Program? | Electronic Frontier Founda... - 0 views

www.eff.org/...public-about-its-drone-program

surveillance state FBI domestic drones drones

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Today we’re publishing—for the first time—the FBI’s drone licenses and supporting records for the last several years. Unfortunately, to say that the FBI has been less than forthcoming with these records would be a gross understatement. Just yesterday, Wired broke the story that the FBI has been using drones to surveil Americans. Wired noted that, during an FBI oversight hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Robert Mueller let slip that the FBI flies surveillance drones on American soil. Mueller tried to reassure the senators that FBI’s drone program “is very narrowly focused on particularized cases and particularized leads.” However, there’s no way to check the Director on these statements, given the Bureau’s extreme lack of transparency about its program.
  • EFF received these records as a result of our Freedom of Information lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for the licenses the FAA issues to all public entities wishing to fly drones in the national airspace. As detailed in prior posts and on our drone map, we have already received tens of thousands of pages of valuable information about local, state and federal agencies’ drone flights. However, unlike other federal agencies, including the US Air Force, the Bureau has withheld almost all information within its documents—even including the dates the FAA’s Certificates of Authorization (COAs) were issued. As you can see from the two examples linked below—the first from the Air Force and the second from the FBI—the FBI is withholding information, including something as basic as the city and state of the Bureau’s point of contact, that could in no way be expected to risk circumvention of the law (the applicable test under FOIA, 5 U.S.C. § 552 (b)(7)(E)).
  • The FBI has even withheld information from standard documents that all agencies file with the FAA to support their COA applications, many of which come directly from the drone manufacturer. (Compare, for example, the Air Force’s “LOST_LINK_MISSION” or “AIRCRAFT_SYSTEM” documents with the FBI’s versions of the same documents.) One interesting fact is that the Bureau has withheld most of the records under several statutes and regulations related to the arms exports and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) (see statutes and regulations here, here, and here.) This is surprising because, although ITAR does apply explicitly to drones, not even the US Military has claimed these statutes in withholding information from its drone records. Given the FBI’s past abuses and the information recently revealed about how the Bureau exploits specious interpretations of federal law to help out the NSA’s spying program, we have good reason to be concerned about the FBI’s lack of transparency here. We hope Senator Feinstein will follow up on her concerns about the FBI’s apparent lack of “strictures” in place to protect Americans’ privacy in connection to FBI drone use and demand a full accounting of how, when, where and why the Bureau has been using drones to monitor the public. Download the zip files of the documents here, here, and here.
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