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Interview with Oliver Stone and author Peter Kuznick.  They answer questions related to Oliver Stone's "Show Time" television series, "The Untold History of the United States".  Good stuff - essential information for anyone seeking to understand why the US Constitution and the principles of individual liberty as defined in the Declaration of Independence are being disregarded and discarded by the ruling elites.  The final stages of the New World Feudalism, er "Order", are now unfolding.  Right before our eyes.  And we seem helpless bystanders as the Globalist cabal of banksters, corporatists and ruling elites make their final assault on the world's last best hope for individual liberty. "Americans are living in an Orwellian state argue Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick, as they sit down with RT to discuss US foreign policy and the Obama administration's disregard for the rule of law. Both argue that Obama is a wolf in sheep's clothing and that people have forgiven him a lot because of the "nightmare of the Bush presidency that preceded him." "He has taken all the Bush changes he basically put them into the establishment, he has codified them," Stone told RT. "It is an Orwellian state. It might not be oppressive on the surface, but there is no place to hide. Some part of you is going to end up in the database somewhere." According to Kuznick, American citizens live in a fish tank where their government intercepts more than 1.7 billion messages a day. "That is email, telephone calls, other forms of communication." RT's Abby Martin in the program Breaking the Set discusses the Showtime film series and book titled The Untold History of the United States co-authored by Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick. "Obama was a great hope for change""

Pepe Escobar foresees a movie about what Edward Snowden has done to rival the Jason Bourne thrillers. And provides the international political context behind Snowden's escape from pursuing Feds out to punish him for blowing the whistle on their creation of an Orwellian surveillance state. The entire article is recommended reading; Pepe has an unusual talent for coming up with the information other reporters miss and telling the story in a fascinating way.    

The Washington Post has reported that "on July 15 [2001], the secret surveillance court allowed the NSA to resume bulk collection under the court's own authority. The opinion, which remains highly classified, was based on a provision of electronic surveillance law, known as "pen register, trap and trace," that was written to allow law enforcement officers to obtain the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls from a single telephone line." .  The seminal case on pen registers is the Supreme Court's 1979 Smith v. Maryland decision, bookmarked here and the Clerk's syllabus highlighted, with the Court's discussion on the same web page. We will be hearing a lot about this case decision in the weeks and months to come.  Let it suffice for now to record a few points of what my antenna are telling me:  -- Both technology and the law have moved on since then. We are 34 years down the line from the Smith decision. Its pronouncements have been sliced and diced by subsequent decisions. Not a single Justice who sat on the Smith case is still on the High Bench.   -- In Smith, a single pen register was used to obtain calling information from a single telephone number by law enforcement officials. In the present circumstance, we face an Orwellian situation of a secret intelligence agency with no law enforcement authority forbidden by law from conducting domestic surveillance perusing and all digital communications of the entire citizenry. -- The NSA has been gathering not only information analogous to pen register results but also the communications of American citizens themselves. The communications themselves --- the contents --- are subject to the 4th Amendment warrant requirement. Consider the circuitous route of the records ordered to be disclosed in the Verizon FISA order. Verizon was ordered to disclose them to the FBI, not to the NSA. But then the FBI apparently forwards the records to the NSA, who has both the "pen register

Good stuff from the Orwellian blog.  Check out the "Rothschild-owned "Central Banks" of the world.  This is a list of countries where the Central Bank is owned by the Rothschild family and their interlocking globalist extended families.  Note, these are "families" not "Corporations.  although many of the family fortunes are now managed through trust funds that own banks and corporations.  It's the new feudalism.  Sovereign debt has replaced family debt as the new serfdom. There are only seven countries where the Central Bank is not owned by Rothschild banksters.

Andrew Napolitano, in what I view as his best essay I have read, explains the significance of "jurisdictionally based judicial ruling on the cellphone aspect of the domestic spying that former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed last spring" as compared to the non-jurisdictional rulings of the FISA court.

Lengthy but truly amazing resolution now goes to Parliament for a vote. A lot of very tough love for the U.S. in there. Highly recommended reading if you have the time for a lengthy document. It's an action plan for what Parliament intends to do about privacy violations by the NSA, GCHQ, Norway, Sweden, and Germany. If this passes, the U.S. and U.K. will be forced to give major ground. Gist of the document: civil liberties including privacy rights in correspondence trump national security and anti-terrorism. The E.U. would bow out of an Orwellian future.

Pepe Escobar's take on the Obama Administration and Edward Snowden's leaked documents, and on the forthcoming Balkanization of the Internet. Will Obama be remembered most for destroying the Global Internet? 

And growing right along with it is the government security/industrial establishment that will lobby Congress incessantly to continue the politics of fear and to grow its government spending. Bad politics is a lot like the regulation of toxic substances. Better to delay the introduction of new synthetic substances into the market than to try to get them off the market on public health or environmental grounds once they've become profitable. In 1966, the Mrak Commission identified 166 marketed pesticides that caused cancer or cell mutations in animal studies. Lots of them are still on the market, largely because they are so profitable that industry is willing to spend the money to lobby down their regulation. Meanwhile, some 10,000 new synthetic substances come onto the market each year without adequate testing. Bad politics are like that. Better to nip the problem in the bud than wait until an entire industry has been built around the government spending based on the bad politics. The politics of fear is particularly bad because it has already turned the U.S. into an Orwellian surveillance state and it's getting worse by the day.    

The latest hilarious chapter in the ongoing saga of BBC commentators trying to best Glenn Greenwald in an interview. This time with a stuffed-shirt, pompous type who does an exceedingly poor job of concealing that his is the voice of GCHQ. How many documents do you have? Who else has them? How are they protected? Don't you think that you should give them back to NSA? What makes you think you are qualified to make decisions about what to publish? Haven't you endangered the security of millions of people with your sensational, advocacy journalism. Don't you know that Bob Woodward has severely criticized the way you have handled this?   Greenwald, of course, makes mincemeat of the latest BBC talking head to tackle him without knowing the subject matter and always turns the questions back onto the real story: that government agencies have created an Orwellian surveillance state, that goverrnent can't be trusted to operate in secrecy. Greenwald so thoroughly danced on the fellow's brain that he probably missed that Greenwald had not only demonstrated that the guy was a government stooge but then told him flat out that he was.   When the guy tried the old shouting match trick, Greenwald calmly informed him that if he wanted to filibuster that Greenwald would hang up and let him filibuster to his heart's content but that if he wanted to conduct an interview he would darned well allow Greenwald to answer the questions before changing the subject. All in all, a masterful performance by a U.S. constitutional lawyer, uncowed by the interviewer's highbrow received pronunciation. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation This reminded me of federal District Court Judge Owen Panner's First Law of Trial Conduct: Never try to cross-examine an expert. In my time I've met a very few lawyers capable of doing so but it takes an incredible amount of research and consultation with another expert or five, and the setting of meticulous traps. Glenn Greenwald's latest B

A Supreme Court majority also specifically reserved judgment on whether the principles of Smith v. Maryland would apply in cases involving dragnet surveillance, specifically referring to Smith, in the case of Amnesty International v. Clapper, last year. Both Amnesty Int'l  and Jones were decided before revelations of widespread NSA surveillance broke beginning in June, 2013. Since then, the mood of the nation has changed enormously, from ignorant to informed and mostly objecting.  That factor will weigh heavily in the Supreme Court's inevitable decision on whether dragnet seizure of call metadata is constitutional.   So it takes some chutzpah for government lawyers to claim that Smith v. Maryland authorized warrantless gathering of telephone metadata in the dragnet context where no single person is suspected of a crime. The Supreme Court has never so held. At stake: whether we become an Orwellian state.

This is the case I thought was the weakest because of poor drafting in the complaint. The judge noted those issues in dismissing the plaintiffs' claims under the Administrative Procedures Act, but picked his way through what remained to find sufficient allegations to support the 4th Amendment challenge. Because he ruled for the plaintiffs on the 4th Amendment count, the judge did not reach the plaintiffs' arguments under the First and Fifth Amendments. This case is about cellphone call metadata, which the FISA Court has been ordering cell phone companies to provide every day, with the orders updated every 90 days. The judge's 68-page opinion is at https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2013cv0881-40 (cleaner copy than the Guardian's, which was apparently faxed). Notably, the judge, Richard Leon, is a Bush II appointee and one of the plaintiffs is a prominent conservative civil libertarian lawyer. The other plaintiff is the father of an NSA cryptologist who worked closely with SEAL Team 6 and was killed along with members of that team when their helicopter crashed in Afghanistan. I'll add some more in a comment. But digital privacy is not yet dead.

Unfortunately, DRM is not dead yet either and the court's PDF file is locked. No easy copying of its content. If you want to jump directly to the discussion of 4th Amendment issues, go to page 35. That way, you can skip past all the dreary discussion of the Administrative Procedures Act claim and you won't miss much that's memorable. In ruling on the plaintiffs' standing to raise the 4th Amendment claim, Judge Leon postulated two possible search issues: [i] the bulk daily collection of metadata and its retention in the database for five years; and [ii] the analysis of that data through the NSA's querying process. The judge had no difficulty with the first issue; it definitely qualifies as a search. But the judge rejected the plaintiffs' argument on the second type (which was lame), demonstrating that at least one federal judge understands how computers work. The government's filings indicated that a "seed" telephone number or other identifier is used as the query string. Judge Leon figured out for himself from this fact that the NSA of necessity had to compare that number or identifier to every number or identifier in its database looking for a match. The judge concluded that the plaintiffs' metadata --- indeed everyone's metadata --- had to be searched for comparison purposes *every* time the NSA analysts ran any query against the database. See his incisive discussion at pp. 39-41. So having established that two searches were involved, one every time the NSA queried the database, the judge moved on to the next question, whether "the plaintiffs had a reasonable expectation of privacy that is violated when the Government indiscriminately collects their telephony metadata along with the metadata of hundreds of millions of other citizens without any particularized suspicion of wrongdoing, retains that metadata for five years, and then queries, analyzes, and investigates that data without prior judicial approval of the investigative targets." pg. 43. More later

It is now beyond doubt that the Supreme Court is declining to authorize an Orwellian government surveillance future for the U.S. This sweeping, unanimous ruling definitely has broad application beyond cellphones, in no small part because the court recognized that cellphones of today are more like desktop computers and a host of other computerized devices than they are like the telephones of yesteryear. Hence, almost everything the court said afterward about the privacy rights in cellphones applies equally to all personal use computers. 

While some governments -- my own included -- attempt to impose an Orwellian Dark State of ubiquitous secret surveillance, secret wars, the rule of oligarchs, and public ignorance, the Edward Snowden leaks fanned the flames of the countering War on Ignorance that had been kept alive by civil libertarians. Only days after the U.S. Supreme Court denied review in a case where a reporter had been ordered to reveal his source of information for a book on the Dark State under the penalties for contempt of court (a long stretch in jail), a new web site is launched for communications between sources and journalists where the source's names never need to be revealed. This article is part of the publicity for that new weapon fielded by the civil libertarian side in the War Against Ignorance.  Hurrah!

Another "charity" to cross-out from your charitable contributions list of candidates.

Pepe Escbar catches a whiff of the same rat Tony Cartalucci caught, but sees it ending badly for the House of Saud. I've said it before, but I'll say it again: Escobar has earned very high credibility with me. 

The Privacy Act, 5 U.S.C. 552a, provides in relevant part: "(a)(4) the term "record" means any item, collection, or grouping of information about an individual that is maintained by an agency, including, but not limited to, his education, financial transactions, medical history, and criminal or employment history and that contains his name, or the identifying number, symbol, or other identifying particular assigned to the individual, such as a finger or voice print or a photograph[.] ... "(b) Conditions of Disclosure.-No agency shall disclose any record which is contained in a system of records by any means of communication to any person, or to another agency, except pursuant to a written request by, or with the prior written consent of, the individual to whom the record pertains, unless disclosure of the record would be- ... "(7) to another agency or to an instrumentality of any governmental jurisdiction within or under the control of the United States for a civil or criminal law enforcement activity if the activity is authorized by law, and if the head of the agency or instrumentality has made a written request to the agency which maintains the record specifying the particular portion desired and the law enforcement activity for which the record is sought[.]" So a separate written request for each "portion" of any individual record that describes the "law enforcement activity for which the record is sought[.]" That doesn't sound like the contemplated unfettered access to bulk raw data. And it gets even better, with a right to sue for any violation, attorney fees and expenses, and a statutory minimum of $1,000 damages per violation just for winning the case.