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Gary Edwards

REVEALING QUOTES ON THE GOALS OF PSYCHIATRY AND PSYCHOLOGY - 0 views

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psychquotes psychiatry psychiatric

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Psychiatry's Views on Conservatives "In August 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million taxpayer-funded study. It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed. Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from ‘mental rigidity,’ ‘dogmatism,’ and ‘uncertainty avoidance,’ together with associated indicators for mental illness."
  • Psychiatry's Views on Education "Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future"
  • Teaching school children to read was a "perversion" and high literacy rate bred "the sustaining force behind individualism."
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  • You see, one of the effects of self-esteem (Values Clarification) programs is that you are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don’t feel like it. You don’t have to tell the truth because if the truth you have to tell is about your own failure then your self-esteem will go down and that is unthinkable."
  • The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are 'obstructive' and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective ..
  • When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."
  • "…through schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government – one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interests of all people."
  • "Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know – it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave." 
  • "This is the idea where we drop subject matter and we drop Carnegie Unites (grading from A-F) and we just let students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the politically correct attitudes.
  • "I regard myself as one of the most dangerous enemies of religion" Sigmund Freud
  • "Education is thus a most power ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday school, meeting for an hour once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five-day program of humanistic teachings?"
  • "Despite rapid progress in the right direction, the program of the average elementary school has been primarily devoted to teaching the fundamental subjects, the three R’s, and closely related disciplines… Artificial exercises, like drills on phonetics, multiplication tables, and formal writing movements, are used to a wasteful degree. Subjects such as arithmetic, language, and history include content that is intrinsically of little value. Nearly every subject is enlarged unwisely to satisfy the academic ideal of thoroughness… Elimination of the unessential by scientific study, then, is one step in improving the curriculum."
  • "We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine."
  • "...a student attains 'higher order thinking' when he no longer believes in right or wrong"
  • "A large part of what we call good teaching is a teacher´s ability to obtain affective objectives by challenging the student's fixed beliefs.  …a large part of what we call teaching is that the teacher should be able to use education to reorganize a child's thoughts, attitudes, and feelings."  
  • "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished
  • Psychiatry's Views on Religion "Religion (is) a universal obsessional neurosis." Sigmund Freud, defining spiritual belief
  • "The educational system should be a sieve, through which all the children of a country are passed. It is highly desirable that no child escape inspection."
  • "The soul or consciousness, which played the leading part in the past, now is of very little importance; in any case both are deprived of their main functions and glory to such an extent that only the names remain. Behaviorism sang their funeral dirge while materialism – the smiling heir – arranges a suitable funeral for them.
  • "…humanists still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith." "
  • "We can therefore justifiably stress our particular point of view with regard to the proper development of the human psyche, even though our knowledge be incomplete. We must aim to make it permeate every educational activity in our national life…. We have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the Church: the two most difficult are law and medicine."
  • We shall not solve the problems of alcoholism and juvenile delinquency by increasing a sense of responsibility. It is the environment which is 'responsible' for the objectionable behavior, and it is the environment, not some attribute of the individual, which must be changed.
  • Psychiatry's Views on Creating a Slave Society "We can choose to use our growing knowledge to enslave people in ways never dreamed of before, depersonalizing them, controlling them by means so carefully selected that they will perhaps never be aware of their loss of personhood."
  • Teaching school children to read was a "perversion" and high literacy rate bred "the sustaining force behind individualism."
  • "It will of course, be understood that directly or indirectly, soon or late, every advance in the sciences of human nature will contribute to our success in controlling human nature and changing it to the advantage of the common wheel." Edward Thorndike, Key Psychology Theorist, member of the "Eugenics Committee of the USA"
  • "We need a program of psychosurgery for political control of our society. The purpose is physical control of the mind. Everyone who deviates from the given norm can be surgically mutilated.
  • The individual may think that the most important reality is his own existence, but this is only his personal point of view. . . Man does not have the right to develop his own mind. . . . We must electronically control the brain. Someday armies and generals will be controlled by electronic stimulation of the brain." 
  • "Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished
  • "One of the least understood strategies of the world revolution now moving rapidly toward its goal is the use of mind control as a major means of obtaining the consent of the people who will be subjects of the New World Order."
  • "Those of us who work in this field see a developing potential for nearly a total control of human emotional status, mental functioning, and will to act. These human phenomena can be started, stopped or eliminated by the use of various types of chemical substances. What we can produce with our science now will affect the entire society." A "utopia" could be found – providing "a sense of stability and certainty, whether realistic or not."
  • "To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas..."
  • Some packages even include instructions on how to deal with parents and others who object. Stripping away psychological defenses can be done through assignments to keep diaries to be discussed in group sessions, and through role-playing assignments, both techniques used in the original brainwashing programs in China under Mao. Thomas Sowell, writing in Forbes, 1991
  • "The State is the absolute reality and the individual himself has objective existence, truth and morality only in his capacity as a member of the State." Hegel (who influenced Karl Marx)
  • Psychiatry's Views on America "America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic mistake, but a mistake nevertheless." Sigmund Freud America is the most grandiose experiment the world has seen, but, I am afraid, it is not going to be a success. Sigmund Freud
  • "To achieve world government, it is necessary to remove from the minds of men their individualism, loyalty to family traditions, national patriotism and religious dogmas...
  • "One of the least understood strategies of the world revolution now moving rapidly toward its goal is the use of mind control as a major means of obtaining the consent of the people who will be subjects of the New World Order."
  • Freud on Marxism "The strength of Marxism obviously does not lie in its view of history or in the prophecies about the future which it bases upon that view, but in its clear insight into the determining influence which is exerted by the economic conditions of man upon his intellectual, ethical and artistic reactions." Sigmund Freud
  • Basically, all that is necessary to revoke all the constitutional rights of any citizen is to accuse him of being mentally-ill."
  • John A. Stormer, "None Dare Call it Treason"
  • "Old conventions, customs and values… to be challenged… The aim should be to control not only nature, but human nature." He recommended two slogans for "spreading world-wide the gospel of mental hygiene": "To learn to think internationally" and "The necessity to disarm the mind." Dr. J.R. Lord, psychiatrist
  • "Public life, politics and industry should all of them be within our sphere of influence…. If we are to infiltrate the professional and social activities of other people I think we must imitate the Totalitarians and organize some kind of fifth column activity!  If better ideas on mental health are to progress and spread we, as the salesmen, must lose our identity… Let us all, therefore, very secretly be ‘fifth columnists.’"
  • The techniques of brainwashing developed in totalitarian countries are routinely used in psychological conditioning programs imposed on school children.
  • These include emotional shock and desensitization, psychological isolation from sources of support, stripping away defenses, manipulative cross-examination of the individual’s underlying moral values by psychological rather than rational means. These techniques are not confined to separate courses or programs...they are not isolated idiosyncracies of particular teachers. They are products of numerous books and other educational materials in programs packaged by organizations that sell such curricula to administrators and teach the techniques to teachers.
  • "If all else fails, punishable behavior may be made less likely by changing physiological conditions. Hormones may be used to change sexual behavior, surgery (as in lobotomy) to control violence, tranquilizers to control aggression, and appetite depressants to control overeating." Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner in "Beyond Freedom and Dignity"
  • We must learn to recognize them for what they are - possessors of no special knowledge of the human psyche, who have, nonetheless, chosen to earn their living from the dissemination of the myth that they do indeed know how the mind works". Psychiatrist Garth Wood, M.D., in "The Myth of Neurosis", 1986
  • These terms indicate only approval or disapproval of some aspect of a person's mentality (thinking, emotions, or behavior). Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, in "The Death of Psychiatry", 1974
  • "The very term ['mental disease'] is nonsensical, a semantic mistake. The two words cannot go together except metaphorically; you can no more have a mental 'disease' than you can have a purple idea or a wise space". Similarly, there can no more be a "mental illness" than there can be a "moral illness." The words "mental" and "illness" do not go together logically. Mental "illness" does not exist, and neither does mental "health."
  • By calling the harmless 'insane', (who statistics prove to be no more violence-prone than the average citizen, unless hopelessly deranged by damaging psychiatric 'treatment'), dangerous and justifying their own existence by the 'need' to deal with that inflated 'danger', the mad-doctors themselves pose the greatest threat to liberty, property and democracy in our times."
  • Citizens for Higher Ethical Standards in Medicine
  • "Mental illness is often used as an ad homonym to discredit the individual. This has been a common use of psychiatric diagnosis in psychiatry in Russia. " ... there are two main groups [of schizophrenia patients] ... 1) people admitted to the mental hospital long before they had been political dissenters ... 2. others who ... have put forward complex social and economic theories as alternatives to orthodox Marxism..."  Wing, cited in "Pseudoscience in Psychology", by Dr. Szasz, p. 126
  • "It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.." J. Krishnamurti
  • "...the subject which will be of most importance politically is Mass Psychology.... The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen. As yet there is only one country which has succeeded in creating this politician’s paradise."   The Impact of Science on Society by Bertrand Russell
  • "A Trojan horse full of dangerous psycho-fantasies has been professionally prepared for us by Christian psychiatrists and psychologists...  At the base, such therapies stand upon dogma, not scientific observations, and the dogma is the odious one of Freud and his followers who were some of the century's most anti-Christ teachers.  No amount of well-intentioned refinement of deadly doctrines will make them clean for Christians." Dr. Hilton P. Terrell, M.D
  • "Contrary to the popular public conception, this happenstance is NOT a form of health care, but the result of a fraudulent system being granted police powers by the State.
  • "Psychotherapy may be known in the future as the greatest hoax of the twentieth century."
  • "Nearly half a century has passed since Watson proclaimed his manifesto. Today, apart from a few minor reservations, the vast majority of psychologists, both in this country and in America, still follow his lead. The result, as a cynical onlooker might be tempted to say, is that psychology, having first bargained away its soul and then gone out of its mind, seems now, as it faces an untimely end, to have lost all consciousness." 
  • "Advocates of psychiatric drugs often claim that the medications improve learning and the ability to benefit from psychotherapy, but the contrary is true.  There are no drugs that improve mental function, self-understanding, or human relations.  Any drug that affects mental processes does so by impairing them."
  • "In the 14-year period between 1950 and 1964, more American deaths occurred in state and county mental institutions than in all of the nation's armed conflicts beginning with the Revolutionary War and ending with the Persian Gulf War.  Between 1965 and 1990, the total number of mental-hospital inpatient deaths exceeded the number of battle deaths in the same wars by 70 percent.  Inpatient deaths topped out at 1,103,000 during this 25-year period, compared with 650,563 recorded deaths in battles."
  • Kelly Patricia O’Meara: "The Forgotten Dead of St. Elizabeth's", Insight Magazine, June 16, 2001
  • "The similarities between street drug abuse and psychotropic prescription drug use are disturbing. Both types are toxic. Both can cause psychosis, damage the brain and other organs, and even cause death. And neither type of mind-altering drugs, legal or illegal, treats disease. It's important to recognize that the only significant difference between many prescription psychotropic drugs and street drugs such as "speed" and "downers" is that prescription drugs are legal."
  • Neuro-psychiatrist Sydney Walker in "Dose of Sanity"
  • "Clearly this business of treating minds, particularly this big business of treating young minds, has not policed itself, and has no incentive to put a stop to the kinds of fraudulent and unethical practices that are going on."
Gary Edwards

The 6 Grand Illusions That Keep Us Enslaved to the Matrix - 0 views

www.blacklistednews.com/...M.html

blacklistednews Grand-Illusions Banksters The-New-Feudalism New-World-Order

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Bansky, the revered and elusive revolutionary street artist, once commented: “People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you.” – Banksy  Advertising is just the tip of the iceberg. When we look further we see that the overall organization of life is centered around the pursuit of illusions and automatic obedience to institutions and ideas which are not at all what they seem. We are in a very real sense enslaved. Many call this somewhat intangible feeling of oppression ‘the matrix,’ a system of total control that invades the mind, programming individuals to pattern themselves in accordance with a mainstream conformist version of reality, no matter how wicked it gets. The grandest of the illusions which keep us enslaved to the matrix, the ones that have so many of us still entranced, are outlined below for your consideration.
  • 1. The Illusion of Law, Order and Authority For so many of us, following the law is considered a moral obligation, and many of us gladly do so even though corruption, scandal, and wickedness repeatedly demonstrate that the law is plenty flexible for those who have the muscle to bend it. Police brutality and police criminality is rampant in the US, the courts favor the wealthy, and we can longer even lead our lives privately thanks to the intrusion of state surveillance. And all the while the illegal and immoral Orwellian permanent war rages on in the background of life, murdering and destroying whole nations and cultures. The social order is not what it seems, for it is entirely predicated on conformity, obedience and acquiescence which are enforced by fear of violence. History teaches us again and again that the law is just as often as not used as an instrument of oppression, social control and plunder, and any so-called authority in this regard is false, hypocritical, and unjust. When the law itself does not follow the law, there is no law, there is no order, and there is no justice. The pomp and trappings of authority are merely a concealment of the truth that the current world order is predicated on control, not consent.
  • 2. The Illusion of Prosperity and Happiness Adorning oneself in expensive clothes and trinkets, and amassing collections of material possessions that would be the envy of any 19th century monarch has become a substitute for genuine prosperity. Maintaining the illusion of prosperity, though, is critical to our economy as it is, because its foundation is built on consumption, fraud, credit and debt. The banking system itself has been engineered from the top down to create unlimited wealth for some while taxing the eternity out of the rest of us. True prosperity is a vibrant environment and an abundance of health, happiness, love, and relationships. As more people come to perceive material goods as the form of self-identification in this culture, we slip farther and farther away from the experience of true prosperity.
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  • 3. The Illusion of Choice and Freedom Read between the lines and look at the fine print, we are not free, not by any intelligent standard. Freedom is about having choice, yet in today’s world, choice has come to mean a selection between available options, always from within the confines of a corrupt legal and taxation system and within the boundaries of culturally accepted and enforced norms. Just look no further than the phony institution of modern democracy to find a shining example of false choices appearing real. Two entrenched, corrupt, archaic political parties are paraded as the pride and hope of the nation, yet third party and independent voices are intentionally blocked, ridiculed and plowed under. The illusion of choice and freedom is a powerful oppressor because it fools us into accepting chains and short leashes as though they were the hallmarks of liberty. Multiple choice is different than freedom, it is easy servitude.
  • 4. The Illusion of Truth Truth has become a touchy subject in our culture, and we’ve been programmed to believe that ‘the‘ truth comes from the demigods of media, celebrity, and government. If the TV declares something to be true, then we are heretics to believe otherwise. In order to maintain order, the powers that be depend our acquiescence to their version of the truth. While independent thinkers and journalists continually blow holes in the official versions of reality, the illusion of truth is so very powerful that it takes a serious personal upheaval to shun the cognitive dissonance needed to function in a society that openly chases false realities.
  • 5. The Illusion of Time They say that time is money, but this is a lie. Time is your life. Your life is an ever-evolving manifestation of the now. Looking beyond the five sense world, where we have been trained to move in accordance with the clock and the calendar, we find that the spirit is eternal, and that the each individual soul is part of this eternity. The big deception here is the reinforcement of the idea that the present moment is of little to no value, that the past is something we cannot undo or ever forget, and that the future is intrinsically more important than both the past and the present. This carries our attention away from what is actually happening right now and directs it toward the future. Once completely focused on what is to come rather than what is, we are easy prey to advertisers and fear-pimps who muddy our vision of the future with every possible worry and concern imaginable. We are happiest when life doesn’t box us in, when spontaneity and randomness gives us the chance to find out more about ourselves. Forfeiting the present moment in order to fantasize about the future is a trap. The immense, timeless moments of spiritual joy that are found in quiet meditation are proof that time is a construct of the mind of humankind, and not necessarily mandatory for the human experience. If time is money, then life can be measured in dollars. When dollars are worth less, so is life. This is total deception, because life is, in truth, absolutely priceless.
  • 6. The Illusion of Separateness On a strategic level, the tactic of divide and conquer is standard operating procedure for authoritarians and invading armies, but the illusion of separateness runs even deeper than this. We are programmed to believe that as individuals we are in competition with everyone and everything around us, including our neighbors and even mother nature. Us vs. them to the extreme. This flatly denies the truth that life on this planet is infinitely inter-connected. Without clean air, clean water, healthy soil, and a vibrant global sense of community we cannot survive here. While the illusion of separateness comforts us by gratifying the ego and and offering a sense of control, in reality it only serves to enslave and isolate us.
  • Conclusion The grand illusions mentioned here have been staged before us as a campaign to encourage blind acquiescence to the machinations of the matrix. In an attempt to dis-empower us, they demand our conformity and obedience, but we must not forget that all of this is merely an elaborate sales pitch. They can’t sell what we don’t care to buy.
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Jun 15
     
    "SOURCE: SIGMUND FRAUD, WAKING TIMES "In prison, illusions can offer comfort." - Nelson Mandela For a magician to fool his audience his deceit must go unseen, and to this end he crafts an illusion to avert attention from reality. While the audience is entranced, the deceptive act is committed, and for the fool, reality then becomes inexplicably built upon on a lie. That is, until the fool wakes up and recognizes the truth in the fact that he has been duped. Maintaining the suspension of disbelief in the illusion, however, is often more comforting than acknowledging the magician's secrets. We live in a world of illusion. So many of the concerns that occupy the mind and the tasks that fill the calendar arise from planted impulses to become someone or something that we are not. This is no accident. As we are indoctrinated into this authoritarian-corporate-consumer culture that now dominates the human race, we are trained that certain aspects of our society are untouchable truths, and that particular ways of being and behaving are preferred.  Psychopaths disempower people in this way. They blind us with never ceasing barrages of suggestions and absolutes that are aimed at shattering self-confidence and confidence in the future.  "
Gary Edwards

The Business Offensive: A Symmetrical Ruling Class - 0 views

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Ruling-Class American-Oligarchy Corporate-Oligarchs Corporate-Facsists

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Since the close of World War II, America has sought an integrated policy as the militarization of capitalism
  • In the intervening years, this was not always easy to achieve, as, depending on circumstances, one or the other, the corporate-financial order, and the military itself, asserted itself and made strong demands on government.
  • the Cold War itself providing a cover for the US globalization of power via market penetration, international financial and monetary architecture under US supervision, and the steady build-up of an Armaments State.
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  • Yet, the dynamism of early modern capitalism, realized in part through grinding methods of labor suppression, notably, the privatization of force, helped on by a compliant government, meant that within capitalism itself there was tremendous jockeying for power requiring the imposition of Order if major railroads and industrial firms were to enjoy their secure monopoly status.
  • Here government was crucial to harmonious internal structural arrangements, anticompetitive in its policies for the promotion of monopolism sector-by-sector including banking (the House of Morgan, whose offshoots firmed up the organization of railroads and manufacturing) as the means to systemic consolidation—an end to internecine competition—which was achieved in the early 20th century under Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (themselves the Janus-faced construct of the Battleship Navy and supposed liberal internationalism) setting the stage for the present era.
  • In practice, we see the interpenetration of business and government as the integration of monopoly capitalism in its own right.
  • By the late 1940s one can say that the military remained a junior partner of a synthesized ruling group or class, given the overwhelming thrust of business and its ascendant banking wing in defining American capitalism.
  • American capitalism could no longer go it alone, the military increasingly supplying the muscle for continued expansion and profitability. Korea and Vietnam were important chapters in the reshaping of a capitalist polity, with numerous interventions beyond mention the underpinning for a coalescent framework of elites, all making for a structural process of shaking down to the bare essentials the capitalist and military components in search of equilibrium. For otherwise, America feared its decline and would do anything to prevent.
  • Granted, it is hard to conceive of capitalism as a perpetual war machine, especially in America, which labors under the fiction of being, or if it ever was, then remaining, a democracy.
  • But there it is, an arms budget dwarfing all else, military bases strategically gathered worldwide, death squads euphemistically termed Special Ops, presidential-directed drone assassinations, the list goes on—so much so that one almost forgets capitalism is centrally about business and profits, not murder and mayhem.
  • the Great Capitalist Synthesis
  • an accomplice to the more successful militarization of capitalism by holding its own as an integral part in the relationship. In sum, the desideratum of business as usual, as in fleecing the consumer and jeopardizing his/her safety, destroying the environment, and best of all, removing itself from the constitutional foundations of the rule of law.
  • Corporations and banks have become a law unto themselves, with all the organs of government stretching from the Executive, Congress, the Supreme Court, to myriad regulatory agencies some unbeknownst to the public, sitting as a chorus of admiring voices egging them on.
  • Corporate Rescindment of Legal Rights: Business Power Run Amuck,
  • Class-action law suits, frequently the only feasible action of the poor for seeking redress of grievances against the giant corporations, are all but prohibited, replaced in contracts by compulsory-arbitration clauses, intended in the first place to kill class actions, which compel the individual standing alone to face insurmountable odds in a process by which the corporation names the arbitrator, keeps the proceedings secret, and determines the rules of procedure.
  • Civil courts are thrown to the winds.
  • It is as though capitalism, in this one seemingly minor area touching primarily the normalization of everyday relationships, has gone on the offensive, not of course to re-establish its relation to the military, but specifically and directly to exercise its domination over the people.
  • The now-and-future business polity is the fulfillment of the fascist dream, an authoritarian power structure of corporate consolidation supported through governmental suppression of dissent at home and an aggressively waged foreign policy to capture world markets.
  • The small print of the contracts one signs, whether for car rentals or nursing homes, and thousands of transactions in between, emboldens capitalism to go its solipsistic way, to the destruction of freedom, the planet, and human dignity.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Nov 15
     
    "Since the close of World War II, America has sought an integrated policy as the militarization of capitalism. In the intervening years, this was not always easy to achieve, as, depending on circumstances, one or the other, the corporate-financial order, and the military itself, asserted itself and made strong demands on government. The result was never an intracompetitive mold because each needed and recognized the value of the other, but still there were periods of imbalance in their respective surges of governmental policy-emphasis. American capitalism had become a functional duopoly (C. Wright Mills' Power Elite was a good popular discussion of this general structure at an earlier point in our capitalist-development trajectory after the war), the Cold War itself providing a cover for the US globalization of power via market penetration, international financial and monetary architecture under US supervision, and the steady build-up of an Armaments State. There is nothing actually new here about the American historical pattern, except of course the more explicit and pronounced role to be assigned the military in the stabilization and expansion of American capitalism. The military was never at any point following the Civil War a negligible input in synthesizing the materials for an operational ruling class, but essentially, as in the late-19th century policy of the Open Door, business was sufficiently confident of its own power (the "imperialism of free trade") to carry forward the process of expansion largely on its own. Yet, the dynamism of early modern capitalism, realized in part through grinding methods of labor suppression, notably, the privatization of force, helped on by a compliant government, meant that within capitalism itself there was tremendous jockeying for power requiring the imposition of Order if major railroads and industrial firms were to enjoy their secure monopoly status."
Paul Merrell

Confession of Former Russian Officer in Nemtsov Slaying could prompt Mole-Hunt | nsnbc ... - 0 views

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war & peace Russia Nemtsov-asassination U.S.-foreign-policy NED Soros

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The Moscow Basmanny Court, on Sunday, sanctioned the detention of three additional suspects in the case of the murder of Russian politician Boris Nemtsov. Meanwhile, Daur Dadayev , a former Chechen officer pleaded guilty for his involvement. The developments prompt the President of the Russian Federation’s Republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, to launch a probe into the republics security services and a probe to identify what may have motivated Dadayev, whom he knew as a loyal officer, to get involved in the crime. The three additional suspects whose arrest was sanctioned by Moscow’s Basmanny Court are Khamzad Bakhayev, Tamerlan Eskerkhanov and Shagid Gubashev, reported the Russian Tass news agency.
  • The Court stated that it reached the conclusion to support the investigators’ request after having reviewed the materials presented to the court. Gubachev was arrested on March 7 while Eskerkhanov and Bakhayev were arrested on March 8. The three were charged under Articles 105 and 222 of the Russian Federation’s Criminal Code, involving the murder committed by a group of persons, in collusion, and for reasons of money, as well as with robbery, extortion and banditry and the illegal possession or transfer of weapons. The Court justifies their detention on the grounds that the suspects could flee and possibly attempt to destroy evidence.
  • Judge Natalya Mushnikova was quoted by Tass as saying that “Zaur Dadayev’s involvement has been confirmed by his confession”. The Court would not provide details about Dadayev’s alleged or confessed role in the murder of RPR-Psarnas party Co-Chair Boris Nemtsov during the night from February 27 to 28. Dadayev’s arrest and confession prompted the President of the Russian Federation’s Republic of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, to order an investigation into the Dadayev’s past. President Kadyrov stressed that he remembered Dadayev as a true Russian patriot. The Tass news agency quoted the Chechen Republic’s President as stating: “I have known Zaur as a true patriot of Russia. … Zaur was one of the bravest men in the regiment. … He displayed particular courage in an operation against a large group of terrorists near Benoi. He was awarded the Order of Courage, and medals For Bravery and For Services to the Chechen Republic. I am certain that he was sincerely dedicated to Russia and prepared to give his life for the Motherland. The real reasons and motives behind Dadayev’s dismissal from the Russian Interior Ministry troops are unclear to me.
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  • … I have instructed Chechnya’s Security Council Secretary Vakhit Usmayev to conduct a thorough investigation of Zaur Dadayev’s resignation and to scrutinize his behavior and morale on the eve of leaving the service. … In any case, if Dadayev’s guilt is established in court, it will have to be admitted that by taking a human life he committed a grave crime. But I must say once again that he would have never taken a single step against Russia, for the sake of which he had risked his own life for many years. Beslan Shavanov, the man killed during an attempt to detain him, was a brave soldier, too. We hope that a thorough investigation will follow to show if Dadayev is really guilty, and if yes, what was the real reason behind his actions.”.
  • Western and Arab Support of Terrorists could justify a Mole-Hunt in the Russian Federation’s Security Services. Chechen and Ingushetian Islamist terrorist organizations are known for their close ties to foreign intelligence services. In 2013 the then Chief of Saudi Arabia’s Intelligence, Prince Bandar admitted that Saudi Arabia uses and controls Chechen and other Caucasian terrorists promising President Putin “a safe Winter Olympic Games in Sochi” in exchange for Russian willingness to have a Saudi-friendly regime installed in Syria. The released minutes of the meeting between Putin and Bandar quote Bandar as saying: “I can give you a guarantee to protect the Winter Olympics in the city of Sochi on the Black Sea next year. The Chechen groups that threaten the security of the games are controlled by us, and they will not move in the direction of the Syrian territory without coordinating with us. These groups don´t scare us. We use them in the face of the Syrian regime but they will have no role or influence in Syria´s political future”.
  • Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, for his part, has previously accused U.S. intelligence officials, including David Petraeus, for involvement in “flipping” detainees at Camp Bucca and at black CIA sites, including Caliph Ibrahim of the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS / ISIL) Al-Baghdadi, a.k.a. Al-Badri or Caliph Ibrahim. In Helsinki, the capital of Finland the Kavkaz Center is maintaining a “pro-Caucasus Emirate” website. The Center provided PR support to the now deceased terrorist leader Doku Umarov and his terrorist network. Umarov would threaten to disrupt the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games before he was killed in an explosion. U.S. Civil Society organizations as well as CIA and JSOC fronts like USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are known for their support of “Caucasian Rebels or Freedom Fighters”.
  • A shortlist of the civil society organizations which have been implicated in supporting Russian terrorist organizations includes the Jamestown Foundation, the United States-Chechen Republic Alliance Inc., the American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus (ACPC), Freedom House, the Open Society Foundation, funded by George Soros, among many others.
  • he former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniev Brzezinski is generally known as one of the main enablers and sponsors of the “Chechen Representation in the United States” led by Alisher Usmanov. Brzezinsky, for his part, is strongly supported by Rockefeller Foundation money. Brzezinski is according to several analysts pathologically obsessed with dividing Russia into at least six separate States” to reign in Moscow under the umbrella of a U.S. hegemony. It is noteworthy that Boris Nemtsov and the RPR-Psarnas party had close ties to the National Endowment of Democracy (NED). In 2012, Russian President Vladimir Putin would state that “he knows as a meter of fact” that especially foreign-backed organizations, over the last ten years, have used the strategy to sacrifice one of their own to create a martyr”. (see video)
  • The alleged involvement of Chechen and Ingushetian nationals in the murder of Boris Nemtsov and the confession of the former Interior Ministry officer Dadayev is not unlikely to prompt in-depth “mole-hunt” operations in the federal and national Russian, Chechen, Ingushetian and other security forces as well as mole-hunts in foreign-backed NGO’s.
Gary Edwards

The Constitution and Foreign Policy: The Future of Freedom Foundation - 0 views

www.fff.org/fd0707e.asp

Constitution Constitution-Foreign-Policy

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  • Gary Edwards on 17 Jan 12
     
    The Constitution and Foreign Policy by Bart Frazier, Posted October 17, 2007 Protecting the country from invasion and securing individual rights are two of the vital functions of the federal government. At the same time the government is the greatest threat to our freedom. This was the subject of FFF's June conference, "Restoring the Republic: Foreign Policy and Civil Liberties." An underlying theme, touched on by every one of the speakers, was the relationship between the state and the individual, for it is the individual who ultimately feels the effects of the government policies. For Americans, the rulebook for this relationship is the Constitution. In the United States, the Constitution is the primary connection between the individual and the state. It is the law of the land and the document that trumps all others when determining what the state may and may not do. The Constitution was designed to protect us, the people, from government. It is the government, however, that has advanced an overactive foreign policy for the past several decades, and it is the American people who now feel the adverse effects of the resulting blowback. It is the government that violates civil liberties, and it is the individual who feels the effects of government surveillance, detention, and torture.
Gary Edwards

Liberal Activists Worked With AGs to Target Conservatives - 0 views

dailysignal.com/...th-ags-to-target-conservatives

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 May 16 - No Cached
  • violate “constitutionally protected rights of freedom of speech, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and due process of law and constitute the common law tort of abuse of process.”
  • ExxonMobil also alleges that Walker’s delegation of his prosecutorial power to a private law firm “likely on a contingency-fee basis” violates basic “due process of law and fundamental fairness,” particularly because that same law firm has “pursued a bitterly contested and contentious litigation in an unrelated lawsuit against ExxonMobil … which could result in a substantial fee award if Cohen Milstein’s client were to prevail.”
  • That raises “substantial doubts about whether that firm should be permitted to serve as the ‘disinterested prosecutor’ whose impartiality is demanded by law and expected by the public.”
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • ExxonMobil asks the Texas court to declare that the “issuance and mailing of the subpoena” violates various provisions of the U.S. Constitution, federal law, and the Texas Constitution.
  • . According to The Washington Free Beacon, “a small coalition of prominent climate change activists and political operatives” met on Jan. 8 in a closed door meeting at the Rockefeller Family Fund in Manhattan. Their agenda: taking down oil giant ExxonMobil through a coordinated campaign of legal action, divestment efforts, and political pressure.”
  • A copy of the agenda from that meeting states that two of the common goals of these activists are to “establish in public’s mind [sic.] that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos and grave harm” and to “delegitimize them as a political actor.” Part of the discussion of their grand strategy was how to include “industry associations, scientists and front groups” in their targeting. And at the top of their list for “legal actions & related campaigns” was state “AGs.”
  • That last goal was apparently put into action. According to Fox News, a series of emails obtained by the Energy & Environmental Legal Institute showed communications between some of these same anti-fossil fuel activists and the attorneys general that are part of this “Green” coalition against climate change dissenters.
  • Some of them secretly briefed state attorneys general before their March press conference on arguments they could present to justify “climate change litigation” and the “imperative of taking action now.” The attorneys general and their staff tried to hide this discussion and coordination with the activists by “using a ‘Common Interest Agreement’… [that] sought to protect as privileged the discussions about defending President Obama’s controversial global warming rules, and going after political opponents using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.”
  • Some state attorneys general have criticized the dangerous and misguided efforts of their inquisitorial peers. As Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry correctly states, they are using “prosecutorial weapons to intimidate critics, silence free speech, or chill the robust exchange of ideas” about a public policy issue. And it is just as malevolent as the burning of books in the society depicted by Bradbury in “Fahrenheit 451.”
  • Gary Edwards on 07 May 16
     
    "In Ray Bradbury's classic dystopian novel, "Fahrenheit 451," a future society criminalizes the possession of books and burns them in order to suppress any dissenting ideas, opinions, and views. Today, we have state attorneys general trying to implement their own version of "Fahrenheit 451" to criminalize dissent over a disputed, unproven scientific theory: man-induced climate change. Recently, the attorney general of the Virgin Islands, Claude Walker, unleashed a subpoena on the Competitive Enterprise Institute seeking 10 years' worth of research and communications about climate change. It turns out that same Grand Inquisitor, Claude Walker, has hit ExxonMobil with a similar subpoena that seeks all of that company's communications, conversations, and correspondence with 88 conservative and libertarian think tanks, foundations, and universities, and 54 individual researchers, scientists, and writers."
Paul Merrell

Former Oil Tycoon Launches Pro-European Political Movement within Russia | nsnbc intern... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...litical-movement-within-russia

war & peace Russia Khodorkovsky color-revolutions

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • September the 20th marked the launch of Open Russia, a pro-European political movement spearheaded by former Russian oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Russia’s former wealthiest man was released from prison in December 2013 due to a pardon by Vladimir Putin, after serving close to 10 years in jail following his conviction in 2005.
  • Although officially convicted of tax evasion and embezzlement, it seems that Khodorkovsky was singled out among the Russian oligarchs due to him using his mass fortune to interfere in domestic Russian politics, in an attempt to overthrow Putin for the benefit of the Western elite. Open Russia is the rebirth of the Open Russia Foundation, which was launched in 2001 by Khodorkovsky to foster animosity in Russia but was later shut down after the tycoon was behind bars. The board of the Open Russia Foundation included two Anglo-American titans, namely Henry Kissinger and Lord Jacob Rothschild, revealing the mindset and intentions of the individuals who steered the foundation.
  • Khodorkovsky profited immensely from the mass privatisation of state assets following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s, at a time when corruption and back-door deals was the norm in Russia. He was the Chairman and CEO of the Russian based ‘Yakos Oil Company’ from 1997 to 2004, where he acquired an immense fortune leading him to be named the 16th wealthiest person on earth by Forbes magazine in 2004, worth a staggering $15 billion. Immediately after his release from prison at the end of 2013, Khodorkovsky declared on numerous occasions that he had no desire to enter politics. Yet only months after his initial statements he has launched a pro-European political movement within Russia, openly called for the overthrow of Putin in Moscow, announced he would be interested in leading Russia as President in the coming years, as well as asserting that Ukraine is the “model” for Russia to follow in the future. “I feel it imperative that the section of the population that is Europe-centered would have the opportunity to impact the way the country develops…. Without a doubt, Putin’s leaving is one of the necessary elements of Russia being able to take a European path of development…. It’s clear that Ukraine is that model that Russia is ready to accept and it’s precisely for this reason that Putin was so not interested in seeing the success of that revolution”, Khodorkovsky told the Daily Beast in an interview earlier this month.
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  • Khodorkovsky recently demonstrated that he still has very close links with the Anglo-American Establishment after speaking at the most distinguished think tank in America, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He also delivered a speech at Freedom House, an organisation that has been involved in the majority of Western orchestrated colour revolutions that have erupted across the planet over the past two decades.
Paul Merrell

NSA can eavesdrop on Americans' phone calls, documents show | Politics and Law - CNET News - 0 views

news.cnet.com/...ans-phone-calls-documents-show

surveillance state NSA Clapper lies must-read

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency has been secretly granted legal authority to operate a massive domestic eavesdropping system that vacuums up Americans' phone calls and Internet communications, newly leaked documents show. A pair of classified government documents (No. 1 and No. 2) signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and posted by the Guardian on Thursday show that NSA analysts are able to listen to Americans' intercepted phone calls without asking a judge for a warrant first. That appears to be at odds with what President Obama said earlier this week in defense of the NSA's surveillance efforts. "I can say unequivocally is that if you are a U.S. person, the NSA cannot listen to your telephone calls and the NSA cannot target your e-mails," Obama said. The new documents indicate, however, that NSA, CIA, and FBI analysts are granted broad access to data vacuumed up by the world's most powerful intelligence agency -- but are supposed to follow certain "targeting" and "minimization" procedures to limit the number of Americans who become individual targets of warrantless surveillance.
  • Analysts are expected to exercise "reasonable judgment" in determining which data to use, according to the documents, and "inadvertently acquired communications of or concerning a United States person may be retained no longer than five years." The documents also refer to "content repositories" that contain records of devices' "previous Internet activity," and say the NSA keeps records of Americans' "electronic communications accounts/addresses/identifiers" in an apparent effort to avoid targeting them in future eavesdropping efforts. The Holder procedures were blessed in advance by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Guardian reported, meaning that the judges would have issued a general order that authorizes the NSA to engage in warrantless surveillance as long as it's primarily aimed at foreign targets, subject to some limited judicial oversight. Today's disclosure jibes with what Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who leaked top-secret documents, alleged in an online chat earlier this week. Snowden said, referring to the contents of e-mail and phone calls, that "Americans' communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant."
  • On Sunday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper released a carefully-worded statement in response to a CNET article and other reports questioning when intelligence analysts can listen to domestic phone calls. Clapper said: "The statement that a single analyst can eavesdrop on domestic communications without proper legal authorization is incorrect and was not briefed to Congress." Clapper's statement was viewed as a denial, but it wasn't. Today's disclosures reveal why: Because the Justice Department granted intelligence analysts "proper legal authorization" in advance through the Holder regulations. "The DNI has a history of playing games with wording, using terms with carefully obscured meanings to leave an impression different from the truth," Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has litigated domestic surveillance cases, told CNET earlier this week.
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  • Jameel Jaffer, the American Civil Liberties Union's deputy legal director, said in a statement today that: After Congress enacted the FISA Amendments Act in 2008, we worried that the NSA would use the new authority to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans' telephone calls and emails. These documents confirm many of our worst fears. The "targeting" procedures indicate that the NSA is engaged in broad surveillance of Americans' international communications. The "minimization" procedures that supposedly protect Americans' constitutional rights turn out to be far weaker than we imagined they could be. For example, the NSA claims the authority to collect and disseminate attorney-client communications -- and even, in some circumstances, to turn them over to Justice Department prosecutors. The government also claims the authority to retain Americans' purely domestic communications in certain situations.
  • The documents suggest there are some significant loopholes in domestic surveillance: if an NSA analyst reviews an intercepted communication and finds "evidence of a crime that has been, is being, or is about to be committed," it can be forwarded to the FBI or other federal law enforcement agencies. Another loophole is "a serious harm to life or property" -- which could sweep in intellectual property -- and "enciphered" data. Communications that contain "enciphered" data, which would likely include PGP but also could mean encrypted Web connections using SSL, may be kept indefinitely. Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls -- in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established "listening posts" that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, "whether they originate within the country or overseas." That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.
  • Section 702 of the FAA says surveillance may be authorized by the attorney general and director of national intelligence without prior approval by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, as long as minimization requirements and general procedures blessed by the court are followed.
Gary Edwards

The Police State Is Here by Tim Kelly - The Future of Freedom Foundation - 0 views

www.fff.org/com1205p.asp

Tim-Kelly FFF The-Futur-of-Freedom-Foundation

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 May 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 26 May 12
     
    Hat tip to marbux for this catch.  Tim Kelly walks us through the increasingly rapid decline of American liberty, and our fall into the clutches of an ever growing police state.  Nicely written.  No solutions given.  I suggest we declare any effort,that violates the Constitutional rights of an American citizen as an act of treason,  especially if committed, unknowingly or knowingly authorized, or voted on by a public servant sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution.   excerpt: The intent of this short essay is not to provide a "list of horribles" committed by the government (although such an accounting is useful) but to point out that the much-feared police state has come into being. Its growth had been gradual, which contributed to the public's indifference, but it metastasized after 9/11, when the remaining legal barriers to the state's expansion were taken down in the name of "national security." A large portion of the public appears to be appropriately alarmed, but it remains to be seen whether this will reach a critical mass in time to reverse the country's destructive course.
Paul Merrell

Bill Clinton and the Bogus Iranian Threat The Future of Freedom Foundation - 0 views

fff.org/...n-and-the-bogus-iranian-threat

war & peace Israel U.S.-foreign-policy Iranian-nukes-myth Bush-II Clinton Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 May 14 - No Cached
  • Tragically, President George H.W. Bush passed up a chance for a rapprochement with Iran because, after the Soviet Union imploded, the national-security apparatus needed a new threat to stave off budget cutters in Congress. Iran became the “manufactured crisis,” according to author Gareth Porter’s new book by that title. Doubly tragic, Bush’s successor, Bill Clinton, compounded the dangerous folly by hyping the bogus threat. Why? That might be a good question for progressives to ask possible presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who enjoys basking in her husband’s supposed presidential successes. Porter writes, That ramping up of pressure on Iran by the Clinton administration was still driven by the same bureaucratic incentives that had appeared at the end of the Cold War, but it shifted into overdrive because it was linked to support of the Israeli government’s drive to portray Iran as the great threat to peace in the world. Clinton’s advisers saw the threat of nuclear proliferation as the path to beefing up the national-security apparatus. It was perfect for justifying new weapons systems and a continuing role as world policeman.
  • Moreover, the military focus on Iran, Porter adds, “dovetailed with the Clinton administration’s move to align its Iran policy with that of the Israeli government of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.” Before assuming power, Clinton signaled his intention to be “more explicitly pro-Israel than the Bush administration had been.” To that end, he selected Martin Indyk as his campaign’s Middle East adviser. Indyk had been an adviser to former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir; a researcher at the chief pro-Israel lobbying organization, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee; and cofounder of AIPAC’s spinoff think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. (Today, Indyk is President Obama’s chief envoy to the failed U.S.-sponsored Israeli-Palestinian talks.) The Clinton administration implemented the “dual containment” policy against Iraq and Iran. But Porter reports that Robert Pelletreau, the Middle East policymaker in the State Department, acknowledges “that it was ‘pretty much accepted in Washington’ that the policy had originated in Israel.”
Paul Merrell

Engendering Crises to Justify the National Security State The Future of Freedom Foundation - 0 views

fff.org/...fy-the-national-security-state

security state national-security peace-dividend essays

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • The latest issue of Time magazine, one of the very models of the mainstream press, says it all: “NATO’s Back in Business, Thanks to Russia’s Threat to Ukraine.” The basic theme of the article is that we should be thankful that NATO didn’t go out of business when the Cold War ended. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, the article suggests, proves that keeping NATO in existence was a wise decision. What a crock.
  • The best thing the American people could have ever done is not having embraced the totalitarian-type apparatus known as the national-security state. In the name of fighting communism, it caused America to abandon its founding principles and ideals of liberty and limited government and turned America toward dark side practices that characterize communist and other totalitarian regimes. The next-best thing the American people could have done is having dismantled the national-security state apparatus at the end of the Cold War. The best thing the American people could do today is dismantle, not reform, the national-security state apparatus. That’s a key to restoring a balanced, harmonious, peaceful, moral, free, and prosperous society to our land.
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Apr 14
     
    Excellent essay that laces together the history of the security state and national "defense."
Paul Merrell

TGIF: The Phony Trade-off between Privacy and Security The Future of Freedom Foundation - 0 views

fff.org/...f-between-privacy-and-security

surveillance state Obama Obama-speech privacy-v-security

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Most people take it for granted — because they’ve heard it so many times from politicians and pundits — that they must trade some privacy for security in this dangerous world. The challenge, we’re told, is to find the right “balance.” Let’s examine this.
  • In other words, in the freed market I would find the right “balance” for myself, and you would do the same. One size wouldn’t be deemed to fit all. The market would cater to people with a range of security/privacy concerns, striking the “balance” differently for different people. That’s as it should be. Actually, we can say that there would be no trade-off between privacy and security at all, because the information would be voluntarily disclosed by each individual on mutually acceptable terms. Under those circumstances, it wouldn’t be right to call what the firm does an “intrusion.” But that sort of situation is not what Barack Obama, Mike Rogers, Peter King, and their ilk mean when they tell us that “we” need to find the right balance between security and privacy. They mean they will dictate to us what the alleged balance will be. We will have no real say in the matter, and they can be counted on to find the balance on the “security” side of the spectrum as suits their interests. That’s how these things work.
  • where the state is concerned, you can’t trade off privacy against security because they’re exactly the same thing.
Paul Merrell

Microsoft fights US warrant demanding information from overseas servers - RT USA - 0 views

rt.com/...icrosoft-fights-search-warrant

surveillance state search-&-seizure MSFT extraterritorial-warrants

shared by Paul Merrell on 11 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Microsoft is attempting to fend off a search warrant served by federal prosecutors in the United States because the tech giant says the government lacks the authority to compel the company for customer data that’s stored overseas. Experts are already saying that Microsoft’s attempt to squash a search warrant served last December marks the first time that a major company has fought requests from the Justice Department for digital information held on overseas servers. If the Silicon Valley corporation fails to win, however, then a precedent could be established to ensure prosecutors in the US will in the future have little problem asking for digital files even if that data lacks all other ties to America. Much of the case in question remains under seal, including the identity and nationality of the Microsoft customer whose data is sought by US investigators. What’s certain, though, is that a federal magistrate judge in New York granted a search warrant as part of a criminal inquiry last December that asked Microsoft of Washington state for emails pertaining to a customer who claimed to reside outside of the US.
  • US Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV of the New York court refused in April an initial attempt from Microsoft to quash the warrant, prompting Microsoft to challenge the government’s request in a filing made public just this week. Attorneys for Verizon, a telecommunications provider, have since filed a friend-of-the-court brief, and the Electronic Freedom Foundation, a privacy group, plans to soon do the same.
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