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Gary Edwards

Obama gives himself control of all communication systems in America - RT - 0 views

rt.com/...ident-order-communications-770

Obammunism executive-orders

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Jul 12
     
    Awful stuff.  Another Obama executive order suspending the Constitution and terminating the Bill of Rights. Revoking the right of habeas corpus is unconstitutional. So is declaring a national emergency without congressional approval. The Constitution declares, "The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." While Congress has passed many an unConstitutional Law regarding "National Emergency Powers", there is nothing in the Constitution granting any branch of the Federal government to tear up the Constitution and Bill of Rights.  Atrocities like FiSA, The Military Commissions Act, NSP51, HSPD20, the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, the National Emergencies Act, and the Patriot Act are un Constitutional to the core.   Only the American people, through their representatives in Congress, can declare a national emergency.  With the exception of the habeas corpus clause, the Constitution makes no allowance for the suspension of any of its provisions during a national emergency.  Many statist seeking to breach the Constitution and Bill of Rights argue that the granting of emergency powers by Congress is implicit in its Article I, section 8 authority to "provide for the common Defense and general Welfare," the commerce clause, its war, armed forces, and militia powers, and the "necessary and proper" clause empowering it to make such laws as are required to fulfill the executions of "the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof." But this issue of "implied" powers defies an actual reading of the Constitution, and seeks to breach the meaning of that most basic of all Madisonian  Constitutional concepts embedded into the framework of limited government: "enumerated powers".  The United States is a government of enumerated powers.  N
Paul Merrell

Hackers Stole Secrets of U.S. Government Workers' Sex Lives - The Daily Beast - 0 views

www.thedailybeast.com/...ernment-workers-sex-lives.html

surveillance state OPM-computer-breach Snowden China

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • It was already being described as the worst hack of the U.S. government in history. And it just got much worse.A senior U.S. official has confirmed that foreign hackers compromised the intimate personal details of an untold number of government workers. Likely included in the hackers’ haul: information about workers’ sexual partners, drug and alcohol abuse, debts, gambling compulsions, marital troubles, and any criminal activity.Those details, which are now presumed to be in the hands of Chinese spies, are found in the so-called “adjudication information” that U.S. investigators compile on government employees and contractors who are applying for security clearances. The exposure suggests that the massive computer breach at the Office of Personnel Management is more significant and potentially damaging to national security than officials have previously said.
  • Three former U.S. intelligence officials told The Daily Beast that the adjudication information would effectively provide dossiers on current and former government employees, as well as contractors. It gives foreign intelligence agencies a roadmap for finding people with access to the government’s most highly classified secrets.Obama administration officials had previously acknowledged the breach of information that applicants voluntarily disclose on a routine questionnaire, called Standard Form 86, but the theft of the more detailed and wide-ranging adjudication information appears to have gone overlooked.
  • “Whoever compromised the adjudication information is going to have clear knowledge, beyond what’s in the SF86, about who the best targets for espionage are in the United States,” Michael Adams, a computer security expert who served more than two decades in the U.S. Special Operations Command, told The Daily Beast. “This is the most successful cyber attack in the history of the United States,” owing to the amount and quality of the information that was stolen, Adams said. U.S. intelligence officers spend years trying to recruit foreign spies to gather the kinds of details and insights that are contained in adjudication information, one former senior U.S. official said. This official, who requested anonymity, added that adjudication information would give foreign intelligence services “enormous leverage” over U.S. personnel whom they might forcibly interrogate for information or try to recruit.
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  • The adjudication process had a broad scope, taking into account the SF86 questionnaire, reports from background investigations, interviews with the applicant's family members and associates, his or her employment history, and for people seeking high-level clearances, the results of polygraph investigations.Seymour said such records “span an employee’s career” and could stretch back as far as 30 years. Officials have said that as many as 18 million people may have been affected by the breach. Asked specifically what information the hackers had obtained, Seymour told lawmakers that she preferred to answer later in a “classified session.” Seymour didn’t specify how many people’s information was stolen. But the OPM oversees background investigations, which comprise a key part of the adjudication process, for more than 90 percent of security clearance applicants, according to the Congressional Research Service. An OPM spokesman didn’t respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
  • A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who asked to remain anonymous, said the OPM breach would cause more damage to national security operations and personnel than the leaks by Edward Snowden about classified surveillance by the National Security Agency.“This is worse than Snowden, because at least programs that were running before the leaks could be replaced or rebuilt,” the former official said. “But OPM, that’s the gift that keeps on giving. You can’t rebuild people.”Adjudicators are in a powerful position because in deciding whether to recommend granting a security clearance, they have access to the entire scope of an applicant’s file and are told to make a subjective analysis.“The adjudication process is the careful weighing of a number of variables known as the whole-person concept,” according to official guidelines. “Available, reliable information about the person, past and present, favorable and unfavorable, should be considered in reaching a determination.”
  • By design, adjudication is an invasive process, meant to unearth risk factors including drug and alcohol abuse, extramarital affairs, a history of violence, and other events that speak to a person’s “trustworthiness” and their susceptibility to blackmail or being recruited to spy for a foreign government.For instance, “compulsive gambling is a concern, as it may lead to financial crimes including espionage,” the guidelines say. Adjudicators are told to note “a pattern of compulsive, self-destructive, or high risk sexual behavior,” “relapse after diagnosis of alcohol abuse,” and “emotionally unstable, irresponsible, dysfunctional, violent, paranoid, or bizarre behavior,” among other warning signs in 13 categories. Some of the embarrassing personal details found in some adjudications have been made public. That’s what happens after an applicant who was denied a security clearance launched an appeal.
  • Armed with such intimate details of a person’s worst moments, foreign spies would have unprecedented advantage against their U.S. adversaries. And the news is especially bad for people who hold the highest levels of clearance, which require more rigorous background checks, noted Adams, the computer security expert. “The higher up you go in your sensitivity levels, the more data that’s in your adjudication file,” he said.
Gary Edwards

Arnold Ahlert: Russia Would Love a Third Obama Term - The Patriot Post - 0 views

patriotpost.us/43984

Hillary

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • New York Post columnist John Crudele obliterates the despicable word-parsing. “Clinton was so careless when using her BlackBerry that the Russians stole her password,” he writes. “All Russian President Vladimir Putin’s gang had to do was log into Clinton’s account and read whatever they wanted.” When it comes to the DNC hack, “The Russians did it” is the theme-du-jour. Clinton campaign manager, Robby Mook stated Sunday that “experts are telling us that Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, [and are] releasing these emails for the purpose of helping Donald Trump.” The campaign itself echoed that assertion. “This is further evidence the Russian government is trying to influence the outcome of the election.”
  • The reliably leftist Politico — so far left that reporter Ken Vogel remains employed there despite sending a story to the DNC before he sent it to his own editor — is quite comfortable advancing that agenda, using it as a vehicle to buff up Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state. “Former U.S. officials who worked on Russia policy with Clinton say that Putin was personally stung by Clinton’s December 2011 condemnation of Russia’s parliamentary elections, and had his anger communicated directly to President Barack Obama,” Politico reports. “They say Putin and his advisers are also keenly aware that, even as she executed Obama’s ‘reset’ policy with Russia, Clinton took a harder line toward Moscow than others in the administration. And they say Putin sees Clinton as a forceful proponent of ‘regime change’ policies that the Russian leader considers a grave threat to his own survival.” Yet even Politico is forced to admit the payback angle is “speculation,” and that some experts remain “unconvinced that Putin’s government engineered the DNC email hack or that it was meant to influence the election in Trump’s favor as opposed to embarrassing DNC officials for any number of reasons.”
  • Americans would also be wise to remain highly skeptical of this claim for any number of reasons. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asserts there is “there is no proof whatsoever” Russia is behind the hack and that “this is a diversion that’s being pushed by the Hillary Clinton campaign.” To be fair, Assange is a Russian sympathizer, and leftists aren’t the only ones attributing the hack to the Russians. The same FBI that gave Clinton a pass will be investigating the DNC hack, and at some point the bureau will reach a conclusion. In the meantime, it might be worth considering that this smacks of a carefully orchestrated disinformation campaign similar to the one Clinton and several other Obama administration officials engineered with regard to Benghazi. While Clinton was never held personally or legally accountable for the deaths of four Americans, it is beyond dispute that she lied unabashedly about a video causing the attack, while sending her daughter a damning email at 11:12 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2012, admitting the administration knew “the attack had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest.” The theme of this coordinated narrative? Clinton campaign chair John Podesta referred Monday night to “a kind of bromance going on” between Putin and Trump. Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook echoed that assertion, insisting the email dump comes on the heels of “changes to the Republican platform to make it more pro-Russian.”
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  • The Leftmedia were equally obliging. “The theory that Moscow orchestrated the leaks to help Trump … is fast gaining currency within the Obama administration because of the timing of the leaks and Trump’s own connections to the Russian government,” reports the Daily Beast. Other Leftmedia examples abound. “Until Friday, that charge, with its eerie suggestion of a Kremlin conspiracy to aid Donald J. Trump, has been only whispered,” shouted the New York Times. “Because the leaks are widely suspected of being the result of a Russian hacking operation, they can be used to reinforce the narrative that Russian President Vladimir Putin is rooting for Trump and that Trump, in turn, would be too accommodating to Moscow,” adds the Los Angeles Times. “Why would Russian President Vladimir Putin want to help Donald Trump win the White House?” asks NPR. “If you want to indulge in a bit of conspiracy theory, remember that Russian President Vladimir Putin has praised candidate Trump as recently as June,” states the Burlington Free Press.
  • Ultimately, here’s the question: If the Russians could access the DNC server, they could certainly access Clinton’s unsecure server. And if they could access Clinton’s server, including the 33,000 emails she deleted (maybe some were about how the Clintons profited from selling American uranium to Russia), ask yourself who they’d rather have in the Oval Office: Donald Trump, who professed admiration for Putin but remains a highly unpredictable individual — or Hillary Clinton, who could be subjected to blackmail for as long as eight years? Russia’s clear objective would be to have the weakest American leadership they can get. Blackmail aside, what would be weaker than an extension of Obama’s presidency?
  • Moreover, it is just as likely a number of the so-called “experts” as well as Clinton’s useful idiot media apparatchiks have considered the blackmail possibility and are trying to divert attention from it with a phony Trump connection story. Democrats can theorize, complain and blame to their hearts' content, but none of it obscures the reality that the DNC — and by extension Hillary Clinton and the entire Democrat Party — are a conglomeration of morally bereft, utterly incompetent individuals wholly ill-equipped to handle internal security, much less national security. And they are aided and abetted by an equally corrupt media, more than willing to abide that potentially catastrophic reality as long as it gets a Democrat in the Oval Office. WikiLeaks has promised additional dumps with be forthcoming. How much deeper Democrats sink is anyone’s guess.
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Aug 16
     
    "If one lives by the vulnerable server, one dies by the vulnerable server. As the week unfolds, America is witnessing the ultimate unmasking of the Democrat Party, an entity whose self-aggrandizing claims of unity, fairness and intellectual honesty have been revealed as utterly fraudulent by a flood of DNC emails released by WikiLeaks. Moreover, a stunning level of hypocrisy attends the entire exposure, as DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is sent packing for this breach of confidential party information, while Hillary Clinton, whose equally accessible private server contained far more critical top-secret information, officially became the party's standard-bearer. But not to worry, assured FBI Director James Comey, who insisted there was no direct evidence that Clinton's server had been hacked by hostile actors - before adding it was possible that hostile actors "gained access" to Clinton's accounts. Clinton was equally adept at making semantical distinctions. "If you go by the evidence, there is no evidence that the system was breached or hacked successfully," Clinton said. "And I think that what's important here is follow the evidence. And there is no evidence. And that can't be said about a lot of other systems, including government systems.""
Paul Merrell

European Lawmakers Demand Answers on Phone Key Theft - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...gemalto-heist-shocks-europe

surveillance state Gemalto SIM-card-keys

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • European officials are demanding answers and investigations into a joint U.S. and U.K. hack of the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile SIM cards, following a report published by The Intercept Thursday. The report, based on leaked documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, revealed the U.S. spy agency and its British counterpart Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, hacked the Franco-Dutch digital security giant Gemalto in a sophisticated heist of encrypted cell-phone keys. The European Parliament’s chief negotiator on the European Union’s data protection law, Jan Philipp Albrecht, said the hack was “obviously based on some illegal activities.” “Member states like the U.K. are frankly not respecting the [law of the] Netherlands and partner states,” Albrecht told the Wall Street Journal. Sophie in ’t Veld, an EU parliamentarian with D66, the Netherlands’ largest opposition party, added, “Year after year we have heard about cowboy practices of secret services, but governments did nothing and kept quiet […] In fact, those very same governments push for ever-more surveillance capabilities, while it remains unclear how effective these practices are.”
  • “If the average IT whizzkid breaks into a company system, he’ll end up behind bars,” In ’t Veld added in a tweet Friday. The EU itself is barred from undertaking such investigations, leaving individual countries responsible for looking into cases that impact their national security matters. “We even get letters from the U.K. government saying we shouldn’t deal with these issues because it’s their own issue of national security,” Albrecht said. Still, lawmakers in the Netherlands are seeking investigations. Gerard Schouw, a Dutch member of parliament, also with the D66 party, has called on Ronald Plasterk, the Dutch minister of the interior, to answer questions before parliament. On Tuesday, the Dutch parliament will debate Schouw’s request. Additionally, European legal experts tell The Intercept, public prosecutors in EU member states that are both party to the Cybercrime Convention, which prohibits computer hacking, and home to Gemalto subsidiaries could pursue investigations into the breach of the company’s systems.
  • According to secret documents from 2010 and 2011, a joint NSA-GCHQ unit penetrated Gemalto’s internal networks and infiltrated the private communications of its employees in order to steal encryption keys, embedded on tiny SIM cards, which are used to protect the privacy of cellphone communications across the world. Gemalto produces some 2 billion SIM cards a year. The company’s clients include AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint and some 450 wireless network providers. “[We] believe we have their entire network,” GCHQ boasted in a leaked slide, referring to the Gemalto heist.
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  • While Gemalto was indeed another casualty in Western governments’ sweeping effort to gather as much global intelligence advantage as possible, the leaked documents make clear that the company was specifically targeted. According to the materials published Thursday, GCHQ used a specific codename — DAPINO GAMMA — to refer to the operations against Gemalto. The spies also actively penetrated the email and social media accounts of Gemalto employees across the world in an effort to steal the company’s encryption keys. Evidence of the Gemalto breach rattled the digital security community. “Almost everyone in the world carries cell phones and this is an unprecedented mass attack on the privacy of citizens worldwide,” said Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a non-profit that advocates for digital privacy and free online expression. “While there is certainly value in targeted surveillance of cell phone communications, this coordinated subversion of the trusted technical security infrastructure of cell phones means the US and British governments now have easy access to our mobile communications.”
  • For Gemalto, evidence that their vaunted security systems and the privacy of customers had been compromised by the world’s top spy agencies made an immediate financial impact. The company’s shares took a dive on the Paris bourse Friday, falling $500 million. In the U.S., Gemalto’s shares fell as much 10 percent Friday morning. They had recovered somewhat — down 4 percent — by the close of trading on the Euronext stock exchange. Analysts at Dutch financial services company Rabobank speculated in a research note that Gemalto could be forced to recall “a large number” of SIM cards. The French daily L’Express noted today that Gemalto board member Alex Mandl was a founding trustee of the CIA-funded venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. Mandl resigned from In-Q-Tel’s board in 2002, when he was appointed CEO of Gemplus, which later merged with another company to become Gemalto. But the CIA connection still dogged Mandl, with the French press regularly insinuating that American spies could infiltrate the company. In 2003, a group of French lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to create a commission to investigate Gemplus’s ties to the CIA and its implications for the security of SIM cards. Mandl, an Austrian-American businessman who was once a top executive at AT&T, has denied that he had any relationship with the CIA beyond In-Q-Tel. In 2002, he said he did not even have a security clearance.
  • AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon could not be reached for comment Friday. Sprint declined to comment. Vodafone, the world’s second largest telecom provider by subscribers and a customer of Gemalto, said in a statement, “[W]e have no further details of these allegations which are industrywide in nature and are not focused on any one mobile operator. We will support industry bodies and Gemalto in their investigations.” Deutsche Telekom AG, a German company, said it has changed encryption algorithms in its Gemalto SIM cards. “We currently have no knowledge that this additional protection mechanism has been compromised,” the company said in a statement. “However, we cannot rule out this completely.”
  • Update: Asked about the SIM card heist, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said he did not expect the news would hurt relations with the tech industry: “It’s hard for me to imagine that there are a lot of technology executives that are out there that are in a position of saying that they hope that people who wish harm to this country will be able to use their technology to do so. So, I do think in fact that there are opportunities for the private sector and the federal government to coordinate and to cooperate on these efforts, both to keep the country safe, but also to protect our civil liberties.”
  • Paul Merrell on 24 Feb 15
     
    Watch for massive class action product defect litigation to be filed against the phone companies.and mobile device manufacturers.  In most U.S. jurisdictions, proof that the vendors/manufacturers  knew of the product defect is not required, only proof of the defect. Also, this is a golden opportunity for anyone who wants to get out of a pricey cellphone contract, since providing a compromised cellphone is a material breach of warranty, whether explicit or implied..   
Paul Merrell

Western Spy Agencies Secretly Rely on Hackers for Intel and Expertise - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...-nsa-gchq-rely-intel-expertise

surveillance state NSA-targets hackers

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The U.S., U.K. and Canadian governments characterize hackers as a criminal menace, warn of the threats they allegedly pose to critical infrastructure, and aggressively prosecute them, but they are also secretly exploiting their information and expertise, according to top secret documents. In some cases, the surveillance agencies are obtaining the content of emails by monitoring hackers as they breach email accounts, often without notifying the hacking victims of these breaches. “Hackers are stealing the emails of some of our targets… by collecting the hackers’ ‘take,’ we . . .  get access to the emails themselves,” reads one top secret 2010 National Security Agency document. These and other revelations about the intelligence agencies’ reliance on hackers are contained in documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents—which come from the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters agency and NSA—shed new light on the various means used by intelligence agencies to exploit hackers’ successes and learn from their skills, while also raising questions about whether governments have overstated the threat posed by some hackers.
  • By looking out for hacking conducted “both by state-sponsored and freelance hackers” and riding on the coattails of hackers, Western intelligence agencies have gathered what they regard as valuable content: Recently, Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) and Menwith Hill Station (MHS) discovered and began exploiting a target-rich data set being stolen by hackers. The hackers’ sophisticated email-stealing intrusion set is known as INTOLERANT. Of the traffic observed, nearly half contains category hits because the attackers are targeting email accounts of interest to the Intelligence Community. Although a relatively new data source, [Target Offices of Primary Interest] have already written multiple reports based on INTOLERANT collect. The hackers targeted a wide range of diplomatic corps, human rights and democracy activists and even journalists: INTOLERANT traffic is very organized. Each event is labeled to identify and categorize victims. Cyber attacks commonly apply descriptors to each victim – it helps herd victims and track which attacks succeed and which fail. Victim categories make INTOLERANT interesting: A = Indian Diplomatic & Indian Navy B = Central Asian diplomatic C = Chinese Human Rights Defenders D = Tibetan Pro-Democracy Personalities E = Uighur Activists F = European Special Rep to Afghanistan and Indian photo-journalism G = Tibetan Government in Exile
  • In those cases, the NSA and its partner agencies in the United Kingdom and Canada were unable to determine the identity of the hackers who collected the data, but suspect a state sponsor “based on the level of sophistication and the victim set.” In instances where hacking may compromise data from the U.S. and U.K. governments, or their allies, notification was given to the “relevant parties.” In a separate document, GCHQ officials discuss plans to use open source discussions among hackers to improve their own knowledge. “Analysts are potentially missing out on valuable open source information relating to cyber defence because of an inability to easily keep up to date with specific blogs and Twitter sources,” according to one document. GCHQ created a program called LOVELY HORSE to monitor and index public discussion by hackers on Twitter and other social media. The Twitter accounts designated for collection in the 2012 document:
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  • Documents published with this article: LOVELY HORSE – GCHQ Wiki Overview INTOLERANT – Who Else Is Targeting Your Target? Collecting Data Stolen by Hackers – SIDtoday  HAPPY TRIGGER/LOVELY HORSE/Zool/TWO FACE – Open Source for Cyber Defence/Progress NATO Civilian Intelligence Council – Cyber Panel – US Talking Points
  • These accounts represent a cross section of the hacker community and security scene. In addition to monitoring multiple accounts affiliated with Anonymous, GCHQ monitored the tweets of Kevin Mitnick, who was sent to prison in 1999 for various computer and fraud related offenses. The U.S. Government once characterized Mitnick as one of the world’s most villainous hackers, but he has since turned security consultant and exploit broker. Among others, GCHQ monitored the tweets of reverse-engineer and Google employee, Thomas Dullien. Fellow Googler Tavis Ormandy, from Google’s vulnerability research team Project Zero, is featured on the list, along with other well known offensive security researchers, including Metasploit’s HD Moore and James Lee (aka Egypt) together with Dino Dai Zovi and Alexander Sotirov, who at the time both worked for New York-based offensive security company, Trail of Bits (Dai Zovi has since taken up a position at payment company, Square). The list also includes notable anti-forensics and operational security expert “The Grugq.” GCHQ monitored the tweets of former NSA agents Dave Aitel and Charlie Miller, and former Air Force intelligence officer Richard Bejtlich as well as French exploit vendor, VUPEN (who sold a one year subscription for its binary analysis and exploits service to the NSA in 2012).
  • The U.S., U.K. and Canadian governments characterize hackers as a criminal menace, warn of the threats they allegedly pose to critical infrastructure, and aggressively prosecute them, but they are also secretly exploiting their information and expertise, according to top secret documents. In some cases, the surveillance agencies are obtaining the content of emails by monitoring hackers as they breach email accounts, often without notifying the hacking victims of these breaches. “Hackers are stealing the emails of some of our targets… by collecting the hackers’ ‘take,’ we . . .  get access to the emails themselves,” reads one top secret 2010 National Security Agency document. These and other revelations about the intelligence agencies’ reliance on hackers are contained in documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents—which come from the U.K. Government Communications Headquarters agency and NSA—shed new light on the various means used by intelligence agencies to exploit hackers’ successes and learn from their skills, while also raising questions about whether governments have overstated the threat posed by some hackers.
Paul Merrell

Hacker claims to have breached CIA director's personal email - 0 views

bigstory.ap.org/...d-cia-directors-personal-email

surveillance state CIA DHS email-hacks spying-on-spies

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • An anonymous hacker claims to have breached CIA Director John Brennan's personal email account and has posted documents online, including a list of email addresses purportedly from Brennan's contact file. The CIA said it referred the matter to the proper authorities, but would not comment further. The hacker spoke to the New York Post, which described him in an article published Sunday as "a stoner high school student," motivated by his opposition to U.S. foreign policy and support for Palestinians. His Twitter account, @phphax, includes links to files that he says are Brennan's contact list, a log of phone calls by then-CIA deputy director Avril Haines, and other documents.
  • The hacker also claimed to have breached a Comcast account belonging to Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, and released what appeared to be personal information. One document purporting to come from Brennan's AOL email account contains a spreadsheet of people, including senior intelligence officials, along with their Social Security numbers, although the hacker redacted the numbers in the version he posted on Twitter. It's unclear why Brennan would have stored such a document in his private email account. Based on the titles, the document appears to date from 2009 or before. When people visit the White House and other secure facilities, they are required to supply their Social Security numbers. Brennan could have been forwarding a list of invitees to the White House when he was President Barack Obama's counter terrorism adviser, the job he held before he became CIA director in 2013.
  • The hacker told the Post he had obtained a 47-page version of Brennan's application for a security clearance, known as an SF86. That document — millions of which were stolen from the federal personnel office last year by hackers linked to China — contains detailed information about past jobs, foreign contacts, finances and other sensitive personal details. No such document appears to be posted on the hacker's Twitter account, but it's not clear whether the hacker posted it elsewhere.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Oct 15
     
    Got to love it. I can think of few people more deserving of getting their email accounts cracked.
Gary Edwards

Liberty in the Breach | The End of the American Dream - 0 views

bayareapatriots.wordpress.com

Alexis-de-Tocqueville freedom-liberty Banksters Globalist-Elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 13
     
    This link will take you to a public blog, the content of which comes from the collaborative work of the Diigo group, "Socialism and the End of the American Dream". The content for the Liberty in the Breach (http://goo.gl/AAFJ9) blog is posted directly from a Diigo.com group called "Socialism and the End of the American Dream". So yes, this groups bookmarking efforts are public.  The way this works is easy for anyone to to do, and I encourage everyone to make use of blog and RSS posts. The Diigo bookmark service enables groups of people to share tagged and categorized lists of bookmarks, but the only way to take these group collaborations truly public is through the blog and RSS posting mechanisms. There are also select sharing methods.  Each Group of bookmarks and comments can have any number of "Lists". A list is a subset of a group, but it can stand on it's own or serve many groups. The difference is that Groups have members and lists do not.  The effect of this separation is that you can publish or RSS any list to a Web Site or Reader, and not be concerned about errant group membership comments and posts. Fortunately we not encountered that problem with the End of the American Dream group.  The "Socialism and the End of the American Dream" group contains two prominent "lists": Banksters and USA-Constitution. There are other lists, but over time these two became dominant.  I started the "Socialism and the End of the American Dream" group in August of 2008 as part of my research and attempt to understand the financial collapse of 2008. What I found was quite chilling, and has nothing to do with "Socialism" or it's many forms.  I came to understand that socialism in it's many forms (liberalism, Progressivism, Marxism, Naziism, and Communism), is used the same as conservatism and corporate facism by a wealthy globalist elite to seize the instruments and resources of government for their own purposes.  So yeah, if I had the chance to rename to group, I
Paul Merrell

Hacking Team Asks Customers to Stop Using Its Software After Hack | Motherboard - 0 views

motherboard.vice.com/...-using-its-software-after-hack

surveillance state Hacking-Team hacked

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • But the hack hasn’t just ruined the day for Hacking Team’s employees. The company, which sells surveillance software to government customers all over the world, from Morocco and Ethiopia to the US Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI, has told all its customers to shut down all operations and suspend all use of the company’s spyware, Motherboard has learned. “They’re in full on emergency mode,” a source who has inside knowledge of Hacking Team’s operations told Motherboard.
  • Hacking Team notified all its customers on Monday morning with a “blast email,” requesting them to shut down all deployments of its Remote Control System software, also known as Galileo, according to multiple sources. The company also doesn’t have access to its email system as of Monday afternoon, a source said. On Sunday night, an unnamed hacker, who claimed to be the same person who breached Hacking Team’s competitor FinFisher last year, hijacked its Twitter account and posted links to 400GB of internal data. Hacking Team woke up to a massive breach of its systems.
  • A source told Motherboard that the hackers appears to have gotten “everything,” likely more than what the hacker has posted online, perhaps more than one terabyte of data. “The hacker seems to have downloaded everything that there was in the company’s servers,” the source, who could only speak on condition of anonymity, told Motherboard. “There’s pretty much everything here.” It’s unclear how the hackers got their hands on the stash, but judging from the leaked files, they broke into the computers of Hacking Team’s two systems administrators, Christian Pozzi and Mauro Romeo, who had access to all the company’s files, according to the source. “I did not expect a breach to be this big, but I’m not surprised they got hacked because they don’t take security seriously,” the source told me. “You can see in the files how much they royally fucked up.”
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  • For example, the source noted, none of the sensitive files in the data dump, from employees passports to list of customers, appear to be encrypted. “How can you give all the keys to your infrastructure to a 20-something who just joined the company?” he added, referring to Pozzi, whose LinkedIn shows he’s been at Hacking Team for just over a year. “Nobody noticed that someone stole a terabyte of data? You gotta be a fuckwad,” the source said. “It means nobody was taking care of security.”
  • The future of the company, at this point, it’s uncertain. Employees fear this might be the beginning of the end, according to sources. One current employee, for example, started working on his resume, a source told Motherboard. It’s also unclear how customers will react to this, but a source said that it’s likely that customers from countries such as the US will pull the plug on their contracts. Hacking Team asked its customers to shut down operations, but according to one of the leaked files, as part of Hacking Team’s “crisis procedure,” it could have killed their operations remotely. The company, in fact, has “a backdoor” into every customer’s software, giving it ability to suspend it or shut it down—something that even customers aren’t told about. To make matters worse, every copy of Hacking Team’s Galileo software is watermarked, according to the source, which means Hacking Team, and now everyone with access to this data dump, can find out who operates it and who they’re targeting with it.
Paul Merrell

CSIS asked foreign agencies to spy on Canadians, kept court in dark, judge says - 0 views

www.ottawacitizen.com/...story.html

surveillance state Canada CSIS courts blowback

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • OTTAWA — Canada’s foremost jurist on national security law has slammed CSIS for deliberately keeping the Federal Court of Canada “in the dark” about outsourcing its spying on Canadians abroad to foreign agencies, according to a redacted version of a classified court decision made public Friday.In a thundering rebuke, Federal Court Judge Richard Mosley said the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) purposely misled him when he granted it numerous warrants beginning in 2009 to intercept the electronic communications of unidentified Canadians abroad suspected as domestic security threats.“This was a breach of the duty of candour owed by the service and their legal advisers to the court,” Mosley said in his Further Reasons for Order.CSIS also mistakenly assigned powers to the warrants that the court never authorized and which do not exist in law, he said.“It is clear that the exercise of the court’s warrant issuing authority has been used as protective cover for activities that it has not authorized,” Mosley wrote.Furthermore, tasking foreign security intelligence services to spy on Canadians overseas “carries the risk of the detention of or other harm to a Canadian person based on that information.“Given the unfortunate history of information sharing with foreign agencies over the past decade and the reviews conducted by several royal commissions, there can be no question that the Canadian agencies are aware of those hazards. It appears to me that they are using the warrants as authorization to assume those risks.”
  • Legal observers say this case and Mosley’s scolding will harm CSIS’s credibility and raise questions about whether the service has broken Criminal Code provisions dealing with the invasion of privacy.“When a judge says the government breached its duty of candour that is a very big ‘ouch’ moment,” Craig Forcese, a national security law scholar at the University of Ottawa, wrote in a recent blog posting.At the time the first warrants were issued, CSIS told the court “on clearly stated grounds” that the electronic intercepts would be carried out from within Canada by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the country’s foreign signals intelligence spy service.CSIS is largely restricted to domestic spying operations. If an investigation involves the use of intrusive techniques, such as electronic intercepts, Section 21 of the CSIS Act requires it to obtain a warrant approved by a Federal Court judge to guard the Charter right to a reasonable expectation of privacy.CSEC, meanwhile, is not allowed to spy on Canadians anywhere unless it is to provide technical and operational assistance to federal law enforcement and security agencies such as CSIS.And the federal court only has jurisdiction to authorize warrants under the CSIS Act as long as the communications in question are intercepted within Canada.
  • Yet once the so-called 30-08 warrants were approved by the court, CSEC, on behalf of CSIS, turned around and handed the jobs to one or more of its partners in the “Five Eyes” intelligence-gathering alliance between Canada, the United States, Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand.Mosley found out about the situation late this summer and summoned CSIS, CSEC and government officials and lawyers to court to explain themselves. The public version of his reasons for order was released Friday.
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  • Some excerpts:• “I am satisfied that a decision was made by CSIS officials in consultation with their legal advisers to strategically omit information in applications for 30-08 warrants about their intention to seek the assistance of the foreign partners. As a result, the court was led to believe that all of the interception activity would take place in or under the control of Canada.”• “The principle of comity between nations that implies the acceptance of foreign laws and procedures when Canadian officials are operating abroad ends where clear violations of international law and human rights begin. In tasking the other members of the Five Eyes to intercept the communications of the Canadian targets, CSIS and CSEC officials knew ... this would involve the breach of international law by the requested second parties.”• “There is nothing in any of the material that I have read ... that persuades me that it was the intent of Parliament to give the service authority to engage the collection resources of the second party allies to intercept the private communications of Canadians.”• “It must be made clear, in any grant of a 30-08 warrant, that the warrant does not authorize the interception of the communications of a Canadian person by any foreign service on behalf of the service either directly or through the assistance of CSEC.”• “There must be no further suggestion in any reference to the use of second party assets by CSIS and CSEC, or their legal advisers, that it is being done under the authority of a (section) 21 warrant issued by this court.”
  • Forcese, meanwhile, raises some intriguing questions:• If Five Eyes assistance was not authorized, and CSEC and CSIS nevertheless sought it, are they still protected from Criminal Code, Part VI (invasion of privacy) culpability? Culpability, he writes, is only avoided where the intercept is lawfully authorized. If the parameters of the warrant were disregarded, does that vitiate the lawful access?• If CSEC and CSIS called on Five Eyes agencies to intercept communications, was the intercept still territorial, thus satisfying the international law concerns raised in the two warrant applications?“Outsourcing an international violation does not diminish state responsibility for that international violation. In a different context, that would be like asking bounty hunters to do your kidnapping of fugitives on the territory of a foreign state. Still a violation of international law.”CSIS has a choice, Forcese concludes: “Conduct extraterritorial spying without recourse to the courts, at risk of ultimately being called to account under domestic law, or honour the federal court’s construal of international law — and CSIS’s jurisdiction — and pull in its truly international surveillance operations, potentially blinding the country’s chief security intelligence agency.
  • Paul Merrell on 27 Dec 13
     
    Canadian Security Intelligence Service is in politically explosive deep doo-doo. 
Paul Merrell

Obama to propose legislation to protect firms that share cyberthreat data - The Washing... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...4-bcfb-059ec7a93ddc_story.html

surveillance state U.S. digital-privacy legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • President Obama plans to announce legislation Tuesday that would shield companies from lawsuits for sharing computer threat data with the government in an effort to prevent cyber­attacks. On the heels of a destructive attack at Sony Pictures Entertainment and major breaches at JPMorgan Chase and retail chains, Obama is intent on capitalizing on the heightened sense of urgency to improve the security of the nation’s networks, officials said. “He’s been doing everything he can within his executive authority to move the ball on this,” said a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss legislation that has not yet been released. “We’ve got to get something in place that allows both industry and government to work more closely together.”
  • The legislation is part of a broader package, to be sent to Capitol Hill on Tuesday, that includes measures to help protect consumers and students against ­cyberattacks and to give law enforcement greater authority to combat cybercrime. The provision’s goal is to “enshrine in law liability protection for the private sector for them to share specific information — cyberthreat indicators — with the government,” the official said. Some analysts questioned the need for such legislation, saying there are adequate measures in place to enable sharing between companies and the government and among companies.
  • “We think the current information-sharing regime is adequate,” said Mark Jaycox, legislative analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy group. “More companies need to use it, but the idea of broad legal immunity isn’t needed right now.” The administration official disagreed. The lack of such immunity is what prevents many companies from greater sharing of data with the government, the official said. “We have heard that time and time again,” the official said. The proposal, which builds on a 2011 administration bill, grants liability protection to companies that provide indicators of cyberattacks and threats to the Department of Homeland Security.
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  • But in a provision likely to raise concerns from privacy advocates, the administration wants to require DHS to share that information “in as near real time as possible” with other government agencies that have a cybersecurity mission, the official said. Those include the National Security Agency, the Pentagon’s ­Cyber Command, the FBI and the Secret Service. “DHS needs to take an active lead role in ensuring that unnecessary personal information is not shared with intelligence authorities,” Jaycox said. The debates over government surveillance prompted by disclosures from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden have shown that “the agencies already have a tremendous amount of unnecessary information,” he said.
  • The administration official stressed that the legislation will require companies to remove unnecessary personal information before furnishing it to the government in order to qualify for liability protection. It also will impose limits on the use of the data for cybersecurity crimes and instances in which there is a threat of death or bodily harm, such as kidnapping, the official said. And it will require DHS and the attorney general to develop guidelines for the federal government’s use and retention of the data. It will not authorize a company to take offensive cyber-measures to defend itself, such as “hacking back” into a server or computer outside its own network to track a breach. The bill also will provide liability protection to companies that share data with private-sector-developed organizations set up specifically for that purpose. Called information sharing and analysis organizations, these groups often are set up by particular industries, such as banking, to facilitate the exchange of data and best practices.
  • Efforts to pass information-sharing legislation have stalled in the past five years, blocked primarily by privacy concerns. The package also contains provisions that would allow prosecution for the sale of botnets or access to armies of compromised computers that can be used to spread malware, would criminalize the overseas sale of stolen U.S. credit card and bank account numbers, would expand federal law enforcement authority to deter the sale of spyware used to stalk people or commit identity theft, and would give courts the authority to shut down botnets being used for criminal activity, such as denial-of-service attacks.
  • It would reaffirm that federal racketeering law applies to cybercrimes and amends the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by ensuring that “insignificant conduct” does not fall within the scope of the statute. A third element of the package is legislation Obama proposed Monday to help protect consumers and students against cyberattacks. The theft of personal financial information “is a direct threat to the economic security of American families, and we’ve got to stop it,” Obama said. The plan, unveiled in a speech at the Federal Trade Commission, would require companies to notify customers within 30 days after the theft of personal information is discovered. Right now, data breaches are handled under a patchwork of state laws that the president said are confusing and costly to enforce. Obama’s plan would streamline those into one clear federal standard and bolster requirements for companies to notify customers. Obama is proposing closing loopholes to make it easier to track down cybercriminals overseas who steal and sell identities. “The more we do to protect consumer information and privacy, the harder it is for hackers to damage our businesses and hurt our economy,” he said.
  • In October, Obama signed an order to protect consumers from identity theft by strengthening security features in credit cards and the terminals that process them. Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said there is concern that a federal standard would “preempt stronger state laws” about how and when companies have to notify consumers. The Student Digital Privacy Act would ensure that data entered would be used only for educational purposes. It would prohibit companies from selling student data to third-party companies for purposes other than education. Obama also plans to introduce a Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights. And the White House will host a summit on cybersecurity and consumer protection on Feb. 13 at Stanford University.
Paul Merrell

What GOP Senators Don't Understand About Iran | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

america.aljazeera.com/...not-understand-about-iran.html

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Iranian-nukes-myth Security Council Obama negotiations

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • There’s a charming naiveté to the open letter [PDF] by 47 Republican senators that condescendingly seeks to explain features of the U.S. constitutional system to Iran’s leaders that they otherwise “may not fully understand.” The missive warns that, with respect to “your nuclear negotiations with our government ... any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress” could be revoked by the next president “with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”
  • Beyond the amusing inaccuracies about U.S. parliamentary order, it seems there are some features of the nuclear negotiations that the signatory senators don’t fully understand — not only on the terms of the deal, but also on who would be party to an agreement. There are no negotiations on Iran’s “nuclear-weapons program” because the world’s intelligence agencies (including those of the U.S. and Israel) do not believe Iran is currently building nuclear weapons, nor has it made a strategic decision to use its civilian nuclear infrastructure to produce a bomb. An active Iranian nuclear-weapons program would render moot the current negotiations, because Iran would be in fundamental violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). As things stand, Tehran remains within the terms of the NPT, which allows nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, but monitors member states to prevent weaponization. Tehran and the IAEA remain in dispute over full compliance with all transparency requirements of the NPT, particularly over alleged previous research into weapons design. But Iran’s nuclear facilities remain under constant monitoring by international inspectors who certify that no nuclear material is being diverted.
  • The current negotiations are focused on strengthening verifiable safeguards against weaponization over-and-above those required by the NPT, yet the Republican-led Congress, egged on by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is warning that those goals are insufficient, and the terms and time-frame of the deal are unacceptable. The key element missing from the GOP Senators’ letter, however, is that the deal is not being negotiated between Iran and the United States; it is being negotiated between Iran and the P5+1 group, in which the U.S. is joined by Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China. Even if the U.S. is the key player in that group, the deal being pursued reflects an international consensus — the same consensus that has made sanctions against Iran so effective. This was likely in the mind of Iran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif, who dismissed the letter as “of no legal value” and a “propaganda ploy.” Zarif noted that the deal would indeed be an international agreement adopted by the U.N. Security Council, which a new administration would be obliged to uphold — and that any attempt by the White House or Congress to abrogate, unilaterally modify or impede such an agreement would be a breach of U.S. obligations. 
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Mar 15
     
    "Zarif noted that the deal would indeed be an international agreement adopted by the U.N. Security Council, which a new administration would be obliged to uphold - and that any attempt by the White House or Congress to abrogate, unilaterally modify or impede such an agreement would be a breach of U.S. obligations." Apparently, I was wrong. I thought Obama would work around the demand for Congressional input by letting the other P5+1 members ink the deal but the U.S. not signing. But a U.N. Security Council Resolution is even stronger medicine for the War Party, since the SC has the power to forbid economic sanctions as well. Take that, Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Boehner!
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Mar 15
     
    Could anything make it more clear that Netanyahu's speech to Congress was only to aid in his reelection in Israel? Israel has been briefed on the negotiations all along, so Netanyahu surely knew that the goal was a Security Council resolution that Congress could not affect. And while admittedly, the fact that it was a Security Council Resolution in the making was not widely known, are we to believe that the Speaker of the House of Representatives did not know that too? So are now not down to the entire spectacle of Netanyahu's speech being political, Netanyahu electioneering and Boehner mud-slinging the President?
Paul Merrell

The Mistral Affair: Breach of Contract or Hostile Act? | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...ir-breach-contract-hostile-act

war & peace Russia France NATO Ukraine Mistrals

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • On November 18th 2014 Sputnik news reported that the French government has denied access to the Russian training crew for the Mistral ship Vladivostok docked at St. Nazaire. The French Ministry of Defence denied knowledge of the action but their denial is in line with the French President’s continual habit of saying one thing and meaning another. The alarming question now has to be asked whether this is just a commercial breach of contract or a hostile act, because the French government has not just “failed” to deliver the first of the two Mistral ships contracted and paid for as the press reports state, it has refused to deliver them and will not unless certain conditions are met, political conditions, which have strategic importance for Russia and conditions that can never be met unless Russia surrenders its strategic position and its defence of the Ukrainians of the Donbass.
Gary Edwards

Senate Democrats Pushed for IRS Tea Party Snooping Before Criticizing It - Brian Walsh ... - 0 views

www.usnews.com/...snooping-before-criticizing-it

IRS IRS-gate

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 May 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 May 13
     
    Democrats caught red handed pushing the IRS to audit, harass and delay efforts to establish Constitutional Patriot and Jewish Homeland non profit groups.   The Democrats political efforts behind the IRS's blatant violation of these American citizens 4th Amendment Right to organize and assemble dates back to the 2009 Supreme Court decision known as "Citizens United". In "Citizens Untied", the court ruled that corporations are people, and thus are entitled to 1st Amendment Rights.  Including full participation and monetary contributions in political campaigns. this ruling was further confirmed when the Supreme Court overturned a century old Montana Law prohibiting corporate spending in that State's elections.   The "Citizens United" ruling so upset Obama and the Socialist Party that he publicly scolded the Supreme Court justices during a State of the Union address.  The Progressives rightfully feared that corporations would ppour "unregulated independent expenditures" into newly formed Tea Party Patriot based non profits.  Unable to overturn Citizens United, the Dems called on the IRS and a host of other government bureaucracies to block, harass and slow down the funding of their political opposition. this article exposes the same Dem clowns who are now crying foul as the same tyrants who kicked off the IRS led effort to slow down the Tea Party Patriot opposition movement.   How the Jewish Homeland groups got into the IRS gun sights is still a mystery, but one thing is known:  With the election of Obama in 2008, the IRS moved from targeting non profit Muslim Groups as possible terrorist funding organizations, to targeting Tea Party Patriot movements.  Maybe that's also when they took on Jewish Homeland groups?  excerpt: "With Washington gripped by a trio of exploding scandals this week - from Benghazi to government spying on news outlets to thug tactics by the Internal Revenue Service - Senate Democrats seem to be hoping that if they just yell lou
Paul Merrell

Brinkmanship in Syria boosts risk of regional war with Israel | News , Politics | THE D... - 0 views

www.dailystar.com.lb/...-regional-war-with-israel.ashx

war & peace Syria Israel missiles Russia Lebanon

shared by Paul Merrell on 19 May 13 - No Cached
  • The dangerous brinkmanship pitting Israel against the alliance of Iran, Syria and Hezbollah has brought the region closer to war than at any time since the end of the July-August 2006 conflict. A combination of bellicose rhetoric, aggressive acts, warnings and threats set against the backdrop of Syria’s grueling civil war and its critical implications for the Middle East has revived the era of miscalculation after nearly seven years of calm and restraint, with potentially disastrous consequences, diplomats and observers say. In the past two weeks, Israel has confirmed its unprecedented policy of airstrikes against suspected Hezbollah arms caches in Syria with two more attacks in swift succession after the inaugural bombing in January. Syria has warned of an “automatic response” should Israel stage a fourth strike.
  • Israel upped the stakes by using Thursday’s edition of the New York Times to deliver a clear warning to Syrian President Bashar Assad that he would “risk forfeiting his regime” if he fulfilled the vow of retaliation to any further airstrikes. That same warning was delivered by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon to CIA Director John Brennan Thursday.
  • Israel has sensed a window of opportunity opened by the war in Syria to attack Hezbollah arms supplies stockpiled in Syria, calculating that there will be no reaction while the Assad regime is fighting for its existence. This is an unprecedented act. Since the late 1990s, Israel has watched Hezbollah’s rocket and missile arsenal grow in size and quality but never risked targeting the caches in Syria in case it sparked an escalation. So far, Israel’s calculation has paid off. But the tolerance threshold grows a little closer with each fresh airstrike. The Syrian authorities have warned that orders have been given to the army to launch an “automatic” – if unspecified – retaliation should the Israelis launch another airstrike into Syria.
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  • Israel’s defense establishment appears to be torn between wanting to see Assad gone as this would deliver a blow to Iran and Hezbollah and wanting Assad to remain in power because the potential alternative to the present regime could be militant Islamists. Another option is to attempt to shoot down an Israeli jet in Lebanese airspace. All three Israeli airstrikes against sites west of Damascus were conducted from the Lebanese side of the border using long-range standoff missiles. The Israeli Air Force used a similar technique in October 2003 when it attacked the Ain es-Saheb training camp for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command which was located 20 kilometers east of the Lebanese border and in the same general area as the more recent strikes.
  • Following the Israeli air raid against the suspected nuclear reactor near Deir al-Zor in 2007, Syria received newer missiles from Russia, mainly short- to medium-range systems such as the Pantsir S1 and the Buk-M2. Syria is currently seeking to acquire the long-range S-300 system from Russia. Reports suggest that Syria has been paying for the missiles and that they could be delivered in the coming three months.
  • If an Israeli jet was shot down over Lebanon, the Lebanese can argue with justification that Israel repeatedly breaches Lebanese sovereignty with its illegal overflights (so far this year at a rate roughly double the same period in 2012). Israel does not hesitate to shoot down any aircraft deemed hostile that breaches Israeli airspace, so why should Lebanon not do the same, either directly by Hezbollah (if it possesses the capabilities) or with the assistance of Syrian air defense units? On the other hand, the downing of an Israeli jet would shatter Israel’s long-standing “red line” concerning the use of advanced antiaircraft weapons in Lebanon.
Gary Edwards

Columbine Survivor Pens Bold Open Letter to Obama Rejecting Gun Control: 'Whose Side Ar... - 0 views

www.theblaze.com/...-control-whose-side-are-you-on

Gun-Control second-amendment Evan-Todd

shared by Gary Edwards on 21 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 21 Feb 13
     
    Amazing letter from Columbine survivor, Evan Todd, to Obama, explaining why Obama's gun control proposals are non sense. Evan Todd's open letter to Obama, below. - Mr. President, As a student who was shot and wounded during the Columbine massacre, I have a few thoughts on the current gun debate. In regards to your gun control initiatives: Universal Background Checks First, a universal background check will have many devastating effects. It will arguably have the opposite impact of what you propose. If adopted, criminals will know that they can not pass a background check legally, so they will resort to other avenues. With the conditions being set by this initiative, it will create a large black market for weapons and will support more criminal activity and funnel additional money into the hands of thugs, criminals, and people who will do harm to American citizens. Second, universal background checks will create a huge bureaucracy that will cost an enormous amount of tax payers dollars and will straddle us with more debt. We cannot afford it now, let alone create another function of government that will have a huge monthly bill attached to it. Third, is a universal background check system possible without universal gun registration? If so, please define it for us. Universal registration can easily be used for universal confiscation. I am not at all implying that you, sir, would try such a measure, but we do need to think about our actions through the lens of time. It is not impossible to think that a tyrant, to the likes of Mao, Castro, Che, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and others, could possibly rise to power in America. It could be five, ten, twenty, or one hundred years from now - but future generations have the natural right to protect themselves from tyrannical government just as much as we currently do. It is safe to assume that this liberty that our forefathers secured has been a thorn in the side of would-be tyrants ever since the Second Amendmen
Gary Edwards

A brief bit of history concerning the posting on the "Liberty in the Breach" blog - 1 views

The content for the Liberty in the Breach (http://goo.gl/AAFJ9) blog is posted directly from a Diigo.com group called "Socialism and the End of the American Dream". So yes, this groups bookmarking...

started by Gary Edwards on 08 Jul 13 no follow-up yet
Paul Merrell

Mass Surveillance and the Right to Privacy: Adding Nuance to the Schrems Case | Just Se... - 0 views

www.justsecurity.org/...t-max-schrems-case-safe-harbor

surveillance state EU ECJ Schrems litigation data privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Oct 15 - No Cached
  • Last week’s post by Megan Graham is certainly a welcome contribution in explaining the implications of the Max Schrems case by the European Union Court of Justice, and specifically how it relates to the Safe Harbor arrangement between the US and the EU. Let me add a different perspective: Irrespective of its consequences for Safe Harbor, last week’s ruling is hugely important on a more general level, namely for the understanding of what the right to privacy entails in Europe and what this means for mass surveillance. Through its ruling in Max Schrems the EU’s highest court has established that: Mere access by public authorities to confidential or group-specific communications data constitutes an intrusion into the right to privacy, even without any further processing of that data; and While indiscriminate intrusion into “metadata” may constitute a particularly serious intrusion into the right to privacy, access to “content” data will affect the essence of the right to privacy.
  • These findings were made under Article 7 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, a broad provision on the right to respect for one’s private life. This provision of the EU Charter, which is a part of the foundational treaty framework of the European Union, is almost identical to Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty legally binding for broader Europe and routinely a part of domestic legal orders. It remains to be seen whether the guardian of the latter framework, the European Court of Human Rights, will also be courageous enough to determine that indiscriminate mass surveillance that provides access to “content” data breaches the essential core of the right to privacy. The highest EU court already took that bold step. One of the most important implications of identifying government access to content as breaching the essence of the right to privacy, is that it negates the need for a proportionality assessment. Measures that compromise the essence of privacy have already crossed a red line, and there is no need for any further “balancing” between privacy and security. Therefore, the Max Schrems ruling is a huge blow to many of the current methods of electronic mass surveillance, including those practiced by the US and several European countries (including the United Kingdom).
  • Several additional points from my earlier post in Verfassungsblog about this case are also worth noting. First, the EU court did not really dwell on the separate Article 8 provision of the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights, concerning the right to the protection of personal data. This was perhaps because that provision is triggered by the “processing” of data, while the general privacy (Article 7) impact comes into play through mere “access.” Another point is that while it was easy to establish the jurisdiction of the EU court over data transfers from Europe to Facebook’s servers in the US, it may be much harder to bring a case before that court concerning “upstream” methods of mass surveillance, such as the NSA’s tapping of transatlantic fiber optic telecommunications cables. Perhaps most importantly, the substantive ruling in the Schrems case is formulated in a way that it would apply to any method of mass surveillance that gives public authorities access to the content of ordinary people’s private communications, including communications intended for a group of people but not for the authorities. Hence, the ruling is a major contribution as to what the right to privacy substantively means in Europe.
Paul Merrell

Wells Fargo Fined Over Secret Sales Policy to Open Fake Customer Accounts - nsnbc inter... - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...to-open-fake-customer-accounts

banksters Wells-Fargo CFPB fraud data-breach student-loans

shared by Paul Merrell on 09 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) has fined Wells Fargo for $100 million based on fraudulent customer account practices. An additional $85 million is to be paid to the city of Los Angeles in California, along with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
  • Last year Wells Fargo was sued by employees (current and former) and customers all across the nation for setting up “unwanted accounts, unwarranted fees”. According to the lawsuit, this was “the largest California-based bank violated state and federal laws by misusing confidential information and failing to notify customers when personal information was breached.” Using “aggressive tactics” to coerce new customers, Wells Fargo made it “difficult to correct the mistakes” made by Wells Fargo and return fees to customers because of “high-pressure sales culture set unrealistic quotas, spurring employees to engage in fraudulent conduct to keep their jobs and boost the company’s profits.” Over the course of an extended period of time, “Wells Fargo employees secretly opened unauthorized accounts to hit sales targets and receive bonuses.” There were 1.5 million accounts opened without the authorization of customers and 500,000 credit cards accounts to boot. Wells Fargo has consistently blames “a few rogue employees. Five hundred employees were terminated, according to a Wells Fargo spokesperson. There was no mention of rescinding of bonuses paid to those employees, and there is no clear evidence that executive’s payouts totaling $155 million for “performance based compensation” for 2012 through 2013 was returned to the bank.
  • Those bonuses were administered based on the fraudulent accounts opened without customer approval. In a statement, Wells Fargo expressed belated regret and a sudden desire to “take responsibility for any instances where customers may have received a product that they did not request.” The training that caused this problem in the first place was a cross-selling strategy called “Going For Gr-Eight” which is a brochure for employees to push banking products onto households of existing customers to increase fee potential and overall profitability. Wells Fargo “staffers, fearing disciplinary action from managers, begged friends and family members to open ghost accounts” and forged signatures “and falsified phone numbers” of customers who did not want to open an account. This practice drove Wells Fargo’s financial success with an estimated “26% of the company’s revenue was from fee income, including those from credit and debit card accounts, trusts and investments.” The bank not only stole money from customers but “also damage their credit scores” and put some into collections to garner fees “for unauthorized accounts went unpaid”. In case of a complaining customer, Wells Fargo would “sandbag” their customers; meaning “failing to open accounts when requested by customers, and instead accumulating a number of account applications to be opened at a later date.”
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  • Another devious tactic Wells Fargo employed was “bundling” or “incorrectly informing customers that certain products are available only in packages with other products such as additional accounts, insurance, annuities, and retirement plans.” This is not an isolated incident. Wells Fargo has fired 5,300 employees for this same “illegal behavior”. Beyond this questionable business practice, Wells Fargo was previously recognized by the CFPB for misapplying student loan payments in order to increase fee income. In this case, Wells Fargo was fined $3.6 million and forced to pay $410,000 to student loan borrowers for restitution.
Gary Edwards

George Soros Hacked, Connections To Global 'Dissident Groups' Revealed - 1 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...219531

Soros New-World-Order Globalist Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • The documents are from multiple departments of Soros’ organizations. Soros’ the Open Society Foundations seems to be the group with the most documents in the leak. Files come from sections representing almost all geographical regions in the world, from the USA, to Europe, Eurasia, Asia, Latin, America, Africa, the World Bank “the President’s Office”, as well as an unknown entity named SOUK. As the Daily Caller notes, there are documents dating from at least 2008 to 2016. Documents in the leak range from research papers such as “EUROPEAN CRISIS: Key Developments of the Past 48 Hours” focusing on the impact of the refugee crisis, to a document titled “The Ukraine debate in Germany“, to an update specific financials of grants. They reveal work plans, strategies, priorities and other activities by Soros, and include reports on European elections, migration and asylum in Europe.
  • Gary Edwards on 20 Aug 16
     
    "Last Thursday, as Bloomberg was gingerly setting the stage, and the preemptive damage control for what was about to be a historic leak, it did everything in its power to deflect attention from the key topic, namely that prominent liberal billionaire and Hillary supporter, George Soros had been hacked and countless documents were about to be leaked, and instead focus on the alleged identity of the hackers, the so-called DCLeaks, which - like all other "experts" - it positioned as yet another Russian government-sponsored operation. To this we had one retort: "Far more important than the inane speculation on the hackers' identity, is the now official disclosure - and warning - that Soros himself was hacked. Bloomberg writes that Open Society Foundations, the Soros group, reported the breach to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in June, according to spokeswoman Laura Silber, who added that an investigation by a security firm found the intrusion was limited to an intranet system used by board members, staff and foundation partners." And, sure enough, over the weekend that is precisely what DCLeaks revealed as it disclosed over two thousand internal documents from groups run by George Soros were leaked online Saturday after hackers infiltrated the groups. The 2,576 files were released by DCLeaks, a website which claims to be "launched by the American hacktivists who respect and appreciate freedom of speech, human rights and government of the people.""
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Aug 16
     
    The leaked documents are here. http://soros.dcleaks.com/
Paul Merrell

Democratic Pundits Downplay Serious Ethical Issues Raised by the Clinton Foundation - 0 views

theintercept.com/...clinton-foundation-spin

Auction 2016 Hillary Clinton-Foundation corruption bribery

shared by Paul Merrell on 27 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • The Associated Press story this week revealing that as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton frequently met with donors to the Clinton Foundation, set off a firestorm in the media. Many Democrats and sympathetic pundits are criticizing the article — and have made the sweeping claim that, contrary to many deeply reported investigations, there is no evidence that well-heeled backers of the foundation received favorable treatment from the State Department. While there are some legitimate criticisms of the AP story — its focus, for instance, on a Nobel Peace Prize winner meeting with Clinton distracts from the thesis of the piece — it is nonetheless a substantive investigation based on calendars that the State Department has fought to withhold from the public. The AP took the agency to court to obtain a partial release of the meeting logs. Other commentators took issue with a tweet promoting the AP piece, which they said might confuse readers because the AP story reflected private sector meetings, not overall meetings. But in challenging the overall credibility of the AP story, Clinton surrogates and allies are going well beyond a reasoned critique in an effort to downplay the serious ethical issues raised by Clinton Foundation activities.
  • The assertions above obscure the problems unearthed through years of investigative reporting on the foundation. Journalist David Sirota, who has reported extensively on the Clinton Foundation, rounded up a sample of the stories that provide a window into Clinton Foundation issues: The Washington Post found that two months after Secretary Clinton encouraged the Russian government to approve a $3.7 billion deal with Boeing, the aerospace company announced a $900,000 donation to the Clinton Foundation. The Wall Street Journal found that Clinton made an “unusual intervention” to announce a legal settlement with UBS, after which the Swiss bank increased its donations to, and involvement with, the Clinton Foundation. The New York Times reported that a Russian company assumed control of major uranium reserves in a deal that required State Department approval, as the chairman of the company involved in the transaction donated $2.35 million to the Clinton Foundation.
  • The Intercept has also reported on the Clinton Foundation and the conduct of the State Department under Clinton. Leaked government documents obtained by The Intercept revealed that the Moroccan government lobbied Clinton aggressively to influence her and other officials on the Moroccan military occupation of Western Sahara, which holds some of the world’s largest reserves of phosphate, a lucrative export for the kingdom. As part of its strategy for influence, the Moroccan government and companies controlled by the kingdom donated to the Bill Clinton presidential library, the Clinton Foundation, and hired individuals associated with the Clinton political network. Despite a statement by the Obama administration that suggested it would reverse the previous Bush administration support for the Moroccan government and would back a U.N.-negotiated settlement for the conflict in Western Sahara, Clinton announced there would be “no change” in policy — and has gone on to praise the Moroccan government’s human rights record. As recently as Monday, we learned that after being denied an official meeting with the State Department, Peabody Energy, the worlds largest coal company, used a consultant who donated heavily to the Clinton Foundation to back channel and attempt to set up a meeting with Clinton via her aide Huma Abedin. The consultant, Joyce Aboussie, wrote that “It should go without saying that the Peabody folks” reached out to her because of her “relationship with the Clinton’s [sic].” Peabody and Aboussie have declined to comment, and it is unclear if the meeting took place.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • There may be many other potential influence-peddling stories, but the State Department has not released all of the emails from Clinton’s private server and other meeting log documents, while redacting identifying information that could shed light on other stories. For example, Mother Jones and The Intercept have reported that Clinton used the State Department to promote fracking development across the globe, and in particular her agency acted to benefit particular companies such as a Chevron project in Bulgaria and ExxonMobil’s efforts in Poland. Both ExxonMobil and Chevron are major donors to the Clinton Foundation. The release of more meeting log documents and emails would certainly reveal a better picture of potential influence.
  • Earlier this year, in similar fashion to the questions raised about the Clinton Foundation, Democrats in Arizona raised influence peddling concerns regarding the reported $1 million donation from the Saudi Arabian government to the McCain Institute for International Leadership, a nonprofit group closely affiliated with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. As chairman of the Armed Services Committee, McCain oversees a range of issues concerning Saudi Arabia, including arms sales. But none of the pundits rushing to the defense of the Clinton Foundation defended McCain. In fact, the more Clinton’s allies have worked to defend big money donations to the Clinton Foundation, the more closely they resemble the right-wing principles they once denounced. In one telling argument in defense of the Clinton Foundation, Media Matters, another group run by David Brock, argued this week that there was “no evidence of ethics breaches” because there was no explicit quid pro quo cited by the AP. The Media Matters piece mocked press figures for focusing on the “optics” of corruption surrounding the foundation. Such a standard is quite a reversal for the group. In a piece published by Media Matters only two years ago, the organization criticized conservatives for focusing only on quid pro quo corruption — the legal standard used to decide the Citizens United and McCutcheon Supreme Court decisions — calling such a narrow focus a “new perspective of campaign finance” that dismisses “concerns about institutional corruption in politics.” The piece notes that ethics laws concerning the role of money in politics follow a standard, set forth since the Watergate scandal, in which even the appearance, or in other words, the “optics” of corruption, is cause for concern.
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