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Paul Merrell

Activists send the Senate 6 million faxes to oppose cyber bill - CBS News - 0 views

www.cbsnews.com/...ion-faxes-to-oppose-cyber-bill

surveillance state CISA legislation faxes Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 06 Aug 15 - No Cached
  • Activists worried about online privacy are sending Congress a message with some old-school technology: They're sending faxes -- more than 6.2 million, they claim -- to express opposition to the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA).Why faxes? "Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn't understand modern technology," according to the campaign Fax Big Brother. The week-long campaign was organized by the nonpartisan Electronic Frontier Foundation, the group Access and Fight for the Future, the activist group behind the major Internet protests that helped derail a pair of anti-piracy bills in 2012. It also has the backing of a dozen groups like the ACLU, the American Library Association, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and others.
  • CISA aims to facilitate information sharing regarding cyberthreats between the government and the private sector. The bill gained more attention following the massive hack in which the records of nearly 22 million people were stolen from government computers."The ability to easily and quickly share cyber attack information, along with ways to counter attacks, is a key method to stop them from happening in the first place," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who helped introduce CISA, said in a statement after the hack. Senate leadership had planned to vote on CISA this week before leaving for its August recess. However, the bill may be sidelined for the time being as the Republican-led Senate puts precedent on a legislative effort to defund Planned Parenthood.Even as the bill was put on the backburner, the grassroots campaign to stop it gained steam. Fight for the Future started sending faxes to all 100 Senate offices on Monday, but the campaign really took off after it garnered attention on the website Reddit and on social media. The faxed messages are generated by Internet users who visit faxbigbrother.com or stopcyberspying.com -- or who simply send a message via Twitter with the hashtag #faxbigbrother. To send all those faxes, Fight for the Future set up a dedicated server and a dozen phone lines and modems they say are capable of sending tens of thousands of faxes a day.
  • Fight for the Future told CBS News that it has so many faxes queued up at this point, that it may take months for Senate offices to receive them all, though the group is working on scaling up its capability to send them faster. They're also limited by the speed at which Senate offices can receive them.
  • Paul Merrell on 06 Aug 15
     
    From an Fight For the Future mailing: "Here's the deal: yesterday the Senate delayed its expected vote on CISA, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act that would let companies share your private information--like emails and medical records--with the government. "The delay is good news; but it's a delay, not a victory. "We just bought some precious extra time to fight CISA, but we need to use it to go big like we did with SOPA or this bill will still pass. Even if we stop it in September, they'll try again after that. "The truth is that right now, things are looking pretty grim. Democrats and Republicans have been holding closed-door meetings to work out a deal to pass CISA quickly when they return from recess. "Right before the expected Senate vote on CISA, the Obama Administration endorsed the bill, which means if Congress passes it, the White House will definitely sign it.  "We've stalled and delayed CISA and bills like it nearly half a dozen times, but this month could be our last chance to stop it for good." See also http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/125953876003/senate-fails-to-advance-cisa-before-recess-amid (;) http://www.cbsnews.com/news/activists-send-the-senate-6-million-faxes-to-oppose-cyber-bill/ (;) http://www.npr.org/2015/08/04/429386027/privacy-advocates-to-senate-cyber-security-bill (.)
Paul Merrell

CISPA is back! - 0 views

www.faxbigbrother.com

surveillance state legislation CISA digital-privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 28 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • OPERATION: Fax Big Brother Congress is rushing toward a vote on CISA, the worst spying bill yet. CISA would grant sweeping legal immunity to giant companies like Facebook and Google, allowing them to do almost anything they want with your data. In exchange, they'll share even more of your personal information with the government, all in the name of "cybersecurity." CISA won't stop hackers — Congress is stuck in 1984 and doesn't understand modern technology. So this week we're sending them thousands of faxes — technology that is hopefully old enough for them to understand. Stop CISA. Send a fax now!
  • (Any tweet w/ #faxbigbrother will get faxed too!) Your email is only shown in your fax to Congress. We won't add you to any mailing lists.
  • CISA: the dirty deal between government and corporate giants. It's the dirty deal that lets much of government from the NSA to local police get your private data from your favorite websites and lets them use it without due process. The government is proposing a massive bribe—they will give corporations immunity for breaking virtually any law if they do so while providing the NSA, DHS, DEA, and local police surveillance access to everyone's data in exchange for getting away with crimes, like fraud, money laundering, or illegal wiretapping. Specifically it incentivizes companies to automatically and simultaneously transfer your data to the DHS, NSA, FBI, and local police with all of your personally-indentifying information by giving companies legal immunity (notwithstanding any law), and on top of that, you can't use the Freedom of Information Act to find out what has been shared.
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  • The NSA and members of Congress want to pass a "cybersecurity" bill so badly, they’re using the recent hack of the Office of Personnel Management as justification for bringing CISA back up and rushing it through. In reality, the OPM hack just shows that the government has not been a good steward of sensitive data and they need to institute real security measures to fix their problems. The truth is that CISA could not have prevented the OPM hack, and no Senator could explain how it could have. Congress and the NSA are using irrational hysteria to turn the Internet into a place where the government has overly broad, unchecked powers. Why Faxes? Since 2012, online and civil liberties groups and 30,000+ sites have driven more than 2.6 million emails and hundreds of thousands of calls, tweets and more to Congress opposing overly broad cybersecurity legislation. Congress has tried to pass CISA in one form or another 4 times, and they were beat back every time by people like you. It's clear Congress is completely out of touch with modern technology, so this week, as Congress rushes toward a vote on CISA, we are going to send them thousands of faxes, a technology from the 1980s that is hopefully antiquated enough for them to understand. Sending a fax is super easy — you can use this page to send a fax. Any tweet with the hashtag #faxbigbrother will get turned into a fax to Congress too, so what are you waiting for? Click here to send a fax now!
Paul Merrell

CNN apologizes for commentator who called WikiLeaks founder a 'pedophile' | McClatchy DC - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...article124566504.html

WIkileaks Assange libel Dark-State harrassment

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • In fact, the pedophile allegation has little to do with Assange’s plight that has kept him in the embassy in London, which involves incidents in Stockholm in the summer of 2010.
  • Rather, it is a bizarre tale involving a Houston-based dating website and its global and well-funded efforts to discredit Assange around the globe. The byzantine saga involves disconnected telephones and mystery websites. The website, toddandclare.com, launched and ramped up its efforts against Assange during the U.S. presidential campaign, as WikiLeaks released hacked emails related to the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.Whoever is behind the dating site has marshaled significant resources to target Assange, enough to gain entry into a United Nations body, operate in countries in Europe, North America and the Caribbean, conduct surveillance on Assange’s lawyer in London, obtain the fax number of Canada’s prime minister and seek to prod a police inquiry in the Bahamas.The dating site’s campaign sought to thwart WikiLeaks’ efforts and discredit Assange, who played a role in a presidential campaign season that deeply divided the U.S. electorate and illuminated Russia as a major cyber adversary of the U.S. government.One part of toddandclare’s two-pronged campaign put a megaphone to unproven charges that Assange made contact with a young Canadian girl in the Bahamas through the internet with the intention of molesting her. The second part sought to entangle him in a plan to receive $1 million from the Russian government.
  • WikiLeaks claims the dating site is “a highly suspicious and likely fabricated” company. In turn, the company has lashed out at Assange and “his despicable activities against American national security,” and warned journalists to “check with your libel lawyers first before printing anything that could impact or endanger innocent people’s lives.”For nearly two months after the October allegations, toddandclare.com went off line. But it recently reappeared, repeating charges about the 8-year-old Canadian girl. The website did not immediately respond Thursday to a new query from McClatchy, and no respondent in the past has given a name or allowed telephone contact.The online company paints itself as all-American. Online material says its founders, Todd and Clare Hammond, “are an average American couple from Michigan, who met in the eighth grade.” In 2011, the company says, the Christian couple started an email dating service, and “have married 3,000 couples to date.” Their online network began in 2015, and a statement it filed to a U.N. body says it has “100,000+ female singles” in six countries. The company’s operating address is a warehouse loading dock in Houston. Its mail goes to a Houston drop box. Its phone numbers no longer work. WikiLeaks says Texas officials tell it the entity is not registered there either under toddandclare.com or a parent company, T&C Network Solutions.A person who answered emails to the website in November declined to identify him or herself.
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  • The people behind toddandclare.com persuaded a U.N. body known as the Global Compact to give it status as a participant in May, and it submitted an eight-page report to the U.N. group Oct. 4 carefully laying out its allegations against Assange. The firm was delisted by the U.N. body eight days later amid controversy over its claims. The report was later taken off the internet. An Australian lawyer, Melinda Taylor, said the report’s precise language raised additional suspicions at WikiLeaks, where she assists Assange in human rights litigation.“This is not a report that’s been drafted by a dating agency. It’s highly legalistic and very structured. It’s the language of someone who has drafted complex legal submissions,” she said.Under Todd Hammond’s name, the report alleged that Assange’s Swedish lawyer had reached out in June to offer Assange’s services on a campaign against rape in exchange for an undisclosed amount of bitcoin. It said the two sides held two videoconferences.Then came the bombshell: It said the company had ended ties with Assange following “pedophile crimes” he had committed in the Bahamas in late September. It charged that the victim was the 8-year-old daughter of a Canadian couple on a monthlong yachting vacation. The father went to police in Nassau on Sept. 28, the report claimed, charging that his family held video and chat logs showing Assange “internet grooming” the child and “propositioning the 8-year-old juvenile ‘to perform oral and anal sex acts.’ ”It said Assange made a connection to the child’s 22-year-old sister, who was a client of the online dating site, from his refuge in London, eventually gaining access to the young girl.
  • An assistant commissioner for the Royal Bahamas Police Force, Stephen Dean, said “there is no investigation” into any such incident and that the police have received no evidence that such an incident occurred.“We got a phone call of someone giving us some information. But we never had a face-to-face. It could have been a hoax,” Dean said. “We don’t know.”If someone were in possession of video or chat logs about a pedophile crime, he or she did not provide them to Bahamian police, Dean said, which he said would be odd: “If you have something so significant, I think you’d want to leave a report.”Assange’s Swedish lawyer, Per Samuelson, wrote to the U.N. body on Oct. 10 alleging that Hammond’s report against Assange was “entirely false” in all its facets and that he had had no contact with the dating site or Hammond.Even as authorities in the Bahamas dismissed the report, the dating site sent a fax Oct. 17 to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau saying the Canadian family had fled the Bahamas due to “anti-white, racist abuse by Bahamian police.”“Julian Assange ... has started a smear campaign to claim our dating company is behind an elaborate scam. It is fully to be expected. Pedophiles are devious and cunning,” the fax said.The company said it would “continue to protect the family’s identity, until either the (Royal Bahamas Police Force) conduct a proper investigation, or hell freezes over. Whichever comes first.”
  • The fax was signed, “The Todd and Clare Team,” and left no way to contact the firm.While the founders of toddandclare.com say they’ve been in the matchmaking business since 2011, their internet presence dates only to September 2015 and really got going only early last year. Those who have done work for the company say they were kept at arm’s length.By summer, in the run-up to what many expected to be an “October surprise” from WikiLeaks to make an impact on the U.S. election, toddandclare.com began moving against Assange in multiple countries simultaneously. The DNC and a cyber-threat intelligence firm it had hired, CrowdStrike, were already fingering Russia as behind the hacks that would provide the fodder for WikiLeaks. They’d said in June that Russian hackers had access to DNC servers for about a year.A company representative, identifying herself as Hannah Hammond, emailed Assange’s Swedish and British legal agents offering $1 million for him to appear in a five-minute tongue-in-cheek television advertisement. In a subsequent exchange Sept. 19, the representative wrote that “the source of the $1,000,000 is the Russian government.”In a curious twist, she offered what she said were three facts about Assange’s London attorney that are “unknown to the public,” including details inside her home and an event in her son’s life, suggesting a capability to conduct surveillance.Taylor, the Assange lawyer, said the details appeared “to create the impression that the members of his team were under close surveillance and/or to bolster the bona fides of the claim that the offer was linked to a State. Its inclusion does appear quite menacing.”
  • A lawyer identifying himself only as “James” responded the next day, slamming the offer as an “elaborate scam designed to entrap” Assange and embarrass him for ties to Russia.The dating site representative sought to pull the veil off “James.”“Julian: We know it’s you writing. The offer expires at midnight, October 31st 2016,” she wrote back on Sept. 21, according to copies of the emails posted by WikiLeaks on its website.By early October, toddandclare.com went on the offensive. It filed a civil complaint in a British court against Assange, seeking 295 pounds sterling – about $359 – in damages because it said it could no longer use his services due to the “child sex offenses in Nassau.”The suit, said Taylor, Assange’s lawyer, “seems to be designed to evade defamation law in the U.K. They’ve put highly noxious information knowing that it would be made public.”The global tussle between the online dating company and WikiLeaks went public in mid-October when the anti-secrecy group voiced public doubt on whether toddandclare.com actually existed, or served only as a vehicle to attack Assange.
  • The announcement opened the gates for a disparate crew of internet sleuths – some motivated by hatred of Clinton and others impelled by support for WikiLeaks – to probe into the history of toddandclare.com, suspicious that the dating site might be an undercover operation with links to the Clinton campaign.Posting their findings on the discussion websites like Reddit.com, they unearthed some curious coincidences. A perusal into the archives of the internet revealed that the Hammonds had once occupied a San Francisco building later rented to a company, Premise Data, whose co-founder has ties to Clinton and her top supporters.Moreover, a telephone number once registered to a Todd Hammond later was registered to a former Premise employee, Aaron Dunn, although with a different area code.Premise co-founder David Soloff said such findings could only be coincidences.“I want to reiterate that Premise has no connection with this case. And beyond confirming that Aaron Dunn worked at Premise until 2014, I don’t know the answer to any of your questions,” Soloff wrote in an email.
Paul Merrell

Would You Buy a Used Macroeconomic Policy From This Man? | Popehat - 0 views

www.popehat.com/...oeconomic-policy-from-this-man

macroeconomics krugman internet

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Dec 13
     
    Clark at Popehat dusts off an oldie but goodie: Macroeconomics pundit Paul Krugman's prediction in 1998, courtesy of the Wayback Machine: "The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law'--which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants--becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's." But wait; it gets even better on the Wayback machine itself, http://tinyurl.com/bw3kguh "As the rate of technological change in computing slows, the number of jobs for IT specialists will decelerate, then actually turn down; ten years from now, the phrase information economy will sound silly." Oops. Someone forgot to send that memo to the NSA and others; or maybe the fax machine ate it ... 
Gary Edwards

'Clinton death list': 33 spine-tingling cases - 0 views

www.wnd.com/...-list-33-most-intriguing-cases

Clinton-Body-Count

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Feb 17
     
    "(Editor's note: This list was originally published in August 2016 and has gone viral on the web. WND is running it again as American voters cast their ballots for the nation's next president on Election Day.) How many people do you personally know who have died mysteriously? How about in plane crashes or car wrecks? Bizarre suicides? People beaten to death or murdered in a hail of bullets? And what about violent freak accidents - like separate mountain biking and skiing collisions in Aspen, Colorado? Or barbells crushing a person's throat? Bill and Hillary Clinton attend a funeral Apparently, if you're Bill or Hillary Clinton, the answer to that question is at least 33 - and possibly many more. Talk-radio star Rush Limbaugh addressed the issue of the "Clinton body count" during an August show. "I swear, I could swear I saw these stories back in 1992, back in 1993, 1994," Limbaugh said. He cited a report from Rachel Alexander at Townhall.com titled, "Clinton body count or left-wing conspiracy? Three with ties to DNC mysteriously die." Limbaugh said he recalled Ted Koppel, then-anchor of ABC News' "Nightline," routinely having discussions on the issue following the July 20, 1993, death of White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster. In fact, Limbaugh said, he appeared on Koppel's show. "One of the things I said was, 'Who knows what happened here? But let me ask you a question.' I said, 'Ted, how many people do you know in your life who've been murdered? Ted, how many people do you know in your life that have died under suspicious circumstances?' "Of course, the answer is zilch, zero, nada, none, very few," Limbaugh chuckled. "Ask the Clintons that question. And it's a significant number. It's a lot of people that they know who have died, who've been murdered. "And the same question here from Rachel Alexander. It's amazing the cycle that exists with the Clintons. [Citing Townhall]: 'What it
Paul Merrell

NSA phone surveillance program likely unconstitutional, federal judge rules | World new... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-likely-unconstitutional-judge

surveillance state NSA call-metadata litigation 4th Amendment constitutional law NSA-blowback

shared by Paul Merrell on 17 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • A federal judge in Washington ruled on Monday that the bulk collection of Americans’ telephone records by the National Security Agency is likely to violate the US constitution, in the most significant legal setback for the agency since the publication of the first surveillance disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden. Judge Richard Leon declared that the mass collection of metadata probably violates the fourth amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, and was "almost Orwellian" in its scope. In a judgment replete with literary swipes against the NSA, he said James Madison, the architect of the US constitution, would be "aghast" at the scope of the agency’s collection of Americans' communications data. The ruling, by the US district court for the District of Columbia, is a blow to the Obama administration, and sets up a legal battle that will drag on for months, almost certainly destined to end up in the supreme court. It was welcomed by campaigners pressing to rein in the NSA, and by Snowden, who issued a rare public statement saying it had vindicated his disclosures. It is also likely to influence other legal challenges to the NSA, currently working their way through federal courts.
  • In Monday’s ruling, the judge concluded that the pair's constitutional challenge was likely to be successful. In what was the only comfort to the NSA in a stinging judgment, Leon put the ruling on hold, pending an appeal by the government. Leon expressed doubt about the central rationale for the program cited by the NSA: that it is necessary for preventing terrorist attacks. “The government does not cite a single case in which analysis of the NSA’s bulk metadata collection actually stopped an imminent terrorist attack,” he wrote.
  • Leon’s opinion contained stern and repeated warnings that he was inclined to rule that the metadata collection performed by the NSA – and defended vigorously by the NSA director Keith Alexander on CBS on Sunday night – was unconstitutional. “Plaintiffs have a substantial likelihood of showing that their privacy interests outweigh the government’s interest in collecting and analysing bulk telephony metadata and therefore the NSA’s bulk collection program is indeed an unreasonable search under the fourth amendment,” he wrote. Leon said that the mass collection of phone metadata, revealed by the Guardian in June, was "indiscriminatory" and "arbitrary" in its scope. "The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979," he wrote, referring to the year in which the US supreme court ruled on a fourth amendment case upon which the NSA now relies to justify the bulk records program.
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  • In a statement, Snowden said the ruling justified his disclosures. “I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts," he said in comments released through Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who received leaked documents from Snowden. "Today, a secret program authorised by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights. It is the first of many.”
  • In his ruling, Judge Leon expressly rejected the government’s claim that the 1979 supreme court case, Smith v Maryland, which the NSA and the Obama administration often cite to argue that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy over metadata, applies in the NSA’s bulk-metadata collection. The mass surveillance program differs so much from the one-time request dealt with by the 1979 case that it was of “little value” in assessing whether the metadata dragnet constitutes a fourth amendment search.
  • In a decision likely to influence other federal courts hearing similar arguments from the ACLU, Leon wrote that the Guardian’s disclosure of the NSA’s bulk telephone records collection means that citizens now have standing to challenge it in court, since they can demonstrate for the first time that the government is collecting their phone data.
  • Leon also struck a blow for judicial review of government surveillance practices even when Congress explicitly restricts the ability of citizens to sue for relief. “While Congress has great latitude to create statutory schemes like Fisa,” he wrote, referring to the seminal 1978 surveillance law, “it may not hang a cloak of secrecy over the constitution.”
  • In his ruling on Monday, Judge Leon predicted the process would take six months. He urged the government to take that time to prepare for an eventual defeat. “I fully expect that during the appellate process, which will consume at least the next six months, the government will take whatever steps necessary to prepare itself to comply with this order when, and if, it is upheld,” wrote Leon in his opinion. “Suffice it to say, requesting further time to comply with this order months from now will not be well received and could result in collateral sanctions.”
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Dec 13
     
    This is the case I thought was the weakest because of poor drafting in the complaint. The judge noted those issues in dismissing the plaintiffs' claims under the Administrative Procedures Act, but picked his way through what remained to find sufficient allegations to support the 4th Amendment challenge. Because he ruled for the plaintiffs on the 4th Amendment count, the judge did not reach the plaintiffs' arguments under the First and Fifth Amendments. This case is about cellphone call metadata, which the FISA Court has been ordering cell phone companies to provide every day, with the orders updated every 90 days. The judge's 68-page opinion is at https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2013cv0881-40 (cleaner copy than the Guardian's, which was apparently faxed). Notably, the judge, Richard Leon, is a Bush II appointee and one of the plaintiffs is a prominent conservative civil libertarian lawyer. The other plaintiff is the father of an NSA cryptologist who worked closely with SEAL Team 6 and was killed along with members of that team when their helicopter crashed in Afghanistan. I'll add some more in a comment. But digital privacy is not yet dead.
  • Paul Merrell on 17 Dec 13
     
    Unfortunately, DRM is not dead yet either and the court's PDF file is locked. No easy copying of its content. If you want to jump directly to the discussion of 4th Amendment issues, go to page 35. That way, you can skip past all the dreary discussion of the Administrative Procedures Act claim and you won't miss much that's memorable. In ruling on the plaintiffs' standing to raise the 4th Amendment claim, Judge Leon postulated two possible search issues: [i] the bulk daily collection of metadata and its retention in the database for five years; and [ii] the analysis of that data through the NSA's querying process. The judge had no difficulty with the first issue; it definitely qualifies as a search. But the judge rejected the plaintiffs' argument on the second type (which was lame), demonstrating that at least one federal judge understands how computers work. The government's filings indicated that a "seed" telephone number or other identifier is used as the query string. Judge Leon figured out for himself from this fact that the NSA of necessity had to compare that number or identifier to every number or identifier in its database looking for a match. The judge concluded that the plaintiffs' metadata --- indeed everyone's metadata --- had to be searched for comparison purposes *every* time the NSA analysts ran any query against the database. See his incisive discussion at pp. 39-41. So having established that two searches were involved, one every time the NSA queried the database, the judge moved on to the next question, whether "the plaintiffs had a reasonable expectation of privacy that is violated when the Government indiscriminately collects their telephony metadata along with the metadata of hundreds of millions of other citizens without any particularized suspicion of wrongdoing, retains that metadata for five years, and then queries, analyzes, and investigates that data without prior judicial approval of the investigative targets." pg. 43. More later
Paul Merrell

Senate majority whip: Cyber bill will have to wait until fall | TheHill - 0 views

thehill.com/...l-will-have-to-wait-until-fall

surveillance state CISA legislation digital-privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) on Tuesday said the upper chamber is unlikely to move on a stalled cybersecurity bill before the August recess.Senate Republican leaders, including Cornyn, had been angling to get the bill — known as the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) — to the floor this month.ADVERTISEMENTBut Cornyn said that there is simply too much of a time crunch in the remaining legislative days to get to the measure, intended to boost the public-private exchange of data on hackers.  “I’m sad to say I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he told reporters off the Senate floor. “The timing of this is unfortunate.”“I think we’re just running out time,” he added.An aide for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he had not committed to a specific schedule after the upper chamber wraps up work in the coming days on a highway funding bill.Cornyn said Senate leadership will look to move on the bill sometime after the legislature returns in September from its month-long break.
  • The move would delay yet again what’s expected to be a bruising floor fight about government surveillance and digital privacy rights.“[CISA] needs a lot of work,” Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who currently opposes the bill, told The Hill on Tuesday. “And when it comes up, there’s going to have to be a lot of amendments otherwise it won’t pass.”Despite industry support, broad bipartisan backing, and potentially even White House support, CISA has been mired in the Senate for months over privacy concerns.Civil liberties advocates worry the bill would create another venue for the government’s intelligence wing to collect sensitive data on Americans only months after Congress voted to rein in surveillance powers.But industry groups and many lawmakers insist a bolstered data exchange is necessary to better understand and counter the growing cyber threat. Inaction will leave government and commercial networks exposed to increasingly dangerous hackers, they say.Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who has been leading the chorus opposing the bill, rejoiced Tuesday after hearing of the likely delay.
  • “I really want to commend the advocates for the tremendous grassroots effort to highlight the fact that this bill was badly flawed from a privacy standpoint,” he told The Hill.Digital rights and privacy groups are blanketing senators’ offices this week with faxes and letters in an attempt to raise awareness of bill’s flaws.“Our side has picked up an enormous amount of support,” Wyden said.Wyden was the only senator to vote against CISA in the Senate Intelligence Committee. The panel approved the measure in March by a 14-1 vote and it looked like CISA was barrelling toward the Senate floor.After the House easily passed its companion pieces of legislation, CISA’s odds only seemed better.But the measure got tied up in the vicious debate over the National Security Agency's (NSA) spying powers that played out throughout April and May.“It’s like a number of these issues, in the committee the vote was 14-1, everyone says, ‘oh, Ron Wyden opposes another bipartisan bill,’” Wyden said Tuesday. “And I said, ‘People are going to see that this is a badly flawed bill.’”
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  • CISA backers hoped that the ultimate vote to curb the NSA’s surveillance authority might quell some of the privacy fears surrounding CISA, clearing a path to passage. But numerous budget debates and the Iranian nuclear deal have chewed up much of the Senate’s floor time throughout June and July.  Following the devastating hacks at the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), Senate Republican leaders tried to jump CISA in the congressional queue by offering its language as an amendment to a defense authorization bill.Democrats — including the bill’s original co-sponsor Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) — revolted, angry they could not offer amendments to CISA’s language before it was attached to the defense bill.Cornyn on Tuesday chastised Democrats for stalling a bill that many of them favor.“As you know, Senate Democrats blocked that before on the defense authorization bill,” Cornyn said. “So we had an opportunity to do it then.”Now it’s unclear when the Senate will have another opportunity.When it does, however, CISA could have the votes to get through.
  • There will be vocal opposition from senators like Wyden and Leahy, and potentially from anti-surveillance advocates like Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.).But finding 40 votes to block the bill completely will be a difficult task.Wyden said he wouldn’t “get into speculation” about whether he could gather the support to stop CISA altogether.“I’m pleased about the progress that we’ve made,” he said.
  • Paul Merrell on 30 Jul 15
     
    NSA and crew decide to delay and try later with CISA. The Internet strikes back again.
Gary Edwards

Grassfire Nation - 0 views

www.grassfire.com/...offer.asp

grassfire-nation

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Oct 11
     
    Automated Congressional petitions and fax notification system for conservative, libertarian and Tea Party activist.
Teresa Carter

3 Year Loans- Quick Cash Advance for Fix Your Monthly Expenses! - 0 views

is.gd/SWu8Ra

3 year loans 36 month loans long term cash loans long term loans long term installment loans

shared by Teresa Carter on 20 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Teresa Carter on 20 Oct 16
     
    3 Year loans are suitable financial alternative for those people who have adverse credit score and need some urgent bucks from external sources. This is unsecured type of monetary aid so there is no need to fax unnecessary documents and to undergo credit verification against getting loan support.
Paul Merrell

NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes with Children, C... - 1 views

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

Auction 2016 Hillary-emails FBI NYPD Huma Weiner sex-crimes perjury Clinton-Foundation money-laundering obstruction

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • New York Police Department detectives and prosecutors working an alleged underage sexting case against former Congressman Anthony Weiner have turned over a newly-found laptop he shared with wife Huma Abedin to the FBI with enough evidence “to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life,” NYPD sources told True Pundit. NYPD sources said Clinton’s “crew” also included several unnamed yet implicated members of Congress in addition to her aides and insiders. The NYPD seized the computer from Weiner during a search warrant and detectives discovered a trove of over 500,000 emails to and from Hillary Clinton, Abedin and other insiders during her tenure as secretary of state. The content of those emails sparked the FBI to reopen its defunct email investigation into Clinton on Friday.
  • But new revelations on the contents of that laptop, according to law enforcement sources, implicate the Democratic presidential candidate, her subordinates, and even select elected officials in far more alleged serious crimes than mishandling classified and top secret emails, sources said. NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to: Money laundering Child exploitation Sex crimes with minors (children) Perjury Pay to play through Clinton Foundation Obstruction of justice Other felony crimes NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department’s highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices. “What’s in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach,” the NYPD Chief said. “There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that.”
  • The NYPD Chief said once Comey saw the alarming contents of the emails he was forced to reopen a criminal probe against Clinton. “People are going to prison,” he said. Meanwhile, FBI sources said Abedin and Weiner were cooperating with federal agents, who have taken over the non-sexting portions the case from NYPD. The husband-and-wife Clinton insiders  are both shopping for separate immunity deals, sources said. “If they don’t cooperate they are going to see long sentences,” a federal law enforcement source said. NYPD sources said Weiner or Abedin stored all the emails in a massive Microsoft Outlook program on the laptop. The emails implicate other current and former members of Congress and one high-ranking Democratic Senator as having possibly engaged in criminal activity too, sources said. Prosecutors in the office of US Attorney Preet Bharara have issued a subpoena for Weiner’s cell phones and travel records, law enforcement sources confirmed. NYPD said it planned to order the same phone and travel records on Clinton and Abedin, however, the FBI said it was in the process of requesting the identical records. Law enforcement sources are particularly interested in cell phone activity and travel to the Bahamas, U.S. Virgin Islands and other locations that sources would not divulge.
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  • The new emails contain travel documents and itineraries indicating Hillary Clinton, President Bill Clinton, Weiner and multiple members of Congress and other government officials accompanied convicted pedophile billionaire Jeffrey Epstein on his Boeing 727 on multiple occasions to his private island in the U.S Virgin Islands, sources said. Epstein’s island has also been dubbed Orgy Island or Sex Slave Island where Epstein allegedly pimps out underage girls and boys to international dignitaries. Both NYPD and FBI sources confirm based on the new emails they now believe Hillary Clinton traveled as Epstein’s guest on at least six occasions, probably more when all the evidence is combed, sources said. Bill Clinton, it has been confirmed in media reports spanning recent years, that he too traveled with Epstein over 20 times to the island.
  • According to other uncovered emails, Abedin and Clinton both sent and received thousands of classified and top secret documents to personal email accounts including Weiner’s unsecured campaign web site which is managed by Democratic political consultants in Washington D.C. Weiner maintained little known email accounts that the couple shared on the website anthonyweiner.com. Weiner, a former seven-term Democratic Congressman from New York, primarily used that domain to campaign for Congress and for his failed mayoral bid of New York City. At one point, FBI sources said, Abedin and Clinton’s classified and top secret State Department documents and emails were stored in Weiner’s email on a server shared with a dog grooming service and a western Canadian bicycle shop. However, Weiner and Abedin, who is Hillary Clinton’s closest personal aide, weren’t the only people with access to the Weiner’s email account. Potentially dozens of unknown individuals had access to Abedin’s sensitive State Department emails that were stored in Weiner’s email account, FBI sources confirmed. FEC records show Weiner paid more than $92,000 of congressional campaign funds to Anne Lewis Strategies LLC to manage his email and web site. According to FBI sources, the D.C.-based political consulting firm has served as the official administrator of the anthonyweiner.com domain since 2010, the same time Abedin was working at the State Department. This means technically Weiner and Abedin’s emails, including top secret State Department emails, could have been accessed, printed, discussed, leaked, or distributed by untold numbers of personnel at the Anne Lewis consulting firm because they can control where the website and it emails are pointed, FBI sources said.
  • According to FBI sources, the bureau’s newly-minted probe into Clinton’s use and handling of emails while she served as secretary of state, has also been broadened to include investigating new email-related revelations, including: Abedin forwarded classified and top secret State Department emails to Weiner’s email Abedin stored emails, containing government secrets, in a special folder shared with Weiner warehousing over 500,000 archived State Department emails. Weiner had access to these classified and top secret documents without proper security clearance to view the records Abedin also used a personal yahoo address and her Clintonemail.com address to send/receive/store classified and top secret documents A private consultant managed Weiner’s site for the last six years, including three years when Clinton was secretary of state, and therefore, had full access to all emails as the domain’s listed registrant and administrator via Whois email contacts. Because Weiner’s campaign website is managed by the third-party consultant and political email guru, FBI agents are burdened with the task of trying to decipher just how many people had access to Weiner’s server and emails and who were these people. Or if the server was ever compromised by hackers, or other actors.
  • Abedin told FBI agents in an April interview that she didn’t know how to consistently print documents or emails from her secure Dept. of State system. Instead, she would forward the sensitive emails to her yahoo, Clintonemail.com and her email linked to Weiner. Abedin said, according to FBI documents, she would then access those email accounts via webmail from an unclassified computer system at the State Dept. and print the documents, many of which were classified and top secret, from the largely unprotected webmail portals. Clinton did not have a computer in her office on Mahogany Row at the State Dept. so she was not able to read timely intelligence unless it was printed out for her, Abedin said. Abedin also said Clinton could not operate the secure State Dept. fax machine installed in her Chappaqua, NY home without assistance. Perhaps more alarming, according to the FBI’s 302 Report detailing its interview with Abedin, none of the multiple FBI agents and Justice Department officials who conducted the interview pressed Abedin to further detail the email address linked to Weiner. There was never a follow up, according to the 302 report. But now, all that has changed, with the FBI’s decision to reopen the Clinton email investigation and the husband and wife seeking immunity deals to testify against Clinton and other associates about the contents of the laptop’s emails.
  • Gary Edwards on 03 Nov 16
     
    "New York Police Department detectives and prosecutors working an alleged underage sexting case against former Congressman Anthony Weiner have turned over a newly-found laptop he shared with wife Huma Abedin to the FBI with enough evidence "to put Hillary (Clinton) and her crew away for life," NYPD sources told True Pundit. NYPD sources said Clinton's "crew" also included several unnamed yet implicated members of Congress in addition to her aides and insiders. The NYPD seized the computer from Weiner during a search warrant and detectives discovered a trove of over 500,000 emails to and from Hillary Clinton, Abedin and other insiders during her tenure as secretary of state. The content of those emails sparked the FBI to reopen its defunct email investigation into Clinton on Friday. But new revelations on the contents of that laptop, according to law enforcement sources, implicate the Democratic presidential candidate, her subordinates, and even select elected officials in far more alleged serious crimes than mishandling classified and top secret emails, sources said. NYPD sources said these new emails include evidence linking Clinton herself and associates to: Money laundering Child exploitation Sex crimes with minors (children) Perjury Pay to play through Clinton Foundation Obstruction of justice Other felony crimes NYPD detectives and a NYPD Chief, the department's highest rank under Commissioner, said openly that if the FBI and Justice Department fail to garner timely indictments against Clinton and co- conspirators, NYPD will go public with the damaging emails now in the hands of FBI Director James Comey and many FBI field offices. "What's in the emails is staggering and as a father, it turned my stomach," the NYPD Chief said. "There is not going to be any Houdini-like escape from what we found. We have copies of everything. We will ship them to Wikileaks or I will personally hold my own press conference if it comes to that." The NYPD
Paul Merrell

WorldLII - WorldLII: About WorldLII - 0 views

www.worldlii.org/worldlii

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • You are here: WorldLII >> About WorldLII   What is WorldLII? The World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII) is a free, independent and non-profit global legal research facility developed collaboratively by the following Legal Information Institutes and other organisations. Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) British and Irish Legal Information Institute (BAILII) Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII) Hong Kong Legal Information Institute (HKLII) Legal Information Institute (Cornell) (LII (Cornell)) Pacific Islands Legal Information Institute (PacLII) Wits University School of Law (Wits Law School) For further details, see the WorldLII brochure. The LIIs, meeting in Montreal in October 2002, adopted the Montreal Declaration on public access to law. WorldLII comprises three main facilities: Databases, Catalog and Websearch.
  • WorldLII Databases WorldLII provides a single search facility for databases located on the following Legal Information Institutes: AustLII; BAILII; CanLII; HKLII; LII (Cornell); and PacLII. WorldLII also includes as part of this searchable collection its own databases not found on other LIIs. These include databases of decisions of international Courts and Tribunals, databases from a number of Asian countries, and databases from South Africa (provided by Wits Law School). Over 270 databases from 48 jurisdictions in 20 countries are included in the initial release of WorldLII. Databases of case-law, legislation, treaties, law reform reports, law journals, and other materials are included. WorldLII welcomes enquiries concerning the possible inclusion of other databases on WorldLII or on one of its collaborating LIIs. WorldLII Catalog and Websearch The WorldLII Catalog provides links to over 15,000 law-related web sites in every country in the world. WorldLII's Websearch makes searchable the full text of as many of these sites as WorldLII's web-spider can reach. WorldLII welcomes enquiries from law librarians and other legal experts who are interested to become Contributing Editors to the WorldLII Catalog.
  • Operation of WorldLII The provision of the WorldLII service is coordinated by the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII), which maintains WorldLII's user interface, the WorldLII Catalog and Websearch, and the databases located only on WorldLII. Technical enhancements to WorldLII are being developed jointly by the cooperating Legal Information Institutes. Contacting WorldLII General contact: feedback@worldlii.org AustLII/WorldLII Co-Directors: Professor Andrew Mowbray, UTS <andrew@austlii.edu.au> Professor Graham Greenleaf, UNSW <graham@austlii.edu.au> Philip Chung, AustLII Executive Director <philip@austlii.edu.au> Mail: WorldLII, c/- AustLII, UTS Faculty of Law, PO Box 123 Broadway NSW 2007 Australia Telephone: +61 2 9514 4921 Fax: +61 2 9514 4908 We hope that you enjoy using WorldLII and find it to be a useful service. Feedback (particularly words of encouragement or constructive criticism) are welcome and may be sent to feedback@worldlii.org. WorldLII: Copyright Policy | Disclaimers | Privacy Policy | Feedback URL: http://www.worldlii.org/worldlii/
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Sep 16
     
    The various Legal information Institutes that collaborate on WorldLII have the most advanced, integrated, and largest public legal research databases available on the Internet, searchable through a common interface. Still nothing like a complete university law library because so many legal source materials are copyrighted, this is the combined effort of many law schools. A companion browser extension is available for Chrome and Firefox called Jureeka. That extension causes your pages rendered in the browser to contain hyperlinks to all legal authorities cited on the page that are recognized by the extension, with the links going to case law, regulations, and statues that are in the public domain. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jureeka/ediidjmindkcaflpfjgabfaibhngadbb?utm_source=chrome-app-launcher-info-dialog Thus far, Jureeka is integrated with all legal materials published by the Legal Information Institute long located at Cornell Law School, as well as the Justia archives of U.S. case law. Rumor has it that the extension will be extended to cover materials published by other Legal Information Institutes at various law schools around the globe.
Paul Merrell

Private firms selling mass surveillance systems around world, documents show | World ne... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...mass-surveillance-technologies

surveillance state surveillance-industry capabilities

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Private firms are selling spying tools and mass surveillance technologies to developing countries with promises that "off the shelf" equipment will allow them to snoop on millions of emails, text messages and phone calls, according to a cache of documents published on Monday.The papers show how firms, including dozens from Britain, tout the capabilities at private trade fairs aimed at offering nations in Africa, Asia and the Middle East the kind of powerful capabilities that are usually associated with government agencies such as GCHQ and its US counterpart, the National Security Agency.The market has raised concerns among human rights groups and ministers, who are poised to announce new rules about the sale of such equipment from Britain.
  • The documents are included in an online database compiled by the research watchdog Privacy International, which has spent four years gathering 1,203 brochures and sales pitches used at conventions in Dubai, Prague, Brasilia, Washington, Kuala Lumpur, Paris and London. Analysts posed as potential buyers to gain access to the private fairs.The database, called the Surveillance Industry Index, shows how firms from the UK, Israel, Germany, France and the US offer governments a range of systems that allow them to secretly hack into internet cables carrying email and phone traffic.The index has details from 338 companies, including 77 from the UK, offering a total of 97 different technologies.
  • The documents include a brochure from a company called Advanced Middle East Systems (AMES), based in Dubai. It has been offering a device called Cerebro – a DIY system similar to the Tempora programme run by GCHQ – that taps information from fibre-optic cables carrying internet traffic.AMES describes Cerebro as a "core technology designed to monitor and analyse in real time communications … including SMS (texting), GSM (mobile calls), billing data, emails, conversations, webmail, chat sessions and social networks."The company brochure makes clear this is done by attaching probes to internet cables. "No co-operation with the providers is required," it adds."Cerebro is designed to store several billions of records – metadata and/or communication contents. At any time the investigators can follow the live activity of their target with advanced targeting criteria (email addresses, phone numbers, key words)," says the brochure.
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  • Another firm selling similar equipment is VASTech, based in South Africa, which has a system called Zebra. Potential buyers are told it has been designed to help "government security agencies face huge challenges in their combat against crime and terrorism".VASTech says Zebra offers "access to high volumes of information generated via telecommunication services for the purposes of analysis and investigation".It has been designed to "intercept all content and metadata of voice, SMS, email and fax communications on the connected network, creating a rich repository of information".
  • It is now possible, from a single laptop computer, to locate where a mobile phone is calling from anywhere in the world, with an accuracy of between 200 metres and a mile. This is not done by attaching probes, and it is not limited to the area where the laptop is working from. The "cross border" system means it is now theoretically possible to locate a mobile phone call from a town abroad from a laptop in London.
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Nov 13
Paul Merrell

Al Qaeda: The Database | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...24738

war & peace al-Qaeda database

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • This article originally published by Global Research in 2005 sheds light on the nature of Al Qaeda, an intelligence construct used by Washington to destabilize and destroy sovereign countries, while sustaining the illusion of  an outside enemy, which threatens the security of the Western World.
  • Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence. “I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . .
  • “In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs. “It was decided to use a part of the system’s memory to host the Islamic Conference’s database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network. “[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ and ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic ‘Q eidat ilmu’ti’aat’ which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for “base.” The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called ‘q eidat ‘riyadh al ‘askariya.’ Q eida means “a base” and “Al Qaida” means “the base.” “In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference’s secretariat.
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  • “In the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services . . . We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK or from Belgium. “These documents contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida. “Al Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the Islamic Conference are ‘rogue states’ and many Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and business world. “Because of the presence of ‘rogue states,’ it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the ‘rogue states’ used to fight. And the ‘rogue states’ included Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages.
  • “Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden’s personal property . . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to ‘punish’ Prime Minister Erdogan for being a ‘toot tepid’ Islamic politician. ” . . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact ‘rogue states,” specially the US and other NATO countries. ” Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the ‘liberal” economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed behind them. “The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money.”
  • In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel’s case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the details of the case classified. Bunel’s character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system “got him” for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group. It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of “Al Qaeda.” We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. French officer Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel, who knew the truth about “Al Qaeda” — Another target of the neo-cons.
  • This article originally published by Global Research in 2005 sheds light on the nature of Al Qaeda, an intelligence construct used by Washington to destabilize and destroy sovereign countries, while sustaining the illusion of  an outside enemy, which threatens the security of the Western World. *       *       * Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence. “I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . .
  • “Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students’ punishment. “For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: ‘You’ll be noted in ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ which meant ‘You’ll be logged in the information database.’ Meaning ‘You will receive a warning . . .’ If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Meaning ‘the decision database.’ It meant ‘you will be punished.’ For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in ‘Al Qaida.’
Paul Merrell

How Secret Partners Expand NSA's Surveillance Dragnet - The Intercept - 0 views

firstlook.org/...le-partners-revealed-rampart-a

surveillance state NSA NSA-partners fiber-optic

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Huge volumes of private emails, phone calls, and internet chats are being intercepted by the National Security Agency with the secret cooperation of more foreign governments than previously known, according to newly disclosed documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden. The classified files, revealed today by the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information in a reporting collaboration with The Intercept, shed light on how the NSA’s surveillance of global communications has expanded under a clandestine program, known as RAMPART-A, that depends on the participation of a growing network of intelligence agencies.
  • It has already been widely reported that the NSA works closely with eavesdropping agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia as part of the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance. But the latest Snowden documents show that a number of other countries, described by the NSA as “third-party partners,” are playing an increasingly important role – by secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on their fiber-optic cables. The NSA documents state that under RAMPART-A, foreign partners “provide access to cables and host U.S. equipment.” This allows the agency to covertly tap into “congestion points around the world” where it says it can intercept the content of phone calls, faxes, e-mails, internet chats, data from virtual private networks, and calls made using Voice over IP software like Skype.
  • The program, which the secret files show cost U.S. taxpayers about $170 million between 2011 and 2013, sweeps up a vast amount of communications at lightning speed. According to the intelligence community’s classified “Black Budget” for 2013, RAMPART-A enables the NSA to tap into three terabits of data every second as the data flows across the compromised cables – the equivalent of being able to download about 5,400 uncompressed high-definition movies every minute. In an emailed statement, the NSA declined to comment on the RAMPART-A program. “The fact that the U.S. government works with other nations, under specific and regulated conditions, mutually strengthens the security of all,” said NSA spokeswoman Vanee’ Vines. “NSA’s efforts are focused on ensuring the protection of the national security of the United States, its citizens, and our allies through the pursuit of valid foreign intelligence targets only.”
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  • The secret documents reveal that the NSA has set up at least 13 RAMPART-A sites, nine of which were active in 2013. Three of the largest – codenamed AZUREPHOENIX, SPINNERET and MOONLIGHTPATH – mine data from some 70 different cables or networks. The precise geographic locations of the sites and the countries cooperating with the program are among the most carefully guarded of the NSA’s secrets, and these details are not contained in the Snowden files. However, the documents point towards some of the countries involved – Denmark and Germany among them. An NSA memo prepared for a 2012 meeting between the then-NSA director, Gen. Keith Alexander, and his Danish counterpart noted that the NSA had a longstanding partnership with the country’s intelligence service on a special “cable access” program. Another document, dated from 2013 and first published by Der Spiegel on Wednesday, describes a German cable access point under a program that was operated by the NSA, the German intelligence service BND, and an unnamed third partner.
  • The Danish and German operations appear to be associated with RAMPART-A because it is the only NSA cable-access initiative that depends on the cooperation of third-party partners. Other NSA operations tap cables without the consent or knowledge of the countries that host the cables, or are operated from within the United States with the assistance of American telecommunications companies that have international links. One secret NSA document notes that most of the RAMPART-A projects are operated by the partners “under the cover of an overt comsat effort,” suggesting that the tapping of the fiber-optic cables takes place at Cold War-era eavesdropping stations in the host countries, usually identifiable by their large white satellite dishes and radomes. A shortlist of other countries potentially involved in the RAMPART-A operation is contained in the Snowden archive. A classified presentation dated 2013, published recently in Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald’s book No Place To Hide, revealed that the NSA had top-secret spying agreements with 33 third-party countries, including Denmark, Germany, and 15 other European Union member states:
  • Paul Merrell on 20 Jun 14
     
    Don't miss the slide with the names of the NSA-partner nations. Lots of E.U. member nations.
Paul Merrell

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

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

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

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

Legislative Cyber Threats: CISA's Not The Only One | Just Security - 0 views

www.justsecurity.org/...egislative-cyber-threats-cisas

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • If anyone in the United States Senate had any doubts that the proposed Cyber Information Sharing Act (CISA) was universally hated by a range of civil society groups, a literal blizzard of faxes should’ve cleared up the issue by now. What’s not getting attention is a CISA “alternative” introduced last week by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va) and Susan Collins (R-Me). Dubbed the “FISMA Reform Act,” the authors make the following claims about the bill:  This legislation would allow the Secretary of Homeland Security to operate intrusion detection and prevention capabilities on all federal agencies on the .gov domain. The bipartisan bill would also direct the Secretary of Homeland Security to conduct risk assessments of any network within the government domain. The bill would allow the Secretary of Homeland Security to operate defensive countermeasures on these networks once a cyber threat has been detected. The legislation would strengthen and streamline the authority Congress gave to DHS last year to issue binding operational directives to federal agencies, especially to respond to substantial cyber security threats in emergency circumstances.
  • The bill would require the Office of Management and Budget to report to Congress annually on the extent to which OMB has exercised its existing authority to enforce government wide cyber security standards. On the surface, it actually sounds like a rational response to the disastrous OPM hack. Unfortunately, the Warner-Collins bill has some vague or problematic language and non-existent definitions that make it potentially just as dangerous for data security and privacy as CISA. The bill would allow the Secretary of Homeland Security to carry out cyber security activities “in conjunction with other agencies and the private sector” [for] “assessing and fostering the development of information security technologies and capabilities for use across multiple agencies.” While the phrase “information sharing” is not present in this subsection, “security technologies and capabilities” is more than broad — and vague — enough to allow it.
  • The bill would also allow the secretary to “acquire, intercept, retain, use, and disclose communications and other system traffic that are transiting to or from or stored on agency information systems and deploy countermeasures with regard to the communications and system traffic.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The bill also allows the head of a federal agency or department “to disclose to the Secretary or a private entity providing assistance to the Secretary…information traveling to or from or stored on an agency information system, notwithstanding any other law that would otherwise restrict or prevent agency heads from disclosing such information to the Secretary.” (Emphasis added.) So confidential, proprietary or other information otherwise precluded from disclosure under laws like HIPAA or the Privacy Act get waived if the Secretary of DHS or an agency head feel that your email needs to be shared with a government contracted outfit like the Hacking Team for analysis. And the bill explicitly provides for just this kind of cyber threat analysis outsourcing:
  • (3) PRIVATE ENTITIES. — The Secretary may enter into contracts or other agreements, or otherwise request and obtain the assistance of, private entities that provide electronic communication or information security services to acquire, intercept, retain, use, and disclose communications and other system traffic in accordance with this subsection. The bill further states that the content of your communications, will be retained only if the communication is associated with a known or reasonably suspected information security threat, and communications and system traffic will not be subject to the operation of a countermeasure unless associated with the threats. (Emphasis added.) “Reasonably suspected” is about as squishy a definition as one can find.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Jul 15
     
    "The bill also allows the head of a federal agency or department "to disclose to the Secretary or a private entity providing assistance to the Secretary…information traveling to or from or stored on an agency information system, notwithstanding any other law that would otherwise restrict or prevent agency heads from disclosing such information to the Secretary."" Let's see: if your information is intercepted by the NSA and stored on its "information system" in Bluffdale, Utah, then it can be disclosed to the Secretary of DHS or any private entity providing him/her with assistance, "notwithstanding any other law that would otherwise restrict or prevent agency heads from disclosing such information to the Secretary." And if NSA just happens to be intercepting every digital bit of data generated or received in the entire world, including the U.S., then it's all in play, "notwithstanding any other law that would otherwise restrict or prevent agency heads from disclosing such information to the Secretary.". Sheesh! Our government voyeurs never stop trying to get more nude pix and videos to view.  
Paul Merrell

NSA tapped German Chancellery for decades, WikiLeaks claims | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ecades-wikileaks-claims-merkel

surveillance state NSA NSA-targets Germany

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • The US National Security Agency tapped phone calls involving German chancellor Angela Merkel and her closest advisers for years and spied on the staff of her predecessors, according to WikiLeaks. A report released by the group on Wednesday suggested NSA spying on Merkel and her staff had gone on far longer and more widely than previously realised. WikiLeaks said the NSA targeted 125 phone numbers of top German officials for long-term surveillance . The release risks renewing tensions between Germany and the US a month after they sought to put a row over spying behind them, with Barack Obama declaring in Bavaria that the two nations were “inseparable allies”. WikiLeaks published what it said were three NSA intercepts of Merkel’s conversations, and data it said listed telephone numbers for the chancellor, her aides, her office and even her fax machine. “The names associated with some of the targets indicate that spying on the Chancellery predates Angela Merkel as it includes staff of former Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (in office 1998-2002), and his predecessor Helmut Kohl,” WikiLeaks added in a statement.
Paul Merrell

Al Qaeda: The Database | Global Research - Centre for Research on Globalization - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...24738

war & peace al-Qaeda-history U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 05 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that “Al Qaeda” is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence. “I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . . “Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students’ punishment. “For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: ‘You’ll be noted in ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ which meant ‘You’ll be logged in the information database.’ Meaning ‘You will receive a warning . . .’ If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Meaning ‘the decision database.’ It meant ‘you will be punished.’ For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in ‘Al Qaida.’
  • “In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs. “It was decided to use a part of the system’s memory to host the Islamic Conference’s database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network. “[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, ‘Q eidat il-Maaloomaat’ and ‘Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.’ Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic ‘Q eidat ilmu’ti’aat’ which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for “base.” The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called ‘q eidat ‘riyadh al ‘askariya.’ Q eida means “a base” and “Al Qaida” means “the base.”
  • “In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference’s secretariat. “In the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services . . . We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK or from Belgium. “These documents contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida. “Al Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the Islamic Conference are ‘rogue states’ and many Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and business world.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “Because of the presence of ‘rogue states,’ it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the ‘rogue states’ used to fight. And the ‘rogue states’ included Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages.
  • “Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden’s personal property . . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to ‘punish’ Prime Minister Erdogan for being a ‘toot tepid’ Islamic politician. ” . . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact ‘rogue states,” specially the US and other NATO countries. ” Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the ‘liberal” economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed behind them. “The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the ‘devil’ only in order to drive the ‘TV watcher’ to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money.”
  • In yet another example of what happens to those who challenge the system, in December 2001, Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel was convicted by a secret French military court of passing classified documents that identified potential NATO bombing targets in Serbia to a Serbian agent during the Kosovo war in 1998. Bunel’s case was transferred from a civilian court to keep the details of the case classified. Bunel’s character witnesses and psychologists notwithstanding, the system “got him” for telling the truth about Al Qaeda and who has actually been behind the terrorist attacks commonly blamed on that group. It is noteworthy that that Yugoslav government, the government with whom Bunel was asserted by the French government to have shared information, claimed that Albanian and Bosnian guerrillas in the Balkans were being backed by elements of “Al Qaeda.” We now know that these guerrillas were being backed by money provided by the Bosnian Defense Fund, an entity established as a special fund at Bush-influenced Riggs Bank and directed by Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. French officer Maj. Pierre-Henri Bunel, who knew the truth about “Al Qaeda” — Another target of the neo-cons.
Paul Merrell

What Obama Should Have Told Bibi - The Unz Review - 0 views

www.unz.com/...at-obama-should-have-told-bibi

war & peace Israel U.S.-foreign-policy Netanyahu Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • For what it’s worth, this is what I propose Obama should have said to Bibi but didn’t, with a transcript of the conversation also faxed over to Ron Lauder at the World Jewish Congress: “Nice to have you back Prime Minister, but not really as it’s close to lunchtime, to which, incidentally, you are not invited. Why don’t you stay home? You have been interfering in our politics and denigrating both me personally and my office for far too long. How would you like it if I were to go to Israel and endorse one of your opponents? If you keep up this crap I will revoke your visa and you’ll never visit here again.” “And by the way, your plan to expel thousands of Arabs from East Jerusalem and to shoot kids throwing stones at your occupying army is not acceptable to us. And then there are new reports of your harvesting organs and other medical transplant material from the bodies of Palestinians that you have killed. There’s a long history of that in your country, but it’s a bit much even by your standards, isn’t it, and it begs the question whether there is anything that you won’t do. Next time a motion comes up in the United Nations condemning your brutality we will support it. Maybe we’ll co-sponsor or even propose it to show that we’re serious.” “We are running out of money here in Washington and are thinking of cutting benefits to our own people. I note that Israelis have free medical care and university education, which means that we are subsidizing things that we Americans do not have so it hardly seems fair. We have been giving you more than $3 billion in aid every year and also looking the other way when you benefit from tax free charitable contributions that actually are illegal under American law. By executive order, I am stopping the cash flow and asking the IRS to look at your friends over here.”
  • “And speaking of Israel’s many friends, your good buddy at the State Department Victoria Nuland is now working down in the mail room. And I am asking the Justice Department to register the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as a foreign agent, subject to having its finances and operations monitored by U.S. authorities. Oh, and your spy Jonathan Pollard will be denied parole later this month and will be the guest of a federal prison for the next twenty years.” “I cannot see where you have done anything for us except complain. As you are now pledging Israel to continue its occupation of Palestinian land and ‘live by the sword’, meaning the killing of Arabs will accelerate, I am suspending all military cooperation with you until you come up with a plan to remove most of your settlers from the West Bank. Come back when you have something to show me. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” Well, okay, it was never bloody likely to happen that way, but I can dream, can’t I? If you think Obama is spineless when confronted by Ron Lauder and the usual suspects, just think of how bad it will be when we have President Clinton or President Rubio, proxies for their Israel firster donors Haim Saban and Paul Singer respectively. The new president and his or her staff will have to learn how to perform proskynesis whenever Netanyahu enters the oval office.
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