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Paul Merrell

Jim Crow returns | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

projects.aljazeera.com/...index.html

voting-rights Interstate-Cross-Check voter-fraud-fraud civil-liberties

shared by Paul Merrell on 30 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Election officials in 27 states, most of them Republicans, have launched a program that threatens a massive purge of voters from the rolls. Millions, especially black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters, are at risk. Already, tens of thousands have been removed in at least one battleground state, and the numbers are expected to climb, according to a six-month-long, nationwide investigation by Al Jazeera America. At the heart of this voter-roll scrub is the Interstate Crosscheck program, which has generated a master list of nearly 7 million names. Officials say that these names represent legions of fraudsters who are not only registered but have actually voted in two or more states in the same election — a felony punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison. Until now, state elections officials have refused to turn over their Crosscheck lists, some on grounds that these voters are subject to criminal investigation. Now, for the first time, three states — Georgia, Virginia and Washington — have released their lists to Al Jazeera America, providing a total of just over 2 million names.
  • The Crosscheck list of suspected double voters has been compiled by matching names from roughly 110 million voter records from participating states. Interstate Crosscheck is the pet project of Kansas’ controversial Republican secretary of state, Kris Kobach, known for his crusade against voter fraud. The three states’ lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim — ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too — 1 in 11 — are at risk of having their names scrubbed from the voter rolls, though not as vulnerable as minorities.If even a fraction of those names are blocked from voting or purged from voter rolls, it could alter the outcome of next week’s electoral battle for control of the U.S. Senate — and perhaps prove decisive in the 2016 presidential vote count.
  • Based on the Crosscheck lists, officials have begun the process of removing names from the rolls — beginning with 41,637 in Virginia alone. Yet the criteria used for matching these double voters are disturbingly inadequate.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • In practice, all it takes to become a suspect is sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state. Typical “matches” identifying those who may have voted in both Georgia and Virginia include:Kevin Antonio Hayes of Durham, North Carolina, is a match for a man who voted in Alexandria, Virginia, as Kevin Thomas Hayes.John Paul Williams of Alexandria is supposedly the same man as John R. Williams of Atlanta, Georgia.Robert Dewey Cox of Marietta, Georgia is matched with Robert Glen Cox of Springfield, Virginia.
  • That was the sales pitch. But the actual lists show that not only are middle names commonly mismatched and suffix discrepancies ignored, even birthdates don’t seem to have been taken into account. Moreover, Crosscheck deliberately ignores Social Security mismatches, in the few instances when the numbers are even collected. The Crosscheck instructions for county election officers state, “Social Security numbers are included for verification; the numbers might or might not match.”
  • There are 6,951,484 names on the target list of the 28 states in the Crosscheck group; each of them represents a suspected double voter whose registration has now become subject to challenge and removal. According to a 2013 presentation by Kobach to the National Association of State Election Directors, the program is a highly sophisticated voter-fraud-detection system. The sample matches he showed his audience included the following criteria: first, last and middle name or initial; date of birth; suffixes; and Social Security number, or at least its last four digits.
  • Al Jazeera America visited these and several other potential double voters. John Paul Williams of Alexandria insists he has never used the alias “John R. Williams.” “I’ve never lived in Georgia,” he says.Jo Cox, wife of suspected double voter Robert Glen Cox of Virginia, says she has a solid alibi for him. Cox “is 85 years old and handicapped. He wasn’t in Georgia. Never voted there,” she says. He has also never used the middle name “Dewey.” Twenty-three percent of the names — nearly 1.6 million of them — lack matching middle names. “Jr.” and “Sr.” are ignored, potentially disenfranchising two generations in the same family. And, notably, of those who may have voted twice in the 2012 presidential election, 27 percent were listed as “inactive” voters, meaning that almost 1.9 million may not even have voted once in that race, according to Crosscheck’s own records.
  • Mark Swedlund is a specialist in list analytics whose clients have included eBay, AT&T and Nike. At Al Jazeera America’s request, he conducted a statistical review of Crosscheck’s three lists of suspected double voters. According to Swedlund, “It appears that Crosscheck does have inherent bias to over-selecting for potential scrutiny and purging voters from Asian, Hispanic and Black ethnic groups. In fact, the matching methodology, which presumes people in other states with the same name are matches, will always over-select from groups of people with common surnames.” Swedlund sums up the method for finding two-state voters — simply matching first and last name — as “ludicrous, just crazy.”
  • elen Butler is the executive director of Georgia’s Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda, which conducts voter drives in minority communities. Any purge list that relies on name matches will contain a built-in racial bias against African-Americans, she says, because “We [African-Americans] took our slave owners’ names.” The search website PeopleSmart notes that 86,020 people in the United States have the name John Jackson. And according to the 2000 U.S. Census, which is the most recent data set, 53 percent of Jacksons are African-American.
  • In North Carolina, state officials have hired former FBI agent Charles W. “Chuck” Stuber, who played a major role in the campaign finance fraud case brought against former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, to, in the words of their press release, “investigate cases of possible voter fraud identified by an interstate cross-check comparing election records from 28 states.”
  • But despite knowing the names and addresses of 192,207 supposed double voters in the state, Stuber has not nabbed a single one in his five months on the job. Josh Lawson, a spokesman for the board of elections, says, “This agency has made no determination as to which portion of these [lists] represent data error or voter fraud.” In fact, to date, Lawson admits that Stuber has found only errors and not one verified fraudulent voter.
Paul Merrell

Stanford Researchers: It Is Trivially Easy to Match Metadata to Real People - Rebecca J... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...282642

surveillance state NSA lies Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 13 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In defending the NSA's telephony metadata collection efforts, government officials have repeatedly resorted to one seemingly significant detail: This is just metadata—numbers dialed, lengths of calls. "There are no names, there’s no content in that database," President Barack Obama told Charlie Rose in June. No names; just metadata. New research from Stanford demonstrates the silliness of that distinction. Armed with very sparse metadata, Jonathan Mayer and Patrick Mutchler found it easy—trivially so—to figure out the identity of a caller. <div><a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drebecca-j-rosen%26title%3Dstanford-researchers-it-is-trivially-easy-to-match-metadata-to-real-people%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x185&c=387748957&tile=3" title=""><img src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drebecca-j-rosen%26title%3Dstanford-researchers-it-is-trivially-easy-to-match-metadata-to-real-people%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x185&c=387748957&tile=3" alt="" /></a></div> Mayer and Mutchler are running an experiment which works with volunteers who agree to use an Android app, MetaPhone, that allows the researchers access to their metadata. Now, using that data, Mayer and Mutchler say that it was hardly any trouble at all to figure out who the phone numbers belonged to, and they did it in just a few hours.
  • They write: We randomly sampled 5,000 numbers from our crowdsourced MetaPhone dataset and queried the Yelp, Google Places, and Facebook directories. With little marginal effort and just those three sources—all free and public—we matched 1,356 (27.1%) of the numbers. Specifically, there were 378 hits (7.6%) on Yelp, 684 (13.7%) on Google Places, and 618 (12.3%) on Facebook. What about if an organization were willing to put in some manpower? To conservatively approximate human analysis, we randomly sampled 100 numbers from our dataset, then ran Google searches on each. In under an hour, we were able to associate an individual or a business with 60 of the 100 numbers. When we added in our three initial sources, we were up to 73. How about if money were no object? We don’t have the budget or credentials to access a premium data aggregator, so we ran our 100 numbers with Intelius, a cheap consumer-oriented service. 74 matched.1 Between Intelius, Google search, and our three initial sources, we associated a name with 91 of the 100 numbers.
  • Their results weren't perfect (and they note that the Intelius data was particularly spotty), but they didn't even try all that hard. "If a few academic researchers can get this far this quickly, it’s difficult to believe the NSA would have any trouble identifying the overwhelming majority of American phone numbers," they conclude. It's also difficult to believe they wouldn't try. As federal district judge Richard Leon wrote in his decision last week, "There is also nothing stopping the Government from skipping the [National Security Letter] step altogether and using public databases or any of its other vast resources to match phone numbers with subscribers."
  • Paul Merrell on 13 Jan 14
     
    Another Obama/NSA lie exposed. 
Paul Merrell

Watchdog: FBI Facial Recognition May Not Be Accurate - Nextgov.com - 0 views

www.nextgov.com/...129155

surveillance state FBI facial-recognition

shared by Paul Merrell on 18 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • The FBI doesn’t know exactly how accurate its facial recognition technology is, new watchdog report finds. The bureau's Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System, a database including more than 30 million photos of criminals, lets law enforcement match a surveillance camera photo to that of a known criminal by narrowing their identity to between two and 50 possible candidates. But the FBI hasn't ensured its facial recognition technology doesn’t “unnecessarily include photos of innocent people as investigative leads,” according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. The NGI-IPS and the FBI’s "Facial Analysis, Comparison and Evaluation Services," or FACE, which accesses databases from other federal, state and local groups, were the subject of a recent audit.  Most photos in NGI-IPS are submitted from 18,000 external groups among federal, state and local law enforcement -- about 70 percent are criminal mugshots. It’s the same technology that helped the FBI and a state track down a sex offender who had been on the run for 20 years. The FBI has spent about $55 million on facial recognition over the last six years.
  • FBI officials haven’t tested the detection rate -- how often a match is generated against a submitted photo -- for lists less than 50 candidates, according to GAO. Law enforcement may request a specific number of candidates for any search, though the default is 20. Verifying that NGI-IPS is accurate for all candidate list sizes would provide more assurance that the system helps to “enhance, rather than hinder, criminal investigations,” the GAO report said. <a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?sz=300x300&c=801138892&iu=%2F617%2Fnextgov.com%2Fsection_emergingtech%2Fcontent%2Fpid_129155&t=noscript%3Dtrue%26referring_domain%3DTyped%252FBookmarked%26pos%3Dinjector%26level%3D0"> <img src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?sz=300x300&c=801138892&iu=%2F617%2Fnextgov.com%2Fsection_emergingtech%2Fcontent%2Fpid_129155&t=noscript%3Dtrue%26referring_domain%3DTyped%252FBookmarked%26pos%3Dinjector%26level%3D0"/> </a> The FBI also hasn’t assessed how often errors occur in facial matching. These can be caused both by lower-quality technology, but also by low-quality photos, the report said. The detection- and the false-positive rate are key data points that will help the bureau and the public understand these risks before the technology is deployed, the report said. GAO also found FBI hadn’t determined whether the facial recognition technology its federal, state and local partners use is accurate enough to support its own investigations. These oversights could impinge on citizen's privacy and civil liberties, the report noted. In 2012, the advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggested facial recognition systems could allow “covert, remote, and mass capture and identification of images.”
  • In criminal cases, a false positive might force a defendant to prove he or she isn’t who the facial recognition system thought he was -- such a scenario might “alter the traditional presumption of innocence,” an EFF statement said. The FBI has also been slow in publishing its privacy protocol, the report found. The Justice Department hadn’t updated a key “Privacy Impact Assessment” between 2008 and 2015; and though NGI-IPS has existed since 2011, the FBI also didn’t publish the requisite System of Records Notice, explaining how the technology is used, until May 2016. Publishing these notices more promptly would reassure the public “the FBI is evaluating risks to privacy,” the report said.  The GAO review comes shortly after DOJ published a notice arguing its massive biometric database should be excluded from the Privacy Act, which requires the federal government to disclose, upon inquiry from the subject, the information it collects on the public. The system includes finger and palm prints, iris and facial scans, images of tattoos, from criminals, suspects, detainees and anyone undergoing background checks, security clearances and other government assessments.
Paul Merrell

Backstage at the Trump vs. Deep State Cage Match - 0 views

sputniknews.com/...ge-trump-deep-state-cage-match

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Flynn Iran Russia

shared by Paul Merrell on 03 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Pepe Escobar118211755The real story behind The Fall of Michael Flynn has been confirmed by a highly informed US insider, who has previously detailed how the Trump presidency's foreign policy will unfold.
  • According to the insider, which I named "X", "Flynn was removed because he was agitating for a strike against Iran which would have had disastrous consequences. That would have led to Iranian strikes against Western oil supplies in the Middle East, raising Russia's economic power as the oil price would have soared to over $200 a barrel, and the EU would have had to join the Russian-Chinese block, or not be able to obtain sufficient energy to survive. The United States would have been completely isolated." When still on the job as National Security Adviser, Flynn, on the record, had already put Iran "on notice". That was, for all practical purposes, a virtual declaration of war. "X" expands on the ramifications: "Turkey is the key here, and Turkey wants a deal with Iran. The key danger to NATO is Turkey, as it does not control Serbia, and Turkey-Serbia undermines Romania and Bulgaria in an outflanking maneuver to the southern-southeastern part of NATO. Serbia linked to Russia in WWI and Turkey linked with Germany. Tito linked with Russia in WWII and Turkey was neutral. If Turkey, Serbia, Russia link together, NATO is outflanked. Russia is linked to Iran. Turkey is linking to Russia and Iran after what Erdogan perceives was a failed CIA coup attempt against him. All this was way beyond the capacity of Flynn to handle." "X" maintains that the Obama administration opening towards Iran, which led to the nuclear deal, was essentially a tactic to undermine Russia's Gazprom – assuming an Iran-Iraq gas pipeline would be built all the way to Turkey and then connected to EU markets.
  • "X", against a virtual Beltway consensus, insists, "the rapprochement to Russia was not dependent on Flynn. It is dependent on those who supervise Trump, and they put him in there for the purpose of shifting towards Russia. The deep state conflict is irrelevant. These are pros who know how and when to change policy. They have the goods on anyone who is in a high position and can destroy them at will. Flynn was in their way and now he is out."
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  • "X" reveals once again what makes the Pentagon squirm as far as Russia is concerned: "Russia is not an economic threat to the US. Its manufacturing base is centered on military production. It has developed since the [late 1990s] Belgrade bombing into the greatest military power in the world in terms of self-defense. Its defensive missiles seal its air space and its offensive ICBMs are the most advanced in the world. The recently tested US defensive missile placed in Romania is nearly worthless despite a fake, staged success for European consumption and to hold NATO together. Russia is a natural ally to the US. The US will shift to Russia and Flynn's departure is relatively meaningless except for its entertainment value."
Paul Merrell

Big Oil's "Sore Losers" Lead the Drive to War » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts... - 0 views

www.counterpunch.org/...e-losers-lead-the-drive-to-war

war & peace Ukraine Russia U.S.-foreign-policy pipelinestan reserve currrencies

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Following a 13 year rampage that has reduced large swathes of Central Asia and the Middle East to anarchy and ruin, the US military juggernaut has finally met its match on a small peninsula in southeastern Ukraine that serves as the primary operating base for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Crimea is the door through which Washington must pass if it intends to extend its forward-operating bases throughout Eurasia, seize control of vital pipeline corridors and resources, and establish itself as the dominant military/economic power-player in the new century. Unfortunately, for Washington, Moscow has no intention of withdrawing from the Crimea or relinquishing control of its critical military outpost in Sevastopol. That means that the Crimea–which has been invaded by the Cimmerians, Bulgars, Greeks, Scythians, Goths, Huns, Khazars, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, and Germans–could see another conflagration in the months ahead, perhaps, triggering a Third World War, the collapse of the existing global security structure, and a new world order, albeit quite different from the one imagined by the fantasists at the Council on Foreign Relations and the other far-right think tanks that guide US foreign policy and who are responsible for the present crisis.
  • How Washington conducts itself in this new conflict will tell us whether the authors of the War on Terror–that public relations hoax that concealed the goals of eviscerated civil liberties and one world government–were really serious about actualizing their NWO vision or if it was merely the collective pipedream of corporate CEOs and bored bankers with too much time on their hands. In the Crimea, the empire faces a real adversary, not a disparate group of Kalashinov-waving jihadis in flip-flops. This is the Russian Army; they know how to defend themselves and they are prepared to do so. That puts the ball in Obama’s court. It’s up to him and his crackpot “Grand Chessboard” advisors to decide how far they want to push this. Do they want to intensify the rhetoric and ratchet up the sanctions until blows are exchanged, or pick up their chips and walk away before things get out of hand? Do they want to risk it all on one daredevil roll of the dice or move on to Plan B? That’s the question. Whatever US policymakers decide, one thing is certain, Moscow is not going to budge. Their back is already against the wall. Besides, they know that a lunatic with a knife is on the loose, and they’re ready to do whatever is required to protect their people. If Washington decides to cross that line and provoke a fight, then there’s going to trouble. It’s as simple as that. Perma-hawk, John McCain thinks that Obama should take off the gloves and show Putin who’s boss. In an interview with TIME magazine McCain said “This is a chess match reminiscent of the Cold War and we need to realize that and act accordingly…We need to take certain measures that would convince Putin that there is a very high cost to actions that he is taking now.” “High cost” says McCain, but high cost for who?
  • What McCain fails to realize is that this is not Afghanistan and Obama is not in a spitting match with puppet Karzai. Leveling sanctions against Moscow will have significant consequences, the likes of which could cause real harm to US interests. Did we mention that “ExxonMobil’s biggest non-US oil project is a collaboration with Russia’s Rosneft in the Arctic, where it has billions of dollars of investments at stake.” What if Putin decides that it’s no longer in Moscow’s interest to honor contracts that were made with US corporations? What do you think the reaction of shareholders will be to that news? And that’s just one example. There are many more. Any confrontation with Russia will result in asymmetrical attacks on the dollar, the bond market, and oil supplies. Maybe the US could defeat Russian forces in the Crimea. Maybe they could sink the fleet and rout the troops, but there’ll be a heavy price to pay and no one will be happy with the outcome.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Here’s a clip from an article at Testosterone Pit that sums it up nicely: “Sergei Glazyev, the most hardline of Putin’s advisors, sketched the retaliation strategy: Drop the dollar, sell US Treasuries, encourage Russian companies to default on their dollar-denominated debts, and create an alternative currency system with the BRICS and hydrocarbon producers like Venezuela and Iran… Putin’s ally and trusted friend, Rosneft president Igor Sechin…suggested that it was “advisable to create an international stock-exchange for the participating countries, where transactions could be registered with the use of regional currencies.” (From Now On, No Compromises Are Possible For Russia, Testosterone Pit)
  • As the US continues to abuse its power, these changes become more and more necessary. Foreign governments must form new alliances in order to abandon the present system–the “dollar system”–and establish greater parity between nation-states, the very nation-states that Washington is destroying one-by-one to establish its ghoulish vision of global corporate utopia. The only way to derail that project is by exposing the glaring weakness in the system itself, which is the use of an international currency that is backed by $15 trillion in government debt, $4 trillion in Federal Reserve debt, and trillions more in unpaid and unpayable federal obligations. Whatever steps Moscow takes to abort the current system and replace the world’s reserve currency with money that represents a fair store of value, should be applauded. Washington’s reckless and homicidal behavior around the world make it particularly unsuitable as the de facto steward of the global financial system or to enjoy seigniorage, which allows the US to play banker to the rest of the world. The dollar is the foundation upon which rests the three pillars of imperial strength; political, economic and military. Remove that foundation and the entire edifice comes crashing to earth. Having abused that power, by killing and maiming millions of people across the planet; the world needs to transition to another, more benign way of consummating its business transactions, preferably a currency that is not backed by the blood and misery of innocent victims.
  • Paul Volcker summed up the feelings of many dollar-critics in 2010 when he had this to say: “The growing sense around much of the world is that we have lost both relative economic strength and more important, we have lost a coherent successful governing model to be emulated by the rest of the world. Instead, we’re faced with broken financial markets, underperformance of our economy and a fractious political climate.” America is irreparably broken and Washington is a moral swamp. The world needs regime change; new leaders, new direction and a different system.
  • In our last article, we tried to draw attention to the role of big oil in the present crisis. Author Nafeez Ahmed expands on that theme in a “must read” article in Monday’s Guardian. Check out this brief excerpt from Ahmed’s piece titled “Ukraine crisis is about Great Power oil, gas pipeline rivalry”: “Ukraine is increasingly perceived to be critically situated in the emerging battle to dominate energy transport corridors linking the oil and natural gas reserves of the Caspian basin to European markets… Considerable competition has already emerged over the construction of pipelines. Whether Ukraine will provide alternative routes helping to diversify access, as the West would prefer, or ‘find itself forced to play the role of a Russian subsidiary,’ remains to be seen.” (Guardian) The western oil giants have been playing “catch up” for more than a decade with Putin checkmating them at every turn. As it happens, the wily KGB alum has turned out to be a better businessman than any of his competitors, essentially whooping them at their own game, using the free market to extend his network of pipelines across Central Asia and into Europe. That’s what the current crisis is all about.
Paul Merrell

Asia Times Online :: The Kerry-Lavrov chess match - 0 views

www.atimes.com/...CEN-01-310314.html

war & peace Ukraine Russia U.S.-foreign-policy

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • It's hardly a match between equals - as one is playing Monopoly while the other plays chess. It's as if Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has been postponing his checkmate, while US Secretary of State John Kerry increasingly realizes he's facing the inevitable. Lavrov has explained over and over again, a loose federation is the only possible solution for Ukraine, as part of a "deep constitutional reform". That would imply ethnic - and even sentimentally - Russian eastern and southern Ukraine would be largely autonomous. Kerry gave signs of agreeing around two weeks ago that Ukrainian regions need more decision power; but then the White House recharged its moral blitzkrieg - coinciding with <a href='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/ck.php?n=a9473bc7&cb=%n' target='_blank'><img src='http://asianmedia.com/GAAN/www/delivery/avw.php?zoneid=36&cb=%n&n=a9473bc7&ct0=%c' border='0' alt='' ></a> President Barack Obama's trip to The Hague and Brussels. Still, even after an inconclusive four-hour Kerry-Lavrov chess match in Paris, there will be a checkmate.
  • The Russian solution is the same plan proposed by Moscow already a few weeks ago, and again discussed on the phone by Obama and President Vladimir Putin on Friday - which prompted Kerry to redirect his flight to Paris. Each Ukrainian region, according to Lavrov, would be able to control its economy, taxes, culture, language, education and "external economic and cultural connections with neighboring countries or regions". That's such a sound plan that even former - or perennial, depending on spin - cold warriors such as Henry Kissinger and Zbig Brzezinski reasonably agree. The key problem is that Washington immovably considers the present Kiev set up - also known as the Khaganate of Nulands, as in State Department Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nulands - as legitimate. Moscow sees them as a bunch of putschists and fascists. And Washington still refuses to press Kiev to accept a federal system - thus allowing, among other things, Russian as an official second language. The latest American stunt is a massive propaganda drive of "The Reds are coming" kind, about Russian troops massing at the border(pliant corporate media spins numbers over 100,000). Kerry, for the moment, is at least refraining from hysteria; he admits Washington and Moscow agree a diplomatic solution is a must, just to revert to the new meme - the artificial, Pentagon/NATO-spun "prelude to an invasion".
  • Paul Merrell on 04 Apr 14
     
    Pepe Escobar again on the Ukraine.
Paul Merrell

Colonization by Bankruptcy: The High-stakes Chess Match for Argentina | Global Research - 0 views

www.globalresearch.ca/...5397548

banksters vulture-capitalism Argentina bankruptcy-court-for-nations

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • If Argentina were in a high-stakes chess match, the country’s actions this week would be the equivalent of flipping over all the pieces on the board. – David Dayen, Fiscal Times, August 22, 2014 Argentina is playing hardball with the vulture funds, which have been trying to force it into an involuntary bankruptcy. The vultures are demanding what amounts to a 600% return on bonds bought for pennies on the dollar, defeating a 2005 settlement in which 92% of creditors agreed to accept a 70% haircut on their bonds. A US court has backed the vulture funds; but last week, Argentina sidestepped its jurisdiction by transferring the trustee for payment from Bank of New York Mellon to its own central bank. That play, if approved by the Argentine Congress, will allow the country to continue making payments under its 2005 settlement, avoiding default on the majority of its bonds. Argentina is already foreclosed from international capital markets, so it doesn’t have much to lose by thwarting the US court system. Similar bold moves by Ecuador and Iceland have left those countries in substantially better shape than Greece, which went along with the agendas of the international financiers.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Aug 14
     
    The saga of bankster and vulture capitalist attempts to establish an international tribunal that could declare nations bankrupt and sell of their land holdings, using Argentina as the exemplary of such efforts. But did Argentina just out-maneuver them?
Paul Merrell

The Latest Rules on How Long NSA Can Keep Americans' Encrypted Data Look Too Familiar |... - 0 views

justsecurity.org/...s-hold-encrypted-data-familiar

surveillance state NSA IAA-2015 Sect-309 legislation

shared by Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Does the National Security Agency (NSA) have the authority to collect and keep all encrypted Internet traffic for as long as is necessary to decrypt that traffic? That was a question first raised in June 2013, after the minimization procedures governing telephone and Internet records collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were disclosed by Edward Snowden. The issue quickly receded into the background, however, as the world struggled to keep up with the deluge of surveillance disclosures. The Intelligence Authorization Act of 2015, which passed Congress this last December, should bring the question back to the fore. It established retention guidelines for communications collected under Executive Order 12333 and included an exception that allows NSA to keep ‘incidentally’ collected encrypted communications for an indefinite period of time. This creates a massive loophole in the guidelines. NSA’s retention of encrypted communications deserves further consideration today, now that these retention guidelines have been written into law. It has become increasingly clear over the last year that surveillance reform will be driven by technological change—specifically by the growing use of encryption technologies. Therefore, any legislation touching on encryption should receive close scrutiny.
  • Section 309 of the intel authorization bill describes “procedures for the retention of incidentally acquired communications.” It establishes retention guidelines for surveillance programs that are “reasonably anticipated to result in the acquisition of [telephone or electronic communications] to or from a United States person.” Communications to or from a United States person are ‘incidentally’ collected because the U.S. person is not the actual target of the collection. Section 309 states that these incidentally collected communications must be deleted after five years unless they meet a number of exceptions. One of these exceptions is that “the communication is enciphered or reasonably believed to have a secret meaning.” This exception appears to be directly lifted from NSA’s minimization procedures for data collected under Section 702 of FISA, which were declassified in 2013. 
  • While Section 309 specifically applies to collection taking place under E.O. 12333, not FISA, several of the exceptions described in Section 309 closely match exceptions in the FISA minimization procedures. That includes the exception for “enciphered” communications. Those minimization procedures almost certainly served as a model for these retention guidelines and will likely shape how this new language is interpreted by the Executive Branch. Section 309 also asks the heads of each relevant member of the intelligence community to develop procedures to ensure compliance with new retention requirements. I expect those procedures to look a lot like the FISA minimization guidelines.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • This language is broad, circular, and technically incoherent, so it takes some effort to parse appropriately. When the minimization procedures were disclosed in 2013, this language was interpreted by outside commentators to mean that NSA may keep all encrypted data that has been incidentally collected under Section 702 for at least as long as is necessary to decrypt that data. Is this the correct interpretation? I think so. It is important to realize that the language above isn’t just broad. It seems purposefully broad. The part regarding relevance seems to mirror the rationale NSA has used to justify its bulk phone records collection program. Under that program, all phone records were relevant because some of those records could be valuable to terrorism investigations and (allegedly) it isn’t possible to collect only those valuable records. This is the “to find a needle a haystack, you first have to have the haystack” argument. The same argument could be applied to encrypted data and might be at play here.
  • This exception doesn’t just apply to encrypted data that might be relevant to a current foreign intelligence investigation. It also applies to cases in which the encrypted data is likely to become relevant to a future intelligence requirement. This is some remarkably generous language. It seems one could justify keeping any type of encrypted data under this exception. Upon close reading, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that these procedures were written carefully to allow NSA to collect and keep a broad category of encrypted data under the rationale that this data might contain the communications of NSA targets and that it might be decrypted in the future. If NSA isn’t doing this today, then whoever wrote these minimization procedures wanted to at least ensure that NSA has the authority to do this tomorrow.
  • There are a few additional observations that are worth making regarding these nominally new retention guidelines and Section 702 collection. First, the concept of incidental collection as it has typically been used makes very little sense when applied to encrypted data. The way that NSA’s Section 702 upstream “about” collection is understood to work is that technology installed on the network does some sort of pattern match on Internet traffic; say that an NSA target uses example@gmail.com to communicate. NSA would then search content of emails for references to example@gmail.com. This could notionally result in a lot of incidental collection of U.S. persons’ communications whenever the email that references example@gmail.com is somehow mixed together with emails that have nothing to do with the target. This type of incidental collection isn’t possible when the data is encrypted because it won’t be possible to search and find example@gmail.com in the body of an email. Instead, example@gmail.com will have been turned into some alternative, indecipherable string of bits on the network. Incidental collection shouldn’t occur because the pattern match can’t occur in the first place. This demonstrates that, when communications are encrypted, it will be much harder for NSA to search Internet traffic for a unique ID associated with a specific target.
  • This lends further credence to the conclusion above: rather than doing targeted collection against specific individuals, NSA is collecting, or plans to collect, a broad class of data that is encrypted. For example, NSA might collect all PGP encrypted emails or all Tor traffic. In those cases, NSA could search Internet traffic for patterns associated with specific types of communications, rather than specific individuals’ communications. This would technically meet the definition of incidental collection because such activity would result in the collection of communications of U.S. persons who aren’t the actual targets of surveillance. Collection of all Tor traffic would entail a lot of this “incidental” collection because the communications of NSA targets would be mixed with the communications of a large number of non-target U.S. persons. However, this “incidental” collection is inconsistent with how the term is typically used, which is to refer to over-collection resulting from targeted surveillance programs. If NSA were collecting all Tor traffic, that activity wouldn’t actually be targeted, and so any resulting over-collection wouldn’t actually be incidental. Moreover, greater use of encryption by the general public would result in an ever-growing amount of this type of incidental collection.
  • This type of collection would also be inconsistent with representations of Section 702 upstream collection that have been made to the public and to Congress. Intelligence officials have repeatedly suggested that search terms used as part of this program have a high degree of specificity. They have also argued that the program is an example of targeted rather than bulk collection. ODNI General Counsel Robert Litt, in a March 2014 meeting before the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, stated that “there is either a misconception or a mischaracterization commonly repeated that Section 702 is a form of bulk collection. It is not bulk collection. It is targeted collection based on selectors such as telephone numbers or email addresses where there’s reason to believe that the selector is relevant to a foreign intelligence purpose.” The collection of Internet traffic based on patterns associated with types of communications would be bulk collection; more akin to NSA’s collection of phone records en mass than it is to targeted collection focused on specific individuals. Moreover, this type of collection would certainly fall within the definition of bulk collection provided just last week by the National Academy of Sciences: “collection in which a significant portion of the retained data pertains to identifiers that are not targets at the time of collection.”
  • The Section 702 minimization procedures, which will serve as a template for any new retention guidelines established for E.O. 12333 collection, create a large loophole for encrypted communications. With everything from email to Internet browsing to real-time communications moving to encrypted formats, an ever-growing amount of Internet traffic will fall within this loophole.
  • Paul Merrell on 26 Jan 15
     
    Tucked into a budget authorization act in December without press notice. Section 309 (the Act is linked from the article) appears to be very broad authority for the NSA to intercept any form of telephone or other electronic information in bulk. There are far more exceptions from the five-year retention limitation than the encrypted information exception. When reading this, keep in mind that the U.S. intelligence community plays semantic games to obfuscate what it does. One of its word plays is that communications are not "collected" until an analyst looks at or listens to partiuclar data, even though the data will be searched to find information countless times before it becomes "collected." That searching was the major basis for a decision by the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. that bulk collection of telephone communications was unconstitutional: Under the Fourth Amendment, a "search" or "seizure" requiring a judicial warrant occurs no later than when the information is intercepted. That case is on appeal, has been briefed and argued, and a decision could come any time now. Similar cases are pending in two other courts of appeals. Also, an important definition from the new Intelligence Authorization Act: "(a) DEFINITIONS.-In this section: (1) COVERED COMMUNICATION.-The term ''covered communication'' means any nonpublic telephone or electronic communication acquired without the consent of a person who is a party to the communication, including communications in electronic storage."       
Paul Merrell

Branstad Announces New Division Designed to Help Wrongly Convicted People | whotv.com - 0 views

whotv.com/...-help-wrongly-convicted-people

justice Iowa wrongly-convicted FBI-lab-scandal

shared by Paul Merrell on 02 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • “One of the things that is exciting about this is, if we are able to identify any cases in which those mistakes were made, that hair should be under glass somewhere,” said Iowa State Public Defender Adam Gregg. "We could be able to use DNA technology in order to test those hairs and find out whether they got the right person, and if they didn’t, then we will have the post-conviction relief process in order to correct that mistake." About 100 cases involving hair comparison have been flagged for review. The Wrongful Conviction Division is part of the Office of the State Public Defender's Office. It will work with the Division of Criminal Investigation, the Iowa Innocence Project and the Midwest Innocence Project.
  • Governor Branstad announced he's launching a new division designed to help people who are wrongly convicted of crimes. “We also know in a system operated by humans, mistakes can be made including wrongful convictions,” Branstad said. The Wrongful Conviction Division will focus on hair comparison analysis. The FBI recently admitted to serious errors in testimony on those tests, many times overstating how close hair from a crime scene matched a defendant. The FBI trains the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation on hair analysis methods, so the Public Defender's Office wants to review cases where hair comparison analysis was used. They’re looking at cases from 1980-2000, which was a time when DNA analysis wasn't widely used.
  • “One of the things that is exciting about this is, if we are able to identify any cases in which those mistakes were made, that hair should be under glass somewhere,” said Iowa State Public Defender Adam Gregg. "We could be able to use DNA technology in order to test those hairs and find out whether they got the right person, and if they didn’t, then we will have the post-conviction relief process in order to correct that mistake."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “One of the things that is exciting about this is, if we are able to identify any cases in which those mistakes were made, that hair should be under glass somewhere,” said Iowa State Public Defender Adam Gregg. "We could be able to use DNA technology in order to test those hairs and find out whether they got the right person, and if they didn’t, then we will have the post-conviction relief process in order to correct that mistake."
  • Paul Merrell on 02 Nov 15
     
    This should be happening in evry state and court in which the FBI lab's false hair sample testing results may have been used to convict anyone. And it should have happened in all those jurisdictions as soon as the FBI lab scandal was discovered. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html
Paul Merrell

Zogby Analytics - The Zogby Poll℠: Sanders and Biden dominate Trump; Obama an... - 0 views

zogbyanalytics.com/...tight-races-with-the-president

Auction-2020 polls

shared by Paul Merrell on 10 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • Zogby Analytics conducted a hybrid (live interviewer telephone and online) survey of 1,514 likely voters in the US. The survey was conducted 10/19/2017 - 10/25/2017. Based on a confidence interval of 95%, the margin of error for 1,514 is +/- 2.5 percentage points. In our latest poll, we analyzed voters' attitudes concerning potential 2020 presidential election match-ups. We found Donald Trump is in close races against Senator Elizabeth Warren and former first lady Michelle Obama. We also see the president in difficult match-ups with Senator Bernie Sanders and former vice president Joe Biden. In the match-up between President Trump and Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont receives a narrow majority of voters, while Trump receives 40% of voters. Sanders does better than Trump with women (56%-35%), younger voters age 18-24 (69%-27%), 18-29 (64%-30%), Walmart shoppers (47%-42%), voters age 50-64 (46%-44%), Amazon shoppers (51%-41%) and all minorities. As per usual Trump beats Sanders among voters age 65+ (53%-40%) NASCAR fans (47%-46%), Catholic voters (49%-43%), and rural voters (53%-36%). Sanders does the most damage to Trump among men (both tied at46%), and beats him significantly with Independents (51%-36%). Bernie Sanders also cuts into Trump's lead with older voters and NASCAR fans. When we examine Trump vs. former vice president Joe Biden, Biden beats the president 50% to 40%. Joe Biden, like Bernie Sanders, is favored among younger voters age 18-24 (74%-18%), voters age 18-29 (60%-31%), women (57%-34%), Independents (50%-37%), and all minority groups. President Trump struggles against Biden because Biden is able to tap into the president's base of voters who frequently shop at Walmart (tied at 46%), voters age 50-64 (Biden leads 47% to 43%) and voters with no college education (Biden leads 47% to 42%).
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - What TARP Boss Neil Barofsky Told Me Yesterday Should Shock You - 1 views

www.thedailybell.com/...-Me-Yesterday-Should-Shock-You

TARP Neil-Barofsky Banksters Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 May 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 18 May 13
     
    " The Daily Bell Newswire Editorial FRIDAY, MAY 17, 2013 What TARP Boss Neil Barofsky Told Me Yesterday Should Shock You By Bill Bonner 8 Bill Bonner The financial news is getting boring. The Dow goes only one way - up. But gold fell below $1,400 per ounce yesterday. Rather than trying to figure it out, yesterday evening we drove down to Zombietown. A friend in Washington had promised to introduce us to Neil Barofsky, inspector general of the TARP program. You remember TARP? It was the feds' $700 billion program to rescue the US economy from a correction. Neil Barofsky was in charge of it. So we decided to go down and ask him how it turned out... Meanwhile, in yesterday's International Herald Tribune was a small note: "Economists agree that spending cuts and tax increases have slowed the US recovery." Readers will recognize this as the usual claptrap. Government spending does not bring a genuine "recovery." C'mon... how many times do we have to explain? You take $5 worth of resources and give them to an armed 19-year-old in Afghanistan. He shoots a round or two into a mountainside... poof... the $5 is gone. Or you have an ATF official. He's idling his motor as he stakes out a house believed to be used by a cigarette smuggler. In a few minutes, or even seconds, the $5 has vanished. Or give the money to a disabled person; he buys a MoonPie and a Coke. Economists may record the spending as part of GDP... But how are you better off? You're $5 poorer, not $5 richer. But GDP growth is something economists feel they can control. So they go to work on it like a sex maniac strangling a prostitute. Nothing good comes of it. But at least they get results. And here comes Paul Krugman with more garroting wire! The New York Times Magazine: Keynesian economics rests fundamentally on the proposition that macroeconomics isn't a morality play - that depressions are essentially a technical malfunction. As the Great Depression deepened, Keynes famously declared
Joe La Fleur

Mixing and Matching - Thomas Sowell - Townhall Conservative Columnists - Page 1 - 0 views

townhall.com/...mixing_and_matching

mixing matching

shared by Joe La Fleur on 17 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Joe La Fleur on 17 Apr 12
     
    Obama socialism through Social Endineering
Gary Edwards

The Three Biggest Lies the Government Is Telling You by Charles Goyette - 1 views

lewrockwell.com/...goyette24.1.html

Government-debt Unfunded-liabilities lies

shared by Gary Edwards on 27 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 27 Jan 12
     
    Unfunded liabilities are the difference between a program's projected costs and its projected revenues, both valued in today's dollars. Medicare and Social Security both have promised benefits that outrace revenue streams. They are the largest components of the government's unfunded liabilities, the hidden debt of the nation. But there are other federal retirement programs with not merely inadequate funding like Medicare and Social Security, but with no revenue streams of their own at all. Among them are retirement programs for military and federal workers. In September 2011, USA Today analyzed dozens of overlapping programs for retired federal workers. It reported that despite the existing debt crisis, Congress continues to add to the promised benefits, so that retirement programs now have a $5.7 trillion unfunded liability. The newspaper sums up its report on the retirement programs this way: Private employers are legally required to put money into pension funds to match retirement promises. Private pensions have $2.3 trillion in stocks, bonds, real estate and other assets. State and local governments have $3 trillion in retirement funds. The federal government has nothing set aside. The total unfunded liabilities of the U.S. government have been calculated with a number of present value and discount models. Results of the shortfall from these methods range from about $70 trillion to $120 trillion dollars. For a family of four this represents a liability between $900,000 and $1.5 million. (You can follow the debt as it adds up at www.USdebt.org.)
Gary Edwards

Google News - 0 views

news.google.com/?ar=1378752090

Obama-Muslim-Brotherhood Obama-Bribes

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Sep 13
     
    An incredible story is unfolding in Egypt where the new military government is digging through volumes of documents seized in raids on the Muslim Brotherhood. The documents are said to show that Barak Obama has been funneling Billions of dollars into the Muslim Brotherhood. excerpt: "Bare Naked Islam has done extensive reporting on the "bribes." The ... Evidence we have obtained lends credibility to the charges of "gifts" (bribes) being taken in U.S. dollars from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo" that were distributed to top ministerial level officials in the Mursi government. Via Almesryoon: "A judicial source stated that over the past few days, a number of complaints have beenfiled with the Attorney General Hisham Barakat. These complaints accuse the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and leaders of the centrist party of receiving gifts from the American embassy in Cairo. The sponsors of these complaints stated that among these leaders are Mohamed Badie, General Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, Khairat Al-Shater, deputy leader and businessman, Mohamed Beltagy leading the group, Essam el-Erian, deputy head of the Freedom and Justice Party of, and Abu Ela Mady, head of the Wasat Party, Essam Sultan, deputy head of the Wasat Party." The strength of these allegations is seemingly bolstered by another case alluded to by the newspaper in which a document is referenced. This document reportedly reveals monthly "gifts" being paid to Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt by the Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor Al Thani, Minister of Foreign Affairs to the Mursi government. These monthly payments were said to be denominated in U.S. dollars to each leader. Evidence for such allegations are substantiated by a document we have obtained. It includes the names of several recipients of funds and even includes their signatures acknowledging receipt of the funds. This ledger, obtained from inside the Mursi government, lends additional credibility to the rep
Paul Merrell

Glenn Greenwald  "The Goal Of The U.S. Government Is To Eliminate ALL Privacy... - 0 views

www.informationclearinghouse.info/article37002.htm

surveillance state Greenwald BBC

shared by Paul Merrell on 29 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • When Edward Snowden leaked American intelligence secrets the whole world became aware of the extent of US-UK surveillance of global phone and internet traffic. Have the revelations flagged up a corrosive infringement of individual liberty, or undermined efforts to protect the world from terrorism? Hardtalk speaks to journalist, Glenn Greenwald - the man who broke the Snowden story. His mission, he says, is to hold power to account. Is this a journalistic crusade that's gone too far?
  • Paul Merrell on 29 Nov 13
     
    The latest hilarious chapter in the ongoing saga of BBC commentators trying to best Glenn Greenwald in an interview. This time with a stuffed-shirt, pompous type who does an exceedingly poor job of concealing that his is the voice of GCHQ. How many documents do you have? Who else has them? How are they protected? Don't you think that you should give them back to NSA? What makes you think you are qualified to make decisions about what to publish? Haven't you endangered the security of millions of people with your sensational, advocacy journalism. Don't you know that Bob Woodward has severely criticized the way you have handled this?   Greenwald, of course, makes mincemeat of the latest BBC talking head to tackle him without knowing the subject matter and always turns the questions back onto the real story: that government agencies have created an Orwellian surveillance state, that goverrnent can't be trusted to operate in secrecy. Greenwald so thoroughly danced on the fellow's brain that he probably missed that Greenwald had not only demonstrated that the guy was a government stooge but then told him flat out that he was.   When the guy tried the old shouting match trick, Greenwald calmly informed him that if he wanted to filibuster that Greenwald would hang up and let him filibuster to his heart's content but that if he wanted to conduct an interview he would darned well allow Greenwald to answer the questions before changing the subject. All in all, a masterful performance by a U.S. constitutional lawyer, uncowed by the interviewer's highbrow received pronunciation. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Received_Pronunciation This reminded me of federal District Court Judge Owen Panner's First Law of Trial Conduct: Never try to cross-examine an expert. In my time I've met a very few lawyers capable of doing so but it takes an incredible amount of research and consultation with another expert or five, and the setting of meticulous traps. Glenn Greenwald's latest B
Gary Edwards

Seymour M. Hersh · The Red Line and the Rat Line · LRB 6 April 2014 - 0 views

www.lrb.co.uk/...the-red-line-and-the-rat-line

Syria Gun-running Benghazi-coverup Seymour-Hersh

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.[*]​＊ Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14
     
    Sy Hersh walks us through his investigation into the reasons behind Obama's last-minute decision to postpone missile (and as it turns out, B52) strikes on Syria. His trail leads through the Benghazi incident and the CIA's running of weapons from Libya to jihadists in Syria (the "rat line") through Turkey engineering a false flag gas attack in Syria to draw Obama into attacking Syria for crossing his "red line" against Syrian use of chemical weapons. Note that Hersh's account of the "red line" events largely fits with the earlier accounts by Yossef Bodansky.  http://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/Middle-East/Syrian-Chemical-Attack-More-Evidence-Only-Leads-to-More-Questions.html http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/09/09/new-granular-evidence-points-to-saudi-involvement-in-syrias-chemical-weapons-terror-attack/ http://www.globalresearch.ca/did-the-white-house-help-plan-the-syrian-chemical-attack Note however that Hersh's account omits Bodansky's evidence that the U.S. State Department and CIA were part of the planning for the false flag attack.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14
     
    Note also the previous account by Wayne Madsen of events leading Obama to postpone his atack on Syria. http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2013/09/04/american-generals-stand-between-war-and-peace.html "Obama is faced with another grim reality. Some within the Pentagon ranks are so displeased with Obama's policies on Syria, they have let certain members of Congress of both parties know that «smoking gun» proof exists that Obama and CIA director John O. Brennan personally authorized the transfer of arms and personnel from Al-Qaeda-linked Ansar al Sharia Islamist rebels in Libya to Syria's Jabhat al Nusra rebels, who are also linked to Al Qaeda, in what amounts to an illegal «Iran-contra»-like scandal. The proof is said to be highly «[un]impeachable»." This is another "red line" / "rat line" tie, suggesting that the reason the Benghazi investigation has not produced an even larger scandal is that it would expose the War Party's efforts to supply captured Libyan arms to jihadists in Syria.  On the Iran/Contra parallel, note that bills to approve supply of weapons to Syrian "rebels" were then stalled in Congress, evidencing Congressional intent that it rather than the President would authorize arming the "rebel" forces. The fact that CIA and the State Dept. were already covertly doing so completes the Iran/Contra scandal analogy.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Apr 14
     
    See also Hersh's article in December 2013, establishing that the White House had "cooked" the alleged evidence offered in support of Obama's claim that Syria had been responsible for the attack. It also establishes Obama's prior knowledge that the "rebel" forces had sarin weapons. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n24/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Apr 14
     
    "The Red Line and the Rat Line: Seymour M. Hersh on Obama, Erdoğan and the Syrian rebels excerpt/intro: In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the 'red line' he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons.​＊ Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad's offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous. Obama's change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn't match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army's chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn't hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria's infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack."
Paul Merrell

FBI Director: Sony's 'Sloppy' North Korean Hackers Revealed Their IP Addresses | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...s-failed-use-proxies-sony-hack

war & peace cyberwar North-Korea Sony-hack FBI Comey

shared by Paul Merrell on 08 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • The Obama administration has been tightlipped about its controversial naming of the North Korean government as the definitive source of the hack that eviscerated Sony Pictures Entertainment late last year. But FBI director James Comey is standing by the bureau’s conclusion, and has offered up a few tiny breadcrumbs of the evidence that led to it. Those crumbs include the claim that Sony hackers sometimes failed to use the proxy servers that masked the origin of their attack, revealing IP addresses that the FBI says were used exclusively by North Korea. Speaking at a Fordham Law School cybersecurity conference Wednesday, Comey said that he has “very high confidence” in the FBI’s attribution of the attack to North Korea. And he named several of the sources of his evidence, including a “behavioral analysis unit” of FBI experts trained to psychologically analyze foes based on their writings and actions. He also said that the FBI compared the Sony attack with their own “red team” simulations to determine how the attack could have occurred. And perhaps most importantly, Comey now says that the hackers in the attack failed on multiple occasions to use the proxy servers that bounce their Internet connection through an obfuscating computer somewhere else in the world, revealing IP addresses that tied them to North Koreans.
  • “In nearly every case, [the Sony hackers known as the Guardians of Peace] used proxy servers to disguise where they were coming from in sending these emails and posting these statements. But several times they got sloppy,” Comey said. “Several times, either because they forgot or because of a technical problem, they connected directly and we could see that the IPs they were using…were exclusively used by the North Koreans.” “They shut it off very quickly once they saw the mistake,” he added. “But not before we saw where it was coming from.” Comey’s brief and cryptic remarks—with no opportunity for followup questions from reporters—respond to skepticism and calls for more evidence from cybersecurity experts unsatisfied with the FBI’s vague statements tying the hack to North Korean government. In a previous public announcement the FBI had said only that it found “similarities in specific lines of code, encryption algorithms, data deletion methods, and compromised networks,” as well as IP addresses that matched prior attacks it knows to have originated in North Korea. At that time, the FBI also said it had further evidence matching the tools used in the attack to a North Korean hacking attack that hit South Korean banks and media outlets.
  • Following those elliptical statements, the cybersecurity community demanded more information be released to prove North Korea’s involvement. Some have even signed a petition on the White House website calling for more transparency in the investigation. Well-known security blogger and author Bruce Schneier has compared the FBI’s “trust us” mentality to the claims of the Bush administration about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq War. Without more information, security experts themselves have remained deeply divided in their conclusions about who hacked Sony.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • That pseudo-explanation will likely do little to quell the security community’s doubts. Even if the hackers appeared to fail to use proxies on some occasions, it could still be very difficult to be sure those “real” IP addresses weren’t proxies themselves designed to serve as further misdirection. And a nagging loose thread remains that the Guardians of Peace hackers in their initial statements to Sony tried to extort money from the company before making any political demands. Sony’s Kim Jong-un assassination comedy “The Interview,” the suppression of which is believed by many to be the North Korean government’s motive in the hack, wasn’t even mentioned by the hackers until long after the intrusion was underway. Comey didn’t address that plot hole in the North Korean explanation in his speech.
Gary Edwards

America's Terrorism Fear Factory Rolls On | The National Interest - 0 views

nationalinterest.org/...orism-fear-factory-rolls-12054

terrorism

shared by Gary Edwards on 23 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • n her review of Risen’s book in the New York Times, Louise Richardson lauds his criticism of “the profligacy of government agencies and the ‘over-sight free zone’ they operated” as well as of “self-appointed terrorism experts” who promote fear “while drawing lucrative consulting contracts for themselves.
  • She is troubled, however, that Risen “makes no mention of the press,” which she considers a key member of the terrorism industry and “at least as guilty as others in his book of stirring up public anxiety for public gain.”             
  • Fear-mongering by officials and by the media is politically (and economically) understandable, but it is also decidedly irresponsible. Especially when public safety is the concern, it is vital to get the threats right and to evaluate counterterrorism measures in a systematic and coherent manner. Money and effort spent to deal with lesser threats is money unavailable for dealing with greater ones.     
  • Gary Edwards on 23 Jan 15
     
    ""Fear sells," points out journalist James Risen in his recent book, Pay Any Price.             There was a great deal of selling on ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday. Segueing neatly from a report on raids against terrorists in Belgium, host George Stephanopoulos noted that "fears in Europe are matched by growing anxiety here about homegrown terror." He then stoked those anxieties as he introduced a segment on an apparently current "sting operation to stop a radicalized young man planning a deadly attack on our nation's Capitol."            Only at the end of the "exclusive" report, and in passing, was it noted that the plot actually took place three years ago. And nowhere was it pointed out that the man had overstayed his visitor's visa by 12 years (and therefore could have been deported at any time), that he had been evicted from his apartment in Virginia, or that FBI operatives had paid him $5,700 for living expenses and provided him with every scrap of weaponry he possessed. Also unmentioned: FBI informants had promised to pay the man's destitute parents in Morocco up to $1,000 a month after he killed himself in the process of detonating a small (FBI-provided) bomb in a ludicrous mission to bring down the Capitol dome. The average monthly household income in Morocco is less than $600.              It is often assumed that, even without the FBI's aid, a determined homegrown terrorist would eventually find someone else to supply him with his required weaponry. However, as Trevor Aaronson observes in his book, The Terror Factory, there has never "been a single would-be terrorist in the United States who has become operational through a chance meeting with someone able to provide the means for a terrorist attack." Only the police and FBI have been able to supply that service.             In his book, Risen skewers what he calls the "homeland security-industrial complex." American leaders, he
Paul Merrell

Normandy Group to draft Peace Proposal for Ukraine | nsnbc international - 0 views

nsnbc.me/...aft-peace-proposal-for-ukraine

war & peace Ukraine Russia France Germany

shared by Paul Merrell on 07 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • Following Friday’s meeting between Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel behind closed doors in Moscow, the Normandy Group agreed to jointly draft a document, to be discussed with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko during a telephone conference on Sunday.  The result of Friday’s closed doors meeting between the three European leaders was announced by a not surprisingly relatively tight-lipped Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Pescov who reveled that:
  • “On the basis of proposals formulated by the French President and the German Chancellor, joint work is in progress to draft the text of a probable document on the implementation of the Minsk Accords, that would incorporate proposals by the Ukrainian President and those which were formulated today and additional proposals by President Putin”. Pescov added that this draft proposal, once it had been agreed upon, would be presented for the approval by all of the conflicting parties. That is, the Ukrainian government and the self-proclaimed People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lughansk.
  • The French Presidency and the office of the German Chancellor are equally tight-lipped about the five-hour meeting in Moscow. The French, German, Slovakian, Czech, Austrian, Swiss and other European countries position with regards to solving the crisis in Ukraine is substantially different from the positions of the United States and the position of the United Kingdom, Norway, Denmark and other, rather Atlantic Axis aligned European countries.
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  • It is noteworthy that the Minsk Accords on September 5, 2014, which resulted in the volatile but nonetheless a ceasefire agreement and a return to dialog were reached by sidelining the United States and the United Kingdom.
  • Meanwhile, the situation on the ground in southeastern Ukraine remains critical. The pocket around some 7,000 regular Ukrainian troops plus about 1,000 militia, including foreign mercenaries in the Debaltsevo region has been closed by militia from the Lughansk and Donetsk People’s Republics. An interim ceasefire agreement that would have allowed the evacuation of civilians has not been upheld, with both sides blaming the other. The evacuation had to be abandoned.
  • Paul Merrell on 07 Feb 15
     
    The surrounded 8,000 Ukraine troops represent about half of Ukraine's top fighting forces, according to some reports. That, however, isn't saying much. The attacking Ukraine military is mostly a conscripted force without sufficient training but with very low morale. It has been no match for the separatist forces, who are defending their homes and include a high percentage of highly-trained former Soviet and Russian military members. 
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