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Gary Edwards

J.P. Morgan Chase's Ugly Family Secrets Revealed | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...mily-secrets-revealed-20120313

Credit-Card-Scandal Banksters Linda-Almonte financial-collapse

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Mar 12
     
    Socialist blogger and Rolling Stone Magazine journalist Matt Taibi has made a career out of exposing Banksters and their criminal activities causing the 2008 collapse of the global financial industry.  Here he sights a story in American Banker that fully demonstrates the depths of depravity and criminal activities that continues to characterize big Banksters. The mortgage-foreclosure-robo signing scandal is just the tip of the ice berg.  Matt recounts the story of Linda Almonte, a JP Morgan Chase employee in charge of Credit Card debt bundling.  It's horrific. Money shot: The financial crash wouldn't have happened if even a slim plurality of financial executives had done what Linda Almonte did, i.e. simply refuse to sign off on a bogus transaction. If companies had merely upheld their own stated policies and stayed within the ballpark of the law, none of these messes could have accumulated: fraudulent mortgages wouldn't have been sold, families wouldn't have been foreclosed upon based on robo-signed documentation, investors wouldn't have been duped into buying huge packets of "misrepresented assets." ............. excerpt: In a story that should be getting lots of attention, American Banker has released an excellent and disturbing exposé of J.P. Morgan Chase's credit card services division, relying on multiple current and former Chase employees. One of them, Linda Almonte, is a whistleblower whom I've known since last September; I'm working on a recount of her story for my next book. One of the things we were promised by the lawmakers who passed the Dodd-Frank reform bill a few years back is that this would be a new era for whistleblowers who come forward to tell the world about problems in our financial infrastructure. This story now looms as a test case for that proposition. American Banker reporter Jeff Horwitz did an outstanding job in this story detailing the sweeping irregularities in-house at Chase, but his very thoroughness means the news may have ram
Gary Edwards

Precinct Project | How to govern your party locally, nationally. - 0 views

precinctproject.us

election-2012 voter-fraud Tea-Party-Patriots Precinct-Project

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Nov 12
     
    "Real political change begins at the local level & there is no section of political geography more local than the Precinct. Get involved in the political process in your Precinct & make a difference in the world around you. Do your part to promote the ideals & principles that Americans have protected for generations" This site offers a how-to handbook style guide to participating in and managing successful GOTV (Get Out The Vote) operations.  The site even offers technology to assist efforts. One thing is very clear about the 2012 election fraud.  Getting out the vote is FAR MORE IMPORTANT than raising money and buying ad time!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   My thinking is that the Tea Party Patriots need to launch a massive GOTV grassroots initiative that starts with two key efforts: .............. Contest the Obama Election Fraud.  Demand a recount in at least the four states where fraud was obvious, overwhelming and in-your-face clear.   .............. Immediately set about the task of replacing House Speaker Yohan Boehner with Darell Issa. ::  http://goo.gl/Z5xDk ............. Pump the Tea Party Manifesto :: http://goo.gl/ApWBP ............. Join forces to organize at the national level a Precinct Project strategy  ............. Adopt an Anti Agenda 21 movement based on the submission and support of State level Propositions protecting the Constitution, the principles of individual liberty embedded in the founding documents, and, individual property ownership rights.  Including homeownership and land usage.   The Precinct Project effort can become the force that takes on all of these issues.  On the ground local Manpower is the awsome force Tea Party Patriots bring to the table.  Time to start using that force.
Gary Edwards

Barack Obama Voter Fraud 2012: Barack Obama Voter Fraud 2012 - 0 views

obamavoterfraud.blogspot.com/...ck-obama-voter-fraud-2012.html

election-fraud 2012-elections fraud voter-fraud Constitutional-crisis

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Nov 12
     
    Wow.  Great collection of links detailing the incredible theft of the 2012 elections by the Obammunists.   There are a couple things we can do. web site provider suggests that all Tea Party, Libertarian and Conservative groups contact the Secretary of State in each of the involved battleground States and request a recount and verification of actual voters casting ballots. Another suggestion is to send official organization letters to Republican Secretaries of State asking them NOT TO Certify the election until all questions about voter fraud are vetted and abated. This is awful stuff, and may signal the end of our blessed Republic unless good citizens act immediately.
Paul Merrell

James Comey remained at Justice Department as monitoring went on | World news | guardia... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...ice-department-data-monitoring

surveillance state NSA FBI Comey Obama confirmation

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • James Comey famously threatened to resign from the Justice Department in 2004 over the warrantless surveillance of Americans' internet records. But once Justice Department and National Security Agency lawyers found a novel legal theory to cover the surveillance, the man Barack Obama tapped last week to lead the FBI stayed on as deputy attorney general for another year as the monitoring continued.Comey was the acting attorney general in March 2004, when long-simmering legal tensions over the online "metadata" surveillance pitted the Justice Department and FBI against the Bush White House and NSA. That incident, dramatically recounted by Comey to the Senate in May 2007, earned the 6ft 8in former federal prosecutor a reputation for integrity that has become central to his persona.
  • President Obama directly referred to that reputation when he nominated Comey to take over the FBI on June 21. Hovering over the announcement were the Guardian and Washington Post's revelations of wide-ranging surveillance efforts."To know Jim Comey is also to know his fierce independence and his deep integrity," Obama said. "He was prepared to give up a job he loved rather than be part of something he felt was fundamentally wrong."Except that a classified report recounting the incident, acquired by the Guardian, complicates that view. Comey threatened to resign over the perceived illegality of one aspect of the surveillance. But he remained at the Justice Department for another year as that effort, operating under a new legal theory, continued nearly unchanged.
  • Comey would later testify to the Senate that the episode was "the most difficult of my professional career."But "immediately," the NSA IG report shows, lawyers from the NSA and Comey's Justice Department "began efforts to recreate this authority." They found it in what the document nebulously refers to as a Pen Register/Trap and Trace Order – a reference to devices traditionally used by surveillance officials to record the incoming and outgoing calls made and received by a telephone.The Fisa court, the secret court that oversees NSA surveillance, approved the first such order for NSA to again collect and analyze large volumes of internet records from Americans on July 14 2004, barely three months after Comey's rebellion.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "Although NSA lost access to the bulk metadata from 26 March 2004 until the order was signed, the order essentially gave NSA the same authority to collect bulk internet metadata that it had" previously, the NSA IG report reads, "except that it specified the datalinks from which NSA could collect, and it limited the number of people that could access the data."The surveillance Comey and his colleagues – including Mueller, the FBI director he is nominated to replace – objected to had merely been paused and rerouted under a new legal basis. Comey remained at the Justice Department as deputy attorney general until August 15, 2005.
  • Paul Merrell on 04 Jul 13
     
    Here's hoping that the Senate has the sense to reject James Comey as the new FBI Director. The FBI needs a Director and Comey's active assistance  in unconstitutional NSA surveillance, even if not an absolute disqualifier, cannot possibly be sorted out  during the foreseeable future.   Hey, Mr. President, how about a real civil libertarian instead?
Paul Merrell

Greens Question Trump's Victory - Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...greens-question-trumps-victory

Auction 2016 Greens recounts Wisconsin Pennsylvania Michigan

shared by Paul Merrell on 25 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • A sudden flood of cash has enabled the Green Party to demand recounts of votes in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, three formerly Democratic states that largely decided the 2016 election for Donald Trump, reports Joe Lauria.
Gary Edwards

Ali Soufan Video Interviews | The Soufan Group - 1 views

soufangroup.com/video

Ali-Soufan FBI

shared by Gary Edwards on 09 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 09 Jan 12
     
    Former FBI agent and author of Black Banners - the inside story of 911. Ali Soufan on The Colbert Report January 4, 2012 Ali Soufan on The Colbert Report Ali Soufan on Charlie Rose December 23, 2011 Ali Soufan on Charlie Rose Ali Soufan Testifies Before British Parliament December 13, 2011 On Tuesday October 18, 2011, Ali Soufan gave oral evidence before the House of Commons' Home Affairs Committee, on the "roots of radicalization." Read the testimony here: http://soufangroup.com/news/details/?Article_Id=191 Anthony Franks on The John Batchelor Show November 3, 2011 Anthony Franks interviewed on the John Batchelor radio show. The interview covered the recent Atmospheric report that examined the current local dispute over gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean off the island off Cyprus involving U.S. Noble Energy Inc., and how the complex Turkish, US, and Israeli national interests intersected - and then how the interplay of regional energy politics impacts on the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq as it seeks ways to maintain regional influence through an intelligence and military presence in Turkey and Kuwait. Ali Soufan on AC360: Anwar al-Awlaki October 1, 2011 Ali Soufan talks to Anderson Cooper about Anwar al-Awlaki and al Qaeda in Yemen Ali Soufan on Anderson Cooper September 28, 2011 Talking about The Black Banners and harsh interrogation techniques Ali Soufan on Hardball with Chris Matthews September 23, 2011 Talking about the relationship with Pakistan's ISI. Ali Soufan talks with Martin Bashir on MSNBC September 15, 2011 Could the CIA have thwarted the 9/11 Plot? Fox: Judge Napolitano Interviews Ali Soufan: Eyewitness to the War on Terror September 15, 2011 Former FBI agent Ali Soufan recounts his eight years of counterterrorism work for the FBI and explains why 9/11 could?ve been prevented as well as why torture doesn't work. Ali Soufan on Morning Joe: The Interrogator September 13, 2011 Ali Soufan visits MSNBC's Morning Joe to discuss "The Black Banners
Gary Edwards

Investigating TWA 800/ Dreams - Shows - Coast to Coast AM - 0 views

www.coasttocoastam.com/...23

TWA-800

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Aug 13
     
    "Investigating TWA 800/ Dreams' ; mp3 tapes available on request ~ge~ Date: 07-23-13 Host: George Noory Guests: James Sanders, Michael Sebastian, Nicole Sebastian In the first half, former police officer specializing in accident investigation, James Sanders (book link), discussed his investigation into the downing of TWA Flight 800, and his journey looking for the truth behind what happened. He was married to a TWA flight attendant when the plane went down in 1996. He initially resisted getting involved, but began to suspect that a cover-up was taking place. Later, he and his wife were indicted for the crime of receiving residue from the accident and having it tested. He found out that the residue was the result of intense heat both outside and inside the fuselage, when an explosive force came through. On the evening of July 17, 1996 the Navy was conducting a large military exercise in the area near Flight 800, and 26 seconds before the plane was hit, FAA radar picked up a missile launch, which Sanders assumes was part of the Navy exercise. Then, Navy radar tracked the missile as it approached the right side of the 747, and two key witnesses watching TWA 800 from the ground, observed a missile approach its right side and explode where the leading edge of the right wing meets the fuselage, he recounted. Further, there was a second missile that blew the nose off the plane, he said. Sanders speculated that the cover-up was the product of a series of political decisions, particularly, that if the truth about the incident got out, it could hurt Clinton's re-election prospects later that year. "It is my belief that Flight 800 was the catalyst for everything they've covered up since then," he added."
Gary Edwards

Interview with Harold Hamm: How North Dakota Became Saudi Arabia - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...4226204576602524023932438.html

Harold-Hamm Oil-Natural-Gas Energy Obammunism Jackboot-Obammunism watermelons

shared by Gary Edwards on 01 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 01 Oct 11
     
    A USA Oil and Natural Gas revolution - WSBJ Stephen Moore interview Harold Hamm of Continental Resources.  Hamm recounts his discussion with the watermelon in chief, Obama. (Green on the outside and red on the inside).  Seems Obama really believes his green energy will totally replace oil and natural gas within the next five years.  What an idiot. excerpt: Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based founder and CEO of Continental Resources, the 14th-largest oil company in America, is a man who thinks big. He came to Washington last month to spread a needed message of economic optimism: With the right set of national energy policies, the United States could be "completely energy independent by the end of the decade. We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century." "President Obama is riding the wrong horse on energy," he adds. We can't come anywhere near the scale of energy production to achieve energy independence by pouring tax dollars into "green energy" sources like wind and solar, he argues. It has to come from oil and gas. You'd expect an oilman to make the "drill, baby, drill" pitch. But since 2005 America truly has been in the midst of a revolution in oil and natural gas, which is the nation's fastest-growing manufacturing sector. No one is more responsible for that resurgence than Mr. Hamm. He was the original discoverer of the gigantic and prolific Bakken oil fields of Montana and North Dakota that have already helped move the U.S. into third place among world oil producers. How much oil does Bakken have? The official estimate of the U.S. Geological Survey a few years ago was between four and five billion barrels. Mr. Hamm disagrees: "No way. We estimate that the entire field, fully developed, in Bakken is 24 billion barrels."
Paul Merrell

American Surveillance Now Threatens American Business - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...382821

surveillance state NSA U.S. polls sense-of-privacy data privacy

shared by Paul Merrell on 23 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • What does it look like when a society loses its sense of privacy? <div><a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" title=""><img style="border:none;" src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" alt="" /></a></div>In the almost 18 months since the Snowden files first received coverage, writers and critics have had to guess at the answer. Does a certain trend, consumer complaint, or popular product epitomize some larger shift? Is trust in tech companies eroding—or is a subset just especially vocal about it? Polling would make those answers clear, but polling so far has been… confused. A new study, conducted by the Pew Internet Project last January and released last week, helps make the average American’s view of his or her privacy a little clearer. And their confidence in their own privacy is ... low. The study's findings—and the statistics it reports—stagger. Vast majorities of Americans are uncomfortable with how the government uses their data, how private companies use and distribute their data, and what the government does to regulate those companies. No summary can equal a recounting of the findings. Americans are displeased with government surveillance en masse:   
  • A new study finds that a vast majority of Americans trust neither the government nor tech companies with their personal data.
  • What does it look like when a society loses its sense of privacy? <div><a href="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" title=""><img style="border:none;" src="http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/ad?iu=%2F4624%2FTheAtlanticOnline%2Fchannel_technology&t=src%3Dblog%26by%3Drobinson-meyer%26title%3Damerican-surveillance-now-threatens-american-business%26pos%3Din-article&sz=300x250&c=285899172&tile=1" alt="" /></a></div>In the almost 18 months since the Snowden files first received coverage, writers and critics have had to guess at the answer. Does a certain trend, consumer complaint, or popular product epitomize some larger shift? Is trust in tech companies eroding—or is a subset just especially vocal about it? Polling would make those answers clear, but polling so far has been… confused. A new study, conducted by the Pew Internet Project last January and released last week, helps make the average American’s view of his or her privacy a little clearer. And their confidence in their own privacy is ... low. The study's findings—and the statistics it reports—stagger. Vast majorities of Americans are uncomfortable with how the government uses their data, how private companies use and distribute their data, and what the government does to regulate those companies. No summary can equal a recounting of the findings. Americans are displeased with government surveillance en masse:   
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “It’s clear the global community of Internet users doesn’t like to be caught up in the American surveillance dragnet,” Senator Ron Wyden said last month. At the same event, Google chairman Eric Schmidt agreed with him. “What occurred was a loss of trust between America and other countries,” he said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It's making it very difficult for American firms to do business.” But never mind the world. Americans don’t trust American social networks. More than half of the poll’s respondents said that social networks were “not at all secure. Only 40 percent of Americans believe email or texting is at least “somewhat” secure. Indeed, Americans trusted most of all communication technologies where some protections has been enshrined into the law (though the report didn’t ask about snail mail). That is: Talking on the telephone, whether on a landline or cell phone, is the only kind of communication that a majority of adults believe to be “very secure” or “somewhat secure.”
  • According to the study, 70 percent of Americans are “at least somewhat concerned” with the government secretly obtaining information they post to social networking sites. Eighty percent of respondents agreed that “Americans should be concerned” with government surveillance of telephones and the web. They are also uncomfortable with how private corporations use their data: Ninety-one percent of Americans believe that “consumers have lost control over how personal information is collected and used by companies,” according to the study. Eighty percent of Americans who use social networks “say they are concerned about third parties like advertisers or businesses accessing the data they share on these sites.” And even though they’re squeamish about the government’s use of data, they want it to regulate tech companies and data brokers more strictly: 64 percent wanted the government to do more to regulate private data collection. Since June 2013, American politicians and corporate leaders have fretted over how much the leaks would cost U.S. businesses abroad.
  • (That may seem a bit incongruous, because making a telephone call is one area where you can be almost sure you are being surveilled: The government has requisitioned mass call records from phone companies since 2001. But Americans appear, when discussing security, to differentiate between the contents of the call and data about it.) Last month, Ramsey Homsany, the general counsel of Dropbox, said that one big thing could take down the California tech scene. “We have built this incredible economic engine in this region of the country,” said Homsany in the Los Angeles Times, “and [mistrust] is the one thing that starts to rot it from the inside out.” According to this poll, the mistrust has already begun corroding—and is already, in fact, well advanced. We’ve always assumed that the great hurt to American business will come globally—that citizens of other nations will stop using tech companies’s services. But the new Pew data shows that Americans suspect American businesses just as much. And while, unlike citizens of other nations, they may not have other places to turn, they may stop putting sensitive or delicate information online.
Paul Merrell

How the US Armed-up Syrian Jihadists - Consortiumnews - 0 views

consortiumnews.com/...e-us-armed-up-syrian-jihadists

war & peace U.S.-foreign-policy Syria CIA DoD Special-Forces jihadis training

shared by Paul Merrell on 01 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • “No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort”, a former Green Beret writes of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian insurgents, “they know we are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘Fuck it, who cares?’”. “I don’t want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying they were trained by Americans,” the Green Beret added. In a detailed report, US Special Forces Sabotage White House Policy gone Disastrously Wrong with Covert Ops in Syria, Jack Murphy, himself a former Green Beret (U.S. Special Forces), recounts a former CIA officer having told him how the “the Syria covert action program is [CIA Director John] Brennan’s baby …Brennan was the one who breathed life into the Syrian Task Force … John Brennan loved that regime-change bullshit.”
  • “No one on the ground believes in this mission or this effort”, a former Green Beret writes of America’s covert and clandestine programs to train and arm Syrian insurgents, “they know we are just training the next generation of jihadis, so they are sabotaging it by saying, ‘Fuck it, who cares?’”. “I don’t want to be responsible for Nusra guys saying they were trained by Americans,” the Green Beret added. In a detailed report, US Special Forces Sabotage White House Policy gone Disastrously Wrong with Covert Ops in Syria, Jack Murphy, himself a former Green Beret (U.S. Special Forces), recounts a former CIA officer having told him how the “the Syria covert action program is [CIA Director John] Brennan’s baby …Brennan was the one who breathed life into the Syrian Task Force … John Brennan loved that regime-change bullshit.”
  • In gist, Murphy tells the story of U.S. Special Forces under one Presidential authority, arming Syrian anti-ISIS forces, whilst the CIA, obsessed with overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad, and operating under a separate Presidential authority, conducts a separate and parallel program to arm anti-Assad insurgents. Murphy’s report makes clear the CIA disdain for combatting ISIS (though this altered somewhat with the beheading of American journalist James Foley in August 2014): “With the CIA wanting little to do with anti-ISIS operations as they are focused on bringing down the Assad regime, the agency kicked the can over to 5th Special Forces Group. Basing themselves out of Jordan and Turkey” — operating under “military activities” authority, rather than under the CIA’s coveted Title 50 covert action authority. The “untold story,” Murphy writes, is one of abuse, as well as bureaucratic infighting, which has only contributed to perpetuating the Syrian conflict.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But it is not the “turf wars,” nor the “abuse and waste,” which occupies the central part of Murphy’s long report, that truly matters; nor even the contradictory and self-defeating nature of U.S. objectives pursued. Rather, the report tells us quite plainly why the attempted ceasefires have failed (although this is not explicitly treated in the analysis), and it helps explain why parts of the U.S. Administration (Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and CIA Director Brenner) have declined to comply with President Obama’s will – as expressed in the diplomatic accord (the recent ceasefire) reached with the Russian Federation. The story is much worse than that hinted in Murphy’s title: it underlies the present mess which constitutes relations between the U.S. and Russia, and the collapse of the ceasefire.
Paul Merrell

Upcoming Trove Of Wikileaks Files To Expose Google, U.S. Government - 0 views

www.mintpressnews.com/...221113

war & peace Wikileaks Asssange Auction 2016

shared by Paul Merrell on 04 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • uring a press conference in Berlin on Tuesday, the media organization WikiLeaks touted 10 years of drawing the veil of secrecy away from governments and businesses worldwide while also confirming that a new batch of documents—specifically targeting the U.S. government and internet giant Google—will be released over the next two months. “Our upcoming series includes significant material on war, arms, oil, Google, the U.S. elections, and myself,” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said via video link from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been living since 2012. He saidthe documents would be released before the end of the year, with the first cache coming within the week. There was significant anticipation surrounding Tuesday’s announcement, which was originally set to come from a balcony at the embassy but was reconfigured due to “security concerns.” As the New York Times noted, “[the] remarks from Mr. Assange disappointed many followers of WikiLeaks in the United States, who had stayed up into the early hours hoping to hear information relevant to the presidential election.”
  • Indeed, The Verge reported: There was a lot of build-up to today’s press conference, in anticipation of what had been billed as an “October surprise” that could swing the U.S. presidential election. Instead, WikiLeaks devoted most of the event to recounting its most notorious releases and refuting criticism levied against it. Assange acknowledged the anticipation of a bombshell release in a winding address to reporters, though he declined to say whether the upcoming leaks would tilt the election toward Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump. “There is enormous expectation in the United States,” Assange said of the forthcoming leaks. “Some of that expectation will be partly answered; but you should understand that if we’re going to make a major publication in relation to the United States at a particular hour, we don’t do it at 3am.” Assange’s previous hints about forthcoming leaks led Republican operatives to express hope that WikiLeaks’ “October Surprise” would cripple Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy. But Assange appeared to quash that narrative on Tuesday, declaring: The idea that “we intend to harm Hillary Clinton, or I intend to harm Hillary Clinton, or I don’t like Hillary Clinton, all those are false.”
Gary Edwards

Character Matters and Mitt Romney has it - 1 views

The following eMail message is being forwarded around the Web and it does confirm my own personal experiences with then Governor Romney in 2005-2006. The issue then was the Massachusetts Open Gove...

Romney ODF Massachusetts-Lesson Massachusetts-RFi Microsoft OOXML

started by Gary Edwards on 17 Apr 12 no follow-up yet
Paul Merrell

Clapper Reads From the Bush/Cheney/Nixon Playbook to Fear-Monger Over Transparency - Th... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...sparency-helps-terrorists-like

surveillance state politics of fear terrorists™ presstitutes mainstream-media

shared by Paul Merrell on 14 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • James Clapper, President Obama’s top national security official, is probably best known for having been caught lying outright to Congress about NSA activities, behavior which (as some baseball players found out) happens to be a felony under federal law. But – like torturers and Wall Street tycoons before him – Clapper has been not only shielded from prosecution, and not only allowed to keep his job; he has has now been anointed the arbiter of others’ criminality, as he parades around the country calling American journalists “accomplices”. Yesterday, as Wired’s Dave Kravets reports, the “clearly frustrated” Clapper went before a Senate committee (different than the one he got caught lying to) to announce that the Snowden disclosures are helping the terrorists: We’re beginning to see changes in the communications behavior of adversaries: particularly terrorists. A disturbing trend, which I anticipate will continue . . . Terrorists and other adversaries of this country are going to school on U.S. intelligence sources, methods, and tradecraft. And the insights they’re gaining are making our job in the intelligence community much, much harder. And this includes putting the lives of members or assets of the intelligence community at risk, as well as those of our armed forces, diplomats, and our citizens. As Kravets notes, “Clapper is not the most credible source on Snowden and the NSA leaks.” Moreover, it’s hardly surprising that Clapper is furious at these disclosures given that “Snowden’s very first leak last June” – revelation of the domestic surveillance program – “had the side-effect of revealing that Clapper had misled the public and Congress about NSA spying.” And, needless to say, Clapper offered no evidence at all to support his assertions yesterday; he knows that, unlike Kravets, most establishment media outlets will uncritically trumpet his claims without demanding evidence or even noting that he has none.
  • But in general, it’s hardly surprising that national security officials claim that unwanted disclosures help terrorists. Fear-mongering comes naturally to those who wield political power. Particularly in post-9/11 America, shouting “terrorists!” has been the favorite tactic of the leadership of both parties to spread fear and thus induce submission. In a recent New York Times op-ed detailing how exploitation of terrorism fears is the key to sustaining the modern surveillance state, Northwestern University Philosophy Professor Peter Ludlow wrote that “since 9/11 leaders of both political parties in the United States have sought to consolidate power by leaning … on the danger of a terrorist attack”. He recounted that ”Machiavelli notoriously argued that a good leader should induce fear in the populace in order to control the rabble” and that “Hobbes in ‘The Leviathan’ argued that fear effectively motivates the creation of a social contract in which citizens cede their freedoms to the sovereign.” It would be surprising if people like Clapper didn’t do this. But what has struck me is how seriously many media figures take this claim. In the vast majority of interviews I’ve done about NSA reporting, interviewers adopt a grave tone in their voice and trumpet the claims from U.S. officials that our reporting is helping the terrorists. They treat these claims as though they’re the by-product of some sort of careful, deliberative, unique assessment rather than what it is: the evidence-free tactics national security state officials reflexively invoke to discredit all national security journalism they dislike. Let’s review a bit of history to see how true that is.
  • Political officials hate transparency.They would rather be able to hide what they’re doing. They therefore try to demonize those who impose transparency with the most extreme and discrediting accusations they can concoct (you’re helping terrorists kill Americans!). The more transparency one imposes on them, the more extreme and desperate this accusatory rhetoric becomes. This is not complicated. It’s all very basic. James Clapper is saying exactly what Dick Cheney and George Bush before him said, and those three said what John Ehrlichman and Henry Kissinger said before them about Ellsberg. It’s all spouted with no evidence. It’s rote and reflexive. It’s designed to smear and fear-monger. As Professor Ludlow notes, “Fear is even used to prevent us from questioning the decisions supposedly being made for our safety.” Maybe it’s time for journalists to cease being the leading advocates for state secrecy and instead take seriously their claimed role as watchdogs. At the very least, demand evidence before these sorts of highly predictable, cliched attacks are heralded as something to be taken seriously. As it is, they’re just cartoons: ones that are played over and over and over.
  • Paul Merrell on 14 Feb 14
     
    Glenn Greenwald pokes his stick in the presstitutes' eyes, again.
Paul Merrell

Snowden Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks an... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...t-wikileaks-and-its-supporters

surveillance state NSA GCHQ Wikileaks Assange anti-spying-deal lies Obama

shared by Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Top-secret documents from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart reveal for the first time how the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom targeted WikiLeaks and other activist groups with tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution. The efforts – detailed in documents provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – included a broad campaign of international pressure aimed not only at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but at what the U.S. government calls “the human network that supports WikiLeaks.” The documents also contain internal discussions about targeting the file-sharing site Pirate Bay and hacktivist collectives such as Anonymous. One classified document from Government Communications Headquarters, Britain’s top spy agency, shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.
  • Another classified document from the U.S. intelligence community, dated August 2010, recounts how the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group’s publication of the Afghanistan war logs. A third document, from July 2011, contains a summary of an internal discussion in which officials from two NSA offices – including the agency’s general counsel and an arm of its Threat Operations Center – considered designating WikiLeaks as “a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting.” Such a designation would have allowed the group to be targeted with extensive electronic surveillance – without the need to exclude U.S. persons from the surveillance searches.
  • In a statement to The Intercept, Assange condemned what he called “the reckless and unlawful behavior of the National Security Agency” and GCHQ’s “extensive hostile monitoring of a popular publisher’s website and its readers.” “News that the NSA planned these operations at the level of its Office of the General Counsel is especially troubling,” Assange said. “Today, we call on the White House to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the extent of the NSA’s criminal activity against the media, including WikiLeaks, its staff, its associates and its supporters.” Illustrating how far afield the NSA deviates from its self-proclaimed focus on terrorism and national security, the documents reveal that the agency considered using its sweeping surveillance system against Pirate Bay, which has been accused of facilitating copyright violations. The agency also approved surveillance of the foreign “branches” of hacktivist groups, mentioning Anonymous by name. The documents call into question the Obama administration’s repeated insistence that U.S. citizens are not being caught up in the sweeping surveillance dragnet being cast by the NSA. Under the broad rationale considered by the agency, for example, any communication with a group designated as a “malicious foreign actor,” such as WikiLeaks and Anonymous, would be considered fair game for surveillance.
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  • The system used by GCHQ to monitor the WikiLeaks website – codenamed ANTICRISIS GIRL – is described in a classified PowerPoint presentation prepared by the British agency and distributed at the 2012 “SIGDEV Conference.” At the annual gathering, each member of the “Five Eyes” alliance – the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand – describes the prior year’s surveillance successes and challenges. In a top-secret presentation at the conference, two GCHQ spies outlined how ANTICRISIS GIRL was used to enable “targeted website monitoring” of WikiLeaks (See slides 33 and 34). The agency logged data showing hundreds of users from around the world, including the United States, as they were visiting a WikiLeaks site –contradicting claims by American officials that a deal between the U.K. and the U.S. prevents each country from spying on the other’s citizens. The IP addresses collected by GCHQ are used to identify individual computers that connect to the Internet, and can be traced back to specific people if the IP address has not been masked using an anonymity service. If WikiLeaks or other news organizations were receiving submissions from sources through a public dropbox on their website, a system like ANTICRISIS GIRL could potentially be used to help track them down. (WikiLeaks has not operated a public dropbox since 2010, when it shut down its system in part due to security concerns over surveillance.)
  • It is unclear from the PowerPoint presentation whether GCHQ monitored the WikiLeaks site as part of a pilot program designed to demonstrate its capability, using only a small set of covertly collected data, or whether the agency continues to actively deploy its surveillance system to monitor visitors to WikiLeaks. It was previously reported in The Guardian that X-KEYSCORE, a comprehensive surveillance weapon used by both NSA and GCHQ, allows “an analyst to learn the IP addresses of every person who visits any website the analyst specifies.”
  • Paul Merrell on 21 Feb 14
     
    "... the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group's publication of the Afghanistan war logs." Sweden promptly launches an alleged rape investigation and Assange is forced by the UK courts to take refuge in the London embassy of Ecuador. Because of urging by the Obama administration aimed at chilling the the First Amendment rights of journalists. That should be grounds for impeachment.  
Paul Merrell

FINAL - Part II: Evidence Continues to Emerge #MH17 Is a False Flag Operation | No Limi... - 0 views

slavyangrad.wordpress.com/...mh17-is-a-false-flag-operation

war & peace Ukraine Malaysian-airliner U.S.-foreign-policy false-flag

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • #15 – Dissecting the Fake Intercept Disseminated by SBU (Ukrainian Security Service) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5E8kDo2n6g Note: Half of the Post Translated; The Remaining Half is Speculative Complete Original of the Post (in Russian) Can Be Found at Eugene-DF LiveJournal In the disseminated intercept, the place from which the missile was allegedly launched is clearly indicated: the checkpoint at the settlement of Chernukhino. Pay close attention at the Alleged Map of the MH17 Catastrophe.
  • And, so, we have the background. Let’s see how the picture unfolds: The launch is alleged to have been made from Chernukhino. The maximum distance of the launch is 16 kilometres. The aircraft fell between Snezhnoye and Torez. That’s 37 kilometres, which is 20 kilometres more than the maximum possible point at which the plain could have been hit. You know, even a plane with turned-off engines can’t glide like that. But the trouble is that the aircraft was not whole. According to the pattern of the spread of fuselage fragments and bodies, the plane was ruptured practically with the first shot. Here it must be mentioned that the high-explosive/fragmentation warhead of the rocket has a mass of approximately 50 kilograms (by the way, Ukrainians have an outdated modification, which is only 40 kilograms).
  • Overall, that’s not too little; however, it must be understood that it detonates not when it sticks into an airplane, but when it is still at a certain, and fairly significant distance. Moreover, the main strike factor is not the blast wave, but far more significantly – the stream of fragments. These fragments are previously prepared rods (and in the earlier versions – little cubes, if I recall correctly). And yes, for a jet fighter, that, in itself, is more than sufficient. However, here we are dealing with a huge airliner. Yes, one rocket will rip the casing, cause depressurization, and will kill a lot of passengers. But it will not break up the airliner into pieces. Given certain conditions, the pilots may even be able to land it. And, in fact, there have been precedents (to be provided in future posts). For example – the very same An-28, which is alleged to have been the first victim of a BUK system; even though it was done for, but the crew was able to successfully catapult out. Which, in some way, symbolizes. An An-28, by the way, is far smaller than a Boeing.
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  • In other words, the rocket caught up to the plane no closer than 25 kilometres away from Chernukhino. Which is absolutely impossible for a BUK system. By the way, we can’t overlook the fact that, at maximum distances, BUK can be used only provided there is support from an external radar installation for location and guiding purposes. In other words, even if a rockets flies far, BUK’s mobile radar does not cover its entire distance.
  • And that is what is so strange here: SBU literally offers evidence that proves that that the Militia had no part in the shooting down of the Boeing! The fact that they blame themselves in the recording is quite understandable. Unlike the fascists, they have a conscience, which takes its toll until you are sure it was not you who did it. Ok. But somebody did, in fact, shoot down the plane? Of course it was shot down. And here we have another question: what if this recording is a falsification through and through? Then it had to have been prepared somehow? And then disseminated? That’s when smoke starts to clear, and mirrors – to break. That’s the problem with tricks.
  • #14 – An Industry Outlet Confirms Carlos (@spainbuca) as ATC at Borispol Airport in Kiev Original: EturboNews (ETN Global Travel Industry News) – July 17, 2014 ETN received information from an air traffic controller in Kiev on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. This Kiev air traffic controller is a citizen of Spain and was working in the Ukraine. He was taken off duty as a civil air-traffic controller along with other foreigners immediately after a Malaysia Airlines passenger aircraft was shot down over the Eastern Ukraine killing 295 passengers and crew on board. The air traffic controller suggested in a private evaluation and basing it on military sources in Kiev, that the Ukrainian military was behind this shoot down. Radar records were immediately confiscated after it became clear a passenger jet was shot down. Military air traffic controllers in internal communication acknowledged the military was involved, and some military chatter said they did not know where the order to shoot down the plane originated from.
  • Obviously it happened after a series of errors, since the very same plane was escorted by two Ukrainian fighter jets until 3 minutes before it disappeared from radar. Radar screen shots also show an unexplained change of course of the Malaysian Boeing. The change of course took the aircraft directly over the Eastern Ukraine conflict region.
  • #7 – Eyewitness States Two Planes Following MH17, One Of the Craft Shot Down Boeing Video: Father of Eyewitness Tells of the Crash of Boeing MH17 Over Ukraine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPcbFJSGk7E Transcript of the Video Narrator: Who shot it down? Today it was shot down, on [July] 17th. Narrator: Continuing. The village of Grabovo. How was it? What did you son tell you? Father of Eyewitness: Well, they were sitting there, on a hill. And, from behind the clouds … two airplanes were flying … one of the came out from behind the clouds.
  • #12 – Analysis from an Aerodynamics/Physics Standpoint – Ukrainian Army Responsible RESUME OF ANALYSIS: What all this means is that if a BUK rocket was launched from the territory controlled by the Militia, the Boeing would have fallen much further to the south-east – i.e. will into the Russian territory. Otherwise, there would have been not time to detect the aircraft, perform electronic capture and launch the rocket. If this was a BUK, and not a jet fighter, then it is most likely that the launch was made from the territory controlled by the Ukrainian army, and the rocket was sent “chasing after” the airplane.
  • #10 – Eyewitness Recounts a Fighter Jet and 3 Explosions When MH17 Was Shot Down Audio Recording Link: Cassad Net Transcript of the Eyewitness Phone CallI
  • I saw, personally, that there were 3 explosions. The first, the second and the third. So, after the first explosions I went up on the roof and saw that a plane was falling – it was already almost at the ground. There was an explosion, a black cloud, and two parachutists were descending – one was descending on his parachute on the wing. The second was flying down very fast – like a stone. And that is what I saw. However, at that very same moment, a jet fighter was departing in the direction of Debaltsevo. It was over Rassypnoye and was flying toward Debaltsevo. How I understood it.
  • #8 – Ukrainian Military Reports to Poroshenko That Rebels Have Not Captured any BUKs According to Vitaliy Yarema, in an interview to Ukrainskaya Pravda, military officials reported to President Poroshenko immediately after the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777, Flight MH17, that the rebels have not captured any BUK systems from the Ukrainian Armed Forces. This is further confirmed in a statement by the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, published on June 30, 2014. Further Information: “Militias do not have Ukrainian Buk missile system – Ukraine general prosecutor“ KIEV, July 18. /ITAR-TASS/. Militias in the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk people’s republics do not have Ukrainian air defense missile systems Buk and S-300 at their disposal, Ukrainian Prosecutor-General Vitaly Yarema told Ukrainian Pravda newspaper on Friday.
  • “After the passenger airliner was downed, the military reported to the president that terrorists do not have our air defense missile systems Buk and S-300,” the general prosecutor said. “These weapons were not seized,” he added. Ukrainian Interior Minister Anton Gerashchenko said on July 17 that the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 airliner had been downed by an air defense missile system Buk.
  • According to other rumors, the black box for this crashed Malaysian Airlines flight was taken by Donetsk separatists. A spokesperson for the rebel group said this black box would be sent to the Interstate Aviation Committee headquartered in Moscow. The First Deputy Prime Minister of the self-proclaimed People’s Republic of Donetsk, Andrew Purgin, stated that the flight recorders of the crashed aircraft will be transferred to Moscow for examination. Sources say the Rebel group leadership hopes this would confirm the Ukrainian military actually shot down this aircraft. This was reported by the news agency Interfax-Ukraine. ETN statement: The information in this article is independently confirmed and based on the statement of one airline controller and other tweets received.
  • Narrator: Military planes emerged? Father of Eyewitness: Well, he does not understand. Then, with one shot, they shot down the second. And that’s it. The second plane, he says – with one shot. There was one shot and that’s it. Narrator: And the one that was shot down was the civilian one? … Father of Eyewitness: And two … one fell down, he says, and the second too … I did not bring my phone here, so I can’t call him. [in the background] Ah, he saw a jet fighter … Of course … Narrator: The village of Grabovo, in the Shakhtersk district. One the approaches to Grabovo, it fell. Keep looking for remains. Everything is burning. Aluminum has melted. All the casing.
  • #4 – Possible Alternative Video of MH17, Right Wing on Fire (via Vaughan Fomularo) UPDATE: Dann Peroni (@roamer43) The video “#4 – Possible Alternative Video of MH17, Right Wing on Fire (via Vaughan Fomularo)” shows a clear blue sky, while in all other videos showing the crash site the sky is overcast! Video: Malaysian Airlines plane being shot down LIVE! (July 17 2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKIlueJg4cA
  • #2 – Comparing the Form of the Wing in the Video with the Wings of Boeing @gbazov clearly the wings of the plane in the video are not the ones of a Malaysian Boeing 777 pic.twitter.com/oH9L4WjFqF — Crimea&East (@IndependentKrym) July 18, 2014
  • #1 – Video Purporting to be that of MH17 is Actually the Video of An-26 Shot Down Earlier #FLASH #IMPORTANT – THIS —> https://t.co/e0FiVFdAM2 IS NOT #MH17, it’s most likely the An-26 (sound, elevation, form of the wing). PLZ RT. — Gleb Bazov (@gbazov) July 18, 2014
Paul Merrell

Secret Document: How the NSA Spied on Iranians in New York - NBC News - 0 views

www.nbcnews.com/...un-delegation-new-york-n431861

surveillance state NSA NSA-ltarget Iranian-diplomats

shared by Paul Merrell on 24 Sep 15 - No Cached
  • The NSA will probably spy on foreign leaders like Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during the UN General Assembly in New York this week, applying a "full court press" that includes intercepting cellphone calls and bugging hotel rooms, former intelligence analysts told NBC News. A top-secret report on a previous NSA operation against Iran's U.N. delegation illustrates just how extensive this electronic surveillance can be. The document, obtained by NBC News, shows the U.S. bugged the hotel rooms and phones of then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his entire 143-member delegation in 2007, listening to thousands of conversations and learning the "social networks" of Iran's leadership. The three-page document, called "Tips for a Successful Quick Reaction Capability," recounted what happened when the NSA was asked by the Bush administration for blanket surveillance of Ahmadinejad's September 2007 trip to the UNGA.
Paul Merrell

Lavabit To Release Code As Open Source, As It Creates Dark Mail Alliance To Create Even... - 0 views

www.techdirt.com/...surveillance-proof-email.shtml

surveillance state NSA Dark Mail Alliance NSA-blowback

shared by Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • This whole morning, while all these stories of the NSA hacking directly into Google and Yahoo's network have been popping up, I've been at the Inbox Love conference, all about the future of email. The "keynote" that just concluded, was Ladar Levison from Lavabit (with an assist from Mike Janke from Silent Circle), talking about the just announced Dark Mail Alliance, between Lavabit and Silent Circle -- the other "security" focused communications company who shut down its email offering after Lavabit was forced to shut down. Levison joked that they went with "Dark Mail" because "Black Mail" might have negative connotations. Perhaps just as interesting, Levison is going to be releasing the Lavabit source code (and doing a Kickstarter project to support this), with the hope that many others can set up their own secure email using Lavabit's code, combined with the new Dark Mail Alliance secure technology which will be available next year. As noted, the Alliance is working on trying to create truly secure and surveillance-proof email. Of course, nothing is ever 100% surveillance proof -- and both members of the alliance have previously claimed that it was almost impossible to do surveillance-proof email. However, they're claiming they've had a "breakthrough" that will help.
  • The newly developed technology has been designed to look just like ordinary email, with an interface that includes all the usual folders—inbox, sent mail, and drafts. But where it differs is that it will automatically deploy peer-to-peer encryption, so that users of the Dark Mail technology will be able to communicate securely. The encryption, based on a Silent Circle instant messaging protocol called SCIMP, will apply to both content and metadata of the message and attachments. And the secret keys generated to encrypt the communications will be ephemeral, meaning they are deleted after each exchange of messages. For the NSA and similar surveillance agencies across the world, it will sound like a nightmare. The technology will thwart attempts to sift emails directly from Internet cables as part of so-called “upstream” collection programs and limit the ability to collect messages directly from Internet companies through court orders. Covertly monitoring encrypted Dark Mail emails would likely have to be done by deploying Trojan spyware on a targeted user. If every email provider in the world adopted this technology for all their users, it would render dragnet interception of email messages and email metadata virtually impossible.
  • Importantly, they're not asking everyone to just trust them to be secure -- even though both companies have the right pedigree to deserve some level of trust. Instead, they're going to release the source code for public scrutiny and audits, and they're hoping that other email providers will join the alliance. At the conference, Levison recounted much of what's happened over the last few months (with quite a bit of humor), joking about how he tried to be "nice" in giving the feds Lavabit's private keys printed out, by noting that he included line numbers to help (leaving unsaid that this would make OCR'ing the keys even more difficult). He also admitted that giving them the paper version was really just a way to buy time to shut down Lavabit.
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  • Janke came up on stage to talk about the importance of changing the 40-year-old architecture of email, because it's just not designed for secure communications. The hope is that as many other email providers as possible will join the Alliance and that this new setup becomes the de facto standard for end-to-end secure email, which is where Levison's open sourcing of his code gets more interesting. In theory, if it all works out, it could be a lot easier for lots of companies to set up their own "dark mail" email providers. Either way, I would imagine that this development can't make the NSA all that happy.
  • Paul Merrell on 31 Oct 13
     
    Oh, Goody!
Paul Merrell

How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program - Avner Cohen and William Burr - POLI... - 0 views

www.politico.com/...el-nuclear-weapons-117014.html

war & peace Israel-nukes history Office-365

shared by Paul Merrell on 16 Apr 15 - No Cached
  • For decades, the world has known that the massive Israeli facility near Dimona, in the Negev Desert, was the key to its secret nuclear project. Yet, for decades, the world—and Israel—knew that Israel had once misleadingly referred to it as a “textile factory.” Until now, though, we’ve never known how that myth began—and how quickly the United States saw through it. The answers, as it turns out, are part of a fascinating tale that played out in the closing weeks of the Eisenhower administration—a story that begins with the father of Secretary of State John Kerry and a familiar charge that the U.S. intelligence community failed to “connect the dots.
  • In its final months, even as the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race captivated the country, the Eisenhower administration faced a series of crises involving Cuba and Laos. Yet, as the fall of 1960 progressed, President Dwight D. Eisenhower encountered a significant and unexpected problem of a new kind—U.S. diplomats learned and U.S. intelligence soon confirmed that Israel was building, with French aid, a secret nuclear reactor in the Negev Desert. Soon concluding that the Israelis were likely seeking an eventual nuclear weapons capability, the administration saw a threat to strategic stability in the Middle East and a nuclear proliferation threat. Adding fuel to the fire was the perception that Israel was deceitful, or had not “come clean,” as CIA director Allen Dulles put it. Once the Americans started asking questions about Dimona, the site of Israel’s nuclear complex, the Israelis gave evasive and implausible cover stories. 
  • This article, recounting the Dimona discovery and its implications, is based on a special collection of declassified documents published on Wednesday by the National Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, and the Center for Nonproliferation Studies of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California.
Gary Edwards

The Divider vs. the Thinker - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3554104577002262150454258.html

Banksters Paul-Ryan Obammunism Peggy-Noonan WSJ The-American-Idea

shared by Gary Edwards on 28 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • There's a lot to rebel against, to want to throw off. If they want to make a serious economic and political critique, they should make the one Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner make in "Reckless Endangerment": that real elites in Washington rigged the system for themselves and their friends, became rich and powerful, caused the great catering, and then "slipped quietly from the scene."
  • It is a blow-by-blow recounting of how politicians—Democrats and Republicans—passed the laws that encouraged the banks to make the loans that would never be repaid, and that would result in your lost job.
  • It began in the early 1990s, in the Clinton administration, and continued under the Bush administration, with the help of an entrenched Congress that wanted only two things: to receive campaign contributions and to be re-elected.
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  • Specifically it is the story of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage insurers, and how their politically connected CEOs, especially Fannie's Franklin Raines and James Johnson, took actions that tanked the American economy and walked away rich.
  • "the temptation to exploit fear and envy returns." Politicians divide in order to "evade responsibility for their failures" and to advance their interests.
  • "The American Idea"
  • Which gets us to Rep. Paul Ryan. Mr. Ryan receives much praise, but I don't think his role in the current moment has been fully recognized. He is doing something unique in national politics. He thinks. He studies. He reads. Then he comes forward to speak, calmly and at some length, about what he believes to be true. He defines a problem and offers solutions, often providing the intellectual and philosophical rationale behind them.
  • But Republicans, in their desire to defend free economic activity, shouldn't be snookered by unthinking fealty to big business. They should never defend—they should actively oppose—the kind of economic activity that has contributed so heavily to the crisis.
  • Here Mr. Ryan slammed "corporate welfare and crony capitalism."
  • "Why have we extended an endless supply of taxpayer credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, instead of demanding that their government guarantee be wound down and their taxpayer subsidies ended?" Why are tax dollars being wasted on bankrupt, politically connected solar energy firms like Solyndra? "Why is Washington wasting your money on entrenched agribusiness?"
  • The "true sources of inequity in this country," he continued, are "corporate welfare that enriches the powerful, and empty promises that betray the powerless."
  • The real class warfare that threatens us is "a class of bureaucrats and connected crony capitalists trying to rise above the rest of us, call the shots, rig the rules, and preserve their place atop society."
  • Gary Edwards on 28 Oct 11
     
    Peggy Noonan writes about Paul Ryan's "The American Idea" speech he recently gave at the heritage Foundation.  It's a beautifully written summary that goes right to the heart of the matter:  the ruling elites have been enriching themselves, feeding at the public trough of corporate welfare and crony capitalism.  Washington DC is corrupt and rotten to the core, and the hand maiden of Banksters, Global Corporatist, Big Unions, and Big Bearucracy.   One things for sure.  Congressman Paul Ryan is a brilliant thinker aho believes in the great promise he calls "The American Idea".   Funny how, as the presidential primary race rolls on, my hopeful attention is being drawn towards four men:  Herman Cain, Paul Ryan, Ron Paul and Marco Rubio.   Herman unfortunately is soft on Banksters, totally unaware and oblivious to the need to take back the currency, and end the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel.  I also have some difficulties with the "revenue neutral" aspects of his 999 plan.  We need less government, not more.  The private sector needs to keep more money, not less.   Too bad because everything else about Herman excites me.  Especially his authentic, from the heart love of America, American exceptionalism and opportunity, and the founders truly unique "American Idea". Ron Paul has an awesome "American Recovery" plan.  Awesome.  But his remarks on terrorism and foreign policy stray far from his usual reliance on the Constitution and the 10th Amendment.   He's right about the connection between global corporatism and the never ending militarism they push.  But he's dead ass wrong about our enemies and their intentions.  And that's scary.  If RP had stuck to the Constitution and 10th Amendment, i would fully support him.   If it's not an enumerated power, it belongs to the States and individual citizens.  End of story.   Marco Rubio is awesome in the same way Herman is.  He connects with a special authenticity that screams the principles and val
Paul Merrell

Data Pirates of the Caribbean: The NSA Is Recording Every Cell Phone Call in the Bahama... - 0 views

firstlook.org/...-every-cell-phone-call-bahamas

surveillance state NSA DEA cell-phone-dragnet-recording

shared by Paul Merrell on 20 May 14 - No Cached
  • The National Security Agency is secretly intercepting, recording, and archiving the audio of virtually every cell phone conversation on the island nation of the Bahamas. According to documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the surveillance is part of a top-secret system – code-named SOMALGET – that was implemented without the knowledge or consent of the Bahamian government. Instead, the agency appears to have used access legally obtained in cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to open a backdoor to the country’s cellular telephone network, enabling it to covertly record and store the “full-take audio” of every mobile call made to, from and within the Bahamas – and to replay those calls for up to a month. SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.
  • All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere. The program raises profound questions about the nature and extent of American surveillance abroad. The U.S. intelligence community routinely justifies its massive spying efforts by citing the threats to national security posed by global terrorism and unpredictable rival nations like Russia and Iran. But the NSA documents indicate that SOMALGET has been deployed in the Bahamas to locate “international narcotics traffickers and special-interest alien smugglers” – traditional law-enforcement concerns, but a far cry from derailing terror plots or intercepting weapons of mass destruction.
  • By targeting the Bahamas’ entire mobile network, the NSA is intentionally collecting and retaining intelligence on millions of people who have not been accused of any crime or terrorist activity. Nearly five million Americans visit the country each year, and many prominent U.S. citizens keep homes there, including Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey.
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  • The Intercept has confirmed that as of 2013, the NSA was actively using MYSTIC to gather cell-phone metadata in five countries, and was intercepting voice data in two of them. Documents show that the NSA has been generating intelligence reports from MYSTIC surveillance in the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and one other country, which The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. The more expansive full-take recording capability has been deployed in both the Bahamas and the unnamed country. MYSTIC was established in 2009 by the NSA’s Special Source Operations division, which works with corporate partners to conduct surveillance. Documents in the Snowden archive describe it as a “program for embedded collection systems overtly installed on target networks, predominantly for the collection and processing of wireless/mobile communications networks.”
  • If an entire nation’s cell-phone calls were a menu of TV shows, MYSTIC would be a cable programming guide showing which channels offer which shows, and when. SOMALGET would be the DVR that automatically records every show on every channel and stores them for a month. MYSTIC provides the access; SOMALGET provides the massive amounts of storage needed to archive all those calls so that analysts can listen to them at will after the fact. According to one NSA document, SOMALGET is “deployed against entire networks” in the Bahamas and the second country, and processes “over 100 million call events per day.”
  • When U.S. drug agents need to tap a phone of a suspected drug kingpin in another country, they call up their counterparts and ask them set up an intercept. To facilitate those taps, many nations – including the Bahamas – have hired contractors who install and maintain so-called lawful intercept equipment on their telecommunications. With SOMALGET, it appears that the NSA has used the access those contractors developed to secretly mine the country’s entire phone system for “signals intelligence” –recording every mobile call in the country. “Host countries,” the document notes, “are not aware of NSA’s SIGINT collection.” “Lawful intercept systems engineer communications vulnerabilities into networks, forcing the carriers to weaken,” says Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union. “Host governments really should be thinking twice before they accept one of these Trojan horses.”
  • The DEA has long been in a unique position to help the NSA gain backdoor access to foreign phone networks. “DEA has close relationships with foreign government counterparts and vetted foreign partners,” the manager of the NSA’s drug-war efforts reported in a 2004 memo. Indeed, with more than 80 international offices, the DEA is one of the most widely deployed U.S. agencies around the globe. But what many foreign governments fail to realize is that U.S. drug agents don’t confine themselves to simply fighting narcotics traffickers. “DEA is actually one of the biggest spy operations there is,” says Finn Selander, a former DEA special agent who works with the drug-reform advocacy group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. “Our mandate is not just drugs. We collect intelligence.” What’s more, Selander adds, the NSA has aided the DEA for years on surveillance operations. “On our reports, there’s drug information and then there’s non-drug information,” he says. “So countries let us in because they don’t view us, really, as a spy organization.”
  • “I seriously don’t think that would be your run-of-the-mill legal interception equipment,” says the former engineer, who worked with hardware and software that typically maxed out at 1,000 intercepts. The NSA, by contrast, is recording and storing tens of millions of calls – “mass surveillance,” he observes, that goes far beyond the standard practices for lawful interception recognized around the world. The Bahamas Telecommunications Company did not respond to repeated phone calls and emails.
  • The proliferation of private contractors has apparently provided the NSA with direct access to foreign phone networks. According to the documents, MYSTIC draws its data from “collection systems” that were overtly installed on the telecommunications systems of targeted countries, apparently by corporate “partners” cooperating with the NSA. One NSA document spells out that “the overt purpose” given for accessing foreign telecommunications systems is “for legitimate commercial service for the Telco’s themselves.” But the same document adds: “Our covert mission is the provision of SIGINT,” or signals intelligence.
  • According to the NSA documents, MYSTIC targets calls and other data transmitted on  Global System for Mobile Communications networks – the primary framework used for cell phone calls worldwide. In the Philippines, MYSTIC collects “GSM, Short Message Service (SMS) and Call Detail Records” via access provided by a “DSD asset in a Philippine provider site.” (The DSD refers to the Defence Signals Directorate, an arm of Australian intelligence. The Australian consulate in New York declined to comment.) The operation in Kenya is “sponsored” by the CIA, according to the documents, and collects “GSM metadata with the potential for content at a later date.” The Mexican operation is likewise sponsored by the CIA. The documents don’t say how or under what pretenses the agency is gathering call data in those countries. In the Bahamas, the documents say, the NSA intercepts GSM data that is transmitted over what is known as the “A link”–or “A interface”–a core component of many mobile networks. The A link transfers data between two crucial parts of GSM networks – the base station subsystem, where phones in the field communicate with cell towers, and the network subsystem, which routes calls and text messages to the appropriate destination. “It’s where all of the telephone traffic goes,” says the former engineer.
  • When U.S. drug agents wiretap a country’s phone networks, they must comply with the host country’s laws and work alongside their law enforcement counterparts. “The way DEA works with our allies – it could be Bahamas or Jamaica or anywhere – the host country has to invite us,” says Margolis. “We come in and provide the support, but they do the intercept themselves.” The Bahamas’ Listening Devices Act requires all wiretaps to be authorized in writing either by the minister of national security or the police commissioner in consultation with the attorney general. The individuals to be targeted must be named. Under the nation’s Data Protection Act, personal data may only be “collected by means which are both lawful and fair in the circumstances of the case.” The office of the Bahamian data protection commissioner, which administers the act, said in a statement that it “was not aware of the matter you raise.” Countries like the Bahamas don’t install lawful intercepts on their own. With the adoption of international standards, a thriving market has emerged for private firms that are contracted by foreign governments to install and maintain lawful intercept equipment. Currently valued at more than $128 million, the global market for private interception services is expected to skyrocket to more than $970 million within the next four years, according to a 2013 report from the research firm Markets and Markets.
  • If the U.S. government wanted to make a case for surveillance in the Bahamas, it could point to the country’s status as a leading haven for tax cheats, corporate shell games, and a wide array of black-market traffickers. The State Department considers the Bahamas both a “major drug-transit country” and a “major money laundering country” (a designation it shares with more than 60 other nations, including the U.S.). According to the International Monetary Fund, as of 2011 the Bahamas was home to 271 banks and trust companies with active licenses. At the time, the Bahamian banks held $595 billion in U.S. assets. But the NSA documents don’t reflect a concerted focus on the money launderers and powerful financial institutions – including numerous Western banks – that underpin the black market for narcotics in the Bahamas. Instead, an internal NSA presentation from 2013 recounts with pride how analysts used SOMALGET to locate an individual who “arranged Mexico-to-United States marijuana shipments” through the U.S. Postal Service.
  • The presentation doesn’t say whether the NSA shared the information with the DEA. But the drug agency’s Special Operations Divison has come under fire for improperly using classified information obtained by the NSA to launch criminal investigations – and then creating false narratives to mislead courts about how the investigations began. The tactic – known as parallel construction – was first reported by Reuters last year, and is now under investigation by the Justice Department’s inspector general. So: Beyond a desire to bust island pot dealers, why would the NSA choose to apply a powerful collection tool such as SOMALGET against the Bahamas, which poses virtually no threat to the United States? The answer may lie in a document that characterizes the Bahamas operation as a “test bed for system deployments, capabilities, and improvements” to SOMALGET. The country’s small population – fewer than 400,000 residents – provides a manageable sample to try out the surveillance system’s features. Since SOMALGET is also operational in one other country, the Bahamas may be used as a sort of guinea pig to beta-test improvements and alterations without impacting the system’s operations elsewhere. “From an engineering point of view it makes perfect sense,” says the former engineer. “Absolutely.”
  • SOMALGET operates under Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era rule establishing wide latitude for the NSA and other intelligence agencies to spy on other countries, as long as the attorney general is convinced the efforts are aimed at gathering foreign intelligence. In 2000, the NSA assured Congress that all electronic surveillance performed under 12333 “must be conducted in a manner that minimizes the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of information about unconsenting U.S. persons.” In reality, many legal experts point out, the lack of judicial oversight or criminal penalties for violating the order render the guidelines meaningless. “I think it would be open, whether it was legal or not,” says German, the former FBI agent. “Because we don’t have all the facts about how they’re doing it. For a long time, the NSA has been interpreting their authority in the broadest possible way, even beyond what an objective observer would say was reasonable.” “An American citizen has Fourth Amendment rights wherever they are,” adds Kurt Opsahl, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Nevertheless, there have certainly been a number of things published over the last year which suggest that there are broad, sweeping programs that the NSA and other government agencies are doing abroad that sweep up the communications of Americans.”
  • Legal or not, the NSA’s covert surveillance of an entire nation suggests that it will take more than the president’s tepid “limits” to rein in the ambitions of the intelligence community. “It’s almost like they have this mentality – if we can, we will,” says German. “There’s no analysis of the long-term risks of doing it, no analysis of whether it’s actually worth the effort, no analysis of whether we couldn’t take those resources and actually put them on real threats and do more good.” It’s not surprising, German adds, that the government’s covert program in the Bahamas didn’t remain covert. “The undermining of international law and international cooperation is such a long-term negative result of these programs that they had to know would eventually be exposed, whether through a leak, whether through a spy, whether through an accident,” he says. “Nothing stays secret forever. It really shows the arrogance of these agencies – they were just going to do what they were going to do, and they weren’t really going to consider any other important aspects of how our long-term security needs to be addressed.”
  • Paul Merrell on 20 May 14
     
    Words fail me.
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