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Gary Edwards

» 21 Facts About NSA Snooping That Every American Should Know Alex Jones' Inf... - 0 views

www.infowars.com/hat-every-american-should-know

NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA NSA-Whistleblower PRISM Echelon-SIGINT

shared by Gary Edwards on 18 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 18 Jun 13
     
    NSA-PRISM-Echelon in a nutshell.  The list below is a short sample.  Each fact is documented, and well worth the time reading. "The following are 21 facts about NSA snooping that every American should know…" #1 According to CNET, the NSA told Congress during a recent classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls… #2 According to U.S. Representative Loretta Sanchez, members of Congress learned "significantly more than what is out in the media today" about NSA snooping during that classified briefing. #3 The content of all of our phone calls is being recorded and stored.  The following is a from a transcript of an exchange between Erin Burnett of CNN and former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente which took place just last month… #4 The chief technology officer at the CIA, Gus Hunt, made the following statement back in March… "We fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever." #5 During a Senate Judiciary Oversight Committee hearing in March 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the intelligence community has the ability to access emails "as they come in"… #6 Back in 2007, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told Congress that the president has the "constitutional authority" to authorize domestic spying without warrants no matter when the law says. #7 The Director Of National Intelligence James Clapper recently told Congress that the NSA was not collecting any information about American citizens.  When the media confronted him about his lie, he explained that he "responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner". #8 The Washington Post is reporting that the NSA has four primary data collection systems… MAINWAY, MARINA, METADATA, PRISM #9 The NSA knows pretty much everything that you are doing on the Internet.  The following is a short excerpt from a recent Yahoo article… #10 The NSA is suppose
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Richard Ebeling on Higher Interest Rates, Collectivism and the Coming ... - 0 views

www.thedailybell.com/...tivism-and-the-Coming-Collapse

Richard-Ebeling The-Daily-Bell Austrian-Economics Liberty-Tryanny

shared by Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The "larger dysfunction," as you express it, arises out of a number of factors. The primary one, in my view, is a philosophical and psychological schizophrenia among the American people.
  • While many on "the left" ridicule the idea, there is a strong case for the idea of "American exceptionalism," meaning that the United States stands out as something unique, different and special among the nations of the world.
  • the American Founding Fathers constructed a political system in the United States based on a concept on which no other country was consciously founded:
  • ...95 more annotations...
  • But the American Revolution and the US Constitution hailed a different conception of man, society and government.
  • n the rest of the world, and for all of human history, the presumption has been that the individual was a slave or a subject to a higher authority. It might be the tribal chief; or the "divinely ordained" monarch who presumed to rule over and control people in the name of God; or, especially after the French Revolution and the rise of modern socialism, "the nation" or "the people" who laid claim to the life and work of the individual.
  • the idea of individual rights.
  • That is, as long as the individual did not violate the equal rights of others to their life, liberty and property, each person was free to shape and guide his own future, and give meaning and value to his own life as he considered best in the pursuit of that happiness that was considered the purpose and goal of each man during his sojourn on this Earth.
  • Governments did not exist to give or bestow "rights" or "privileges" at its own discretion.
  • Governments were to secure and protect each individual's rights, which he possessed by "the nature of things."
  • The individual was presumed to own himself. He was "sovereign."
  • The real and fundamental notion of "self-government" referred to the right of each individual to rule over himself.
  • Each individual, by his nature and his reason, had a right to his life, his liberty and his honestly acquired property.
  • during the first 150 years of America's history there was virtually no Welfare State and relatively few government regulations, controls and restrictions on the choices and actions of the free citizen.
  • But for more than a century, now, an opposing conception of man, society and government has increasingly gained a hold over the ideas and attitudes of people in the US.
  • It was "imported" from Europe in the form of modern collectivism.
  • The individual was expected to see himself as belonging to something "greater" than himself. He was to sacrifice for "great national causes."
  • He was told that if life had not provided all that he desired or hoped for, it was because others had "exploited" him in some economic or social manner, and that government would redress the "injustice" through redistribution of wealth or regulation of the marketplace.
  • If he had had financial and material success, the individual should feel guilty and embarrassed by it, because, surely, if some had noticeably more, it could only be because others had been forced to live with noticeably less.
  • left on its own, free competition tends to evolve into harmful monopolies and oligopolies, with the wealthy "few" benefiting at the expense of the "many."
  • They are the crises of the Interventionist-Welfare State: the attempt to impose reactionary collectivist policies of political paternalism and redistributive plunder on a society still possessing parts of its original individualist and rights-based roots.
  • it is in the form of communism's and socialism's critique of capitalism.
  • Unregulated capitalism leads to "unearned" and "excessive" profits; unbridled markets generate the business cycle and the hardships of recessions and depressions;
  • These two conflicting conceptions of man, society and government have been and are at war here in the United States.
  • And if it cannot be gotten and guaranteed through the redistributive mechanisms of the European Union and the euro, well, maybe we should return power to our own nation-states to provide the jobs, the social "safety nets" and the financial means to pay for it through, once again, printing our own national paper currencies.
  • This is the political-philosophical bankruptcy of the West and the dead ends of the collectivist promises of the last 100 years.
  • Ludwig von Mises's book, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, originally published in 1922, demonstrated how and why a socialist, centrally planned system was inherently unworkable.
  • The nationalization of productive property, the abolition of markets and the prohibition of all competitive exchange among the members of society would prevent the emergence and operation of a price system, without which it is impossible to know people's demands for desired goods and the relative value they place on them.
  • It also prevents the emergence of prices for the factors of production (land, labor, capital) and makes it impossible to know their opportunity costs – the value of those factors of production in alternative competing uses among entrepreneurs desiring to employ them.
  • Without such a price system the central planners are flying blind, unable to rationally know or decide how best to utilize labor, capital and resources in productively efficient ways to make the goods and services most highly valued by the consuming public.
  • Thus, Mises concluded, comprehensive socialist central planning would lead to "planned chaos."
  • And, therefore, there is no guarantee that the amount of investments undertaken and their time horizons are compatible with the available resources not also being demanded and used for more immediate consumer goods production in the society.
  • As a consequence, financial markets do not work like real markets.
  • Thus, the interventionist state leads to waste, inefficiency and misuses of resources that lower the standards of living that we all, otherwise, could have enjoyed.
  • We cannot be sure what the amount of real savings may be in the society to support real and sustainable investment and capital formation.
  • Government intervention prevents prices from "telling the truth" about the real supply and demand conditions thus leading to imbalances and distortions in the market.
  • We cannot know what the "real cost" of borrowing should be, since interest rates are not determined by actual, private sector savings and investment decisions.
  • Government production regulations, controls, restrictions and prohibitions prevent entrepreneurs from using their knowledge, ability and capital in ways that most effectively produce the goods consumers actually want and at the most cost-competitive prices possible.
  • This is why countries around the world periodically experience booms and busts, inflations and recessions − not because of some inherent instabilities or "irrationalities" in financial markets, but because of monetary central planning through central banking that does not allow market-based financial intermediation to develop and work as it could and would in a real free-market setting.
  • But in the United States and especially in Europe, government "austerity" means merely temporarily reducing the rate of increase in government spending, slowing down the rate at which new debt is accumulating and significantly raising taxes in an attempt to close the deficit gap.
  • The fundamental problem is that over the decades, the size and scope of governments in the Western world have been growing far more than the rates at which their economies have been expanding, so that the "slice" of the national economic "pie" eaten by government has been growing larger and larger, even when the "pie" in absolute terms is bigger than it was, say, 30 or 40 years ago.
  • European governments, in general, take the view that "austerity" means squeezing the private sector more through taxes and other revenue sources to avoid any noticeable and significant cuts in what government does and spends.
  • So there is "austerity" for the private sector and a mad rush for financial "safety nets" for the government and those who live off the State.
  • In reality, of course, it is the burdens of government regulation, taxation and impediments to more flexible labor and related markets that have generated the high unemployment rates and the retarded recovery from the recession.
  • Instead, the "common market" ideal has been transformed into the goal of a European Union "Super-State" to which the individual countries and their citizens would be subservient and obedient.
  • Keynesian policies offer people and politicians what they want to hear. Claiming that any sluggish business or lost jobs are due to a lack of "aggregate demand," Keynes argued that full employment and profitable business could only be reestablished and maintained through "activist" government monetary and fiscal policy – print money and run budget deficits.
  • What Britain and Europe should have as its goal is the ideal of the classical liberal free traders of the 19th century – non-intervention by governments in people's lives, at home and abroad. That is, a de-politicization of society, so people may freely work, trade and travel as they peacefully wish, with government merely the protector of people's individual rights.
  • Take the benefits away and tell people they are free to come and work to support themselves and their families. Restore more flexibility and competitiveness to labor markets and reduce taxes and business regulations.
  • Then those who come to Britain's shores will be those wanting freedom and opportunity without being a burden upon others.
  • What was needed was a change in ideas from the statist mentality to one of individual freedom and unhampered free markets.
  • In an epoch of collectivist ideas, don't be surprised if governments regulate, control, intervene and redistribute wealth.
  • The tentacle of regulations, restrictions and politically-correct social controls are spreading out in every direction from Brussels and its European-wide manipulating and mismanaging bureaucracy.
  • In the name of assuring "national prosperity," politicians could spend money to buy the votes that get them elected and reelected to government offices.
  • And every special interest group could make the case that government-spending programs that benefitted them were all reasonable and necessary to assure a fully employed and growing economy.
  • Furthermore, the Keynesian rationale for government deficit spending enabled politicians to seem to be able to offer something for nothing. They could offer, say, $100 of government spending to voters and special interest groups but the tax burden imposed in the present might only be $75, since the remainder of the money to pay for that government spending was borrowed. And that borrowed money would not have to be repaid until some indefinite time in the future by unspecific taxpayers when that "tomorrow" finally arrived.
  • instability
  • Keynes argued that the market economy's inherent
  • arose from the
  • who were subject to irrational and unpredictable waves of "optimism" and "pessimism."
  • animal spirits" of businessmen
  • Mises argued that there was nothing inherent in the market economy to bring about these swings of economic booms followed by periods of depression and unemployment.
  • If markets got out of balance with the necessity of an eventual correction in the economy to, once again, set things right, the source of this instability was government monetary policy.
  • Central banks too often followed a policy of trying to create "good times" in the economy by expanding the money supply through the banking system.
  • With new, excess funds created by the central bank available for lending, banks lower rates of interest to attract borrowers.
  • But this throws savings and investment out of balance, since the rate of interest no longer serves as a reliable indicator and signal concerning the availability of real savings in the economy in relation to those wanting to borrow funds for various investment purposes.
  • The economic crisis comes when it is discovered that all the claims on resources, capital and labor for all the attempted consumption and investment activities in the economy are greater than the actual and available amounts of such scarce resources.
  • The recession period, in Mises's view, is the necessary "correction" period when in the post-boom era, people must adapt and adjust to the newly discovered "real" supply and demand conditions in the market.
  • Any interference with the "rebalancing" of the economy by government raising taxes, imposing more regulations, or new artificial government "stimulus" activities merely makes it more difficult and time-consuming for people in the private sector to get the economy back on an even keel.
  • Friedrich A. Hayek, once observed, unemployment is not "caused" by stopping an inflation, but rather inflation induces the artificial employments that cannot be sustained and which inevitably disappear once the inflation is reined in.
  • The recession of 2008-2009 was the result of several years of central bank stimulus.
  • From 2003 to 2008, the Federal Reserve increased the money supply by about 50 percent.
  • Interest rates for much of this time, when adjusted for inflation, were either zero or negative.
  • Awash in cash, banks extended loans to virtually anyone, with no serious and usual concern about the borrower's credit-worthiness.
  • This was most notably true in the housing market, where government agencies like Fannie May and Freddie Mac were pressuring banks to make mortgage loans by promising a guarantee that they would make good on any bad home loans.
  • Since 2008-2009, the Federal Reserve has, again, turned on the monetary spigot, increasing its own portfolio by almost $3 trillion, by buying US Treasuries, US mortgages and other assets.
  • So why has there not been a complementary explosion of price inflation?
  • In some areas there has been, most clearly in the stock market and the bond market, But the reason why all that newly created money has not brought about a higher price inflation is due to the fact that a large part of all newly created money is sitting as unlent reserves in banks.
  • This is because the Federal Reserve has been paying banks a rate of interest slightly above the market interest rates to induce banks not to lend.
  • (a) general "regime uncertainty," that is, no one knows what government policy will be tomorrow; will ObamaCare be fully implemented after January 2014?;
  • Among the reasons for the sluggish jobs growth in the US are:
  • (b) what will taxes be for the rest of the current president's term in the White House
  • (c) what will the regulatory environment be like for the next three years – in 2012, the government implemented around 80,000 pages of regulations as printed in the Federal Registry;
  • (d) how will the deficit and debt problems play out between Congress and the White House and will it threaten the general financial situation in the country; an
  • (e) what wars, if any, will the government find itself involved in, in places like the Middle East?
  • China
  • is still a controlled and commanded society, with a government that works hard to try to determine what people read, see and think.
  • All these building projects have been brought into existence by a government that not only controls the money supply and manipulates interest rates but also heavy-handedly tells banks whom to specifically loan to and for what investment activities.
  • Central planning is alive and well in China, with the motives being both power and profits for those inside and outside the Communist Party having the most influence and connections in "high" places.
  • In my opinion, China is heading for a great economic crisis, resulting from a highly imbalanced and distorted economic system still guided far more by politics than sound market decision-making.
  • global financial markets in any foreseeable future. It is a money that still primarily exists to serve the political purposes of those who sit in the "inner circles" of power in Beijing.
  • One hundred years ago, in 1913, how many could have predicted that a year later a European-wide war would break out that would lead to the destruction of great European empires and set the stage for the rise of totalitarian collectivism that resulted in an even worse global war two decades later?
  • Thus, whether, at the end of the day, freedom triumphs and the future is one of liberty and prosperity is partly on each one of us.
  • Near the end of his great book, Socialism, Ludwig von Mises said:
  • "Everyone carries a part of society on his shoulders; no one is relieved of his share of responsibility by others. And no one can find a safe way out for himself if society is sweeping towards destruction. Therefore, everyone, in his own interest, must thrust himself vigorously into the intellectual battle. None can stand aside with unconcern; the interests of everyone hang on the result. Whether he chooses or not, every man is drawn into the great historical struggle, the decisive battle into which our epoch has plunged us . . . Whether society shall continue to evolve or where it shall decay lies . . . in the hands of man."
  • In my view, the idea of a "soft landing" is an illusion based on the idea held by central bankers, themselves, that they have the wisdom and ability to know how to "micro-manage" the all the changes and adjustments resulting from their own manipulations of the monetary aggregates. They do not have this wisdom and ability. So hold on for what is most likely to be another rocky road.
  • It was Mises's clear vision that once society has broken the relationship between value and payment, sooner or later people would not know the price of anything.
  • At this point, investment ceases and business becomes furtive and transactional.
  • People cannot plan for the future because they do not understand the reality of the present.
  • Society begins to sink.
  • Gary Edwards on 17 Jun 13
     
    Incredible.  A simple explanation that explains everything.  Rchard Ebeling's "Unified Theory of Everything" is something every American can understand.  If only they would take a break from "Dancing with the Stars" and pay attention to the future of their country and the world.  It's a future where either "individual freedom", as defined by our Constitution and Declaration of Independence, will win out; or, the forces of fascist socialism / marxism will continue to roll and rule.  Incredible read!!!!
Gary Edwards

The Empire Takes a Hit: NSA Update - 2 views

Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel NSA
started by Gary Edwards on 15 Jun 13 no follow-up yet
  • Gary Edwards
    #1 Gary Edwards on 15 Jun 13
     
    ........................................................................................

    NSA Conversation with retired lawyer and Open Source legal expert, "Marbux".

    ..............................................
    Monday, June 10th 2013: On CNN, Piers Morgan. Adm. James Wooley and Ron Paul being interviewed on the topic: "Eric Snowden, Traitor or Hero". Probably will be on again later tonight. Ron Paul is having a field day, with Morgan lobbing him softball questions that Paul hits out of the park. It turned into a debate whether Snowden or government officials should be punished. Paul's best score, something like: "Obama ran on a promise of transparency and now we're finally getting transparency. We should all be overjoyed."

    Thanks Paul! Hey, great post on Liberty in the Breach. Your comments are very helpful!
    http://bayareapatriots.wordpress.com/2013/06/14/liberty-06142013-p-m/



    Interesting quote from Ron Paul; "It turned into a debate whether Snowden or government officials should be punished."

    That debate is going to come down to whether or not you support the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Especially the 4th Amendment. It's amazing how the government is now trying to justify the Prism dragnet when we all know that, had they argued for the dragnet back when the Patriot ACT was publicly discussed and voted on, the Act would have not passed congress.


    What follows is a a summary of the situation that I sent a friend in the UK:

    UK: Yes, far less 'noise' in the UK, despite news that we may be taking a US feed of such data... 1984 indeed?

    Marbux: Yes, but a great opportunity to throw a wrench in the works. The feds tried to get Congressional authorization for such a program a few years back, then named TIA (Total Information Awareness) and it aroused such a furor that Congress said no.

    Other complicating factors for our electronic spooks:

    -- The Guardian has said it has only begun to publish articles about the PRISM program, that they have plenty of more documents they got from the leaker. That makes it dicey for the Feds to come up with new excuses because they don't know what's yet to be disclosed.
    .

    -- The head of the NSA is in hot water for committing perjury in Congressional testimony to the Senate intelligence oversight
    committee, denying that the NSA had such records.
    .

    -- The leaked documents hit the press only a few days before Obama's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping that Obama was going to focus on Chinese electronic theft of blueprints, etc. for U.S. weapons systems. I suspect that meeting didn't go the way Obama intended because of the PRISM disclosure and because of the leaker saying just before the meeting that the U.S. had been hacking China and Hong Kong for years. ;
    .
    CIA Surveillance Leak: Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald says 'dozens of stories' in the works

    -- The E.U. is wading in heavily, because the program violates E.U. privacy and human rights.
    .

    -- Similar concerns erupting from other nations, notably India and Australia.

    -- The left-leaning American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the program.
    .

    The First and Fourth Amendment claims look like a slam dunk to me; the PRISM program is way beyond what the case law permits.

    -- Meanwhile, the right-leaning Tea Party is upset about it too. A few days ago one or their darlings who's already begin running for the next Republican presidential nomination, Sen. Rand Paul, promised a class action lawsuit last weekend and it was filed yesterday.
    .

    The suit seeks some $20 billion in damages and an injunction ending the dragnet surveillance for just about all Americans with a telephone.

    -- The legality of the NSA PRISM program could land in the Supreme Court's lap in the next few weeks because of a ruling by a federal judge in Florida. See
    .

    If the judge orders disclosure the Feds must comply or immediately appeal. And likewise if the appellate court upholds the district court, the Feds either comply or must immediately seek review in the Supreme Court. This all has to happen in a period measured in days raher than weeks or months because it's an ongoing murder trial. The legality of the program is directly at issue. The judge seems inclined to order disclosure. And it will be hard for the Feds to argue that the metadata for the two telephones at issue is classified, since it's telephone company data that was not classified before the NSA got it.

    At the same time, if the Feds disclose or the judge orders them to do so, there will be a flood of habeas corpus petitions filed by people already in prison seeking new trials with the NSA data in the record.

    Easiest way out for the Feds is to drop the charges against the defendant to moot the issue. But it will be back via habeas corpus.

    -- Mainstream media is keeping the story in the headlines. Perhaps payback for wiretapping 20 Associated Press journalists and naming a Fox News reporter as an unindicted co-conspirator in an Espionage Act case over an intelligence type who stepped into the whistleblower role?

    -- The public opinion poll results are changing, rapidly going from a strong majority supporting the surveillance right after the first publication of the story to a majority now opposed, with "undecided rising" rapidly too. All at the expense of "support", of course.

    -- The elected Senators and Congressmen have undoubtedly taken note of that trend and more and more are speaking out against the program while its defenders are quickly falling silent.

    -- Even those who are still defending the program are asking Obama to declassify more about the program so they can legally discuss its supposed benefits. They were quickly debunked after claiming that two particular terrorism cases wouldn't have been discovered without PRISM. There were complete court records in both cases, and they involved only old-fashioned detective work.

    -- Lots more going on, but I think this is going to result in a substantial curtailment of government dragnet surveillance powers.

    {End of conversation}

    Followup Comments:
    The 4th Amendment issue is very strong. The PRISM defenders say that the relevant Patriot Act provisions have been upheld in the courts, but that is false.

    In two cases, the district court found the Patriot unconstitutional under the 4th Amendment. On appeal, both cases were tossed out on State Secret privilege grounds, because the government refused to disclose the evidence because it is classified. So the appellate rulings were that since plaintiffs couldn't get the discovery they couldn't prove their cases; therefore, they lacked standing to sue.


    Would you agree that Super Patriot Edward Snowden might provide the evidence needed in those two court cases? Seems like Edward has given us all legal standing.



    In a third case, there is a 86-page ruling by the FISA court ruling that the FBI and NSA exceeded their Constitutional powers. Disclosure of that opinion is at issue right now in a Washington, D.C. Freedom of Information Act case. That case was temporarily stayed so that the plaintiffs could get a ruling from the FISA court on whether that court's rules mean that the Feds' copies of the opinion are sealed. The FISA court just ruled that they are not sealed. So it's back to the D.C. court to decide if they are lawfully classified. It's likely that the court will order disclosure of a redacted copy with only validly classified information deleted. That shouldn't cover the substance of the FISA court's legal rulings.

    It's a combination of the documents Snowden released, the Feds' acknowledgement that the docs are genuine, and statements by Sen. Feinstein and later by Feds that the program exists and has been in operation since 2006. These facts are central to the ACLU case and the class action lawsuit.

    The 4th Amendment has no exception for intelligence gathering. It says in essence that there must be "probable cause" for the Feds to believe that the evidence they seek pursuant to a search warrant is relevant to a particular crime they allege has been committed. It is very definitely not an authorization for government to obtain Big Data because it might later become relevant to future crimes.

    Warrants must be narrowly tailored, describing the particular place to be searched and particular evidence that the Feds want to seize. And the affidavit in support of the motion for the search warrant has to detail the basis for the reasonable cause and its relationship to the particular crime.

    The government's justification has to be something akin to saying that there is a particular book in a large library that is needed as evidence, therefore they want to seize all books in the library.

    There's a lot of confusion out there on what's permissible under the 4th Amendment. To get a start on understanding it, you need to recognize the legally huge difference between investigating a particular crime and gathering intelligence for future use. The 4th Amendment limits collection of evidence to that for a specific crime that has been committed.

    But it's the bright line between intelligence-gathering and criminal investigation that got blurred by the Patriot Act, etc. Think Fusion Centers here. The cops and the spies began to share information in the name of the War on Terror. That's verboten under the 4th Amendment.

    You can see signs of this in the way the Verizon order was obtained. The order said, "turn this information over to the FBI" (a law enforcement agency). Then the FBI turns it over to the NSA, which is not a law enforcement agency. And there are four separate statutes that in essence say that all civil and criminal investigations are to be conducted only by the Dept. of Justice, unless another statute expressly confers law enforcement powers on another agency. NSA lacks that authority.

    It's time for heads to roll.

    ~marbux~
Gary Edwards

PETITION URGING CONGRESS TO IMPEACH PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA - 0 views

www.wnd.com/...impeach-president-barack-obama

Impeach-Obama articles-of-impeachment

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Jun 13
     
    "PETITION URGENTLY REQUESTING THAT CONGRESS LAUNCH AN INDEPENDENT AND COMPREHENSIVE INVESTIGATION INTO UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND IMPEACHABLE OFFENSES ON THE PART OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA To: All members of the U.S. Congress: Whereas, President Barack Obama not only failed to aid U.S. personnel under lethal and prolonged terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, resulting in the deaths of a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans, but also led an outrageously deceitful cover-up for weeks afterward, rivaling the Watergate-era cover-up that ended the presidency of Richard Nixon; Whereas, the IRS under Obama - in accord with direct instructions from congressional Democrats - has engaged in the most egregious and widespread attack on conservative groups in modern history, with the knowledge of top agency officials; Whereas, the Obama Justice Department, on top of its many first-term scandals, has spied on and harassed journalists at Fox News and the Associated Press, prompting widespread, bipartisan condemnation of the DOJ for "criminalizing journalism"; Whereas, top constitutional attorneys from across the political spectrum now agree that Obama has committed certain specific offenses that unquestionably rise to the level of impeachable "high crimes and misdemeanors"; Whereas, one of these offenses - that of illegally conducting war against Libya - has been deemed by a bipartisan panel of constitutional experts to be "clearly an impeachable offense" and "gross usurpation of the war power"; Whereas, Obama's policy of targeted assassinations of U.S. citizens without any constitutionally required due process - including the drone assassination of an American-born 16-year-old as he was eating dinner - is unanimously deemed by experts, both liberal and conservative, as "an impeachable offense"; Whereas, Obama's Justice Department has presided over the disastrous "Fast and Furious" operation in which approximately 2
Gary Edwards

It begins: Major demand to impeach Obama - 1 views

www.wnd.com/...demand-obamas-impeachment-now

Impeach-Obama articles-of-impeachment

shared by Gary Edwards on 15 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 15 Jun 13
     
    "Watergate investigator Bob Woodward of the Washington Post compares Barack Obama to Richard Nixon. Members of Congress say it's about time to consider it. Rock legend Ted Nugent says Obama's constitutional violations make him eligible. And even Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin has called for Obama's impeachment. Now you can join a petition that calls on Congress to immediately investigate the "unconstitutional and impeachable offenses" of Obama. The document is addressed to members of Congress, who have the responsibility to make sure government officials don't go outside the bounds of the U.S. Constitution and to bring appropriate retribution when they do. The petition cites a number of scandals in just the last few weeks and months. Among them are the "lethal and prolonged terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, and the subsequent 'Watergate-era cover-up.'" And then there's the big - and getting bigger - scandal involving the federal government's use of the Internal Revenue Service to harass and attack "conservative groups." There's also the spying and harassment of journalists and the Associated Press. "Top constitutional attorneys from across the political spectrum now agree that Obama has committed certain specific offenses that unquestionably rise to the level of impeachable 'high crimes and misdemeanors," the petition explains. Sign the petition right away!" http://goo.gl/JH6sn
Gary Edwards

bayareapatriots2 : Edward Snowden Quotes About U.S. Government Spying That Should Send... - 0 views

groups.yahoo.com/...11663

NSA NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA Edward-Snowden 4th-Amendment

shared by Gary Edwards on 14 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • "The great fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. [People] won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things... And in the months ahead, the years ahead, it's only going to get worse. [The NSA will] say that... because of the crisis, the dangers that we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power, and there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny."
  • "I will be satisfied if the federation of secret law, unequal pardon and irresistible executive powers that rule the world that I love are revealed even for an instant."
  • "I understand that I will be made to suffer for my actions, and that the return of this information to the public marks my end."
  • Gary Edwards on 14 Jun 13
     
    "Would you be willing to give up what Edward Snowden has given up?  He has given up his high paying job, his home, his girlfriend, his family, his future and his freedom just to expose the monolithic spy machinery that the U.S. government has been secretly building to the world.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where there isn't any privacy.  He says that he does not want to live in a world where everything that he says and does is recorded.  Thanks to Snowden, we now know that the U.S. government has been spying on us to a degree that most people would have never even dared to imagine.  Up until now, the general public has known very little about the U.S. government spy grid that knows almost everything about us.  But making this information public is going to cost Edward Snowden everything.    Essentially, his previous life is now totally over.  And if the U.S. government gets their hands on him, he will be very fortunate if he only has to spend the next several decades rotting in some horrible prison somewhere.  There is a reason why government whistleblowers are so rare.  And most Americans are so apathetic that they wouldn't even give up watching their favorite television show for a single evening to do something good for society.  Most Americans never even try to make a difference because they do not believe that it will benefit them personally.  Meanwhile, our society continues to fall apart all around us.  Hopefully the great sacrifice that Edward Snowden has made will not be in vain.  Hopefully people will carefully consider what he has tried to share with the world.  The following are 27 quotes from Edward Snowden about U.S. government spying that should send a chill up your spine..."
Gary Edwards

It's the Profiling, Stupid! - The Patriot Post - 0 views

patriotpost.us/18651

NSA NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 13 Jun 13
     
    Good article briefly describing th ehistory of the NSA and how it has evolved to the politicized monster it has become today. excerpt: "Last week, Barack Hussein Obama deflected new concerns about the National Security Administration's intrusive domestic data-mining operations, saying, "If people can't trust ... the executive branch ... to make sure we're abiding by the Constitution, due process, and rule of law, then we're going to have some problems here." Barack, we have some problems here. Of course, trusting the Executive Branch is not the issue. The problem is Obama's life-long record of deceit and deception, and his utter contempt for Rule of Law. Amidst recent revelations that Obama's black-bag cutouts inspired his "low-level" union cadres at the IRS to target his Patriot and Tea Party political enemies list, and scripted a cover-up of the Benghazi murders in order that it not derail his 2012 re-election campaign momentum, is it conceivable that his "low-level" union cadres at the NSA might collect intelligence data on U.S. citizens to profile those whom oppose Obama? As with the other scandals, Obama's political handlers and their Leftmedia talkingheads are obfuscating the facts regarding NSA data collection. They ignore legitimate civil liberty concerns, and focus instead on the question of whether such data is essential to our national security. Allow me to reframe a quote from James "Ragin' Cajun" Carville's political playbook about focusing on the big issue, and adapt it for the big data debate: "It's the profiling, stupid!" The question is not whether intelligence data collection is critical to our nation's ability to defend itself -- good intelligence is, and has always been a critical component of national defense and security. The overarching questions are, what is the scope of domestic NSA intelligence gathering, and what is the potential for an administration to use that information to profile and target political opponents? Here is a ver
Gary Edwards

Goggle Hires Obama's Campaign E-Team - America Conservative 2 Conservative - 0 views

americac2c.com/...-hires-obama-s-campaign-e-team

Federalis-Bankster-Corporatist-Media_elites Google NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA

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  • Gary Edwards on 13 Jun 13
     
    Looks like Florian was right after all.  Google is a front for the big Media-Federalis-Bankster-Corporatist elites. excerpt: "The hand-in-hand nature of this White House and some of the nation's biggest corporations is seen in yet another incident as Barack Obama's 2012 campaign data team is now moving from team Obama to team Google. This week, Bloomberg reported that Obama's data mining team, used to such great effect during his 2012 re-election for president, has been hired nearly wholesale to go work for Google. This may not come as such a great surprise, however, as Google's Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt, helped organize and run Obama's re-election e-team. Schmidt "helped recruit talent, choose technology, and coach the campaign manager, Jim Messina, on the finer points of leading a large organization," Bloomberg reports. Since he came onto the national political scene, Barack Obama has campaigned like a veritable David vs Goliath with evil corporations standing in for Goliath while Obama presents himself as David loading his sling shot to do battle. But the reality is not quite that cut and dried and Google has been a big recipient of Obama's largesse. The Washington Examiner's Tim Carney points out that the administration is filled with Googleites and that President Obama and Google have a long standing love affair. Remember Obama's No. 2 tech staffer at the White House was Google's former top lobbyist-who improperly worked with active Google lobbyists on pushing polic.... Obama appointed non-registered Google lobbyist and max-Obama donor Vint Cerf to a science advisory board. Then there was the time when Google chief Schmidt is reported to have told a Google staffer to make sure that the search engine did not connect his entries to his own political donations so that it was a bit harder to find out to whom he donated campaign cash."
Gary Edwards

INFOGRAPHIC: How The NSA Intercepts The Electronic Communications Of Americans - Busine... - 1 views

www.businessinsider.com/unications-of-americans-2012-5

Prism NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA Edward-Snowden Bill-Binney

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Jun 13
     
    Nice INFOGRAPHIC that includes the timeline.  We're still in the early days of discovering just how awful and un-constitutional the Feds worldwide dragnet really is.  But this infographic does a good job of pulling it all together.  These are far more than impeachable offenses.  This treason.  This is a coupe d'etat. "We've covered how, since 9/11, the National Security Agency has spied on electronic communications of Americans without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying. The organization has done this by hiring Israeli contractors to bug the U.S. telecommunications network and building massive complexes such as their secretive $2 billion Utah spy center. Now the American Civil Liberties Union has created this handy infographic that shows how the NSA's domestic spying program thrives with impunity today:"
Gary Edwards

THE TRUTH ABOUT SPYING: The Feds Are Intercepting Your Internet Data And Tech Giants Kn... - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/he-nsas-data-collection-2013-6

Prism NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA Edward-Snowden

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Last year James Bamford of Wired — who wrote the book "The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America" — reported that the NSA hired secretive companies linked to Israeli intelligence to establish 10 to 20 wiretapping rooms at key Internet Service Provider (ISP) telecommunication points throughout the country.
  • In 2004 AT&T engineer Mark Klein discovered that a special NSA network actively "vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T," emphasizing that "much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic."
  • Glenn Greenwald revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) is secretly using the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act to collect telephone records of millions of Americans from Verizon. Greenwald noted that "previous reporting has suggested the NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks," which was best illustrated by this ACLU infographic graphic illustrating how the NSA intercepts more than a billion electronic records and communications every day.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake corroborated Klein's assertions: Binney contends that the NSA analyzes the information "to be able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with while Drake maintains that the NSA is using Israeli-made NARUS hardware to "seize and save all personal electronic communications."
  • Eric Lichtblau and James Risen of the New York Times won a Pulitzer-Prize for this 2005 story: As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
  • in January Google released a transparency report detailing the government's use of controversial legislation that bypasses judicial approval to access the online information of private citizens.
  • Given the fact that the CIA's recently visited tech conference to detail the Agency's vision for collecting and analyzing all of the information people put on the Internet, it would be naïve to think that American tech giants hasn't know that all their data belongs to NSA.
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Jun 13
     
    Timeline for reports and whistleblower information going public about NSA world wide dragnet of information and communications.  Note that the official timeline the NSA slides depict the start of the Internet dragnet as late 2007, when the Bush Administration wrangled Microsoft as a source.  The whistleblower timeline starts in 2001 and is rolling worldwide by 2004.
Gary Edwards

A Graphic Designer Remade The Shoddy PRISM Slideshow - Business Insider - 1 views

www.businessinsider.com/-shoddy-prism-slideshow-2013-6

Prism Edward-Snowden NSA-Patriot-Act-NDAA

shared by Gary Edwards on 12 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 12 Jun 13
     
    Excellent do over of the NSA Prism world wide wiretapping and eavesdropping-spy program. "The leaked PowerPoint presentation detailing a classified program called PRISM - which appears to acquire information from the servers of nine of the biggest internet companies - got shredded for how shoddy the slides are.  Emiland De Cubber, a freelance presentation designer, has published this slideshow with the message: "Dear NSA, You can do whatever you want with my data. But not with my eyes.""
Gary Edwards

Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations | World news ... - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...nsa-whistleblower-surveillance

Edward-Snowden NSA Prism Patriot Libertarian NSA-Whistleblower

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Having watched the Obama administration prosecute whistleblowers at a historically unprecedented rate, he fully expects the US government to attempt to use all its weight to punish him. "I am not afraid," he said calmly, "because this is the choice I've made."He predicts the government will launch an investigation and "say I have broken the Espionage Act and helped our enemies, but that can be used against anyone who points out how massive and invasive the system has become".
  • Over the next three years, he learned just how all-consuming the NSA's surveillance activities were, claiming "they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them".
  • he believed that the value of the internet, along with basic privacy, is being rapidly destroyed by ubiquitous surveillance. "I don't see myself as a hero," he said, "because what I'm doing is self-interested: I don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual exploration and creativity."
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," he said. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 13
     
    ""I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.""
Gary Edwards

We Call a Top NSA Whistleblower … And Get the REAL SCOOP on Spying | Washingt... - 0 views

www.washingtonsblog.com/...ope-of-the-spying-program.html

William-Binney NSA-Whistleblower NSA-Patriot-Act NARUS Verint

shared by Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 10 Jun 13
     
    "NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake corroborated Klein's assertions, testifying that while the NSA is using Israeli-made NARUS hardware to "seize and save all personal electronic communications." ..................... I then asked the NSA veteran Binney if the government's claim that it is only spying on metadata - and not content - was correct. We have extensively documented that the government is likely recording content as well. (And the government has previously admitted to "accidentally" collecting more information on Americans than was legal, and then gagged the judges so they couldn't disclose the nature or extent of the violations.) Binney said that was not true; the government is gathering everything, including content. Binney explained - as he has many times before - that the government is storing everything, and creating a searchable database … to be used whenever it wants, for any purpose it wants (even just going after someone it doesn't like). ..................... Binney said that former FBI counter-terrorism agent Tim Clemente is correct when he says that no digital data is safe (Clemente says that all digital communications are being recorded). Both Verint and Narus were founded in Israel in the 1990s. *** Binney next confirmed the statement of the author of the Patriot Act - Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner - that the NSA spying programs violate the Patriot Act. After all, the Patriot Act is focused on spying on external threats … not on Americans. Binney asked rhetorically: "How can an American court [FISA or otherwise] tell telecoms to cough up all domestic data?!" Update: Binney sent the following clarifying email about content collection: It's clear to me that they are collecting most e-mail in full plus other text type data on the web. As for phone calls, I don't think they would record/transcribe the approximately 3 billion US-to-US calls every day. It's more likely that they are reco
Gary Edwards

Jeff Gundlach June Webcast Presentation - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/ne-webcast-presentation-2013-6

Jeff-Gundlach Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 07 Jun 13
     
    Fascinating presentation filled with stats and charts depicting the state of the world's economy.  51 slides in total, so it takes some time.  The summation is clear though.  We are in a world of hurt.  The $85 Billion per month the Federal Reserve Bankster Cartel is pumping into the financial markets is the only thing holding the world economy together.  When the dollar collapses, the USA must officially devaluate the dollar, the QEII $85 Billion per month joy ride will be over. ""Something happened in the middle of May," said investing god Jeff Gundlach as he began his latest webcast on the state of the global markets and the economy. He was referring to how global interest rates quietly rallied and how the Japanese stock market fell spectacularly. He notes that the magnitude of the interest rate rally isn't unusual.  Having said that, Gundlach believes rates will stay low thanks to a "put" by the Federal Reserve. Should rates rise, Gundlach believes the Fed would actually expand quantitative easing. This is because high interest rates would put too much pressure on the economy, and it would cause Federal interest expenses to become too onerous. "I certainly think the Fed is going to reduce quantitative easing," he said. But he attributes the reduction to the shrinking Federal deficit. "I'm starting to like long-term Treasuries," said Gundlach as he predicted the 10-year Treasury yield would end the year at 1.7%. All of Gundlach's theses are based on the fact that the global economy remains weak, GDP growth forecasts continue to come down, and unemployment remains high and lop-sided. He communicates all of this in his eye-opening, hand-picked collection of charts on growth, employment, inflation, stocks, bonds, and other critical global macro indicators. Anyone who is serious about investing must consider his charts. And for anyone who's just curious, these charts will give you a peek into how Gundlach thinks. Click Here To See Gundlach's Presentation >"
Gary Edwards

Sheriff…Time to arrest members of Congress! | Scanned Retina Blog - 0 views

scannedretina.com/...-to-arrest-members-of-congress

Rico-Giron IRS Federal-Reserve-Bankster-Cartel Income-Tax

shared by Gary Edwards on 07 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Title 26, USC, is a private law that applies to “U.S. corporate ‘citizens’”, all employees of the corporation identified at 28 USC, section 3002.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 07 Jun 13
       
      There is no explanation or quote to explain Title 26 and 28 USC, section 3002!  At the least we should be provided with a link here.
  • When the Sheriff seizes property from a Citizen under the non-authority of the IRS agent, the Sheriff has committed a Second Degree Felony, Conversion of Property.
  • Tyranny is defined as:
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • Dominance through threat of punishment and violence, oppressive rule, abusive government, cruelty and injustice. What better definition than this fits the abusive IRS.
  • Title 12, USC
  • The Federal Reserve Notes in use are mere evidence of a debt.
  • The legal definition of “dollar” is “a gold or silver coin of a specific weight and with specific markings
  • The Federal Reserve Banking system is a private cartel that has usurped the authority of the Congress to coin Money.
  • Article I, section 8, we find that only Congress was given the authority “To coin money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures”.
  • The Federal Reserve Act is a “private law” passed by four Congressmen after the Congressional session closed in December of 1913.
  • The “Killing Blow”, the coup de grace[pronounced gra] was delivered upon the American People by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933 by removing the Gold Standard from the American economy.  FDR assisted the FRB in heisting the gold supply from this country right out from under our noses. 
  • If you still refuse to pay, the IRS will file a document called a “Notice of Federal Tax Lien” in the local County Clerk’s office.
  • a “Notice” is not the “Lien” itself. The “Lien” is a totally separate and distinct document from the “Notice”.
  • The County Clerk, through abysmal ignorance files the “Notice of Federal Tax Lien” as if it was an actual “Lien”. These are two separate and distinct documents. The County Clerk never requests the actual “Lien” from the IRS agent.
  • The Seventh Amendment of the Bill of Rights of this Constitution for the united States of America guarantees you the Right of Trial by Jury in any controversy where the amount shall exceed twenty dollars.
  • You have never owed any money to the IRS. The IRS is simply the enforcer, the debt collector for the Federal Reserve Banking System. However, because you are using a private credit system, wherein the medium of exchange are fancy pieces of paper called Federal Reserve Notes, you owe the Federal Reserve Bank a “user fee”.
  • All the current paycheck garnishments in the entire country could be stopped by having your employer request the above mentioned documents, to wit:
  • A copy of the Driver’s License of the IRS agent A copy of the “Pocket Commission” showing the authority of the IRS agent A copy of the assessment shown on form 23C against the American Citizen A copy of the “Abstract of the Court Judgment” that verifies that you had a trial by jury.
  • As Sheriff of San Miguel County, I will provide educational classes to the County Clerk and the employers who are currently garnishing wages and paychecks to identify areas where they may have broken the law and unwittingly stolen their employees Federal Reserve Notes and thus committed “Conversion of Property”, a second degree felony. Furthermore, I will work closely with the County Clerk through education and knowledge so that the Clerk can stop breaking the law and committing financial terrorism against the Citizens of San Miguel County.
  • When the Citizens of San Miguel County elect me as their new Sheriff in town, I will ban the IRS from San Miguel County, and if I catch an IRS agent within the boundaries of the county, without my permission, I will arrest them for TRESPASSING.
  • In the 1950’s, with the stroke of the pen, the BIR was transformed into the current notorious IRS and brought onto the 50 united States.
  • The IRS is formerly the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) situated in and with authority only in the Philippine Islands (Trust Fund # 61), and moved into Puerto Rico (Trust Fund # 62).
  • Here it is in a nutshell. The IRS is a private, debt collection agency for the private banking system known as the Federal Reserve Bank. The IRS is not a government agency. I repeat, the IRS is not a government agency. Never has been, never will be.
  • This was done without any Congressional authority whatsoever.
  • the IRS is the “Private, debt collection agency for the private banking system known as the Federal Reserve Banks”.
  • Title 26, Internal Revenue Code, is the “Debt Collection Manual” for the IRS.  This manual has nothing with “Constitutitonal Rights”.
  • The IRS does not collect an “income tax”.  The IRS is simply collecting a user fee due to the Federal Reserve Banks because we, Americans, are using a private credit systeem.
  • Title 26, United States Code, is “non-positive” law, which means that no American Citizen is subject to it.  However, all “U.S. citizens” are subject to it.  In order to understand “U.S. citizen” you must go to 28 USC, section 3002.
  • Most American Citizens have voluntarily given up their Sovereignty in exchange for “immunities and privileges” of the 14th Amendment.
Gary Edwards

The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool: NARUS - 0 views

www.wired.com/...70914

NSA Domestic-Spying NARUS

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 13 - Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 13
     
    Chilling stuff.  Note that Mark Klien is an important whistleblower whose testimony has helped expose the  Federal Government - NSA domestic dragnet that has violated the constitutional rights of hundreds of thousands of law abiding American citizens.  The question I have concerns cooperation between NSA NARUS spying and the IRS. We know that the IRS used key words such as "TEA PARTY", "PATRIOT", "Constitution", and "Tenth Amendment" to target American citizens.  Does the NSA NARUS target Americans in the same way?  Are there political enemy lists with background surveillance information now circulating through different government agencies based on this targeted and illegal spying? The first thing we need to do is protect whistle blowers who are risking it all to protect the constitutional rights of American citizens and save our country.   "The equipment that technician Mark Klein learned was installed in the National Security Agency's "secret room" inside AT&T's San Francisco switching office isn't some sinister Big Brother box designed solely to help governments eavesdrop on citizens' internet communications. Rather, it's a powerful commercial network-analysis product with all sorts of valuable uses for network operators. It just happens to be capable of doing things that make it one of the best internet spy tools around. "Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record," says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. "We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls."" Narus' product, the Semantic Traffic Analyzer, is a software application that runs on standard IBM or Dell servers using the Linux operating system. It's renowned within certain circles for its ability to inspect traffic in real time on high-bandwidth pipes, identifying packets of interest as they r
Gary Edwards

The Impact of NSA Domestic Spying - Business Insider - 0 views

www.businessinsider.com/-of-nsa-domestic-spying-2013-6

NSA Domestic-Spying

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • NSA has collected cell records from all major mobile networks.
  • Thanks to AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein and NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake, we know that the NSA has been perpetually amassing not only phone records but virtually all electronic records and communications.
  • As an AT&T engineer, Klein discovered that a special NSA network actively "vacuumed up Internet and phone-call data from ordinary Americans with the cooperation of AT&T," emphasizing that "much of the data sent through AT&T to the NSA was purely domestic."
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Binney — one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history — worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution."
  • He's detailed how, ever since 9/11, the NSA has run a top-secret surveillance program that amasses electronic data — phone calls, emails, banking and travel records, social media, entire government databases — and analyzes the information "to be able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with.
  • Thanks to AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein and NSA whistleblowers William Binney and Thomas Drake, we know that the NSA has been perpetually amassing not only phone records but virtually all electronic records and communications.
  • Binney would know — he built the original software (i.e. ThinThread) that identified, in real time, networks of connections between individuals based on their electronic communications.
  • "I can pull your entire life together from all those domains and map it out and show your entire life over time," Binney told documentarian Laura Poitras while she was investigating the NSA's $2 billion data storage facility in Bluffdale, Utah. "This is something the KGB, the Stasi or the Gestapo would have loved to have had."
  • Binney — one of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history — worked for the Defense Department's foreign signals intelligence agency for 32 years before resigning in late 2001 because he "could not stay after the NSA began purposefully violating the Constitution." He's detailed how, ever since 9/11, the NSA has run a top-secret surveillance program that amasses electronic data — phone calls, GPS information, emails, social media, banking and travel records, entire government databases — and analyzes the information "to be able to monitor what people are doing" and who they are doing it with.
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 13
     
    Excellent coverage.  Follow the links, they are extraordinary. " Glenn Greenwald revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) is using the so-called "business records" provision of the Patriot Act to secretly collect telephone records of millions of Americans. Although the revelation doesn't surprise privacy advocates, the fact that Greenwald obtained a top secret court order compelling Verizon to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems is the first concrete piece of evidence exposing dragnet domestic surveillance. "
Gary Edwards

Sworn Declaration of Whistleblower William Binney on NSA Domestic Surveillance Capabili... - 0 views

publicintelligence.net/binney-nsa-declaration

NSA Domestic-Spying

shared by Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 06 Jun 13
     
    "Sworn Declaration of Whistleblower William Binney on NSA Domestic Surveillance Capabilities July 16, 2012 in National Security Agency The following sworn declaration of William Binney, a former employee of the NSA and specialist in traffic analysis, was filed July 2, 2012 in support of the Electronic Frontier Foundation's case against the National Security Agency (Jewel v. NSA) regarding their illegal domestic surveillance programs which, according to Binney "are consistent, as a mathematical matter, with seizing both the routing information and the contents of all electronic communications" inside the U.S.  Thanks to Jacob Appelbaum for originally drawing attention to the declaration." DECLARATION OF WILLIAM E. BINNEY IN SUPPORT OF PLAINTIFFS' MOTION FOR PARTIAL SUMMARY JUDGMENT REJECTING THE GOVERNMENT DEFENDANTS' STATE SECRET DEFENSE
Gary Edwards

The Daily Bell - Thomas DiLorenzo: More on the Myth of Lincoln, Secession and the 'Civi... - 1 views

www.thedailybell.com/...ln-Secession-and-the-Civil-War

Lincoln Thomas-DiLorenzo

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • The state cannot tell the people that it is bankrupting them and sending their sons and daughters to die by the thousands in aggressive and unconstitutional wars so that crony capitalism can be imposed at gunpoint in foreign countries, and so that the military-industrial complex can continue to rake in billions. That might risk a revolution. So instead, they have to use the happy talk of American virtue and American exceptionalism, the "god" of democracy," etc.
  • Specifically, he repeated the "All Men are Created Equal" line from the Gettysburg Address to make the case that it is somehow the duty of Americans to force "freedom" on all men and women everywhere, all around the globe, at gunpoint if need be. This is the murderous, bankrupting, imperialistic game that Lincoln mythology is used to "justify."
  • Lincoln spent his entire life in politics, from 1832 until his dying day, as a lobbyist for the American banking industry and the Northern manufacturing corporations that wanted cheaper credit funded by a government-run bank.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • No member of the Whig Party was more in bed with the American banking establishment than Lincoln was, according to University of Virginia historian Michael Holt in his book on the history of the American Whig party.
  • Bank of the United States
  • The Whig Party "had no platform to announce," Masters wrote, "because its principles were plunder and nothing else." Lincoln himself once said that he got ALL of his political ideas from Henry Clay, the icon and longtime leader of the Whig Party.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 02 Jun 13
       
      Nice insult.  But watch how the interviewer responds; "Thanks for the insight".  These guys are funny!
  • I don't usually answer "when did you stop beating your wife"-type questions since they always come from people with I.Q.s in the single digits.
  • Thanks for the insights
  • War is always destructive to a nation's economy regardless of whether it wins or loses the war.
  • War is the opposite of capitalism.
  • Capitalism is a system of peaceful, mutually-advantageous exchanges at market prices based on the international division of labor.
  • War destroys the international division of labor and diverts resources from peaceful, capitalistic exchange to death and destruction.
  • However, there are always war profiteers – the people who profit from selling and financing the military. One doesn't need to invent a conspiracy theory about this: War profiteering is war profiteering and has always existed as an essential feature of all wars.
  • "American exceptionalism" did not become a tool of American imperialism until AFTER the Civil War.
  • British intellectuals like Lord Acton understood and wrote about how the result of the war would be a US government that would become more tyrannical and imperialistic.
  • Knights of the Golden Circle
  • Davis was not a dictator. He had a lot of help losing the war, especially from his generals who insisted on the Napoleonic battlefield tactics they were taught at West Point and which had become defunct because of the advent of more deadly military technology by the middle of the nineteenth century.
  • One of his biggest failures was waiting until the last year of the war to finally do what General Robert E. Lee had been arguing from the beginning – offering the slaves freedom in return for fighting with the Confederate Army in defense of their country.
  • eaceful secession is the only way out of the new slavery for the average American, and it will only happen if we have a president who is more like Gorbachev than Lincoln.
  • The union of the founders was voluntary, and several states reserved the right to withdraw from the union in the future if it became destructive of their rights. Since each state has equal rights in the union, this became true for all states.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jun 13
     
    Thank you Thomas DiLorenzo for having the courage to set the record straight.  IMHO, Lincoln should be remembered for freeing the slaves and standing up to the International Bankster Cartel and Wall Street.  But what he did to the USA Constitution and the Bill of Rights was an unprecedented assault on individual liberty.  Good thing the guy could write beautifully on liberty and freedom because his actions amounted to a historic assault on everything the founding fathers held near and dear. excerpt:    "confronting academic "Lincoln revisionism." "Who was Lincoln really and why have you spent so much of your career trying to return Lincoln's academic profile to reality? Thomas DiLorenzo: Lincoln mythology is the ideological cornerstone of American statism. He was in reality the most hated of all American presidents during his lifetime according to an excellent book by historian Larry Tagg entitled The Unpopular Mr. Lincoln: America's Most Reviled President. He was so hated in the North that the New York Times editorialized a wish that he would be assassinated. This is perfectly understandable: He illegally suspended Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern political critics without due process; shut down over 300 opposition newspapers; committed treason by invading the Southern states (Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution defines treason as "only levying war upon the states" or "giving aid and comfort to their enemies," which of course is exactly what Lincoln did). He enforced military conscription with the murder of hundreds of New York City draft protesters in 1863 and with the mass execution of deserters from his army. He deported a congressional critic (Democratic Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Ohio); confiscated firearms; and issued an arrest warrant for the Chief Justice when the jurist issued an opinion that only Congress could legally suspend Habeas Corpus. He waged an unnecessary war (all other countries ended slavery
Gary Edwards

A Battering Ram Becomes a Stonewall - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...3475304578501581991103070.html

Peggy-Noonan IRS Obammunism Banksters

shared by Gary Edwards on 26 May 13 - No Cached
  • "I don't know." "I don't remember." "I'm not familiar with that detail." "It's not my precise area." "I'm not familiar with that letter." These are quotes from the Internal Revenue Service officials who testified this week before the House and Senate. That is the authentic sound of stonewalling, and from the kind of people who run Washington in the modern age—smooth, highly credentialed and unaccountable. They're surrounded by legal and employment protections, they know how to parse a careful response, they know how to blur the essential point of a question in a blizzard of unconnected factoids. They came across as people arrogant enough to target Americans for abuse and harassment and think they'd get away with it. So what did we learn the past week, and what are the essentials to keep in mind?
  • We learned the people who ran and run the IRS are not going to help Congress find out what happened in the IRS. We know we haven't gotten near the bottom of the political corruption of that agency. We do not know who ordered the targeting of conservative groups and individuals, or why, or exactly when it began. We don't know who executed the orders or directives. We do not know the full scope or extent of the scandal. We don't know, for instance, how many applicants for tax-exempt status were abused.
  • With all the talk and the hearings and the news reports, it is important to keep the essentials of this story in mind.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • First, only conservative groups were targeted in this scandal by the IRS. Liberal or progressive groups were not targeted. The IRS leaked conservative groups' confidential applications and donor lists to liberal groups, never the other way around.
  • This was a political operation. If it had not been, then the statistics tell us left-wing groups would have been harassed and abused, and seen their applications leaked to the press.
  • And all of this apparently took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. Meaning that before that election, groups that were anti-Obamacare, or pro-life, or pro-Second Amendment or constitutionalist, or had words like "tea party" or "patriot" in their name—groups that is that would support Republicans, not Democrats—were suppressed, thwarted, kept from raising money and therefore kept from fully operating.
  • if what happened at the IRS is not stopped now—if the internal corruption within it is not broken—it will never stop, and never be broken. The American people will never again be able to have the slightest confidence in the revenue-gathering arm of their government. And that, actually, would be tragic.
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