Gitmo: Authorization for Use of Military Force

18 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in 9/11, Conspiracy, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Obama, Rights, The Fall of America, War, Whistleblowers

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FOIA suit reveals Guantánamo’s ‘indefinite detainees‘

 GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — The Obama administration Monday lifted a veil of secrecy surrounding the status of the detainees at Guantánamo, for the first time publicly naming the four dozen captives it defined as indefinite detainees — men too dangerous to transfer but who cannot be tried in a court of law.

The names had been a closely held secret since a multi-agency task force sifted through the files of the Guantánamo detainees in 2009 trying to achieve President Barack Obama’s executive order to close the detention center. In January 2010, the task force revealed that it classified 48 Guantánamo captives as dangerous but “ineligible for trial because of a lack of evidence, or because the evidence was too “tainted.” (In other words, there is no evidence)

They became so-called “indefinite detainees,” a form of war prisoner held under Congress’ 2001 “Authorization for Use of Military Force.”

Last week, nearly four years after President Obama closed the CIA’s Detention, Interrogation and Rendition Program, the American public is one step closer to learning the truth about a program that sanctioned the torture of terrorism suspects. To date, it has remained shrouded in secrecy, tarnishing our international reputation and severely damaging our nation’s security. Under the leadership of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence has voted to adopt a 6000-plus page report, based on an analysis of more than six million pages of CIA records, detailing the findings of the committee’s three-year investigation into the program. We urge the committee to publicly release the document with as few redactions as possible.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has fiercely criticized the torture tactics of the Bush administration, released a statement expressing his hopes for adoption and declassification of the report, calling the “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners” a “stain on our country’s conscience.” Feinstein stated, “I believe this report will settle the debate once and for all over whether our nation should ever employ coercive interrogation techniques such as those detailed in this report.”

Obama In His Own Words – Transparency

The next step, of course, is for the commission to release the report and allow the American public to decide for themselves, based on a full understanding of the facts. As Obama stated in a White House Memorandum, “a democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency,” adding in simple but powerful terms that, “in the face of doubt, openness prevails.”

The Defense Department released the list to The Miami Herald, which, with the assistance of Yale Law School students, had sued for it in federal court in Washington, D.C. The Pentagon also sent the list to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on Monday, a Defense Department official said.

According to the list, the men designated for indefinite detention are 26 Yemenis, 12 Afghans, 3 Saudis, 2 Kuwaitis, 2 Libyans, a Kenyan, a Moroccan and a Somali.

Human rights groups denounced the existence of such a list.

Amnesty International’s Zeke Johnson called “fundamentally flawed” the notion of classifying captives as indefinite detainees. “Under international human rights law,” he said, “all of the detainees should either be charged and fairly tried in federal court, or released.”

Human Rights First’s Dixon Osburn hailed release of the list through the Freedom of Information Act: “It is fundamental to democracy that the public know the identities of the people our nation is depriving of liberty and why they are being detained.”

Some of the men on the list are among the prisoners currently on hunger strike and being force-fed at the prison, for example, Kuwaitis Fawzi al Odah, 36, and Fayez al Kandari, 35, and Yemeni Abdal Malik al Wahab, about 43, who in March, according to his lawyer David Remes, vowed to fast until he got out of the prison “either dead or alive.”

Two men on the list are deceased. Both Afghans, one “committed suicide” with a bedsheet in a recreation yard at Guantánamo’s Camp 6 for cooperative captives and the other “died of a heart attack,” also in Camp 6. So now the 166 captives at Guantánamo actually include 46 indefinite detainees.

 

Two former CIA captives, held apart from the majority of Guantánamo’s prisoners as “high-value detainees” are also listed as indefinite detainees: Mohammed Rahim, an Afghan man, and Somali Hassan Guleed.

All the other ex-CIA captives were designated for trial. Those include accused al-Qaida kingpin Khalid Sheik Mohammed, 48, and four alleged fellow conspirators in the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, who were in pretrial hearings at the war court this week. Also designated for trial was Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, 48, accused in the 2000 USS Cole attack that killed 17 American sailors, and, like Mohammed, facing a death-penalty tribunal.

So, the “master-minds” behind the 9/11 attacks were CIA agents?

Extrajudicial prisoners of the United States, in the context of the early twenty-first century War on Terrorism, refers to foreign nationals the United States detains outside of the legal process required within United States legal jurisdiction. In this context, the U.S. government was accused of maintaining covert interrogation centers, called black sites, operated by both known and secret intelligence agencies.Such black sites were later confirmed by reports from journalists, investigations and from men who had been imprisoned and interrogated there, and later released.

Of these prisoners being held by the US, some were suspected of being from the senior ranks of al Qaeda, referred to in U.S. military terms as “high value detainees.” According to the Swiss senator Dick Marty‘s reports on Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe Member States, about a hundred persons had been kidnapped by the CIA on European territory and subsequently rendered to countries where they may have been tortured.

The Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, had described the men detained in Camp Delta at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as “the worst of the worst.” But, before September 2006, many of those detainees suspected of having the highest intelligence value were not detained at Guantanamo, but were held at CIA “black sites,” secret prisons in Eastern Europe and other countries, including Afghanistan.

In August 2010, it was reported that four high-value detainees: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, had first been transferred to Guantanamo on September 24, 2003. They were held at “Strawberry Fields“, a secret camp in the complex constructed for their detention.Worried that a pending Supreme Court decision on habeas corpus rights might go against the Bush administration and compel releasing the men’s names and other details, the CIA took back custody of the four men and moved them out of Guantanamo on March 27, 2004.

The United States Supreme Court ruled in Rasul v. Bush (2004) that detainees at Guantanamo Bay detention camp had the habeas corpus right to challenge their detentions before an impartial tribunal. As a result, the US continued to hold many ghost detainees outside Guantanamo Bay and the United States in order to avoid any review of their cases.

These four men and other high-value CIA detainees were not transferred again to military custody at Guantanamo until September 2006. At that time, the Bush administration was assured of passage by Congress of the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which included provisions preventing detainees from using habeas corpus petitions outside the newly authorized system of military tribunals. -

Administration officials have through the years described a variety of reasons why the men could not face trial: Evidence against some of the indefinite detainees was too tainted by CIA or other interrogation torture or abuse to be admissible in a court; insufficient evidence to prove an individual detainee had committed a crime; or military intelligence opinions that certain captives had undertaken suicide or other type of terrorist training, and had vowed to engage in an attack on release.

In all, the list identifies 34 candidates for prosecution. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Martins, the Pentagon’s chief war crimes prosecutor, said Sunday night that fewer than those 34 men will be prosecuted because of federal court rulings that disqualified “providing material support for terror” as a war crime in most if not all Guantánamo cases.

At Human Rights Watch, senior counterterrorism counsel Andrea Prasow called the list “a fascinating window into the Obama administration’s thinking circa January 2010” but both flawed and somewhat irrelevant today.

“Many of the detainees designated for prosecution can only be prosecuted in civilian court,” she said. “So unless Congress lifts the restrictions banning their transfer they are effectively ‘indefinite detainees.’”

She also noted that, since the list was drawn up, the Obama administration was reportedly considering transferring five Afghan Taliban to custody of the Qatari government in exchange for the release of U.S. POW Bowe Bergdahl.

The Wall Street Journal named the five men and all appear on the list released Monday as indefinite detainees: Mullah Mohammad Fazl, Mullah Norullah Noori, Mohammed Nabi, Khairullah Khairkhwa, and Abdul Haq Wasiq.

One man categorized in 2010 as a possible candidate for prosecution was Saudi Arabian Mohammed Qahtani, 37, once “suspected” of being the absent “20th hijacker” in the Sept. 11 plot. He was so brutally interrogated at Guantánamo that a senior Pentagon official excluded him from the Bush-era 9/11 war crimes charge sheet. That official, Susan Crawford, told The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward that Qahtani’s treatment amounted to torture.

The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, with the assistance of the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at the Yale Law School, filed suit in federal court in Washington D.C., in March for the list under the Freedom of Information Act. The students, in collaboration with Washington attorney Jay Brown, represented Rosenberg in a lawsuit that specifically sought the names of the 46 surviving prisoners.

Monday, hours before the release of the names, U.S. District Court Judge Gladys Kessler had set a July 8 deadline for the government to update the court on its classification review. The Justice Department gave the list to Brown, who in turn gave it to Rosenberg.

US House defence bill blocks Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo Bay prison.
Republican-controlled chamber also limits president’s attempt to reduce nuclear weapons in version at odds with Senate bill.

The House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed a sweeping, $638bn defense bill that would block President Barack Obama from closing the US detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, and limit his efforts to reduce nuclear weapons.

Ignoring a White House veto threat, the Republican-controlled House voted 315-108 for the legislation – which also authorizes money for aircraft, weapons, ships, personnel and the war in Afghanistan. It must be reconciled with a Senate version before heading to the president’s desk.

Despite last-minute lobbying by Obama counter-terrorism adviser Lisa Monaco, the House soundly rejected Obama’s repeated pleas to shutter Guantánamo. In recent weeks, the president implored Congress to close the facility in Cuba, citing its “prohibitive costs” and its role as a recruiting tool for extremists.

A hunger strike by more than 100 of the 166 prisoners protesting against their conditions and indefinite confinement has prompted the fresh calls for closure. Obama is pushing to transfer approved detainees – there are 86 – to their home countries and lift a ban on transfers to Yemen. Fifty-six of the 86 are from Yemen.

The House voted down an amendment to close the naval detention centre by 31 December 2014 by 249 votes to 174. It also backed an amendment – by 236 to 188 – to stop the president from transferring any detainees to Yemen.

The restrictions in the House bill put it at odds with the Democratic-controlled Senate.

The Senate armed services committee’s bill gives the defense department additional flexibility to transfer Guantánamo detainees to the US and other countries, with the objective of closing the detention facility there.

But, in a move that reflects deep divisions in Congress over Guantánamo’s future, the committee did not hold votes on the provision in the bill, opting instead to have that debate when the legislation moves to the Senate floor.

In its current form, the Senate committee’s legislation would permit transfer of “suspected terror suspects” to the US if the Pentagon determines that doing so is in the interests of “national security” and that any public safety issues have been addressed, the committee said Friday in a statement detailing the bill’s major provisions.

Detainees could be moved to foreign countries if they are determined to no longer be a threat to US security, the transfers are pursuant to court orders, or the individuals have been “tried and acquitted,” or have been convicted and completed their sentences.

Transfers to third countries also could occur if the Pentagon determines the move supports US national security interests and steps have been taken “to substantially mitigate the risk of the detainee re-engaging in terrorist activities,” the committee said.

The defense policy bill also bars the Pentagon or the National Nuclear Security Agency from spending any money to implement the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START treat) with Russia that the Senate ratified in December 2010 until the defense secretary provides certain information on reducing the US nuclear arsenal to Congress.

The bill also imposes new punishments on members of the armed services found guilty of rape or sexual assault as outrage over the crisis in the military has galvanized Congress.

Obama backs the measures, which would require a mandatory minimum sentence of two years in prison for a member of the armed services convicted of rape or sexual assault in a military court. The bill also would strip military commanders of the power to overturn convictions in rape and sexual assault cases.

Snowden: Obama’s election kept me from leaking earlier

Snowden replied that each time public discussion emerges, U.S. officials provide misleading, false assertions about the program’s value. He encouraged journalists to ask what specific terrorist attacks were thwarted solely by suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained other ways. Then he said Americans should inquire whether such wholesale privacy violations against innocent citizens are worth the sacrifice.

He then addressed Cheney’s comments that he was a traitor for violating his position to “damage the national security interests of the United States.”

Snowden responded, “It’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead.

“Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.”

Cheney’s choice to criticize Snowden as a traitor is rather interesting. A war crime is defined as an action carried out during the conduct of a war that violates accepted international rules of war. War criminals are those who sanction, supervise, perform or defend illegal actions.

NSA whistleblower answered questions for the Guardian audience today, addressing Dick Cheney calling him a

In April, an independent, bi-partisan Washington-based panel implicated Cheney in violations of U.S. law and international treaties for sanctioning “enhanced interrogation” which produced minimal information of value. The former Vice President was tried and found guilty in absentia of war crimes last year in an international court. Human rights groups abroad protest his appearances so passionately that he has difficulty traveling abroad.

Though Cheney swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, he justifies the Bush administration’s destruction of constitutional rule of law and asserts that torture, extrajudicial kidnapping and detention, the militarization of America’s justice system, and the erosion of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments were necessary to keep America safe.

Last Sunday, he also alleged the NSA surveillance programs Snowden exposed could have prevented September 11th terrorist attacks. The former Vice President also said he was “suspicious” the whistleblower was a Chinese government operative.

Snowden rejected Cheney’s assertion his flight to Hong Kong was because he spies for China.

“Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing?” Snowden asked. “I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.”

In a follow-up question, a poster asked whether he could confirm or deny giving classified information to the Chinese. Snowden replied, “No. I have had no contact with the Chinese government. Just like with the Guardian and the Washington Post, I only work with journalists.”

Snowden also said the more panicked the establishment, the better off Americans are in the long run. Career politicians and media pundits have peddled the narrative that Snowden committed treason with solutions ranging from him being “disappeared” to calls for his arrest, extradition and imprisonment.

When asked if the post-leak scandal was proceeding as he hoped, Snowden expressed disappointment.

“Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.”

The full transcript of Snowden’s online discussion with the Guardian is posted here.

Resources:

Shedding Light on the Dark Side – A Call to Congress to Release the SSCI Report

Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START)

Negotiations for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) began when Ronald Reagan first made the proposal to Mikhail Gorbachev at the Geneva Summit in 1985. An agreement was concluded during George H. W. Bush’s term. The talks were complicated by the turmoil surrounding the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s when several newly independent nations ended up with nuclear arsenals. (The Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan subsequently agreed to give up their nuclear weapons, relying in part on the Nunn-Lugar CTR program to do so.) Whereas the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty eliminated short and medium range nuclear weapons, it did not address the tens of thousands of strategic or long range inter-continental ballistic missiles the U.S. and Russia held.  The long sought START Treaty limited the U.S. and Russia to 6,000 nuclear warheads and 1,600 nuclear delivery vehicles each.  These limits led to a drastic reduction in the combined stockpiles of both nations’ nuclear warheads. The New START Treaty, which was signed and ratified in 2010, further reduced these limits.

Freedom of Information Act | The White House

Black site

In military terminology, a black site is a location at which an unacknowledged black project is conducted. Recently, the term has gained notoriety in describing secret prisons operated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), generally outside of U.S. territory and legal jurisdiction.[citation needed] It can refer to the facilities that are controlled by the CIA used by the U.S. government in its “War on Terror” to detain alleged unlawful enemy combatants.

U.S. President George W. Bush acknowledged the existence of secret prisons operated by the CIA during a speech on September 6, 2006. A claim that the black sites existed was made by The Washington Post in November 2005 and before this by human rights NGOs (non-governmental organizations).

Many European countries[who?] have officially denied they are hosting black sites to imprison suspects or cooperating in the U.S. extraordinary rendition program.[citation needed] Not one country has confirmed that it is hosting black sites. However, a European Union (EU) report adopted on February 14, 2007, by a majority of the European Parliament (382 MEPs voting in favour, 256 against and 74 abstaining) stated the CIA operated 1,245 flights and that it was not possible to contradict evidence or suggestions that secret detention centres were operated in Poland and Romania.

In January 2012, Poland’s Prosecutor General‘s office initiated investigative proceedings against Zbigniew Siemiątkowski, the former Polish intelligence chief. Siemiątkowski is charged with facilitating the alleged CIA detention operation in Poland, where foreign suspects may have been tortured in the context of the War on Terror. The possible involvement of Leszek Miller, Poland’s Prime Minister in 2001-2004, is also considered.

Secret detentions and illegal transfers of detainees involving Council of Europe Member States 

The Dollar is Dead – Are You Prepared?

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in BP Oil, Climate, Economics, Energy Resources, Sustainability, The Fall of America

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So Long, US Dollar

There’s a major shift under way, one the US mainstream media has left largely untouched even though it will send the United States into an economic maelstrom and dramatically reduce the country’s importance in the world: the demise of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

For decades the US dollar has been dominant in international trade and illegal wars, especially in the oil markets. This role has create demand for US dollars, and that international demand constitutes a huge part of the dollar’s valuation. Not only did the global-currency role add value to the dollar, it also created a pool of demand for US Treasuries (US taxpayers hard earned slave wage), as countries around the world sought to maintain stores of petrodollars. The availability of all this credit, denominated in a dollar supported by of global trade, enabled the American federal government to “borrow” our hard earned tax dollars, which was then invested in offshore accounts without limit.

The dominance of the dollar gave the United States power and influence around the world… but the times they are a-changing. As the world’s emerging economies gain ever more prominence, the US is losing hold of its position as the world’s superpower.

Over the past few years China and Russia have been making agreements to move away from the US dollar in international trade. Several major oil-producing nations have begun selling oil in currencies other than the dollar, and both the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have issued reports arguing for the need to create a new global reserve currency independent of the dollar.

The supremacy of the dollar is not nearly as solid as most Americans believe it to be. More generally, the United States is not the global superpower it once was. These trends are very much connected, as demonstrated by the world’s response to US interference around the world under the premiss of “democracy.”

People this is no longer America, we have become a Police State, the law has become lawless…..it is the duty of all US citizens to protect our country from the now defunct government.

This should be a wake-up call for those unprepared (or unwilling) to acknowledge an ugly truth: The country’s financial “rescue” devised in Washington has failed miserably.

The blame also lies on those whose job it was to avoid the exact situation we find ourselves in, including current Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and former Chairman Alan Greenspan, tasked with preventing financial meltdowns and keeping the nation’s economy strong through monetary and credit policies.

Unemployment chart

A complete collapse of the U.S. dollar on the very near horizon, but a single, uniform currency system is already in the works to take its place. All that needs to happen now is for the final hammer to drop, so to speak, an event to truly shake the people and wake them out of their drunken, entertainment-imbibed stupors. But when this finally happens, it will already be too late for anyone to actually do anything about it.

“The first shots in a global economic takeover were fired in Cyprus,” explains Doug Hagmann, of the Canada Free Press about the situation as it is currently playing out. “It is a plan for a one world Communist economy where the ‘middle class’ will be wiped out through a series of events that will have the same ultimate effect as we are seeing in present day Cyprus.”

And just what, exactly, happened in Cyprus? The mainstream media claims it was a simple emergency “tax deal,” a “levy” designed to pull the country out of crisis. But in reality, the people of Cyprus, and those with money in Cyprus banks, were literally robbed of untold billions of dollars by the central bankers, who overnight imposed an unannounced freeze on a large portion of depositors’ money. According to more recent reports, up to 40 percent of depositors’ cash could be apprehended as part of the deal.

Federal Reserve recently stole more than 25 percent of Americans’ savings and investments with ‘Quantitative Easing’ Scam

But what is happening in Cyprus is also happening in the U.S. Very few Americans, it turns out, are aware of the fact that the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing scheme, which intentionally injects more paper money into the general money supply, causes inflation. And inflation leads to devaluation of money, which in essence is just another form of stealing from the people to bail out the central bankers.

Though these cash injections might lead to immediate economic jump starts, they never last, and the long-term consequence of their repeated use is hyperinflation and destruction of the currency. And the unfortunate truth of the matter is that all levels of government have been infiltrated with globalists serving the interests of the central bankers at the expense of the people.”The plan for a global currency or a one world economic order is a matter that transcends political parties,” writes Hagmann. “Those who continue to argue in the Republican-Democrat meme are doing nothing more than providing entertainment to distract people from the real issue, that of the global elite versus the rest of us.”The top of the pyramid in this Ponzi scheme is filled with members of both U.S. political parties who are systematically pillaging us and our future generations into financial debt, bondage and slavery. It is a plan that has been in the works for centuries. The problem, however, is that we have been conditioned not to think that big. Yet, the lie is that big.

*** How about Those Iranian Sanctions? ***

The real “sting of Iranian sanctions” was lessened when the U.S. granted waivers to 20 countries because they had significantly reduced their purchases from Iran. Countries that received waivers for Central Bank purchases will also be exempt from these expanded penalties.

It’s ironic. The United States fashioned its Iranian sanctions assuming that oil trades occur in US dollars. That assumption – an echo of the more general assumption that the US dollar will continue to dominate international trade – has given countries unfriendly to the US a great reason to continue their moves away from the dollar: if they don’t trade in dollars, America’s dollar-centric policies carry no weight! It’s a classic backfire! Sanctions intended in part to illustrate the US continued world supremacy are in fact encouraging countries disillusioned with that very notion to continue their moves away from the US currency, a slow but steady trend that will eat away at its economic power until there is little left.

Let’s delve into both situations – the demise of the dollar’s dominance and the Iranian sanction shortcuts – in more detail.

The biggest oil-trading partners in the world, China and Saudi Arabia, are still using the petrodollar in their transactions. How long this will persist is a very important question. China imported 1.4 million barrels of oil a day from Saudi Arabia in February, a 39% increase from a year earlier, and the two countries have teamed up to build a massive oil refinery in Saudi Arabia. As the nations continue to pursue increased bilateral trade, at some point they will decide that involving US dollars in every transaction is unnecessary and expensive, and they will ditch the dollar.

When that happens, the tide will have truly turned against the dollar, as it was an agreement between President Nixon and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia in 1973 that originally created the petrodollar system. Nixon asked Faisal to accept only US dollars as payment for oil and to invest any excess profits in US Treasury bonds, notes, and bills. In exchange, Nixon pledged to protect Saudi oilfields from the Soviet Union and other potential aggressors, such as Iran and Iraq.

That agreement created the foundation for an incredibly strong US dollar. All of the world’s oil money started to flow through the US Federal Reserve, creating ever-growing demand for both US dollars and US debt. Every oil-importing nation in the world started converting its surplus funds into US dollars to be able to buy oil. Oil-exporting countries started spending their cash on Treasury securities. And slowly but surely the petrodollar system spread beyond oil to encompass almost every facet of global trade.

The value of the US dollar is based on this role as the conduit for global trade. That role is vanishing, much of the value in the dollar will evaporate. Massive inflation, high interest rates, and substantial increases in the cost of food, clothing, and gasoline will make the 2008 recession look like nothing more than a bump in the road. This will be a crater. The government is now unable to finance its debts. The house of cards, built on the assumption that the world would rely on US dollars forever, will come tumbling down.

Russia and China are leading the charge. The two nations made good on talks to move away from the dollar and have been using rubles and renminbi to trade with each other. The second-largest economy on earth – China – and the third-largest economy on the planet – Japan – followed suit, striking a deal to promote the use of their own currencies when trading with each other. The deal will allow firms to convert Chinese and Japanese currencies into each other directly, instead of using US dollars as the intermediary as has been the requirement for years. China is now discussing a similar plan with South Korea.

Similarly, a new agreement among the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) promotes the use of their national currencies when trading, instead of using the US dollar. China is also pursuing bilateral trades with Malaysia using the renminbi and ringgit. And Russia and Iran have agreed to use rubles as a means of currency in their trades.

Then there’s the entire continent of Africa. In 2009 China became Africa’s largest trading partner, eclipsing the United States, and now China is working to expand the use of Chinese currency in Africa instead of US dollars. Standard Bank, Africa’s largest financial institution, predicts that $100 billion worth of trade between China and Africa will be settled in renminbi by 2015. That’s more than the total bilateral trade between China and Africa in 2010.

The idea of moving away from the dollar is also finding support from major international agencies. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development has stated that “the current system of currencies and capital rules that binds the world economy is not working properly and was largely responsible for the financial and economic crises.” The statement continued, saying “the dollar should be replaced with a global currency.” The International Monetary Fund agrees, recently arguing that the dollar should cede its role as global reserve currency to an international currency, which is in effect a basket of national currencies.

There is also a host of countries that have started using their own currencies to complete oil trades, a move that strikes right at the heart of US-dollar dominance. China and the United Arab Emirates have agreed to ditch the dollar and use their own currencies in oil transactions. The Chinese National Bank says this agreement is worth roughly $5.5 billion annually. India is buying oil from Iran with gold and rupees. China and Iran are working on a barter system to exchange Iranian oil for Chinese imported products.

The United States and the European Union based their Iran sanctions on the financial system behind Iran’s oil trade. The country uses its central bank to run its oil business – the bank settles trades through the Belgium company Swift Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) and the trades are always in US dollars.

But the arrogance in the sanctions is the assumption that Iran can only use this one, dollar-based avenue. In reality, the Islamic Republic is considerably more agile than that; removing its ability to trade in the official manner has only encouraging the country to find imaginative new methods to sell its oil.

OBAMA’S CHARADE ON IRAN SANCTIONS

By any substantive criterion, the sanctions actually authorized in the resolution are remarkably weak—for the Obama Administration, embarrassingly so (although you won’t hear them admit it).  In the main body of the resolution, there are, literally, no sanctions limiting the capacity of the Islamic Republic to produce and export hydrocarbons.  The Obama Administration wanted energy sanctions, but China made clear that it did not want to support a resolution containing them.  So they were not included in the final text.  Likewise, there are no sanctions barring the extension of financial services, insurance, reinsurance, etc. to Iranian individuals and entities.

Sanctions or no sanctions, Iran is moving its oil.

The mainstream media is avoiding all discussion of the demise of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Even fewer people are talking about how sanctions based on Iran’s supposed need to use the US dollar to sell its oil leave loopholes wide enough for VLCCs to sail right through.

Without acknowledging the elephant in the room, articles about Iranian tankers turning off their transponders or India using gold to buy Iranian oil invariably sound like plot developments in a spy thriller. Much more useful would be to convey the real message: The world doesn’t need to revolve around US dollars anymore and the longer the US tries to pretend that the dollar is still and will remain dominant, the more often its international actions will backfire.

DOLLAR COLLAPSE and END of the AMERICAN EMPIRE

The American mainstream media has made a habit out of demonizing anyone who tries to circumvent or reform the dollar system. The Chinese are being accused of “stabbing the dol­lar”; gold investors are labeled “gold bugs” while the users of Bitcoins are being accused of money laundering without any proof whatsoever. The world can’t be forced to use the dollar at gunpoint. Why would anyone want to price goods or store wealth in a currency which is being continuously debased? What happens if the President of the US decides to naturalize 15 millions of illegal aliens and grant them the right to use Medicare, Medicaid and provide them with foodstamps? Such expenses can only be financed through ob­scene amounts of freshly printed money. In such a scenario, the dollar could lose half of its value overnight. Why would anyone trust a currency exposed to such risks?

The main enemies of a strong and reli­able dollar are located in Washington DC. Until the American budgetary mess is sorted out, the rest of the world, along with free-spirited Ameri­can citizens, will have to look for alternatives to the once mighty US dollar. Deprived of the privileges given by the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency, the US will not be able to pay for imports, finance its army and provide social security to its citizens. The fall of the dollar sys­tem will force the US government to default on its debts and cut its budget. If Washington’s reck­less policy doesn’t change, America will become a second-rate country engulfed in poverty, price inflation and social unrest.

To a lot of people it’s obvious that the American economy has to collapse in order for the one world government to come into power. Understanding this will put it all into perspective. The nation’s problems will not be solved. Prepare yourselves for the fall of the country, the government will not take care of you. Most people will not be prepared, believing everything will be alright. I hope you aren’t in that category. You need to be prepared to survive off the land, and defend yourself, and your family, from total chaos. You don’t have much time to prepare either. Do it NOW!

Further reading:

‘The United States so-called fiscal cliff is more like a ‘bottomless pit of debt’ that the country is diving into. The United States risks collapsing of dollar by 2013. US President Barack Obama has signed into law a bill backed by the Senate that averted the so-called fiscal cliff, the White House says. Obama signed the ‘American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012. On January 1, the House of Representatives voted 257 to 167, approving the bill, which consists of raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, while exempting others who earn less than $450,000 a year. It will also put off 109 billion dollars in budget cuts for two months.’

Earth in crisis: Is the planet on the verge of a ‘meltdown’?

17 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in Uncategorized

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Reblogged from The Extinction Protocol: 2012 and beyond:

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January 5, 2013 - PLANET - Conditions on the planet continue to deteriorate, particularly in respect to more pronounced climate extremes seen across hemispheres, and the number of volcanoes that are now continuously erupting. The planet is undergoing dynamic change, whereby we’re seeing early evidence that the physical dynamics of the planet is moving towards a spectrum of greater instability. This is happening, as the planet’s magnetic field continues to abate in strength.

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The Party is Over: America’s Decline

16 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by in 9/11, AEPAC, Agenda 21 and Communitarianism, Crimes against humanity, Education, Resource Wars, The Fall of America

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The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

The demise of the United States as the global superpower could come far more quickly than anyone imagines.  If Washington is dreaming of 2040 or 2050 as the end of the American Century, a more realistic assessment of domestic and global trends suggests that in 2025, just 17 years from now, it could all be over except for the shouting.

Despite the aura of omnipotence most empires project, a look at their history should remind us that they are fragile organisms. So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly bad, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, 11 years for the Ottomans, 17 years for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, entirely too soon for the United States.

Future historians are likely to identify the Bush administration’s rash invasion of Iraq in that year as the start of America’s downfall. However, instead of the bloodshed that marked the end of so many past empires, with cities burning and innocent civilians slaughtered, this twenty-first century imperial collapse could come relatively quietly through the invisible tendrils of economic collapse or cyberwarfare.

But have no doubt: when Washington’s global dominion finally ends, there will be painful daily reminders of what such a loss of power means for Americans in every walk of life. As a half-dozen European nations have discovered, imperial decline tends to have a remarkably demoralizing impact on a society, regularly bringing at least a generation of economic privation. As the economy cools, political temperatures rise, often sparking serious domestic unrest.

Available economic, educational, and military data indicate that, when it comes to US global power, negative trends will aggregate rapidly and are likely to reach a critical mass. The American Century, proclaimed so triumphantly at the start of World War II, will be tattered and fading.

The US National Intelligence Council admitted for the first time that America’s global power was indeed on a declining trajectory. In one of its periodic futuristic reports, Global Trends 2025, the Council cited “the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way, roughly from West to East” and “without precedent in modern history,” as the primary factor in the decline of the “United States’ relative strength—even in the military realm.” Like many in Washington, however, the Council’s analysts anticipated a very long, very soft landing for American global preeminence, and harbored the hope that somehow the US would long “retain unique military capabilities… to project military power globally” for decades to come.

No such luck. Under current projections, the United States will find itself in second place behind China (already the world’s second largest economy) in economic output and behind India as well. Similarly, Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology just as America’s current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation.

Did you know………………….

The potential problems of big aid provided unconditionally to governments that have dysfunctional preferences are exemplified by the world’s largest aid programme. What was it? World Bank aid to Africa? The Marshall Plan? European aid to Eastern Europe? None of the above: the world’s largest aid programme has been China’s aid to the US, which has now reached around a trillion dollars. Of course, China’s leaders do not strut around the world stage parading their generosity: there are no photos in the Chinese press of Hu Jintao kissing American babies, or trumpeting the word “trillion.” But the huge Chinese lending the U.S. has been on financial terms very similar to World Bank lending to Africa. Both are at very low interests rates, and repayment is deferred to the distant future. The Chinese purchase of American government debt is simply aid that dare not speak its name.

Are you starting to get the picture?

By 2020, according to current plans, the Pentagon will throw a military Hail Mary pass for a dying empire.  It will launch a lethal triple canopy of advanced aerospace robotics that represents Washington’s last best hope of retaining global power despite its waning economic influence. By that year, however, China’s global network of communications satellites, backed by the world’s most powerful supercomputers, will also be fully operational, providing Beijing with an independent platform for the weaponization of space and a powerful communications system for missile- or cyber-strikes into every quadrant of the globe.

Wrapped in imperial hubris, like Whitehall or Quai d’Orsay before it, the White House still seems to imagine that American decline will be gradual, gentle, and partial. In his State of the Union address President Obama offered the reassurance that “I do not accept second place for the United States of America.” A few days later, Vice President Biden ridiculed the very idea that “we are destined to fulfill [historian Paul] Kennedy’s prophecy that we are going to be a great nation that has failed because we lost control of our economy and overextended.” Similarly, the “establishment journal” Foreign Affairs, neo-liberal foreign policy guru Joseph Nye waved away talk of China’s economic and military rise, dismissing “misleading metaphors of organic decline” and denying that any deterioration in US global power was underway.

Ordinary Americans, watching their jobs head overseas in addition to drastic pay cuts, have a more realistic view than their cosseted leaders. An opinion poll found that 65% of Americans believed the country was now “in a state of decline.”

Viewed historically, the question is not whether the United States will lose its unchallenged global power, but just how precipitous and wrenching the decline will be. In place of Washington’s wishful thinking, let’s use the National Intelligence Council’s own futuristic methodology to suggest four realistic scenarios for how, whether with a bang or a whimper, US global power will reach its end soon. (along with four accompanying assessments of just where we are today).  The future scenarios include: economic decline, oil shock, military misadventure, and World War III .  While these are hardly the only possibilities when it comes to American decline and inevitable collapse, they offer a window into an onrushing future.

Economic Decline: Present Situation

Today, three main threats exist to America’s dominant position in the global economy: loss of economic clout thanks to a shrinking share of world trade, the decline of American technological innovation, and the end of the dollar’s privileged status as the global reserve currency.

By 2008, the United States had already fallen to number three in global merchandise exports, with just 11% of them compared to 12% for China and 16% for the European Union.  There is no reason to believe that this trend will reverse itself.

Similarly, American leadership in technological innovation is on the wane. In 2008, the US was still number two behind Japan in worldwide patent applications with 232,000, but China was closing fast at 195,000, thanks to a blistering 400% increase since 2000.  A harbinger of further decline: in 2009 the US hit rock bottom in ranking among the 40 nations surveyed by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation when it came to “change” in “global innovation-based competitiveness” during the previous decade.  Adding substance to these statistics, in October China’s Defense Ministry unveiled the world’s fastest Supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A , so powerful, said one US expert, that it “blows away the existing No. 1 machine” in America.

Add to this clear evidence that the US education system, that source of future scientists and innovators, has been falling behind its competitors. After leading the world for decades in 25- to 34-year-olds with university degrees, the country sank to 12th place in 2010.  The World Economic Forum ranked the United States at a mediocre 52nd among 139 nations in the quality of its university math and science instruction in 2010. Nearly half of all graduate students in the sciences in the US are now foreigners, most of whom will be heading home, not staying here as once would have happened.  In other words, the United States is most likely to face a critical shortage of talented scientists.

Public School Students – Prisoners of the State

Such negative trends are encouraging increasingly sharp criticism of the dollar’s role as the world’s reserve currency. “Other countries are no longer willing to buy into the idea that the US knows best on economic policy,” observed Kenneth S. Rogoff, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. In mid-2009, with the world’s central banks holding an astronomical $4 trillion in US Treasury notes, Russian president Dimitri Medvedev insisted that it was time to end “the artificially maintained unipolar system” based on “one formerly strong reserve currency.”

Simultaneously, China’s central bank governor suggested that the future might lie with a global reserve currency “disconnected from individual nations” (that is, the US dollar). Take these as signposts of a world to come, and of a possible attempt, as economist Michael Hudson has argued, “to hasten the bankruptcy of the US financial-military world order.”

Economic Decline: Scenario 2020

After years of swelling deficits fed by incessant warfare in distant lands, in 2020, or sooner, as long expected, the US dollar finally loses its special status as the world’s reserve currency.  Suddenly, the cost of imports soars. Unable to pay for swelling deficits by selling now-devalued Treasury notes abroad, Washington is finally forced to slash its bloated military budget.  Under pressure at home and abroad, Washington slowly pulls US forces back from hundreds of overseas bases to a continental perimeter.  By now, however, it is far too late.

Faced with a fading superpower incapable of paying the bills, China, India, Iran, Russia, and other powers, great and regional, provocatively challenge US  dominion over the oceans, space, and cyberspace.  Meanwhile, amid soaring prices, ever-rising unemployment, and a continuing decline in real wages, domestic divisions widen into violent clashes and divisive debates, often over remarkably irrelevant issues. Riding a political tide of disillusionment and despair, a far-right patriot captures the presidency with thundering rhetoric, demanding respect for American authority and threatening military retaliation or economic reprisal. The world pays next to no attention as the American Century ends in silence.

Oil Shock: Present Situation

One casualty of America’s waning economic power has been its lock on global oil supplies. Speeding by America’s gas-guzzling economy in the passing lane, China became the world’s number one energy consumer this summer, a position the US had held for over a century.  Energy specialist Michael Klare has argued that this change means China will “set the pace in shaping our global future.”

By 2025, Iran and Russia will control almost half of the world’s natural gas supply, which will potentially give them enormous leverage over energy-starved Europe. Add petroleum reserves to the mix and, as the National Intelligence Council has warned, in just 15 years two countries, Russia and Iran, could “emerge as energy kingpins.”

Despite remarkable ingenuity, the major oil powers are now draining the big basins of petroleum reserves that are amenable to easy, cheap extraction. The real lesson of the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico was not BP’s sloppy safety standards, but the simple fact everyone saw on “spillcam”: one of the corporate energy giants had little choice but to search for what Klare calls “tough oil” miles beneath the surface of the ocean to keep its profits up.

Compounding the problem, the Chinese and Indians have suddenly become far heavier energy consumers. Even if fossil fuel supplies were to remain constant (which they won’t), demand, and so costs, are almost certain to rise—and sharply at that.  Other developed nations are meeting this threat aggressively by plunging into experimental programs to develop alternative energy sources.  The United States has taken a different path, doing far too little to develop alternative sources while, in the last three decades, doubling its dependence on foreign oil imports.  Between 1973 and 2007, oil imports have risen from 36% of energy consumed in the US to 66%.

Oil Shock: Scenario 2025

The United States remains so dependent upon foreign oil that a few adverse developments in the global energy market in 2025 spark an oil shock.  By comparison, it makes the 1973 oil shock (when prices quadrupled in just months) look like the proverbial molehill.  Angered at the dollar’s plummeting value, OPEC oil ministers, meeting in Riyadh, demand future energy payments in a “basket” of Yen, Yuan, and Euros.  That only hikes the cost of US oil imports further.  At the same moment, while signing a new series of long-term delivery contracts with China, the Saudis stabilize their own foreign exchange reserves by switching to the Yuan.  Meanwhile, China pours countless billions into building a massive trans-Asia pipeline and funding Iran’s exploitation of the world largest natural gas field at South Pars in the Persian Gulf.

Concerned that the US Navy might no longer be able to protect the oil tankers traveling from the Persian Gulf to fuel East Asia, a coalition of Tehran, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi form an unexpected new Gulf alliance and affirm that China’s new fleet of swift aircraft carriers will henceforth patrol the Persian Gulf from a base on the Gulf of Oman.  Under heavy economic pressure, London agrees to cancel the US lease on its Indian Ocean island base of Diego Garcia, while Canberra, pressured by the Chinese, informs Washington that the Seventh Fleet is no longer welcome to use Fremantle as a homeport, effectively evicting the US Navy from the Indian Ocean.

With just a few strokes of the pen and some terse announcements, the “Carter Doctrine,” by which US military power was to eternally protect the Persian Gulf, is laid to rest in 2025.  All the elements that long assured the United States limitless supplies of low-cost oil from that region—logistics, exchange rates, and naval power—evaporate. At this point, the US can still cover only an insignificant 12% of its energy needs from its nascent alternative energy industry, and remains dependent on imported oil for half of its energy consumption.

The oil shock that follows hits the country like a hurricane, sending prices to startling heights, making travel a staggeringly expensive proposition, putting real wages (which had long been declining) into freefall, and rendering non-competitive whatever American exports remained. With thermostats dropping, gas prices climbing through the roof, and dollars flowing overseas in return for costly oil, the American economy is paralyzed. With long-fraying alliances at an end and fiscal pressures mounting, US military forces finally begin a staged withdrawal from their overseas bases.

Within a few years, or less, the US is functionally bankrupt and the clock is ticking toward midnight on the American Century.

advance-wars

Military Misadventure: Present Situation

Counterintuitively, as their power wanes, empires often plunge into ill-advised military misadventures.  This phenomenon is known among historians of empire as “micro-militarism” and seems to involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically. These operations, irrational even from an imperial point of view, often yield hemorrhaging expenditures or humiliating defeats that only accelerate the loss of power.

Embattled empires through the ages suffer an arrogance that drives them to plunge ever deeper into military misadventures until defeat becomes debacle. In 413 BCE, a weakened Athens sent 200 ships to be slaughtered in Sicily. In 1921, a dying imperial Spain dispatched 20,000 soldiers to be massacred by Berber guerrillas in Morocco. In 1956, a fading British Empire destroyed its prestige by attacking Suez. And in 2001 and 2003, the US occupied Afghanistan and invaded Iraq. With the hubris that marks empires over the millennia, Washington has increased its troops in Afghanistan to 100,000, expanded the war into Pakistan, and extended its commitment to 2014 and beyond, courting disasters large and small in this guerilla-infested, nuclear-armed graveyard of empires.

Military Misadventure: Scenario 2014

So irrational, so unpredictable is “micro-militarism” that seemingly fanciful scenarios are soon outdone by actual events. With the US military stretched thin from Somalia to the Philippines and tensions rising in Israel, Russia, Syria, Iran, and Korea, possible combinations for a disastrous military crisis abroad are multifold.

Angry at the endless, decades-long stalemate over Palestine, OPEC’s leaders impose a new oil embargo on the US to protest its backing of Israel as well as the killing of untold numbers innocent Muslim civilians in its ongoing wars across the Greater Middle East. With gas prices soaring and refineries running dry, Washington makes its move, sending in Special Operations forces to seize oil ports in the Persian Gulf.  This, in turn, sparks a rash of suicide attacks and the sabotage of pipelines and oil wells. As black clouds billow skyward and diplomats rise at the UN to bitterly denounce American actions, commentators worldwide reach back into history to brand this “America’s Suez,” a telling reference to the 1956 debacle that marked the end of the British Empire.

As a human race we are facing a devastating future war with weapons of mass destruction far beyond anything even slightly imagined in the past. Armies today have technologically advanced electronics, nuclear weapons, satellite imagery, and the capability to deliver huge amounts of explosives by missile very accurately far from the front lines. Most threatening are the poor man’s nuclear weapons, namely, highly advanced biological and chemical weapons. Small amounts of modern biological weapons could be used to wipe out entire populations without destroying the land or infrastructure. World War 3 will occur because of economic competition over these “Resource Wars:” Assume Epidemic Proportion. 

World War III: Present Situation

In the summer of 2010, military tensions between the US and China began to rise in the western Pacific, once considered an American “lake.”  Even a year earlier no one would have predicted such a development. As Washington played upon its alliance with London to appropriate much of Britain’s global power after World War II, so China is now using the profits from its export trade with the US to fund what is likely to become a military challenge to American dominion over the waterways of Asia and the Pacific.

With its growing resources, Beijing is claiming a vast maritime arc from Korea to Indonesia long dominated by the US Navy. When Washington expressed a “national interest” in the South China Sea and conducted naval exercises there to reinforce that claim, Beijing’s official Global Times responded angrily, saying, “The US-China wrestling match over the South China Sea issue has raised the stakes in deciding who the real future ruler of the planet will be.”

Amid growing tensions, the Pentagon reported that Beijing holds “the capability to attack… [US] aircraft carriers in the western Pacific Ocean” and target “nuclear forces throughout… the continental United States.” By developing “offensive nuclear, space, and cyberwarfare capabilities,” China seems determined to vie for dominance of what the Pentagon calls “the information spectrum in all dimensions of the modern battlespace.” With ongoing development of the powerful Long March V booster rocket, as well as the launch of two satellites in January 2010 and another in July, for a total of five, Beijing signaled that the country was making rapid strides toward an “independent” network of 35 satellites for global positioning, communications, and reconnaissance capabilities by 2020.

To check China and extend its military position globally, Washington built a digital network of air and space robotics, advanced cyberwarfare capabilities, and electronic surveillance.  Military planners expect this integrated system to envelop the Earth in a cyber-grid capable of blinding entire armies on the battlefield or taking out a single terrorist in field or favela. By 2020, the Pentagon will launch a three-tiered shield of space drones—reaching from stratosphere to exosphere, armed with agile missiles, linked by a resilient modular satellite system, and operated through total telescopic surveillance.

The Pentagon made history when it extended drone operations into the exosphere by quietly launching the X-37B unmanned space shuttle into a low orbit 255 miles above the planet.  The X-37B is the first in a new generation of unmanned vehicles that will mark the full weaponization of space, creating an arena for future warfare unlike anything that has gone before.

World War III: Scenario 2025

The technology of space and cyberwarfare is so new and untested that even the most outlandish scenarios may soon be superseded by a reality still hard to conceive. If we simply employ the sort of scenarios that the Air Force itself used in its 2009 Future Capabilities Game, however, we can gain “a better understanding of how air, space and cyberspace overlap in warfare,” and so begin to imagine how the next world war might actually be fought.

It’s 11:59 p.m. on Thanksgiving Thursday in 2025. While cyber-shoppers pound the portals of Best Buy for deep discounts on the latest home electronics from China, US Air Force technicians at the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) on Maui choke on their coffee as their panoramic screens suddenly blip to black. Thousands of miles away at the US CyberCommand’s operations center in Texas, cyberwarriors soon detect malicious binaries that, though fired anonymously, show the distinctive digital fingerprints of China’s People’s Liberation Army.

The first overt strike is one nobody predicted. Chinese “malware” seizes control of the robotics aboard an unmanned solar-powered US “Vulture” drone as it flies at 70,000 feet over the Tsushima Strait between Korea and Japan.  It suddenly fires all the rocket pods beneath its enormous 400-foot wingspan, sending dozens of lethal missiles plunging harmlessly into the Yellow Sea, effectively disarming this formidable weapon.

Determined to fight fire with fire, the White House authorizes a retaliatory strike.  Confident that its F-6 “Fractionated, Free-Flying” satellite system is impenetrable, Air Force commanders in California transmit robotic codes to the flotilla of X-37B space drones orbiting 250 miles above the Earth, ordering them to launch their “Triple Terminator” missiles at China’s 35 satellites. Zero response. In near panic, the Air Force launches its Falcon Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle into an arc 100 miles above the Pacific Ocean and then, just 20 minutes later, sends the computer codes to fire missiles at seven Chinese satellites in nearby orbits.  The launch codes are suddenly inoperative.

As the Chinese virus spreads uncontrollably through the F-6 satellite architecture, while those second-rate US supercomputers fail to crack the malware’s devilishly complex code, GPS signals crucial to the navigation of US ships and aircraft worldwide are compromised. Carrier fleets begin steaming in circles in the mid-Pacific. Fighter squadrons are grounded. Reaper drones fly aimlessly toward the horizon, crashing when their fuel is exhausted. Suddenly, the United States loses what the US Air Force has long called “the ultimate high ground”: space. Within hours, the military power that had dominated the globe for nearly a century has been defeated in World War III without a single human casualty.

A New World Order?

Even if future events prove duller than these four scenarios suggest, every significant trend points toward a far more striking decline in American global power by 2025 than anything Washington now seems to be envisioning.

As allies worldwide begin to realign their policies to take cognizance of rising Asian powers, the cost of maintaining 800 or more overseas military bases will simply become unsustainable, finally forcing a staged withdrawal on a still-unwilling Washington. With both the US and China in a race to weaponize space and cyberspace, tensions between the two powers are bound to rise, making military conflict by 2025 at least feasible, if hardly guaranteed.

Complicating matters even more, the economic, military, and technological trends outlined above will not operate in tidy isolation. As happened to European empires after World War II, such negative forces will undoubtedly prove synergistic.  They will combine in thoroughly unexpected ways, create crises for which Americans are remarkably unprepared, and threaten to spin the economy into a sudden downward spiral, consigning this country to a generation or more of economic misery.

As US power recedes, the past offers a spectrum of possibilities for a future world order.  At one end of this spectrum, the rise of a new global superpower, however unlikely, cannot be ruled out. Yet both China and Russia evince self-referential cultures, recondite non-roman scripts, regional defense strategies, and underdeveloped legal systems, denying them key instruments for global dominion. At the moment then, no single superpower seems to be on the horizon likely to succeed the US.

In a dark, dystopian version of our global future, a coalition of transnational corporations, multilateral forces like NATO, and an international financial elite could conceivably forge a single, possibly unstable, supra-national nexus that would make it no longer meaningful to speak of national empires at all.  While denationalized corporations and multinational elites would assumedly rule such a world from secure urban enclaves, the multitudes would be relegated to urban and rural wastelands.

In Planet of Slums, Mike Davis offers at least a partial vision of such a world from the bottom up.  He argues that the billion people already packed into fetid favela-style slums worldwide (rising to two billion by 2030) will make “the ‘feral, failed cities’ of the Third World… the distinctive battlespace of the twenty-first century.” As darkness settles over some future super-favela, “the empire can deploy Orwellian technologies of repression” as “hornet-like helicopter gun-ships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts… Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.

Another possibility: the rise of regional hegemons in a return to something reminiscent of the international system that operated before modern empires took shape. In this neo-Westphalian world order, with its endless vistas of micro-violence and unchecked exploitation, each hegemon would dominate its immediate region—Brasilia in South America, Washington in North America, Pretoria in southern Africa, and so on. Space, cyberspace, and the maritime deeps, removed from the control of the former planetary “policeman,” the United States, might even become a new global commons, controlled through an expanded UN Security Council or some ad hoc body. Where ever the money is.

All of these scenarios extrapolate existing trends into the future on the assumption that Americans, blinded by the arrogance of decades of historically unparalleled power, cannot or will not take steps to manage the unchecked erosion of their global position.

America’s decline is eminent, and we have already wasted away most of the first decade of that decline with wars that distracted us from long-term problems and, like water tossed onto desert sands, wasted trillions of desperately needed dollars.

If only only a few years remain, and since Congress and the president are now in gridlock; and the American system is flooded with corporate money meant to jam up the works; and there is little suggestion that any issues of significance, including our wars, our bloated national security state, our starved education system, and our antiquated energy supplies, will be addressed with sufficient seriousness to assure any sort of “soft landing.”

***

‘I can hear the good earth groaning
crushed beneath a billion souls
just seeking their century
salvation in wealth.

And so the modern world goes
as Gaia sighs and turns to stone
to wait upon a wiser age
when sages and keepers
will come once again.’

Resources:

China’s Great Uprooting: Moving 250 Million Into Cities

Video below| A Staggering Migration The Chinese government plans to move 250 million people from farms to cities over the next twelve to fifteen years.

http://video1.nytimes.com/video/2013/06/15/21662_1_chinese-urbanization_wg_16x9_l_3g_mob.mp4

This reeks of AGENDA 21!  the biggest public relation scam in the world…

Read more here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/asia/chinas-great-uprooting-moving-250-million-into-cities.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

You Can’t Stop Science

14 Friday Jun 2013

Posted by in Education, Science

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block1

There was a groundbreaking ruling at the U.S. Supreme Court today.
The justices ruled unanimously that biotech companies may not patent human genes. However, genes in the lab may be patented.

The Supreme Court issued a unanimous decision (rare these days) in the Myriad Genetics case. There are a lot of things this case is not about, and there are a lot of headlines that are going to mess things up. I would not be surprised to see “Myriad Wins” and “Myriad Loses” coming up at the same time in a news search.

Even if we’re talking about patent eligibility and not patentability per se, we still have a tough question here. Myriad says that the isolated DNA molecules that their patent is directed towards are not found in nature as such, that they have to be manipulated and isolated through human ingenuity, and that they (as opposed to native DNA) can be used in their diagnostic applications. They claim that the district court erred in focusing on the informational content of the molecules, and not the actual composition of matter itself. The plaintiffs argue that the isolated DNA molecules have to have a “distinctive name, character, and use”, as the law reads, and that they are not “markedly different” enough from the natural substance, especially since (as they hold) the entire point of them is the informational sequence they represent.

The Supreme Court Rules on Myriad

Myriad, and others, began offering genetic testing for these mutations in the mid-1990s. The company obtained several patents directed to the gene sequences and methods of assaying them, and informed other players in this field that they were in violation of Myriad intellectual property, specifically the University of Pennsylvania’s Genetic Diagnostic Laboratory (GDL). Their cease-and-desist letters did not apply to research uses, only to commercial testing for which money was charged. By 1999, the GDL had stopped testing, and Myriad was now the only company in the US carrying out this diagnostic assay.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the court’s decision, said that Myriad’s assertion – that the DNA it isolated from the body for its proprietary breast and ovarian cancer tests were patentable – had to be dismissed because it violates patent rules. The court has said that laws of nature, natural phenomena and abstract ideas are not patentable.

“We hold that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” Thomas said.

Patents are the legal protection that gives inventors the right to prevent others from making, using or selling a novel device, process or application. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has been awarding patents on human genes for almost 30 years, but opponents of Myriad Genetics Inc.’s patents on the two genes linked to increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer say such protection should not be given to something that can be found inside the human body.

The company has used its patent to come up with its BRACAnalysis test, which looks for mutations on the breast cancer predisposition gene, or BRCA. Those mutations are associated with much greater risks of breast and ovarian cancer. Women with a faulty gene have a three to seven times greater risk of developing breast cancer and also have a higher risk of ovarian cancer.

Myriad sells the only BRCA gene test. Opponents of its patents say the company can use the patents to keep other researchers from working with the BRCA gene to develop other tests.

“Today, the court struck down a major barrier to patient care and medical innovation,” said Sandra Park, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union Women’s Rights Project. “Myriad did not invent the BRCA genes and should not control them. Because of this ruling, patients will have greater access to genetic testing and scientists can engage in research on these genes without fear of being sued.”

Angelina Jolie revealed last month that her mother died of ovarian cancer and that her maternal grandmother also had the disease. She said she carries a defective BRCA1 gene that puts her at high risk of developing breast and ovarian cancers, and her doctor said that the test that turned up the faulty gene link led Jolie to have both of her healthy breasts removed to try to avoid the same fate. The timing of Joli’s announcement is uncanny, isn’t it? Publicity stunt?

Companies have billions of dollars of investment and years of research on the line in this case. Their advocates argue that without the ability to recoup their investment through the profits that patents bring, breakthrough scientific discoveries to combat all kinds of medical maladies wouldn’t happen.

But “genes and the information they encode area not patent eligible … simply because they have been isolated from the surrounding genetic material,” Thomas said.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia said “the portion of the DNA isolated from its natural state sought to be patented is identical to that portion of the DNA in its natural state.”

A Myriad spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The court did rule that synthetically created DNA, known as cDNA, can be patented “because it is not naturally occurring,” Thomas said.

And Thomas noted there are still ways for Myriad to make money off its discovery. “Had Myriad created an innovative method of manipulating genes while searching for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, it could possibly have sought a method patent,” he said. And he noted that the case before the court did not include patents on the application of knowledge about the two genes.

Here’s the actual decision (PDF), and here’s the key statement:

A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated, but cDNA is patent eligible because it is not naturally occurring.

The earlier appeals court decision was broader, and found that isolated stretches of otherwise natural DNA were, in fact, patent-eligible, because they are not found as such (unwound, de-histoned, cleaved at both ends) in nature. But this ruling dials that back a bit. A cDNA, stripped of introns, etc., is indeed a work of human ingenuity, and is patent-eligible ( it had been considered to be before this decision). Here’s more:

It is important to note what is not implicated by this decision. First, there are no method claims before this Court. Had Myriad created an innovative method of manipulating genes while searching for the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, it could possibly have sought a method patent. But the processes used by Myriad to isolate DNA were well understood by geneticists at the time of Myriad’s patents “were well understood, widely used, and fairly uniform insofar as any scientist engaged in the search for a gene would likely have utilized a similar approach,” 702 F. Supp. 2d, at 202–203, and are not at issue in this case. Similarly, this case does not involve patents on new applications of knowledge about the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Judge Bryson aptly noted that, “[a]s the first party with knowledge of the [BRCA1 and BRCA2] sequences, Myriad was in an excellent position to claim applications of that knowledge. Many of its unchallenged claims are limited to such applications.” 689 F. 3d, at 1349. Nor do we consider the patentability of DNA in which the order of the naturally occurring nucleotides has been altered. Scientific alteration of the genetic code presents a different inquiry, and we express no opinion about the application of §101 to such endeavors. We merely hold that genes and the information they encode are not patent eligible under §101 simply because they have been isolated from the surrounding genetic material.

The appeals court comes down in favor of Myriad here. A key part of their argument rests on the decision in the Chakrabarty case involving the patenting of genetically engineered bacteria, so if you didn’t like that one, you’re not going to like this. The court finds that isolated DNA molecules – unwound from their histones, cleaved at both ends, truncated – are “marked different” enough to be eligible for patents:

. . .Accordingly, BRCA1 and BRCA2 in their isolated states are different molecules from DNA that exists in the body; isolated DNA results from human intervention to cleave or synthesize a discrete portion of a native chromosomal DNA, imparting on that isolated DNA a distinctive chemical identity as compared to native DNA. As the above description indicates, isolated DNA is not just purified DNA. Purification makes pure what was the same material, but was combined, or contaminated, with other materials. Although isolated DNA is removed from its native cellular and chromosomal environment, it has also been manipulated chemically so as to produce a molecule that is markedly different from that which exists in the body. . .

They go on to say that “an isolated DNA molecule is not a purified form of a natural material, but a distinct chemical entity that is obtained by human intervention”. As you might imagine, cDNAs are found under this reasoning to be especially far from nature, and these are already held to be patentable. As to the “informational content” argument that carried the day in the lower court, the appeals court has this to say:

. . .We disagree, as it is the distinctive nature of DNA molecules as isolated compositions of matter that determines their patent eligibility rather than their physiological use or benefit. Uses of chemical substances may be relevant to the nonobviousness of these substances or to method claims embodying those uses, but the patent eligibility of an isolated DNA is not negated because it has similar informational properties to a different, more complex natural material. The claimed isolated DNA molecules are distinct from their natural existence as portions of larger entities, and their informational content is irrelevant to that fact. We recognize that biologists may think of molecules in terms of their uses, but genes are in fact materials having a chemical nature and, as such, are best described in patents by their structures rather than by their functions. . .

In other words, this ruling affirms that molecular biology is, in fact, chemistry, if you want to look at it that way. The court goes on to say that if we as a society want to put DNA in a separate category for terms of patent law (because of its unique informational content, etc.), then Congress should get to work on revising the US Code. It’s not a matter for the courts to write that in by themselves. The opinion also rejects arguments (made in the dissenting opinion) that make analogies to snipped a leaf off a tree or removing an organ from a human body. These, they say, are not specific, defined substances, but an isolated DNA molecule most certainly is.

Unfortunately, many of the news blurbs on this issue are smudging these questions around. I don’t actually expect this ruling to have much effect, to be honest, except as a way to help resolve the question of whether stretches of raw DNA are patentable. The glory days of trying to patent such things are long gone, in any case. And since there are many more useful forms which are patentable, any headlines about “No patents for DNA!” are misleading.

Industry insiders find reason for optimism and angst in SCOTUS Myriad ruling

No matter how much folks may differ on the implications of the Myriad case, many agreed that the U.S. Supreme Court’s unanimous (9-0) ruling means no company can patent human genes isolated from the bloodstream. They also agree that the decision reaffirmed Myriad Genetics’ (NASDAQ: MYGN) right to patent a genetic test, but it also paves the way for competition in this and other aspects of personalized medicine, an area of biotechnology still learning to find its feet. But the bigger question the ruling raises is what the longterm implications will be for companies that develop products like vaccines that may be affected by the precedent set today.

Even Myriad’s stock performance was mixed. Initially it soared from $33.92 to a high of $38.27 falling back down to $32. So here are a variety of opinions from an analyst to scientists to legal minds.

Charlie Miller, equity analyst with Morningstar

In an emailed comment Miller said: “There will be significant pricing pressure on BRAC Analysis in the future but not necessarily correlated with today’s ruling ’ more just as a function of technological advancements in the field (next-gen sequencing in particular).”

In his analyst note he said: “With fierce competition on the horizon and a possible paradigm shift in routine clinical practice, we remain cautious about Myriad’s ability to keep ahead of the field and withstand severe margin and pricing pressure. Simultaneously, we think it is too early to tell whether the company’s portfolio of emerging tests ’ including its new myRisk Hereditary Cancer Panel, designed to address this market evolution to multi-gene analysis – will effectively diversify its revenue base. If Myriad is unable to adapt, we believe forthcoming technologies may ultimately render its products obsolete.

Daniel MacArthur heads the MacArthur Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute to extract information from human DNA sequence data.

“These findings, while mixed, are generally good news for the future of genomic medicine. Myriad Genetics will continue to operate effectively in the breast cancer testing market, but this ruling opens the way for competitors to move into this important area of testing, which should bring prices down for women seeking BRCA testing. Most importantly, the court’s finding means there will be less uncertainty about the regulatory barriers to disease testing based on whole genome sequencing.”

Dr. Hakon Hakonarson, director of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia’s Center for Applied Genomics

“These patents [on the BRCA genes] were outrageous and I think the landscape will change drastically… A lot of institutions could not afford to do research because of the patent contingency.

Mary Anthony Merchant, partner and patent attorney in life sciences at Ballard Spahr

“For a long time there have been questions about who owns what [in the body.] Just look at the debate over Henrietta Lacks. I think this is along the lines of questions being asked now that we would not give ownership to something that belongs to everybody… What’s the point of having a patent on a gene? You can control who does what research.” She added that it raises questions about how broadly the ruling will be applied to biotechnology inventions that come from plants and bacteria. Merchant mused that in light of the the government initiative to map the human brain, it will be interesting to see what potential patent debates arise from whatever findings the scientists on the project make.

Matthew Kreeger of Morrison & Foerster

“There are not many inventions like Myriad’s [diagnostic] so the immediate impact of the ruling will be small. But the decision sets a precedent that could be applied to many other areas like vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics. The question is how much? So many companies use reagents that isolated from nature. For If the example, a lot of vaccines contain a portion of bacteria – the original virus… After the dust settles, the decision may have an impact on commercialization down the road. ”

***

Lists of United States Supreme Court cases

Human Gene Patents and Genetic Testing in Europe: A Reappraisal

Patents – Medical and Molecular Biology Databases

Obama’s War on “Terror”

12 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in 9/11, BIG Brother, Corruption, GITMO, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Police State, Surveillance State

≈ 2 Comments

In 2005, President Obama, then a U.S. Senator, spoke about wiretapping.

President Obama‘s response to the troubling news of “indiscriminate government collection of communication information was meant to be “reassuring:” The NSA is operating under supervision by all three branches of government, he assured us.”

***

“The Fourth Amendment only applies when you take the book off the shelf.”

In this video below, Obama supporter, Lawrence O’Donnell explains his support for the Socialist Agenda.

“I’m going to repeat until this changes. I feel tonight completely unthreatened by anything the NSA has been reported been doing so far and I’m sitting here waiting to be seeing this is a system doing something scary to me at the NSA is doing that isn’t the equivalent of Google and all the other phone companies were not already doing.

Every phone call that ever made my life left in record in the company somewhere it always has and it always will. And so far I am not scared by what the NSA is up to.”

***

The most constructive response to these recent revelations that I can think of is my usual: Make our voices heard. Inform others and be informed. Get involved. Run for office, or make sure the right people do, from the bottom up. We need to fix a broken system, but we can’t do that if we’re all running in different directions screaming our heads off.

A.C.L.U. Sues Obama Administration Over Collection of Phone Logs

WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union sued the Obama administration on Tuesday over its “dragnet” collection of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program — whose existence was exposed last week by a former National Security Agency contractor — is illegal and asking a judge to stop it and order the records purged.

Ron Paul: US government may try to kill NSA whistle-blower http://fxn.ws/13A7xFv

The lawsuit could set up an eventual Supreme Court test. It could also focus attention on this disclosure amid the larger heap of top secret surveillance matters revealed by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who came forward Sunday to say he was their source.

The program “gives the government a comprehensive record of our associations and public movements, revealing a wealth of detail about our familial, political, professional, religious and intimate associations,” the complaint says, adding that it “is likely to have a chilling effect on whistle-blowers and others who would otherwise contact” the A.C.L.U. for legal assistance.

The Justice Department declined to comment on the suit. No surprise there.

In other lawsuits against national security policies, the government has often persuaded courts to dismiss them without ruling on the merits by arguing that litigation would reveal state secrets or that the plaintiffs could not prove they were personally affected and so lacked standing in court.

This case may be different. The government has now declassified the existence of the program. And the A.C.L.U. is a customer of Verizon Business Network Services — the recipient of a leaked secret court order for all its domestic calling records — which it says gives it standing.

The call logging program keeps a record of “Metadata” from domestic phone calls, including which numbers were dialed and received, from which location, and the time and duration.

The effort began as part of the Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11 programs of surveillance without court approval, which has continued since 2006 with the blessing of a national security court. The court has secretly ruled that bulk surveillance is authorized by a section of the Patriot Act that allows the F.B.I. to obtain “business records” relevant to a counterterrorism investigation.

Congress “never openly voted” to authorize the collection of logs of hundreds of millions of domestic calls, but some lawmakers were secretly briefed. Some members of Congress have backed the program as a “useful counterterrorism tool;” others have denounced it. But none of their claims have actually been proven.

“The administration claims authority to sift through details of our private lives because the Patriot Act says that it can,” Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Republican of Wisconsin, wrote in a letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. “I disagree. I authored the Patriot Act, and this is an abuse of that law.”

Over the weekend, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said that officials may access the database only if they can meet a legal justification — “reasonable suspicion, based on specific facts, that the particular basis for the query is associated with a foreign terrorist organization.” Queries are audited under the oversight of the national security court.

Timothy Edgar, a former civil liberties official on intelligence matters in the Bush and Obama administrations who worked on building safeguards into the phone log program, said the notion underlying the limits was that people’s privacy is not invaded by having their records collected, but only when a human examines them.

“When you have important reasons why that collection needs to take place on a scale that is much larger than case-by-case or individual obtaining of records,” he said, “then one of the ways you try to deal with the privacy issue is you think carefully about having a set of safeguards that basically say, ‘O.K., yes, this has major privacy implications, but what can we do on the back end to address those?’ ”

Still, privacy advocates say the existence of the database will erode the sense of living in a free society: whenever Americans pick up a phone, they now face the consideration of whether they want the record of that call to go into the government’s files.

Moreover, while use of the database is now limited to terrorism, history has shown that new government powers granted for one purpose often end up applied to others. An expanded search warrant authority justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, for example, was used far more often in routine investigations like suspected drug, fraud and tax offenses.

Executive branch officials and lawmakers who support the program have “hinted that some terrorist plots have been foiled” by using the database. In private conversations, they have also explained that investigators start with a phone number linked to “terrorism,” and scrutinize the ring of people who have called that number — and other people who in turn called those — in an effort to identify “co-conspirators.”

Still, that analysis may generally be performed without a wholesale sweep of call records, since investigators can instead use subpoenas to obtain relevant logs from telephone companies. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, two Democrats who have examined it in classified Senate Intelligence Committee hearings, have claimed that the evidence is thin that the program provided uniquely available intelligence.

It remains unclear, however, whether there have been any “real-world” instances in which a terrorist was identified through NSA surveillance foiling any terror plots.


If the US government is right, and Cubic  is selling Trapwire to law enforcement, the company has its hands on passenger data for the over 8 million daily MTA riders, suspicious activity reports from New York City, and access to the TrapWire surveillance network.

A 1979 ruling over small-scale collection of calling metadata held that such records were not protected by the Fourth Amendment and Right to Privacy since people have revealed such information to phone companies. In a 2012 case involving GPS trackers, however, the Supreme Court suggested that the long-term, automated collection of people’s public movements violates our Fourth Amendment issues.

The secret court that apparently authorized this program operates nothing like the judicial branch… Its decisions are made in secret and not generally subject to appellate review. And there is no role built into the system for someone to counter the government’s arguments.

President Obama on Wiretapping in 2005Video
President Obama on Wiretapping in 2005
Why Surveillance Draws Little Outcry
Comparing Two Secret Surveillance Programs

Related

NSA Secret PRISM Program | lisaleaks

The Unforgivable Assault | lisaleaks

  • N.S.A. Disclosures Put Awkward Light on Previous Denials (June 12, 2013)

  • US government may try to kill NSA whistle-blower

  • “I’m worried about somebody in our government might kill him with a cruise missile or a drone missile,” Paul said. “I mean we live in a bad time where American citizens don’t even have rights and that they can be killed, but the gentlemen is trying to tell the truth about what’s going on.”
    “He’s not defecting, there are no signs of that happening,” he said. “It’s a shame that we are in an age where people who tell the truth about what the government is doing gets into trouble…No, I don’t think for a minute that he’s a traitor.” Ron Paul

Related in Opinion

  • Op-Ed The Price of the Panopticon (June 12, 2013)

  • ACLU Files Lawsuit Seeking to Stop the Collection of Domestic Phone Logs

  • How Edward J. Snowden Orchestrated a Blockbuster Story

  • Here’s the letter to Attny Eric Holder

  • F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, JR.

    DISTRICT, WISCONSIN

    COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

    SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIME. TERRORISM, AND

    HOMELAND SECURITY CHAIRMAN

    COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, SPACE. AND TECHNOLOGY

     20515- 4905

    The Honorable Eric H. Holder

    Attorney General U.S.Department of Justice

    Dear Attorney General Holder:

    June 6, 2013

    As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely disturbed by what appears to be an overbroad interpretation of the Act. The Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) applied for a top secret court order to collect the phone records of virtually every call that has been made by millions of Verizon customers. These reports are deeply concerning and raise questions about whether our constitutional rights are secure.

    The Patriot Act was a careful balancing of national security interests and constitutional rights. While I believe we found an appropriate balance, I have always worried about potential abuses of the Act.

    The FBI‘s broad application for phone records was made under section 2l5- the so called business records provision- of the Act. To obtain a business records order from the court, the Patriot Act requires the government to show that:it is seeking the information in certain authorized national security investigations conducted pursuant to guidelines approved by the Attorney General; lf the investigative target is a U.S. person, the investigation is not based solely on activities protected by the First Amendment;2 and (3) the information sought is relevant to the authorized investigation] In addition, the Patriot Act requires the government to adhere to minimization procedures that limit the retention and dissemination of the information that is obtained concerning U.S. persons.

    I insisted upon unsetting this provision in order to ensure Congress had an opportunity to reassess the impact the provision had on civil liberties. I also closely monitored and relied on testimony from the Administration about how the Act was being interpreted to ensure that abuseshad not occurred. On March 9, 2011, Acting Assistant Attorney General Todd Hinnen told theJudiciary Committee:

    Section 215 has been used to obtain driver’s license records, hotel records, car rental records, apartment leasing records, credit card records, and the like. It has never been used against a library to obtain circulation records … On average, we seek and obtain section 215 orders less than 40 times per year.

     The Department’s testimony left the Committee with the impression that the Administration was using the business records provision sparingly and for specific materials.

    The recently released FISA order, however, could not have been drafted more broadly.

    I do not believe the released FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot

    Act. How could the phone records of so many innocent Americans be relevant to an authorized investigation as required by the Act? Please respond to the following questions by June 12, 2013:

    I. Do you believe that the recently released FISA order is consistent with the requirements of the Patriot Act?

    2. Why was the order so broad?

    3. Is the released FISA order consistent with the FBI’s interpretation of section 215 of the Patriot Act?

    4. Does the FBI believe there are limits on what information it can obtain under section 215? If so, what are those limits?

    Section 215 is an urgent tool and crucial to intelligence agencies, but if such abuses are not reined in, it will be very difficult to reauthorize these provisions when they sunset in 2015.

    Thank you for your prompt and personal response to this serious matter.

    F James SensenbrelU1 Member of Congress

    -Statement of Todd Hinnen, Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security, House Judiciary

    Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Crime Homeland Security (March 9, 2011).

The Unforgivable Assault

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in 9/11, BIG Brother, Conspiracy, Corruption, Department of Homeland Security, GITMO, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Obama

≈ 4 Comments

Checks, Balances, and the National Security Agency

Congress once respected the Fourth Amendment until it began cutting holes in it. Before Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act FISA) in 1977, Americans and even non-citizens physically present here enjoyed the right to privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. That Amendment, which was written out of a revulsion to warrants that let British soldiers look for any tangible thing anywhere they chose, specifically requires that the government demonstrate to a judge and the judge specifically find the existence of probable cause of criminal activity on the part of the person whose property the government wishes to search. The Fourth Amendment is suppose to command that only a judge can authorize a search warrant.

FISA unconstitutionally changed the probable cause of criminality requirement to probable cause of employment by a foreign government, hostile or friendly. Under FISA, if the government can demonstrate the foreign agency or employment status of the person whose things it wishes to search, the secret FISA court will issue the search warrant.

Over the course of three days, the usually invisible National Security Agency has become ostentatiously visible and many Americans do not like what they see. In an effort to address the widely shared feeling that our vaunted system of checks and balances has utterly failed us, President Obama blatantly lied when he reassured the public Friday that the now-exposed spy programs were sanctioned by “all three branches of government.” Is that true?

Yes and no.

There’s no question, of course, that the executive branch backed the programs. In fact, both President George W. Bush and President Obama enthusiastically embraced the surveillance authorities that were used to justify them. Bush lobbied Congress to enact the USA Patriot Act Section 215 in 2001 and the FISA Amendments Act in 2008. Barack Obama urged Congress to reauthorize both of these statutes.

Congress did enact these statutes and then reauthorize them, so it certainly deserves a great deal of the blame for the massive privacy intrusions that were disclosed this past week. But, as we were reminded when several members of Congress came forward to say that they had been unaware that the NSA was using the Patriot Act to collect phone data from millions of Americans, it can be very difficult for Congress to conduct oversight of top secret, highly compartmentalized intelligence programs. In fact, it seems certain that many members of Congress voted to reauthorize the without even knowing what they were authorizing.

What about the courts?

It’s true that a specialized intelligence court issued the orders approving the NSA’s seizure of Americans’ phone records—but the FISA court is no ordinary court. It meets in secret, allows only the government to appear before it, and rarely publishes its decisions. When the American Civil Liberties Union attempted to challenge the NSA’s surveillance authority in ordinary federal court, the government succeeded in having the case dismissed on the grounds that we couldn’t prove that our plaintiffs had been subjected to surveillance—because, of course, that surveillance is top secret.

So at best, judicial review has amounted to a secret court upholding a secret program by secretly re-interpreting a federal law. That’s hardly the kind of firm endorsement by “all three branches” that the president’s comments suggested.

And if we’re asking whether our system of checks and balances is actually working, we should ask not only about oversight conducted by Congress and the judiciary but also about oversight conducted by the public. Does anyone seriously suggest that the public would ever “evaluate the wisdom, necessity, or legality of the programs that were disclosed this past week?”

In his comments Friday, Obama said that he “welcomes” a debate about the proper limits on government surveillance. We welcome that debate, too. But why are we having this debate only now? Why was all of this secret for so long?

The surveillance information revealed this week did not disclose any operational details that would aid our enemies—there was no conceivable justification for keeping the American people in the dark until now. We should have had this debate before Congress authorized these sweeping powers, and certainly before the executive branch implausibly interpreted them to permit dragnet surveillance of Americans’ communications.

It is probably safe to assume that the NSA is engaged in other surveillance that has implications for Americans’ constitutional rights. The ACLU is currently fighting a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to learn more about the government’s interpretation of Section 215 , but so far the Obama administration has refused to say anything about what kinds of spying it believes the provision permits. If Obama genuinely welcomes a debate over surveillance authorities, will his administration declassify enough information to permit an informed public debate, or will we have to wait for the next leak?

This past week’s disclosures show that we need stricter limits on government surveillance, and stronger oversight mechanisms to ensure that those limits are honored. The suggestion that our system of checks and balances is working is wrong.

***

This particular “story” doesn’t even make sense. For me, this Edward Snowden, “NSA Whistleblower” seems a little to calm, polished, “safe.”

***

This Is What Section 215 of the Patriot Act Does

__

Section 215 of the Patriot Act – FOIA | American Civil Liberties Union

Prism

United Surveillance States | lisaleaks


NSA Secret PRISM Program | lisaleaks

Attention All Whistleblowers | lisaleaks

National Defense Authoriation Act (NDAA) | lisaleaks

Patriot Act Vs The Fourth Amendment: Shredding The Constitution 

Expose The Corruption!

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in 9/11, Conspiracy, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Police State, Socialism

≈ Leave a Comment

Privacy Matters!

Thanks to a brave whistleblower, we now have further evidence that the US government is spying on its own citizens, en masse and without warrants. Many people are justifiably outraged, but there are still people among us who say they don’t mind if the government knows everything about them. We all probably know at least one person who has asked, “If I’m not doing anything wrong, why should I care?”

I am going to base my argument on a more philosophical level on what this does to us as a society. I probably wont change your view, but I will give you another perspective on the matter.

The whole thing is unsettling, the government knowing everything about you from what you watch on T.V. to what you purchase online, to what porn gets you off and everything in between. Even your personal emails.. Don’t you find that a bit jarring? It all reeks of 1984, when you have the government monitoring your every move.

There is a duality in the whole thing: on one end, society can feel a little safer believing that the government, through this kind of surveillance, can “stop a bombing PSYOP” and save hundreds of people. On the other end of the spectrum; This type of surveillance can also EASILY be used to control society.

Thinking in hypotheticals; What if the government decided to implement a curfew? No one outside past 10 pm unless they have legal documentation stating they are allowed to do so. The people don’t like this, they want to protest or form some sort of activist group against this curfew. How are you going to organize that? Through digital devices, which the government monitors, and next thing you know, your activist group is all thrown in jail for conspiring against the government.

When you think about the bigger picture of it all, and what this type of authority could eventually become it kind of makes it seem more disturbing.

The following text comes from a Reddit conversation about the NSA’s PRISM revelations. Written by user 161719, it is a response to a ‘Change My View ‘ post reading: “I believe the government should be able to view my e-mails, tap my phone calls, and view my web history for national security concerns.”

What follows should be required reading for anyone who says they are willing to give up their privacy in exchange for promises of security. You can find this comment and the longer thread here.

I live in a country generally assumed to be a dictatorship. One of the Arab spring countries. I have lived through curfews and have seen the outcomes of the sort of surveillance now being revealed in the US. People here talking about curfews aren’t realizing what that actually FEELS like. It isn’t about having to go inside, and the practicality of that. It’s about creating the feeling that everyone, everything is watching.

A few points:

1) the purpose of this surveillance from the governments point of view is to control enemies of the state. Not terrorists. People who are coalescing around ideas that would destabilize the status quo. These could be religious ideas. These could be groups like anon who are too good with tech for the governments liking. It makes it very easy to know who these people are. It also makes it very simple to control these people.

 Lets say you are a college student and you get in with some people who want to stop farming practices that hurt animals. So you make a plan and go to protest these practices. You get there, and wow, the protest is huge. You never expected this, you were just goofing off. Well now everyone who was there is suspect. Even though you technically had the right to protest, you’re now considered a dangerous person.

With this tech in place, the government doesn’t have to put you in jail. They can do something more sinister. They can just email you a sexy picture you took with a girlfriend. Or they can email you a note saying that they can prove your dad is cheating on his taxes. Or they can threaten to get your dad fired. All you have to do, the email says, is help them catch your friends in the group. You have to report back every week, or you dad might lose his job. So you do. You turn in your friends and even though they try to keep meetings off grid, you’re reporting on them to protect your dad.

2) Let’s say number one goes on. The country is a weird place now. Really weird. Pretty soon, a movement springs up like occupy, except its bigger this time. People are really serious, and they are saying they want a government without this power. I guess people are realizing that it is a serious deal. You see on the news that tear gas was fired. Your friend calls you, frantic. They’re shooting people. Oh my god. you never signed up for this. You say, fuck it. My dad might lose his job but I won’t be responsible for anyone dying. That’s going too far. You refuse to report anymore. You just stop going to meetings. You stay at home, and try not to watch the news. Three days later, police come to your door and arrest you. They confiscate your computer and phones, and they beat you up a bit. No one can help you so they all just sit quietly. They know if they say anything they’re next. This happened in the country I live in. It is not a joke.

3) Its hard to say how long you were in there. What you saw was horrible. Most of the time, you only heard screams. People begging to be killed. Noises you’ve never heard before. You, you were lucky. You got kicked every day when they threw your moldy food at you, but no one shocked you.

No one used sexual violence on you, at least that you remember. There were some times they gave you pills, and you can’t say for sure what happened then. To be honest, sometimes the pills were the best part of your day, because at least then you didn’t feel anything. You have scars on you from the way you were treated. You learn in prison that torture is now common. But everyone who uploads videos or pictures of this torture is labeled a leaker.

 It’s considered a threat to national security. Pretty soon, a cut you got on your leg is looking really bad. You think it’s infected. There were no doctors in prison, and it was so overcrowded, who knows what got in the cut. You go to the doctor, but he refuses to see you. He knows if he does the government can see the records that he treated you. Even you calling his office prompts a visit from the local police.

 You decide to go home and see your parents. Maybe they can help. This leg is getting really bad. You get to their house. They aren’t home. You can’t reach them no matter how hard you try. A neighbor pulls you aside, and he quickly tells you they were arrested three weeks ago and haven’t been seen since. You vaguely remember mentioning to them on the phone you were going to that protest. Even your little brother isn’t there.

4) Is this even really happening? You look at the news. Sports scores. Celebrity news. It’s like nothing is wrong. What the hell is going on? A stranger smirks at you reading the paper. You lose it. You shout at him “fuck you dude what are you laughing at can’t you see I’ve got a fucking wound on my leg?”

“Sorry,” he says. “I just didn’t know anyone read the news anymore.” There haven’t been any real journalists for months. They’re all in jail.

Everyone walking around is scared. They can’t talk to anyone else because they don’t know who is reporting for the government. Hell, at one time YOU were reporting for the government. Maybe they just want their kid to get through school. Maybe they want to keep their job. Maybe they’re sick and want to be able to visit the doctor. It’s always a simple reason. Good people always do bad things for simple reasons.

 You want to protest. You want your family back. You need help for your leg. This is way beyond anything you ever wanted. It started because you just wanted to see fair treatment in farms. Now you’re basically considered a terrorist, and everyone around you might be reporting on you. You definitely can’t use a phone or email. You can’t get a job. You can’t even trust people face to face anymore. On every corner, there are people with guns. They are as scared as you are. They just don’t want to lose their jobs. They don’t want to be labeled as traitors.

This all happened in the country where I live.
You want to know why revolutions happen? Because little by little by little things get worse and worse. But this thing that is happening now is big. This is the key ingredient. This allows them to know everything they need to know to accomplish the above. The fact that they are doing it is proof that they are the sort of people who might use it in the way I described. In the country I live in, they also claimed it was for the safety of the people. Same in Soviet Russia. Same in East Germany. In fact, that is always the excuse that is used to surveil everyone. But it has never ONCE proven to be the reality.
Maybe this story isn’t about you. Maybe it happens 10 or 20 years from now, when a big war is happening, or after another big attack. Maybe it’s about your daughter or your son. We just don’t know yet. But what we do know is that right now, in this moment we have a choice. Are we okay with this, or not? Do we want this power to exist, or not?
Ask yourself a question. In the story I told above, does anyone sound safe?
I didn’t make anything up. These things happened to people I know. We used to think it couldn’t happen in America. But guess what? It’s starting to happen.

You know for me, the reason I’m upset is that I grew up in school saying the pledge of allegiance. I was taught that the United States meant “liberty and justice for all.” You get older, you learn that in this country we define that phrase based on the constitution. That’s what tells us what liberty is and what justice is. Well, the government just violated that ideal. So if they aren’t standing for liberty and justice anymore, what are they standing for? Safety?

I actually get really upset when people say “I don’t have anything to hide. Let them read everything.” People saying that have no idea what they are bringing down on their own heads. They are naive, and we need to listen to people in other countries who are clearly telling us that this is a horrible horrible sign and it is time to stand up and say no!

Supreme Court clears the way for warrantless DNA swabs after arrest

Last Monday, the Supreme Court announced its decision in Maryland v King, holding that “DNA identification of arrestees is a reasonable search that can be considered part of a routine booking procedure.” In 2009, Alonzo King was arrested for assault, and was subjected to a cheek swab for a DNA sample pursuant to a Maryland statute. The results matched a DNA sample of the perpetrator of an unsolved 2003 rape. King was convicted of the rape and appealed his conviction, on grounds that the statute allowing DNA swabbing at the time of arrest violated the Fourth Amendment.

The Court rested its decision on the idea that DNA testing of arrestees could be used to help “identify” them, comparing DNA to mug shots or fingerprints. The Court reasoned that DNA provided “identification”, which served the government interest of avoiding undue risks to the safety of law enforcement officers and other detainees. Forcing a “special need” was necessary because the Fourth Amendment prohibits searching for evidence of a crime without individualized suspicion, unless there is a justifying motive apart from the investigation of crime. (Searches of arrestees incident to arrest are conducted to recover weapons and evidence of the crime for which the individual is under arrest, which involve safety or are supported by suspicion, respectively.) The DNA sample did not identify King in this case.

In fact, the statute at issue prohibited entering arrestee DNA samples into the state database until after arraignment, and the sample was not submitted for testing until three months after King’s arrest, countering the Court’s imagined identification and safety purposes to justify the statute.

The Court’s true intention of solving open cases is obvious from the first paragraph of the decision, where Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, set the scene with the facts of the unsolved rape rather than the circumstances that gave rise to the DNA swabbing. This framed the discussion around bringing King to justice for his past violent crime, rather than analyzing the constitutionality of the Fourth Amendment search. Justice Scalia, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, wrote a scathing dissent criticizing the majority’s lack of candor and at times outright misrepresentation of the procedures and uses of DNA.

The Court’s rationale goes beyond manufacturing purposes for the statute; the opinion openly misrepresents how the DNA samples are used. As Justice Scalia points out, the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) compares new samples from arrestees and convicts against evidence from unsolved crimes, not against other arrestees and convicts. This identifies not the individual who submitted the sample, but the identity of the individual whose DNA is evidence in an unsolved crime, through its connection to the arrestee – whose identity is already known.

As Justice Scalia noted, “If identifying someone means finding out what unsolved crimes he has committed, then identification is indistinguishable from the ordinary law-enforcement aims that have never been thought to justify a suspicionless search.”

Even more disturbing is the Court’s appeal to the due process-minded with the false reassurance that this “may have the salutary effect of freeing a person wrongfully imprisoned.” Justice Scalia corrects this misstatement, clarifying that “this procedure has nothing to do with exonerating the wrongfully convicted, as the Court soothingly promises… The FBI CODIS database includes DNA from unsolved crimes. I know of no indication (and the Court cites none) that it also includes DNA from all – or even any – crimes whose perpetrators have been convicted.”

Is the Court not aware of the basic machinations of cataloguing evidence? Having been disabused of this misconception, would the Court propose law enforcement test evidence from convictions obtained before DNA testing was possible? The mission of the Innocence Project is to file motions to request just this type of testing on a case-by-case basis – because the government is reluctant to burden itself with reconsidering closed cases, even though over 300 people have been exonerated by DNA testing.

The Court maintains that there will be limitations on what information is added to the database and how it may be used, but these promises contradict the Court’s rationale. For instance, the Court claims that the only sections of DNA samples to be stored will be the “noncoding” portions containing identifying information, as opposed to “coding” sections containing comprehensive genetic information. The Court fails to offer an explanation for how this will happen or can be confirmed. The Court also declares that familial searches will be prohibited.

But if the goal is to “identify” those in custody, then there is little to preclude law enforcement from using the same public policy arguments to conduct genetic profile and familial relation searches. And if the goal is to solve more open crimes, Justice Scalia notes that requiring DNA from airplane passengers, driver’s license applicants, or public school students would also be effective.

The Court seems inclined to expand the categories of individuals to subject to DNA collection, reminding us that “[i]t is a common occurrence that ‘[p]eople detained for minor offenses can turn out to be the most devious and dangerous criminals’”, and offering anecdotes that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, serial killer Joel Rifkin, and one of the September 11th terrorists were all stopped for minor traffic offenses.

As Scalia warns: “Make no mistake about it: As an entirely predictable consequence of today’s decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason.”

The critical question in this case is whether the diminished interest in privacy making it reasonable to require a DNA sample should be extended from convicts to those merely arrested, in order to consider them as suspects in every unsolved crime in which there is DNA evidence. This constitutes an enduring assault on the presumption of innocence, subjecting individuals to suspicionless searches any time law enforcement searches the database.

If DNA swabs occur for the Court’s stated identification and safety purposes, the samples should be obtained and processed as soon as an arrestee is booked into custody, without the benefit of review of the arrest by a neutral magistrate. If law enforcement waits for a determination of the validity of the arrest, the “special needs” cannot be credibly said to exist. Justice Scalia highlights the danger of this holding:

…the ironic result of the Court’s error is this: The only arrestees to whom the outcome here will ever make a difference are those who have been acquitted of the crime of arrest (so that their DNA could not have been taken upon conviction). In other words, this Act manages to burden uniquely the sole group for whom the Fourth Amendment’s protections ought to be most jealously guarded: people who are innocent of the State’s accusations.

From the tenor of the Court’s decision, one would think that there is an epidemic of unsolved crimes and empty prisons. This culture of fear is reinforced by crime dramas such as “CSI” and “Law & Order.” Unfortunately, the underfunding of indigent defense and improving communication between agencies do not make for entertaining television. Law enforcement’s obsession with collecting more personal information about citizens while ignoring other means to improve the administration of justice reveals the political goal of obtaining more convictions over ensuring accuracy of prosecution.

Justice Scalia’s dissent seeks to refocus our priorities: ”Solving unsolved crimes is a noble objective, but it occupies a lower place in the American Pantheon of noble objectives than the protection of our people from suspicionless law-enforcement searches. The Fourth Amendment must prevail.”

Excellent news: Massachusetts’ highest court upholds probable cause, judicial oversight standard for extended GPS tracking

It’s been quite a week, what with the Guardian newspaper’s Glenn Greenwald publishing a leaked NSA surveillance order to Verizon, and then last night’s revelations about how the military has directly tapped in to the servers of major internet companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook. What began as a major controversy about phone and internet records has exploded into the biggest surveillance story of a decade, littered with scores of privacy-bombshells.

Particularly in light of these disclosures, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Commonwealth v. Rousseau decision, released this week, deserves wide discussion.

Quite simply, Rousseau cuts to the heart of the question raised by the NSA surveillance scandal: does the government need to have any individualized suspicion to extensively spy on us, or have we done away with that most basic tenet of our constitutional protections against unreasonable government searches?

Thankfully, the court answered the right way.

In short, the state’s highest court ruled that the government must have probable cause and provide judicial oversight before tracking us for extended periods of time using GPS devices. If it were up to the Massachusetts SJC, the NSA would be barred from doing lots of what we have just confirmed it has been doing for years.

Rousseau stems from the 2007 convictions of two Massachusetts men, John Rousseau and Michael Dreslinski, on counts of arson and other crimes. State police officers had used information gleaned from a GPS tracking device placed on Dreslinski’s car as evidence that helped convict both men.

Both men appealed the convictions, arguing, the court writes, “that the warrant which authorized the State police to attach the GPS device to Dreslinski’s car for 31 days was not supported by probable cause and therefore violated the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and art. 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights.”

In response, the government argued Rousseau had no right to challenge the constitutionality of the GPS tracking that helped convict him, because he was neither the driver nor the owner of the car the police were tracking.

That doesn’t make sense. Thankfully, the SJC doesn’t think so, either:

Rousseau, as a passenger in the vehicle, also has standing because he had a reasonable expectation that his movements would not be subjected to extended electronic surveillance by the government through use of GPS monitoring.

That’s great news. But it gets even better. .

Furthermore, the court ruled, “under art. 14, a person may reasonably expect not to be subjected to extended GPS electronic surveillance by the government, targeted at his movements, without judicial oversight and a showing of probable cause.” (Article 14 is essentially the Massachusetts version of the Fourth Amendment; you can read it here.)

Remember three key phrases from that sentence: “extended GPS surveillance,” “judicial oversight,” and “probable cause.” The court ruled that, under the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, if the government wants to watch our movements for an extended period of time (which at the very least is 31 days), then it needs to go to a Judge and prove that it is has probable cause to do so.

As ACLU of Massachusetts’ Legal Director, Matthew Segal, who co-wrote an amicus brief in Rousseau, says:

Today’s ruling by the Supreme Judicial Court is a huge victory for anyone who does not want the government to track their movements. Relying on the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, the court held that the police generally cannot track someone using GPS surveillance unless they secure “judicial oversight” and make “a showing of probable cause.” Although the case itself concerned a passenger in a truck he did not own, the SJC’s ruling was not at all limited to that circumstance. Instead, the SJC made clear that its ruling applies to essentially everyone in Massachusetts.

Not only does the ruling apply to everyone in Massachusetts. The requirement to obtain “judicial oversight” and a “showing of probable cause” before the government can use GPS surveillance to track us for an extended period of time arguably extends well beyond the placement of a GPS tracking device onto a vehicle.

As an ACLU study showed, law enforcement nationwide regularly subpoena detailed information about our travel patterns from our cell phone companies. Our cell phones, too, use GPS to track us. As the ACLU writes, “While virtually all of the roughly 250 police departments that responded to our request said they track cell phones, only a tiny minority reported consistently obtaining a warrant and demonstrating probable cause to do so.”

And that location tracking, sometimes using precise GPS coordinates communicated by our cell phones, is extensive – even apart from the automated-datamart vacuum operations at NSA we are discussing this week. US Congressman Ed Markey found that law enforcement filed over one million requests for cell phone records in 2011 — a number of requests that most likely implicated the private information of many more millions of people.

And these records can reflect years of our private habits and lives. The ACLU reports: “According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Sprint keeps location tracking records for 18-24 months, and AT&T holds onto them “since July 2008,” suggesting they are stored indefinitely.”

Two years and indefinitely are certainly longer than the 31 days the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found was “extended” in the Rousseau case.

But that’s not all.

Automatic license plate readers are increasingly compiling detailed records of everywhere motorists drive. Law enforcement at every level and even private corporations are hoarding this information in regional and even national databases. As the plate readers become cheaper and eventually ubiquitous, hanging from every intersection and attached to every police car, it’s a very real possibility that police will be able to track our every motoring move, going back months, years or even decades. In such cases, officers don’t even need to subpoena anyone for records, because they already have them.

That’s also the case with cell phone sniffing gear like the Stingray, which allows law enforcement to independently track our devices, cutting out the telecoms entirely.

As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a concurring opinion in the landmark Fourth Amendment case US v Jones,

GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person’s public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations. The Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future. And because GPS monitoring is cheap in comparison to conventional surveillance techniques and, by design, proceeds surreptitiously, it evades the ordinary checks that constrain abusive law enforcement practices: “limited police resources and community hostility.”

Sotomayor’s concerns pertain equally to location tracking by way of mobile phone, physical GPS device, and stored automatic license plate reader data.

Citing Jones, the Rousseau decision in Massachusetts makes clear that law enforcement in this state cannot use GPS to track us for an “extended” period of time unless they show probable cause to a judge. That ruling applies to GPS tracking in cell phones. It arguably also applies to detailed license plate reader databases, some of which already contain hundreds of millions of records showing where we drive, and when. These databases are only set to grow, and the vast majority of states have set no limits on how long police departments are allowed to store our location information.

Right now you may be thinking: ‘Who cares about whether or not the SJC said the cops need probable cause to spy on me like this? The NSA is already doing it!’ This is obviously a serious concern and we need to stop it. But the Rousseau decision still matters for people in Massachusetts, in a very big way.

That’s because, even if the Boston or Massachusetts State Police got access to NSA records showing where you went or for how long, they most likely wouldn’t be able to use that evidence against you in a Massachusetts court. Furthermore, the NSA probably isn’t in the business of sharing its preciously hoarded information with state and local police officers, except in highly extraordinary circumstances.

Even more importantly, many of us live in communities wherein we know people who work at the local prosecutors’ office, or are police officers. Local law enforcement is much more integrated into our lives than is the secretive, shadowy NSA. Therefore suspicionless, unaccountable surveillance at the local level poses unique threats to the sanctity of our lives, our dignity as private persons, and even our physical safety.

At the federal level, we need to repeal the FISA Amendments Act so that the military cannot routinely collect and store our private communications, associations and habits. But state law is incredibly important, as well.

That’s why we here in Massachusetts are working to pass legislation to deal with both warrantless cell phone tracking and unregulated license plate tracking, which we hope will become law sooner rather than later. (Join us and add your voice.)

Legislatures have a way of moving very slowly, however, and so in the meantime it’s heartening to see that our state’s highest court agrees on a basic principle, the violation of which underlies the entire NSA and PRISM scandal: if the police want to track our movements over an “extended” period of time, they need to have individualized suspicion and probable cause, and show that evidence to a judge.

It sounds almost quaint this week, but that’s how they do in it Massachusetts.

***

NSA Secret PRISM Program | lisaleaks

United Surveillance States | lisaleaks

Police State of America | lisaleaks

Attention All Whistleblowers | lisaleaks

Dirt on Romas/COIN Classified Intel Mass Surveillance

10 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by in BIG Brother, Conspiracy, Corruption, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Police State, Surveillance State

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“Only through inactive action does one become a victim; by exercising proactive action against evil one walks in their own power creating resistance to that which chooses to destroy humanity and the preciousness of life. Fight America; don’t become a victim to the evil that is destroying our world!” _Donald F. Truax (Tough times don’t last, tough people do)

When President Eisenhower left office in 1960, he provided the American people with a warning.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Sixty years later, the military-industrial complex has been joined by another unprecedented centre of what has increasingly proven to be “misplaced power”: the dozens of secretive firms known collectively as the intelligence contracting industry.

PM Leaks Dirt on Romas/COIN Classified Intel Mass Surveillance

According to a Project PM announcement, here are some of the ‘classified intelligence’ details about Romas/COIN (Odyssey) with capabilities to monitor and automatically analyze millions of conversations, and then secretly store a wide range of personal data. It appears as if even Apple, Google, and Disney’s Pixar were trying to be brought aboard to help out in this mass surveillance apparatus.

To be clear, all analysis and documentation to expose this mass surveillance was done by Project PM.

If you are not sitting, please do so. Although I don’t advocate drinking, you might also pour a double-shot of whiskey to prepare yourself for distinctly unpleasant news about immensely sophisticated mass surveillance called Romas/COIN, or soon to be replaced by a similar program known as Odyssey. The nature and extent of the “counter intelligence” operation can be glimpsed in part by closely inspecting hundreds of e-mails among the 70,000 that were stolen in February from the contracting firm HBGary Federal.

After searching through HBGary e-mails for keywords and reading until I wanted to puke or scream, I decided to go ahead and run with Project PM’s announcement. Barrett Brown of Project PM will publish these findings in full on Project PM Wikii later, but this is part of that release. According to Project PM:

For at least two years, the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade (Odyssey), the top contender to win the federal contract and then take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr - the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm in 2011 after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients.

The new revelation provides for a disturbing picture, particularly when viewed in a wider context. Unprecedented surveillance capabilities are being produced by an industry that works in secret on applications that are nonetheless funded by the American public – and which in some cases are used against that very same public. Their products are developed on demand for an intelligence community that is not subject to Congressional oversight and which has been repeatedly shown to have misused its existing powers in ways that violate U.S. law as well as American ideals.

Although military contractor Northrop Grumman had long held the contract for Romas/COIN, enter HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr in an email to Al Pisani, an executive at the much larger federal contractor TASC, with a plan related to COIN. “I met with [ManTech CEO] Robert P. Frisbie the other day to catch up. He is looking to expand a capability in IO [information operations] related to the COIN re-compete but more for DoD.”
The layout and story is extremely long, and you’ll need to read over the announcement at Project PM when it’s published there. Project PM determined from the dozens of clues and references in leaked emails the unbelievable mass spying nature of Romas/COIN:

* Mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program.

* There’s discussion of bringing in a “gaming developer,” apparently at the behest of Barr, who mentions that the team could make good use of “a social gaming company maybe like zynga, gameloft, etc.” Lovegrove elsewhere notes: “I know a couple of small gaming companies at MIT that might fit the bill.”

* Apple and Google were active team partners, and AT&T may have been as well. The latter is known to have provided the NSA free reign over customer communications (and was in turn protected by a bill granting them retroactive immunity from lawsuits). Google itself is the only company to have received a “Hostile to Privacy” rating from Privacy International. Apple is currently being investigated by Congress after the iPhone was revealed to compile user location data in a way that differs from other mobile phones; the company has claimed this to have been a “bug.”

* The program makes use of several providers of “linguistic services.” At one point, the team discusses hiring a military-trained Arabic linguist. Elsewhere, Barr writes: “I feel confident I can get you a ringer for Farsi if they are still interested in Farsi (we need to find that out). These linguists are not only going to be developing new content but also meeting with folks, so they have to have native or near native proficiency and have to have the cultural relevance as well.”

* Alterian and SocialEyez are listed as “businesses to contact.” The former specializes in “social media monitoring tools.” The latter uses “sophisticated natural language processing methodology” in order to “process tens of millions of multi-lingual conversations daily” while also employing “researchers and media analysts on the ground;” its website also notes that “Millions of people around the globe are now networked as never before – exchanging information and ideas, forming opinions, and speaking their minds about everything from politics to products.”

* At one point, TASC exec Chris Clair asks Aaron Barr and others, “Can we name COIN Saif? Saif is the sword an Arab executioner uses when they decapitate criminals. I can think of a few cool brands for this.”

* A diagram attached to one of Barr’s e-mails to the group depicts MAGPII – Project PM as interacting in some unspecified manner with “Foreign Mobile” and “Foreign Web.” Magpii is a project of Barr’s own creation which stands for “Magnify Personal Identifying Information,” involves social networking, and is designed for the purpose of storing personal information on users. Although details are difficult to determine from references in Barr’s e-mails, he discusses the project almost exclusively with members of military intelligence to which he was pitching the idea.
* There are sporadic references such things as “semantic analysis,” “Latent Semantic Indexing,” “specialized linguistics,” and OPS, a programming language designed for solving problems using expert systems.

* Barr asks the team’s partner at Apple, Andy Kemp (whose signature lists him as being from the company’s Homeland Defense/National Programs division), to provide him “a contact at Pixar/Disney.”

 

Lock-Down Episode 81 “A Foxy Security View” (video)

Altogether, then, a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms – capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence. All this is merely in addition to whichever additional capabilities are not evident from the limited description available, with the program as a whole presumably being operated in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners.

Here’s the team players:

* TASC (PMO, creative services)

* HB Gary (Strategy, planning, PMO)

* Akamai (infrastructure)

* Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning)

* Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics)

* Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services)

*Cipher (strategy, planning operations)

* PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic partners)

* Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development – long list of strategic partners)

* Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance -long list of strategic partners)

* We are trying to schedule an interview with AT&T plus some other small apps

Two days after a briefing requirement meeting, the servers of HBGary and HBGary Federal were hacked by a small team of Anonymous operatives in retaliation for Barr’s boasts to Financial Times that he had identified the movement’s “leadership;” 70,000 e-mails were thereafter released onto the Internet. Barr resigned a few weeks later.

Also according to Project PM, along with clues as to the nature of COIN and its scheduled replacement, a close study of the HBGary e-mails also provide reasons to be concerned with the fact that such things are being developed and deployed in the way that they are. In addition to being the driving force behind the COIN recompete, Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means, some of which appear to be illegal. None of the companies involved have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department’s decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct.

That such firms will continue to target the public with advanced information warfare capabilities on behalf of major corporations is by itself an extraordinary danger to mankind as a whole, particularly insomuch as that such capabilities are becoming more effective while remaining largely unknown outside of the intelligence industry. But a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better “situational awareness” on entire populations while also being able to manipulate the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations. The idea that such power can be wielded without being misused is contradicted by even a brief review of history.

History also demonstrates that the state will claim such powers as a necessity in fighting some considerable threat; the U.S. has defended its recent expansion of powers by claiming they will only be deployed to fight terrorism and will never be used against American civilians. This is cold comfort for those in the Arab world who are aware of the long history of U.S. material support for regimes they find convenient, including those of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and the House of Saud. Nor should Americans be comforted by such promises from a government that has no way of ensuring that they will be kept;just like that a U.S. general in Afghanistan who ordered a military intelligence unit to use pysops on visiting senators in an effort to secure increased funding for the war, an illegal act; only a few days prior, CENTCOM spokesmen were confidently telling the public that such other psychological capabilities as persona management would never be used on Americans as that would be illegal. The fact is that such laws have been routinely broken by the military and intelligence community, who are now joined in this practice by segments of the federal contracting industry.

It is inevitable, then, that such capabilities as form the backbone of Romas/COIN and its replacement Odyssey will be deployed against a growing segment of the world’s population. The powerful institutions that wield them will grow all the more powerful as they are provided better and better methods by which to monitor, deceive, and manipulate. The informed electorate upon which liberty depends will be increasingly misinformed. No tactical advantage conferred by the use of these programs can outweigh the damage that will be done to mankind in the process of creating them.
“And Ye Shall Know The Truth And The Truth Shall Set You Free”

WAKE UP AMERICA….ITs OUR COUNTRY!!!

***

Romas/COIN – Project PM

The complete Project PM announcement about Romas/COIN has been published.

 

How Teliasonera Sells to Dictatorships | Uppdrag Granskning -

 

 

 

References:

“Security” State | lisaleaks

 

“The Black Boxes” – How Teliasonera Sells to Dictatorships

 

 

FBI Director’s Term Extension Ensures Neo-COINTELPRO Operations Will Prevail

Security Grifters Partner-Up on Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Project

The Development of “Privacy Killing Technologies”

Can the NSA and CIA use your phone to track your location?

Security Grifters Partner-Up on Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Project

How Software Updates Become “Hack” Patches

“Face” of Anonymous quits — exclusive interview with Barrett Brown

Project PM Wiki – Upcoming

HBGary Email Viewer – Google

A sinister Cyber-surveillance Scheme Exposed

FBI Director’s Term Extension Ensures Neo-COINTELPRO Operations Will Prevail

The Development of “Privacy Killing Technologies”

Can the NSA and CIA use your phone to track your location?

Security Grifters Partner-Up on Sinister Cyber-Surveillance Project

How Software Updates Become “Hack” Patches

“Face” of Anonymous quits — exclusive interview with Barrett Brown

Project PM Wiki

HBGary Email Viewer – Google

A sinister Cyber-surveillance Scheme Exposed

“Security” State

09 Sunday Jun 2013

Posted by in 9/11, BIG Brother, Conspiracy, National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), Police State, PSYOP, Surveillance State

≈ 3 Comments

In August 2012, Wikileaks revealed details about a system known as Trapwire that uses facial recognition and other techniques to track and monitor individuals captured on countless different closed-circuit cameras operated by cities and other institutions. The software is billed as a method by to prevent terrorism, but can of course also be used to provide unprecedented surveillance and data-mining capabilities to governments, corporations, and other institutions, including many with a history of using new technologies to violate the rights of citizens. T rapwire is already used in New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Texas, DC, London, and other locales.

The x-CIA agents who help run the firm are old friends of Stratfor vice president Fred Burton, whom they’ve briefed on their own capabilities in emails obtained by Anonymous hacker and provided to Wikileaks. Stratfor has engaged in at least several surveillance operations against activists, much as those advocating for victims of the Bhopal disaster, on behalf of large u.s. corporations; Burton himself was revealed to have advocated “bankrupting” and “ruining the life” of activities like Julian Assange in e-mails to other friends.

TrapWire  can be extremely expensive to maintain, and is usually done so at taxpayer expense; Los Angeles county spent over $1.4 million dollars on the software’s use in a single three-month period of 2007.

Although most of the regions in which Trapwire operates don’t share information with each other, all of this is set to change; as Abraxas Applications president Dan Botsch told Burton via e-mail, “I think over time the different networks will begin to unite,” noting that several networks had already begun discus ions on merging their information. Abraxas itself has always had the ability to “cross-network matches” from every region at their own office. By June 2011 , Washington D.C. police were engaged in a pilot project under the Departent of Homeland Security that’s likely to lead to more cities using Trapwire on a more integrated basis.
Abraxas, the firm whose spin-off Abraxas Corporation developed Trapwire in 2007, has long been involved in a lesser-known practice known as persona management, which involves the use of fake online “people” to gather intelligence and/or disseminate disinformation. The firm Ntrepid, created by Abraxas owner Cubic Corporation, won a 2010 CENTCOM contract to provide such capabilities for use in foreign countries; several board members of Ntrepid also sit on Abraxas.
Further reading:

Much of this first report is indicated above but it does include additional information with links:

Unravelling TrapWire: The CIA-Connected Global Suspicious Activity Surveillance System

A screenshot from the front page of trapwire.net, which is believed to be a web-based portal affiliated with the TrapWire system.

Public Intelligence

Leaked on August 11, 2012  released by WikiLeaks, provide information on the extent and operations of a system designed to correlate suspicious activity reports and other evidence that may indicate surveillance connected with a potential terrorist attack.

A proprietary white paper produced by TrapWire, formerly called Abraxas Applications, describes the product as “a unique, predictive software system designed to detect patterns of pre-attack surveillance.”  In an interview from 2005 with the Northern Virginia Technology Council, the CEO of Abraxas Corporation Richard “Hollis” Helms says the goal of TrapWire is to “collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.”  Fred Burton describes TrapWire in an email from November 2009 as “a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance.”

Documents submitted with Abraxas’ initial trademarking of TrapWire, describe the system as utilizing “a facility’s existing technologies (such as Pan–tilt–zoom [PTZ] cameras) and humans (security personnel, employees, and neighbors)” to collect data which is then “recorded and stored in a standardized format to facilitate data mining, information comparison and information sharing across the network.”  TrapWire “standardizes descriptions of potential surveillance activity, such as photographing, measuring and signaling” and then shares “threat information” across the network to track potential correlations across other locations on the network.

One thing that makes TrapWire a particularly interesting company is that its president, chief of operations and director of business development are all former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.  According to a management page on TrapWire’s website, which has recently been removed for an undisclosed reason, the president and one of the founders of the company, Dan Botsch, “served 11 years as an Intelligence Officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, focusing on Russian and Eastern European affairs.” Michael Maness, the company’s business development director, served over 20 years with the CIA, “where he directed counterterrorism and security operations in the Middle-East, the Balkans and Europe. As a senior operations officer and field operations manager, he was instrumental in combating Al-Qaeda’s operational units in the immediate wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.” Michael K. Chang, the company’s director of operations, served for “12 years with the Central Intelligence Agency as a counterterrorism operations officer and security officer” and even acted as personal security for the Director and Deputy Director of Central Intelligence.

Abraxas Corporation founder,  Richard “Hollis” Helms in 2001, two years after he left the CIA where he had worked for nearly 30 years.  Many of the company’s past employees and management have worked at the CIA or other intelligence agencies. In fact, Tim Shorrock notes in his 2008 book Spies for Hire that so many employees of the CIA were thought to be going to work for private companies like Abraxas that in 2005 CIA Director Porter Goss had to ask the company to stop recruiting in the CIA Cafeteria at Langley. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2006 that Abraxas had a contract from the CIA for developing front companies and false identities for the Agency’s nonofficial cover (NOC) program.  The company and its work are so secretive that Shorrock reportedly called the company for comment and was told, “Sir, we don’t talk to the media.”

High-Profile Clients Around the World

The Stratfor emails on TrapWire detail the extent to which the software system is being utilized around the world, describing deals with clients representing domestic agencies, foreign governments and multinational corporations.  An email from Don Kuykendall, the chairman of Stratfor, in May 2009 describes how TrapWire’s clients “include Scotland Yard, #10 Downing, the White House, and many [multinational corporations].”  The email goes on to say how Stratfor is working to help introduce TrapWire to people at “Wal Mart, Dell and other Fred cronies.”  Another email from Fred Burton to Kuykendall in July 2011 describes how the Nigerian government is interested in opening a fusion center and may want to deploy TrapWire in the Nigerian Presidential Palace.

In another email Burton brags about Stratfor’s role in authoring situation reports that feed into the TrapWire system, saying that this is the Stratfor’s number one way of impressing potential clients in government positions.  “Do you know how much a Lockheed Martin would pay to have their logo/feed into the USSS CP? MI5? RCMP? LAPD CT? NYPD CT?” Burton asks, implying that TrapWire is in use by the U.S. Secret Service, the British security service MI5, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as well as counterterrorism divisions in both the Los Angeles and New York Police Department. In a 2009 thesis from the Naval Postgraduate School, the Los Angeles Joint Regional Intelligence Center (LA-JRIC), one of more than seventy fusion centers around the country, is listed as utilizing TrapWire.

The emails also suggest that TrapWire is in use at military bases around the country. A July 2011 email from Burton to others at Stratfor describes how the U.S. Army, Marine Corps and Pentagon have all begun using TrapWire and are “on the system now.”  Burton described the Navy as the “next on the list.”

The Information Sharing Environment – Suspicious Activity Reporting Evaluation Environment Report from 2010 describes how the Las Vegas Police Department is providing TrapWire software to at least fourteen different hotels and casinos in the area. Several emails make reference to the network running in Las Vegas and one discusses contacting a security officer at the MGM Grand to discuss the system’s practical implementation.

According to one particularly unusual email from Burton, TrapWire is reportedly in use to protect the homes of some former Presidents of the United States.

Burton also describes TrapWire as possibly “the most successful invention on the [global war on terror] since 9-11.”  Describing his connections with the company’s management, he adds “I knew these hacks when they were GS-12′s at the CIA. God Bless America. Now they have EVERY major [high-value target] in [the continental U.S.], the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC as clients.”

Links to Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative

TrapWire is also linked to the National Suspicious Activity Reporting (NSI) Initiative, a program designed to help aggregate reports of suspicious activity around the country.  One email from an executive at TrapWire states that “TrapWire SAR reports are fed directly/automatically into the National SAR Initiative” as well as “the FBI’s eGuardian system if/when there’s confirmed nexus to terrorism or major crimes (which is happening frequently).”  The email goes on to say that “our networks in LA, Vegas and DC all support See Something Say Something (S4 as I call it).”

Over the past few years, several cities around the U.S. have implemented websites allowing the public to report suspicious activity, including Washington D.C., Houston and even the U.S. Army.  These activities are part of a larger program called iWatch, which also feeds into TrapWire according to a leaked email:

iWatch pulls community member reporting into the TrapWire search engine and compares SARs across the country…with potential matches being fed back to the local LE agency. An amazing amount of good quality reporting is coming in from alert citizens (and police officers) in the DC area in particular.

TrapWire reportedly operates separate regional networks around the country, each with a number of different interconnected sites.  However, the president of the company Dan Botsch explains in an email to Fred Burton that the TrapWire system operators do “cross-network” some information from separate networks and that he believes one day the networks will begin to merge:

We have regional networks in which information sharing is limited to that network. If a network has 25 sites, those 25 sites match against each other’s reports. They can also send reports to any other site on the network and they can post reports to a network-wide bulletin board. Sites cannot share information across networks.However, we do cross-network matching here at the office. If we see cross-network matches, we will contact each affected site, explain that the individual(s) or vehicle they reported has been seen on another network, and then offer to put the affected sites into direct contact. We have not yet had a cross-network match. I think over time the different networks will begin to unite. I’m not exactly being prescient here, as there is already talk in Vegas and LA of combining their two networks. Same here in DC.

The use of TrapWire could eventually extend to fusion centers all around the country as congressional testimony from June 2011 indicates that the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department is part of a trial project of the Department of Homeland Security to test the use of TrapWire.  The Texas Department of Public Safety, which operates the Texas Fusion Center, also purchased TrapWire software in 2010.

Editor’s Note: WikiLeaks has been inaccessible for some time now due to a sustained distributed denial of service attack.  All links to emails released by WikiLeaks are currently pointing to sites mirroring the content.  If WikiLeaks should come back online sometime soon, all emails associated with TrapWire should be accessible at the following URL:

http://www.wikileaks.org/gifiles/releasedate/2012-08-09.html

Thanks to Justin Ferguson and others for helping to spread the information in these emails in the face of vigorous attempts to suppress them.

***

Telecomix Blue cabinet Wiki

View source for Main Page – Telecomix Blue cabinet Wiki

Romas/COIN

Project PM

The following report was released Project PM in June 2011 and provides an overview of Romas/COIN along with incidental information on some of the firms that were involved in pursuing the contract throughout 2010 and early 2011. My initial announcement piece in The Guardian is here. Additional information may be found in a follow-up piece by Tom Burghardt. Further commentary on the subject by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer is available in this Russia Today segment. All source material may be found here.

For at least two years, the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade scheduled for later this year, the top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr – the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients. The new revelation provides for a disturbing picture, particularly when viewed in a wider context. Unprecedented surveillance capabilities are being produced by an industry that works in secret on applications that are nonetheless funded by the American public – and which in some cases are used against that very same public. Their products are developed on demand for an intelligence community that is not subject to Congressional oversight and which has been repeatedly shown to have misused its existing powers in ways that violate U.S. law as well as American ideals. And with expanded intelligence capabilities by which to monitor Arab populations in ways that would have previously been impossible, those same intelligence agencies now have improved means by which to provide information on dissidents to those regional dictators viewed by the U.S. as strategic allies.

The nature and extent of the operation, which was known as Romas/COIN and which is scheduled for replacement sometime this year by a similar program known as Odyssey, may be determined in part by a close reading of hundreds of e-mails among the 70,000 that were stolen in February from the contracting firm HBGary Federal and its parent company HBGary. Other details may be gleaned by an examination of the various other firms and individuals that are discussed as being potential partners.

Of course, there are many in the U.S. that would prefer that such details not be revealed at all; such people tend to cite the amorphous and much-abused concept of “national security” as sufficient reason for the citizenry to stand idly by as an ever-expanding coalition of government agencies and semi-private corporations gain greater influence over U.S. foreign policy. That the last decade of foreign policy as practiced by such individuals has been an absolute disaster even by the admission of many of those who put it into place will not faze those who nonetheless believe that the citizenry should be prevented from knowing what is being done in its name and with its tax dollars.

To the extent that the actions of a government are divorced from the informed consent of those who pay for such actions, such a government is illegitimate. To the extent that power is concentrated in the hands of small groups of men who wield such power behind the scenes, there is no assurance that such power will be used in a manner that is compatible with the actual interests of that citizenry, or populations elsewhere. The known history of the U.S. intelligence community is comprised in large part of murder, assassinations, disinformation, the topping of democratic governments, the abuse of the rights of U.S. citizens, and a great number of other things that cannot even be defended on “national security” grounds insomuch as that many such actions have quite correctly turned entire populations against the U.S. government. This is not only my opinion, but also the opinion of countless individuals who once served in the intelligence community and have since come to criticize it and even unveil many of its secrets in an effort to alert the citizenry to what has been unleashed against the world in the name of “security.”

Likewise, I will here provide as much information as I can on Romas/COIN and its upcoming replacement.

Although the relatively well-known military contractor Northrop Grumman had long held the contract for Romas/COIN, such contracts are subject to regular recompetes by which other companies, or several working in tandem, can apply to take over. In early February, HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr wrote the following e-mail to Al Pisani, an executive at the much larger federal contractor TASC, a company which until recently had been owned by Northrop and which was now looking to compete with it for lucrative contracts:

“I met with Bob Frisbie the other day to catch up. He is looking to expand a capability in IO related to the COIN re-compete but more for DoD. He told me he has a few acquisitions in the works that will increase his capability in this area. So just a thought that it might be worth a phone call to see if there is any synergy and strength between TASC and ManTech in this area. I think forming a team and response to compete against SAIC will be tough but doable.” IO in this context stands for “information operations,” while COIN itself, as noted in an NDA attached to one of the e-mails, stands for “counter intelligence.” SAIC is a larger intelligence contractor that was expected to pursue the recompete as well. Bob Frisbie is the CEO of Mantech, a firm with which would later offer Barr a position under a new firm to be created for the purpose.

Pisani agreed to the idea, and in conjunction with Barr and fellow TASC exec John Lovegrove, the growing party spent much of the next year working to create a partnership of firms capable of providing the “client” – a U.S. agency that is never specified in the hundreds of e-mails that follow – with capabilities that would outmatch those being provided by Northrop, SAIC, or other competitors.

Several e-mails in particular provide a great deal of material by which to determine the scope and intent of Romas/COIN. One that Barr wrote to his own e-mail account, likely for the purpose of adding to other documents later, is entitled “Notes on COIN.” It begins with a list of entries for various facets of the program, all of which are blank and were presumably filled out later: “ISP, Operations, Language/Culture, Media Development, Marketing and Advertising, Security, MOE.” Afterwards, another list consists of the following: “Capabilities, Mobile Development, Challenges, MOE, Infrastructure, Security.” Finally, a list of the following websites is composed, many of which represent various small companies that provide niche marketing services pursuant to mobile phones.

More helpful is a later e-mail from Lovegrove to Barr and some of his colleagues at TASC in which he announces the following:

Our team consists of: – TASC (PMO, creative services) – HB Gary (Strategy, planning, PMO) – Akamai (infrastructure) – Archimedes Global (Specialized linguistics, strategy, planning) – Acclaim Technical Services (specialized linguistics) – Mission Essential Personnel (linguistic services) – Cipher (strategy, planning operations) – PointAbout (rapid mobile application development, list of strategic partners) – Google (strategy, mobile application and platform development – long list of strategic partners) – Apple (mobile and desktop platform, application assistance -long list of strategic partners) We are trying to schedule an interview with ATT plus some other small app developers.

From these and dozens of other clues and references, the following may be determined about the nature of Romas/COIN:
1. Mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program.

2. There’s discussion of bringing in a “gaming developer,” apparently at the behest of Barr, who mentions that the team could make good use of “a social gaming company maybe like zynga, gameloft, etc.” Lovegrove elsewhere notes: “I know a couple of small gaming companies at MIT that might fit the bill.”

3. Apple and Google were active team partners, and AT&T may have been as well. The latter is known to have provided the NSA free reign over customer communications (and was in turn protected by a bill granting them retroactive immunity from lawsuits). Google itself is the only company to have received a “Hostile to Privacy” rating from Privacy International. Apple is currently being investigated by Congress after the iPhone was revealed to compile user location data in a way that differs from other mobile phones; the company has claimed this to have been a “bug.”

4. The program makes use of several providers of “linguistic services.” At one point, the team discusses hiring a military-trained Arabic linguist. Elsewhere, Barr writes: “I feel confident I can get you a ringer for Farsi if they are still interested in Farsi (we need to find that out). These linguists are not only going to be developing new content but also meeting with folks, so they have to have native or near native proficiency and have to have the cultural relevance as well.”

5. Alterion and SocialEyez are listed as “businesses to contact.” The former specializes in “social media monitoring tools.” The latter uses “sophisticated natural language processing methodology” in order to “process tens of millions of multi-lingual conversations daily” while also employing “researchers and media analysts on the ground;” its website also notes that “Millions of people around the globe are now networked as never before – exchanging information and ideas, forming opinions, and speaking their minds about everything from politics to products.”

6. At one point, TASC exec Chris Clair asks Aaron and others, “Can we name COIN Saif? Saif is the sword an Arab executioner uses when they decapitate criminals. I can think of a few cool brands for this.”

7. A diagram attached to one of Barr’s e-mails to the group (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/7/pmo.png/) depicts MAGPII as interacting in some unspecified manner with “Foreign Mobile” and “Foreign Web.” MAGPII is a project of Barr’s own creation which stands for “Magnify Personal Identifying Information,” involves social networking, and is designed for the purpose of storing personal information on users. Although details are difficult to determine from references in Barr’s e-mails, he discusses the project almost exclusively with members of military intelligence to which he was pitching the idea.

8. There are sporadic references such things as “semantic analysis,” “Latent Semantic Indexing,” “specialized linguistics,” and OPS, a programming language designed for solving problems using expert systems.

9. Barr asks the team’s partner at Apple, Andy Kemp (whose signature lists him as being from the company’s Homeland Defense/National Programs division), to provide him “a contact at Pixar/Disney.”
Altogether, then, a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms – capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence. All this is merely in addition to whichever additional capabilities are not evident from the limited description available, with the program as a whole presumably being operated in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners.

Whatever the exact nature and scope of COIN, the firms that had been assembled for the purpose by Barr and TASC never got a chance to bid on the program’s recompete. In late September, Lovegrove noted to Barr and others that he’d spoken to the “CO [contracting officer] for COIN.” “The current procurement approach is cancelled [sic], she cited changed requirements,” he reported. “They will be coming out with some documents in a month or two, most likely an updated RFI [request for information]. There will be a procurement following soon after. We are on the list to receive all information.” On January 18th of next year, Lovegrove provided an update: “I just spoke to the group chief on the contracts side (Doug K). COIN has been replaced by a procurement called Odyssey. He says that it is in the formative stages and that something should be released this year. The contracting officer is Kim R. He believes that Jason is the COTR [contracting officer's technical representative].” Another clue is provided in the ensuing discussion when a TASC executive asks, “Does Odyssey combine the Technology and Content pieces of the work?”

The unexpected change-up didn’t seem to faze the corporate partnership, which was still a top contender to compete for the upcoming Odyssey procurement. Later e-mails indicate a meeting between key members of the group and the contracting officer for Odyssey at a location noted as “HQ,” apparently for a briefing on requirements for the new program, on February 3rd of 2011. But two days after that meeting, the servers of HBGary and HBGary Federal were hacked by a small team of Anonymous operatives in retaliation for Barr’s boasts to Financial Times that he had identified the movement’s “leadership;” 70,000 e-mails were thereafter released onto the internet. Barr resigned a few weeks later.

Along with clues as to the nature of COIN and its scheduled replacement, a close study of the HBGary e-mails also provide reasons to be concerned with the fact that such things are being developed and deployed in the way that they are. In addition to being the driving force behind the COIN recompete, Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means, some of which appear to be illegal. None of the companies involved have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair, noting that it was the Justice Department’s decision as to whether to investigate, even though it was the Justice Department itself that made the initial introductions. Those in the intelligence contracting industry who believe themselves above the law are entirely correct.

That such firms will continue to target the public with advanced information warfare capabilities on behalf of major corporations is by itself an extraordinary danger to mankind as a whole, particularly insomuch as that such capabilities are becoming more effective while remaining largely unknown outside of the intelligence industry. But a far greater danger is posed by the practice of arming small and unaccountable groups of state and military personnel with a set of tools by which to achieve better and better “situational awareness” on entire populations while also being able to manipulate the information flow in such a way as to deceive those same populations. The idea that such power can be wielded without being misused is contradicted by even a brief review of history.

History also demonstrates that the state will claim such powers as a necessity in fighting some considerable threat; the U.S. has defended its recent expansion of powers by claiming they will only be deployed to fight terrorism and will never be used against American civilians. This is cold comfort for those in the Arab world who are aware of the long history of U.S. material support for regimes they find convenient, including those of Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak, and the House of Saud. Nor should Americans be comforted by such promises from a government that has no way of ensuring that they will be kept; it was just a few months ago that a U.S. general in Afghanistan ordered a military intelligence unit to use pysops on visiting senators in an effort to secure increased funding for the war, an illegal act; only a few days prior, CENTCOM spokesmen were confidently telling the public that such other psychological capabilities as persona management would never be used on Americans as that would be illegal. The fact is that such laws have been routinely broken by the military and intelligence community, who are now been joined in this practice by segments of the federal contracting industry.

It is inevitable, then, that such capabilities as form the backbone of Romas/COIN and its replacement Odyssey will be deployed against a growing segment of the world’s population. The powerful institutions that wield them will grow all the more powerful as they are provided better and better methods by which to monitor, deceive, and manipulate. The informed electorate upon which liberty depends will be increasingly misinformed. No tactical advantage conferred by the use of these programs can outweigh the damage that will be done to mankind in the process of creating them.

Barrett Brown Project PM

***

The Ominous Parallels: PM Leaks Dirt on Romas/COIN Classified

PM Leaks Dirt on Romas/COIN Classified Intel Mass Surveillance

According to a Project PM announcement, here are some of the ‘classified intelligence’ details about Romas/COIN (Odyssey) with capabilities to monitor and automatically analyze millions of conversations, and then secretly store a wide range of personal data. It appears as if even Apple, Google, and Disney’s Pixar were trying to be brought aboard to help out in this mass surveillance apparatus.

Updated note: To be clear, all analysis and documentation to expose this mass surveillance was done by Project PM.

If you are not sitting, please do so. Although I don’t advocate drinking, you might also pour a double-shot of whiskey to prepare yourself for distinctly unpleasant news about immensely sophisticated mass surveillance called Romas/COIN, or soon to be replaced by a similar program known as Odyssey. The nature and extent of the “counter intelligence” operation can be glimpsed in part by closely inspecting hundreds of e-mails among the 70,000 that were stolen in February from the contracting firm HBGary Federal.

After searching through HBGary e-mails for keywords and reading until I wanted to puke or scream, I decided to go ahead and run with Project PM’s announcement. Barrett Brown of Project PM will publish these findings in full on Project PM Wiki later, but this is part of that release. According to Project PM:

For at least two years, the U.S. has been conducting a secretive and immensely sophisticated campaign of mass surveillance and data mining against the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once. And with an upgrade (Odyssey) scheduled for later this year, the top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr – the same disgraced CEO who resigned from his own firm earlier this year after he was discovered to have planned a full-scale information war against political activists at the behest of corporate clients. The new revelation provides for a disturbing picture, particularly when viewed in a wider context. Unprecedented surveillance capabilities are being produced by an industry that works in secret on applications that are nonetheless funded by the American public – and which in some cases are used against that very same public. Their products are developed on demand for an intelligence community that is not subject to Congressional oversight and which has been repeatedly shown to have misused its existing powers in ways that violate U.S. law as well as American ideals.

Although military contractor Northrop Grumman had long held the contract for Romas/COIN, enter HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr in an email to Al Pisani, an executive at the much larger federal contractor TASC, with a plan related to COIN. “I met with [Mantech CEO] Bob Frisbie the other day to catch up. He is looking to expand a capability in IO [information operations] related to the COIN re-compete but more for DoD.”

The layout and story is extremely long, and you’ll need to read over the announcement at Project PM when it’s published there. Project PM determined from the dozens of clues and references in leaked emails the unbelievable mass spying nature of Romas/COIN:

* Mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program.

* There’s discussion of bringing in a “gaming developer,” apparently at the behest of Barr, who mentions that the team could make good use of “a social gaming company maybe like zynga, gameloft, etc.” Lovegrove elsewhere notes: “I know a couple of small gaming companies at MIT that might fit the bill.”

* Apple and Google were active team partners, and AT&T may have been as well. The latter is known to have provided the NSA free reign over customer communications (and was in turn protected by a bill granting them retroactive immunity from lawsuits). Google itself is the only company to have received a “Hostile to Privacy” rating from Privacy International. Apple is currently being investigated by Congress after the iPhone was revealed to compile user location data in a way that differs from other mobile phones; the company has claimed this to have been a “bug.”

* The program makes use of several providers of “linguistic services.” At one point, the team discusses hiring a military-trained Arabic linguist. Elsewhere, Barr writes: “I feel confident I can get you a ringer for Farsi if they are still interested in Farsi (we need to find that out). These linguists are not only going to be developing new content but also meeting with folks, so they have to have native or near native proficiency and have to have the cultural relevance as well.”

* Alterion and SocialEyez are listed as “businesses to contact.” The former specializes in “social media monitoring tools.” The latter uses “sophisticated natural language processing methodology” in order to “process tens of millions of multi-lingual conversations daily” while also employing “researchers and media analysts on the ground;” its website also notes that “Millions of people around the globe are now networked as never before – exchanging information and ideas, forming opinions, and speaking their minds about everything from politics to products.”

* At one point, TASC exec Chris Clair asks Aaron and others, “Can we name COIN Saif? Saif is the sword an Arab executioner uses when they decapitate criminals. I can think of a few cool brands for this.”

* A diagram attached to one of Barr’s e-mails to the group depicts Magpii as interacting in some unspecified manner with “Foreign Mobile” and “Foreign Web.” Magpii is a project of Barr’s own creation which stands for “Magnify Personal Identifying Information,” involves social networking, and is designed for the purpose of storing personal information on users. Although details are difficult to determine from references in Barr’s e-mails, he discusses the project almost exclusively with members of military intelligence to which he was pitching the idea.

* There are sporadic references such things as “semantic analysis,” “Latent Semantic Indexing,” “specialized linguistics,” and OPS, a programming language designed for solving problems using expert systems.

* Barr asks the team’s partner at Apple, Andy Kemp (whose signature lists him as being from the company’s Homeland Defense/National Programs division), to provide him “a contact at Pixar/Disney.”

Altogether, then, a successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms – capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence. All this is merely in addition to whichever additional capabilities are not evident from the limited description available, with the program as a whole presumably being operated in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners.

***

Cubic Corporation – Project PM

http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Cubic_Corporation#Abraxas.2FAnonymizer

Details on Abraxas/Cubic/Ntrepid/ Anonymizer consortium here:
“Leadership” page Abraxas Apps tried to scrub, including names and career bios of execs:

#OpTripWire dox! – Pastebin.com

Additional employees listed here:

Trapwire Executive Docs – Pastebin.com – 1 paste tool since 2002!

***

Ntrepid Corporation: Solving Unique Operational Challenges

***

What’s going on with the New York City subway system?

Contrary to the company’s August 13, 2012 claim, evidence suggests that Cubic Corporation, a defense and transportation services company, manages sales of TrapWire to US law enforcement through a McClean, VA based firm, Abraxas Applications.

The company’s August 2012 denial — issued in the wake of online uproar about TrapWire, a shadowy surveillance system created by former CIA officers — contrasts with information the Abraxas Corporation, a Cubic subsidiary, appears to have provided the federal government as late as February 3, 2011.

Cubic oversees or owns a number of services and companies that deal in the extremely private data of millions of ordinary people. It’s therefore understandable that the $1.2 billion corporation didn’t want to be seen as having anything to do with TrapWire, a surveillance, “predictive intelligence” and data-mining company marketed to governments and corporations.

Among many other similar projects, Cubic runs the back-end data management for the New York City Metropolitan Transit Association (MTA) smart card system. In fact, according to a 2010 press release announcing the expansion of Cubic’s services to the NYC bus system, the company designed and implemented the MetroCard system nearly twenty years ago.

TrapWire claims to be operating the back end of the “See Something, Say Something” suspicious activity reporting program in New York City, a partnership between the New York Police Department and the MTA, though the NYPD denies any association with the company.

Abraxas describes one of the “[s]ystems integration services associated with the TrapWire system” on a FEMA website advertising TrapWire to law enforcement:

In the technology area, this entails providing sensor technologies, customized software, data mining capabilities, technology operations and maintenance support, and other products or services necessary for the operation of the TrapWire system.

If the US government is right, and Cubic is selling TrapWire to law enforcement, the company has its hands on passenger data for the over 8 million daily MTA riders, suspicious activity reports from New York City, and access to the TrapWire surveillance network.

Cubic and TrapWire elsewhere

In 2011, Cubic won a $220 million contract to run the smart card system for the Vancouver, Canada public transit system, TransLink. Cubic Corporation also runs the fare systems for Los Angeles, Atlanta, London and Washington DC public transit.

TrapWire is also operational in Washington DC, according to this 2011 testimony from the Metropolitan Police Department Chief of Police to Congress:

In addition to tracking operational law enforcement activity and identifying emerging threats in the fusion center, MPD is also engaged in the Homeland Security’s pilot project of the Trap Wire, a predictive software system. This system supports the use of our ” suspicious activity” reporting to detect patterns of pre-attack surveillance and logistical planning.

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