British spy agency has access to global communications, shares info with NSA
RT | June 21, 2013
The British spy agency GCHQ has access to the global network of communications, storing calls, Facebook posts and internet histories – and shares this data with the NSA, Edward Snowden has revealed to the Guardian in a new leak.
GCHQ’s network of cables is able to process massive quantities of information from both specific targets and completely innocent people, including recording phone calls and reading email messages, it was revealed on Friday.
“It’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight,” Snowden told the Guardian. “They [GCHQ] are worse than the US.”
The Government Communications Headquarters agency has two different programs, aimed at carrying out this online and telephone monitoring – categorized under ‘Mastering the Internet’ and ‘Global Telecoms Exploitation.’ Both have been conducted in the absence of any public knowledge, reports the Guardian.
“If you remember, even the NSA said that they did not record phone calls, but according to these latest revelations by Edward Snowden, that up to ‘600 million’ telephone events last year were recorded a day by the GCHQ,” said RT’s Tesa Arcilla from London.
“There’s no doubt as to what the objectives of these programs were, having put them in place,” she said, emphasizing the titles.
The agency is able to store the volumes of data it amasses from fiber-optic cables for up to 30 days in an operation codenamed Tempora. The practice has been going on for around 18 months.
GCHQ which was handling 600m telephone ‘events’ a day, according to the documents, had tapped into over 200 fiber-optic cables and had the capacity to analyze data from over 46 of them at a time.
The cables used by GCHQ can carry data at 10 gigabits per second, which in theory, means they could deliver up to 21petabytes of information per day. The program is continuing to develop on a daily basis with the agency aiming to expand to the point it is able to process terabits (thousands of gigabits) of data at once.
By May last year, some 300 GCHQ-assigned analysts and 250 from the NSA had been specially allocated large quantities of data to trawl through as a result of the operations.
The Guardian reports that 850,000 NSA and outside contractors had potential access to the databases. However, the paper does not explain how it came to such an enormous figure
“These revelations reveal the scale of and the scope of cooperation between UK and US intelligence services,” said RT’s Gayane Chichakyan from Washington. “From these revelations we learned how dramatically it has expanded over the years.”
“The document shows the FISA court lets the NSA use data snagged ‘inadvertently.’ They basically give a warrant to target suspects,” she said, recalling Lieutenant General Keith Alexander’s quote after a 2008 visit to the Menwith RAF base in England: “Why can’t we collect all the signals all the time? Sounds like a good summer project for Menwith,” he had said.
The GCHQ project was first trialed in 2008. The intelligence organization has been labeled an ‘intelligence superpower’ on account of its technical capabilities, which by 2010 gave it the strongest access to internet communications out of the ‘Five Eyes’ – an international intelligence sharing alliance, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and US, brought into existence in 1946.
The mass-surveillance has seen the interception of data from transatlantic cables that also carry data to western Europe through ‘intercept partners’ commercial companies that had entered into private agreements with GCHQ. Many have been paid off for their cooperation.
GCHQ feared that exposure of the names of the companies involved could lead to “high-level political fallout,” and took measures to ensure names were kept secret. Warrants had reportedly been issued to compel the companies to cooperate so that GCHQ could engage in spying through them.
“They have no choice,” said a Guardian intelligence source.
Snowden previously warned that he would be releasing further information pertaining to mass security operations carried out on the unwary public, stating in a previous Q & A with the Guardian that the “truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.”
Federal Ban on School Prayer Widely Ignored
By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | June 21, 2013
Half a century after the U.S. Supreme Court banned prayer in public classrooms, religion is nonetheless very present in schools these days.
In two landmark decisions (Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp), the Supreme Court in 1962 and 1963 declared school-sponsored prayer and Bible readings unconstitutional.
But the rulings applied only to public school teachers and administrators.
Students were free to say grace in the cafeteria, meet outside class to study the Bible, Quran, or Torah, and participate in religious after-school programs on their campuses.
“We’ve gone from virtual silence about religion in the curriculum and virtually no student religious expression in many schools,” Charles Haynes, a scholar at the First Amendment Center and head of the Religious Freedom Education Project in Washington, DC, told the Christian Science Monitor, “to today, when social studies and other standards are fairly generous to religion, and students are expressing their faiths in many different ways in many public schools, if not most.”
Consider the following facts:
Good News Clubs, organized by the Child Evangelism Fellowship, hold Sunday school-like classes in some 3,200 public elementary schools for 156,000 students.
One million to two million students participate in “See You at the Pole” prayer services every September beneath their campus flagpoles.
The Fellowship of Christian Athletes has more than 8,000 chapters on junior and high school campuses across the country.
Campus Crusade for Christ has about 200 clubs, almost all of them in public schools.
Youth for Christ, an evangelical missionary organization, has on- and off-campus clubs at 1,200 schools, most of them public.
Meanwhile, a poll conducted in 2012 by the National Opinion Research Center showed that 57% of Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court prohibition against public schools requiring the reading of Bible verses or the Lord’s Prayer, while 39% approve. However, there were sharp regional differences. A majority in the Northeast and the West did approve of the prohibition, while in the South 73% disapproved. In addition, Americans age 18-29 differed from their elders, approving of the prohibition 56% to 38%.
To Learn More:
School Prayer: 50 Years after the Ban, God and Faith more Present than Ever (by Lee Lawrence, Christian Science Monitor)
School Prayer 50 Years Later: What Do Americans Believe? (by Jaweed Kaleem, Huffington Post)
High School Valedictorian Sues to Stop Graduation Prayer (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)
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- Prayer in School: Why Isn’t Silent Prayer Good Enough? (atheistrev.com)
- Prayer in School: All Eyes on Mississippi (atheistrev.com)
Turkey announces plans ‘for gas’ and cyber security in face of Gezi protests
RT | June 20, 2013
Turkey has announced plans to purchase 100,000 gas bomb cartridges and launch a central cyber security agency, local media report. This comes after protests across the country which also saw a series of attacks on government websites.
The order for the 100,000 new cartridges will be accompanied by an order for 60 water cannon vehicles, the daily local newspaper Milliyet reported, also stating that the excessive use of gas bomb cartridges meant that Turkish riot police used up some 130,000 units across the space of a mere 20 days.
The protests began in Istanbul, but nationwide demonstrations shortly followed suit, drawing thousands in support of the Gezi Park protesters suffering brutal police repressions. In one of the instances, a horrifying video emerged of a man in a wheelchair being fired at by a similar [water canon] vehicle on June 11.
“The excessive use of force by the police has turned this issue into a security one,” said Galip Dalay, a research assistant with the SETA foundation.
At the same time, Turkish Transport, Maritime Affairs and Communications Binali Yildirim announced the formation of a new cyber security agency on Thursday. He declared “The Center for Response to National Cyber Threats,” (or USOM) was to be founded on the grounds that cyber-attacks during the Gezi Park protests were a global threat and “likely to increase.”
At the beginning of June, Anonymous hacking group launched #OpTurkey, which took down the Turkish President’s website, along with that of the country’s ruling party, in support of anti-government protests.
Another mid-June attack on over 225 tourist, library, and private business websites was blamed on Kurdish group ColdHackers.
On Thursday, Turkish hacker group Redhack claimed responsibility for all tweets relating to the Gezi protests after the launching of an investigation into some 5 million Gezi Park tweets was announced by the AKP (Justice and Development Party).
“We have posted all tweets and hacked thousands of people’s computers. Don’t take on the innocent ones, we are here,” Redhack wrote on its Twitter account, going on to say that any accounts that appeared to play a role in the organization of resistance were to re-tweet their message, and those that did had been hacked by the group.
Following the claim of responsibility, Twitter users began to announce that they were hacked by Redhack using the hashtag #wewerehackedbyredhack.
After 29 people’s houses were raided and they were subsequently detained for tweets related to the protests on June 5, the group recommended that “users can tell the police that their account was hacked by Redhack. We would take the blame with pleasure.”
Social media activists had been accused of using Twitter to “instigate public hatred and animosity,” according to Turkish media.
PM Erdogan even blamed social media for the unrest stating “there is now a menace which is called Twitter,” in the midst of the upheaval, dismissing the protests as being organized by extreme societal elements. “The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society,” he said.
Transport Minister Binali Yıldırım stressed however on June 19 that the government was working to “fight against cyber-crime, not to regulate social media,” with Deputy PM Bülent Arınç adding that people were free to communicate on social media but should be deterred from encouraging crime or violence.
As the protests have continued to draw support across the country, the Turkish government has used increasingly retaliatory measures against anyone involved in protests, culminating in threats to deploy the armed forces on Tuesday, the day after using tear gas and water cannons to disperse Monday’s demonstrators. Over 130 were arrested on Thursday alone, and six people have died to date as a result of the unrest, which is not scaling down despite authorities halting proposed renovations of Gezi Park.
“They’ve left branches hanging off trees and water and debris all over the streets” said RT’s Tom Barton in Ankara on Thursday.
Peaceful demonstrations began on May 28 when a group of environmentalists gathered together to campaign against the proposed development of a shopping mall in Istanbul neighborhood’s only remaining park – Gezi Park – next to Taksim Square. The violent suppression after Erdogan announced that he had already made his decision motivated thousands nationwide to display their solidarity.
Related article
- Turkish Unions Protest Erdogan Crackdown, Announce Strike (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Intelsat suspends satellite services to Iranian TV channels
Press TV – June 19, 2013
Communications satellite services provider Intelsat has announced the suspension of its services to the channels launched from Iran as the West’s campaign against free speech intensifies.
On Wednesday, the Luxembourg-based company said it will no longer provide services to Iranian channels including Press TV. The decision has been made under the pretext of the company’s abiding by illegal sanctions against the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) – that’s Iran’s national broadcasting corporation.
Intelsat noted that it has been ordered by the US government to avoid extending IRIB’s license, noting that it will stop providing services as of July 1st.
Press TV and other Iranian channels have come under an unprecedented wave of attacks by European governments and satellite companies since January 2012.
They have been taken off the air in several Western countries, including Britain, France, Germany and Spain.
European companies say they are abiding by anti-Iran sanctions. However, EU foreign policy chief’s spokesman, Michael Mann, has told Press TV that sanctions do not apply to media.
In the meantime, the French-Israeli CEO of Europe’s satellite giant, Eutelsat, has written letters to several satellite companies, asking them to stop cooperating with Iranian channels.
The Israeli lobby in the United States has also publicly supported European attempts to shut down Press TV.
Media activists call the attacks on Iranian channels a campaign against free speech launched by the same European governments that preach freedom of expression.
Related article
- Israel says no ‘compromise’ should be made with Iran (alethonews.wordpress.com)
Snowden: Don’t mention the I-Word!
By Steve Sailer | June 18, 2013
The New York Times’ “public editor” writes a little piece that asks an interesting question in the title:
Following Up on the N.S.A. Revelations: Were They Really ‘Confirmations’?
By MARGARET SULLIVAN
She lists various articles over the last eight years that recounted much of what Edward Snowden said. For example, James Bamford has been covering the NSA since his 1982 book The Puzzle Palace. Bamford regularly discloses interesting information in Wired, such as the revelations of the more central NSA whistleblower William Binney.
And there were plenty of disclosures about telephone metadata snooping going back to Carl Cameron’s four-part Fox series in 2001.
No doubt there are lots of reason Snowden got so much publicity, but let me mention a subtle one. Unlike Bamford, Binney, Cameron and many others who have looked into snooping in America, Snowden, as far as I can tell, has never mentioned the I-Word: Israel.
Generally, anybody who looks into NSA questions pretty quickly notices that the NSA outsourced some spying on Americans to Israelis, and that, by now, the question of which country is the dog and which country is the tail has gotten murky. For example, here’s a 2012 Wired article by Bamford:
Shady Companies With Ties to Israel Wiretap the U.S. for the NSA
But that’s not the kind of thing that the media or, to be frank, the great majority of the American public wants to think about. We’ve all been socialized to shut our brains off when it comes to this tail wagging the dog question. Cameron got to keep his job at Fox, for example, but his series got erased from the official record.
Snowden, in contrast, has kept things nice and neat for people. Everybody seems to have a nice strong opinion about Snowden in part because he hasn’t set off the mental shutdown process that the I-Word provokes in well-trained Americans.
Time to Raise Political Asylum Quotas for Americans?
US Should Top the List of the International Quota for Political Refugees
By Sybel Edmonds | Boiling Frogs Post | June 17, 2013
I don’t know how you feel about surveys, ranking or indexes, but whether you follow them or not, you must be aware of how we’ve been falling steadily as a nation. Those of you who follow lists-surveys and global indexes, let’s admit it- as a nation we have not been going up on most global ranking lists – in fact, just the opposite.
We have been going down on the list of the World’s Least Corruption Nations-way down. We have been dropping continuously when it comes to our ranking in the education arena. We have been dropping royally when it comes to Healthcare Systems. When it comes to World Press Freedom, we are embarrassingly low, behind Cape Verde, Cyprus, and even trailing Mali, Tanzania, El Salvador, Botswana and Comoros!! We didn’t even make it onto the ridiculous list of the top ten nations’ national happiness index.
All these competitive areas aside, there is one list we should be climbing steadily and rapidly. Even if you don’t care about all those other global lists you must care about this particular one; for your own good and even your survival. I am talking about a list pertaining to a nation’s status as to its need for acceptance of its political refugees by the global community.
Please don’t laugh or shrug off this suggestion. Instead, pause and think about our whistleblowers in jail or those awaiting the results of their prosecutions. Remember the journalists and reporters being targeted and investigated by our national police. Recall our new laws recently put in place to secretly and indefinitely detain any American citizen (that is you and me)-without any warrant or even having to show any justification. Think about the still-growing national no-fly list. Remind yourself of torture as our government’s common practice; abroad and here at home. Take a look at your land line, cell, laptop, fax and I-Pad as tools used by our government to illegally-secretly-continuously spy on you.
Now you see what I am talking about.
If you still find the notion difficult to accept, then think of the dozens of Hollywood movie classics on the Stasi and KGB. Remember how people climbed the wall or crawled through tunnels to escape the constant surveillance and arbitrary detentions of their national police. Their national police cited national security and unity. Now consider how the NSA and dozens of mega-corporations have you under surveillance illegally; around the clock. Our national police have been citing national security.
How do you think our camps for our citizens to be detained under our new national law, NDAA, would be different than those set up by the Stasi, KGB and the like?
You remember how other western nations received the lucky escapees from the fascistic or communist regimes with open arms? Well, now they should be receiving us, our escapees; with open arms.
They have to. They must. Not doing it would be in violation of their laws and their international pledge:
Asylum is granted to people fleeing persecution or serious harm in their own country and therefore in need of international protection. Asylum is a fundamental right; granting it is an international obligation, first recognized in the 1951 Geneva Convention on the protection of refugees. In the EU, an area of open borders and freedom of movement, countries share the same fundamental values and States need to have a joint approach to guarantee high standards of protection for refugees. Procedures must at the same time be fair and effective throughout the EU and impervious to abuse. With this in mind, the EU States have committed to establishing a Common European Asylum System.
…
And here is the international law describing who qualifies for international protection-Based on UN Convention & Protocols[Emphasis Mine]:
Grounded in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of human rights 1948, which recognizes the right of persons to seek asylum from persecution in other countries, the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted in 1951, is the centerpiece of international refugee protection today.(1)
A refugee, according to the Convention, is someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.
…
Today, we, the citizens of the United States of America, face prosecution, persecution, torture, and possible assassination for engaging in certain journalistic or even Good Samaritan reporting of illegal-criminal-unconstitutional activities by those trusted with our nation’s health, wealth, and security.
Our government has been engaged in ongoing torture and human rights violations at home and abroad. Whether it is the globally recognized USA halls-of-shame in Guantanamo, Bagram and Abu Ghraib, or, secretly carried out atrocities in our government’s black cites around the globe, or, tortures inflicted on a citizen here at home who is guilty of exposing government criminalities, our government is now recognized and acknowledged as a Supreme Torturer.
This situation now is being extended to those of us who may have read or disseminated information originally gathered and distributed by others. Today our whistleblowers-truth tellers-Good Samaritans are thrown behind bars, while our criminals who engage in robbing our taxpayers of billions of dollars, or those who engage in torture and murder, are highly protected and handsomely awarded by our rulers.
We United States Citizens have been deprived of expressing collective dissent even through the most peaceful means and in the most pacifist manner. Our participation or membership in social groups or gatherings that challenge illegal wars or anti humanitarian practices land us on our government’s never-defined ‘enemy & terrorist’ list, with consequences ranging from being prohibited from traveling , to having our homes raided and families intimidated by armed government militia, to being persecuted and thrown before a federal grand jury to face possible incarceration for our beliefs.
We Americans, every single one of us, are treated as potential terrorists, are considered guilty with no way to prove otherwise. We all are subjected to round the clock warrantless-illegal surveillance , and degrading violation-probing-groping searches as mandatory requirements for our travel.
I believe, and you should as well, that we have more than enough cases of recorded atrocities, criminalities and violations inflicted upon us by our very own government to expect a substantial increase in our nation’s status-ranking for acceptance of our political refugees.
I know, and you do too, that there are many nations with governmental practices worse than ours. However, our bad government is much bigger than their bad governments, with much higher capabilities. When you have a huge government like ours, with incredible technological and weaponry capabilities as ours does, you risk far graver atrocities than with smaller bad governments with limited capabilities. That’s a fact. Our big bad government is far worse than their small bad government. And that should increase and elevate our nation’s ranking in the international community’s political refugee quota-status.
As for the so-called liberal nations: we urge you to remember the Stasi and the suffocating repression suffered by the East Germans, and then, go ahead and multiply that by a six-digit number of your choice. Any number will do, that is, as long as it has six digits. Our technology-enabled Stasis can tap, record, analyze and save billions of communications. Our rulers’ mega corporate collaborators can pull the plug on millions of us with no recourse available or even imaginable. Our mega military’s ferocious drones can pinpoint and turn us into ashes with a secret order issued on a simple letterhead.
We implore the international community to grant us, the Citizens of the United States of America, ‘High Priority Political Asylum’ status. At least consider a swapping arrangement whereby the international community’s highest-level criminals, con artists, professional swindlers, and or psychotic serial torturers are sent here where they can find an agreeable working-practicing environment and unlimited government protection and rewards, in exchange for those of us in search of peace, a reasonable degree of freedom and justice.
Sibel Edmonds is the Publisher & Editor of Boiling Frogs Post and the author of the Memoir Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story. She is the recipient of the 2006 PEN Newman’s Own First Amendment Award for her “commitment to preserving the free flow of information in the United States in a time of growing international isolation and increasing government secrecy”
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Police Arrest over 100, Raid Media Offices in Turkey
Al-Manar | June 18, 2013
Turkish police detained dozens of people at their homes and raided two media offices on Tuesday in a coordinated operation across the country to clamp down on nearly three weeks of mass anti-government unrest, AFP reported.
Officers raided the homes of around 90 members of the Socialist Party of the Oppressed (ESP), a small leftist group that has been active in Istanbul’s Gezi Park protest at the centre of the nationwide protest movement, the Istanbul bar association said.
Police also searched the offices of the Atilim daily and the Etkin news agency, local media outlets linked to the ESP group, the NTV and CNN-Turk television stations reported.
NTV said 30 people were arrested in the capital Ankara and another 13 in the northwestern city of Eskisehir in a police swoop targeting 21 provinces overall.
The advantages of knowing everything
Xymphora | June 16, 2013
Here we go: “NSA admits listening to U.S. phone calls without warrants”:
“A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA “may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States.” A possible interpretation of that language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can domestically — on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to “target” a specific American citizen.”
Gathering everything is OK. Also:
“Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell indicated during a House Intelligence hearing in 2007 that the NSA’s surveillance process involves “billions” of bulk communications being intercepted, analyzed, and incorporated into a database.
They can be accessed by an analyst who’s part of the NSA’s “workforce of thousands of people” who are “trained” annually in minimization procedures, he said. (McConnell, who had previously worked as the director of the NSA, is now vice chairman at Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden’s former employer.)”
As far as the NSA is concerned, gathering everything without warrants is legally permitted, and once they have it, NSA analysts who are ‘trained’ to NSA standards are legally allowed to listen to whatever they want. Gathering everything is actually better than getting a FISA warrant for a particular target.
PRISM is going to take over the entire discussion, and, lo and behold, it is not that bad. Get a few more keys for the ‘lockbox’, and all will be deemed to be well.
The three big questions concerning Total Information Awareness are:
- economic – can we pay to store all this information?;
- technical – can we develop search engines that will allow us to handle all this information without becoming paralyzed by the sheer volume of it (remember that Simon’s big straw man was the ridiculousness of having FBI agents listen to all the conversations!!!), the traditional problem with totalitarian states?; and
- legal – in a country with constitutional protections for basic liberties, how is any of this allowed?
The NSA believes it has an answer to the first two of these problems, and just needs to fool Americans into believing that the presence of those scary Moooooooslims under their beds justifies a bit of bending of the constitution to finesse the legal problem. Some tinkering will be done to PRISM, and everybody will go back to sleep.
The final step will be to continue to expand the exploitation of the information as a method of social control using blackmail or something like blackmail – even the awareness that there is information out there that could be used for blackmail will start to influence behavior, particularly repressing any kind of political protest (not that there is much of that anyway) – and to use the insider information to siphon up whatever wealth is not yet in the hands of the 1% (it is a fun fact that Booz Allen is owned by the Carlyle Group).
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Turkey will consider protesters staying at Taksim terrorists, official says
Press TV – June 16, 2013
Turkey’s European Union minister has warned that Turkish police will consider protesters in Istanbul’s Taksim Square as members or supporters of terrorist groups.
“I request our citizens who supported the protests until today kindly to return to their homes,” Egemen Bagis said in a late Saturday interview with Turkish channel A Haber.
“From now on the state will unfortunately have to consider everyone who remains there a supporter or member of a terror organization,” Bagis stated.
He went on to say that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan “has already assured [activists] about their aim with the protests. The protests from now on will play into the hands of some separatist organizations that want to break the peace and prioritize vandalism and terrorism.”
The unrest in Turkey erupted after police broke up a sit-in staged at Taksim Square on May 31 to protest against a government plan for the redevelopment of Gezi Park.
On Saturday night, Turkish police attacked anti-government protesters at Taksim, shortly after Erdogan ordered the demonstrators to evacuate the area.
Police also stormed the protest camp in Gezi Park, firing tear gas and using water cannons to disperse thousands of protesters defying the prime minister’s order to leave.
Several protesters have also been detained or wounded – some of them allegedly by rubber bullets.
Also on Saturday, Erdogan told the protesters that they would face the police if they did not leave Gezi Park.
“I say this very clearly: either Taksim Square is cleared, or if it isn’t cleared, then the security forces of this country will know how to clear it,” the Turkish prime minister said in a speech to his supporters in the Ankara suburb of Sincan.
The embattled premier said the demonstrations – which have been the largest street protests during his 10 years in power – were part of an organized plot against him.
However, the protesters have vowed to continue their campaign until their demands are met and the detained people are released.
The Turkish prime minister has faced international condemnation for his handling of the crisis. Turkish police have also been strongly criticized for using excessive force against the peaceful protests.
Five people, including a police officer, have reportedly died in the clashes and more than 5,000 protesters and 600 police officers have been wounded.
The Deeper Meaning of Mass Spying in America
By James Petras | June 14, 2013
The exposure of the Obama regime’s use of the National Security Agency to secretly spy on the communications of hundreds of millions of US and overseas citizens has provoked world-wide denunciations. In the United States, despite widespread mass media coverage and the opposition of civil liberties organizations, there has not been any mass protest. Congressional leaders from both the Republican and Democratic Parties, as well as top judges, approved of the unprecedented domestic spy program. Even worse, when the pervasive spy operations were revealed, top Senate and Congressional leaders repeated their endorsement of each and every intrusion into all electronic and written communication involving American citizens. President Obama and his Attorney General Holder openly and forcefully defended the NSA’s the universal spy operations.
The issues raised by this vast secret police apparatus and its penetration into and control over civil society, infringing on the citizens freedom of expression, go far beyond mere ‘violations of privacy’, as raised by many legal experts.
Most civil libertarians focus on the violations of individual rights, constitutional guarantees and the citizen’s privacy rights. These are important legal issues and the critics are right in raising them. However, these constitutional–legal critiques do not go far enough; they fail to raise even more fundamental issues; they avoid basic political questions.
Why has such a massive police-state apparatus and universal spying become so central to the ruling regime? Why has the entire executive, legislative and judicial leadership come out in public for such a blatant repudiation of all constitutional guarantees? Why do elected leaders defend universal political espionage against the citizenry? What kind of politics requires a police state? What kind of long-term, large scale domestic and foreign policies are illegal and unconstitutional as to require the building of a vast network of domestic spies and a hundred billion dollar corporate-state techno-espionage infrastructure in a time of budget ‘austerity’ with the slashing of social programs?
The second set of questions arises from the use of the espionage data. So far most critics have questioned the existence of massive state espionage but have avoided the vital issue of what measures are taken by the spymasters once they target individuals, groups, movements? The essential question is: What reprisals and sanctions follow from the ‘information’ that is collected, classified and made operational by these massive domestic spy networks? Now that the ‘secret’ of all-encompassing, state political spying has entered public discussion, the next step should be to reveal the secret operations that follow against those targeted by the spymasters as a ‘risk to national security’.
The Politics behind the Police State
The fundamental reason for the conversion of the state into a gigantic spy apparatus is the nature of deeply destructive domestic and foreign policies which the government has so forcefully pursued. The vast expansion of the police state apparatus is not a response to the terror attack of 9/11. The geometrical growth of spies, secret police budgets, and the vast intrusion into all citizen communications coincides with the wars across the globe. The decisions to militarize US global policy requires vast budgetary re-allocation , slashing social spending to fund empire-building; shredding public health and social security to bailout Wall Street. These are policies which greatly enhance profits for bankers and corporations while imposing regressive taxes on wage and salaried workers
Prolonged and extended wars abroad have been funded at the expense of citizens’ welfare at home. This policy had led to declining living standards for many tens of millions of citizens and rising dissatisfaction. The potential of social resistance as evidenced by the brief “Occupy Wall Street” movement which was endorsed by over 80% of the population. The positive response alarmed the state and led to an escalation of police state measures. Mass spying is designed to identify the citizens who oppose both imperial wars and the destruction of domestic welfare; labeling them as ‘security threats’ is a means of controlling them through the use of arbitrary police powers. The expansion of the President’s war powers has been accompanied by the growth and scope of the state spy apparatus: the more the President orders overseas drone attacks, the greater the number of his military interventions, the greater the need for the political elite surrounding the President to increase its policing of citizens in anticipation of a popular backlash. In this context, the policy of mass spying is taken as ‘pre-emptive action’. The greater the police state operations, the greater the fear and insecurity among dissident citizens and activists.
The assault on the living standards of working and middle class Americans in order to fund the endless series of wars, and not the so-called ‘war on terror’, is the reason the state has developed massive cyber warfare against the US citizenry. The issue is not only a question of a violation of individual privacy: it is fundamentally an issue of state infringement of the collective rights of organized citizens to freely engage in public opposition to regressive socio-economic policies and question the empire. The proliferation of permanent bureaucratic institutions, with over a million security ‘data collectors’, is accompanied by tens of thousands of ‘field operators’, analysts and inquisitors acting arbitrarily to designate dissident citizens as ‘security risks’ and imposing reprisals according to the political needs of their ruling political bosses. The police state apparatus has its own rules of self-protection and self-perpetuation; it has its own linkages and may occasionally compete with the Pentagon. The police state links up with and protects the masters of Wall Street and the propagandists of the mass media – even as it (must) spy on them!
The police state is an instrument of the Executive Branch acting as a vehicle for its arbitrary prerogative powers. However on administrative matters, it possesses a degree of ‘autonomy’ to target dissident behavior. What is clear is the high degree of cohesion, vertical discipline and mutual defense, up and down the hierarchy. The fact that one whistle-blower, Edward Snowden, emerged from the hundreds of thousands of citizen spies is the exception, the lone whistle blower, which proves the rule: There are fewer defectors to be found among the million-member US spy network than in all the Mafia families in Europe and North America.
The domestic spy apparatus operates with impunity because of its network of powerful domestic and overseas allies. The entire bi-partisan Congressional leadership is privy to and complicit with its operations. Related branches of government, like the Internal Revenue Service, cooperate in providing information and pursuing targeted political groups and individuals. Israel is a key overseas ally of the National Security Agency, as has been documented in the Israeli press (Haaretz, June 8, 2013). Two Israeli high tech firms (Verint and Narus) with ties to the Israeli secret police (MOSSAD), have provided the spy software for the NSA and this, of course, has opened a window for Israeli spying in the US against Americans opposed to the Zionist state. The writer and critic, Steve Lendman points out that Israeli spymasters via their software “front companies” have long had the ability to ‘steal proprietary commercial and industrial data” with impunity. Because of the power and influence of the Presidents of the 52 Major American Jewish organizations, Justice Department officials have ordered dozens of Israeli espionage cases to be dropped. The tight Israeli ties to the US spy apparatus serves to prevent deeper scrutiny into its operation and political goals — at a very high price in terms of the security of US citizens. In recent years two incidents stand out: Israeli security ‘experts’ were contracted to advise the Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security in their investigation and ‘Stasi-like’ repression of government critics and environmental activists (compared to ‘al Queda terrorists’ by the Israelis) – the discovery of which forced the resignation of OHS Director James Powers in 2010. In 2003, New Jersey governor, Jim McGreevy appointed his lover, an Israeli government operative and former IDF officer, to head that state’s ‘Homeland Security Department and later resigned, denouncing the Israeli, Golan Cipel, for blackmail in late 2004. These examples are a small sample illustrating the depth and scope of Israeli police state tactics intersecting in US domestic repression.
The Political and Economic Consequences of the Spy State
The denunciations of the mass spy operations are a positive step, as far as they go. But equally important is the question of what follows from the act of spying? We now know that hundreds of millions of Americans are being spied on by the state. We know that mass spying is official policy of the Executive and is approved by Congressional leaders. But we have only fragmented information on the repressive measures resulting from the investigations of “suspect individuals”. We can assume that there is a division of labor among data collectors, data analysts and field operatives following up “risky individuals and groups”, based on the internal criteria known only to the secret police. The key spy operatives are those who devise and apply the criteria for designating someone as a “security risk”. Individuals and groups who express critical views of domestic and foreign policy are “a risk”; those who act to protest are a “higher risk”; those who travel to conflict regions are presumed to be in the “highest risk” category, even if they have violated no law. The question of the lawfulness of a citizen’s views and actions does not enter into the spymasters’ equation; nor do any questions regarding the lawfulness of the acts committed by the spies against citizens. The criteria defining a security risk supersede any constitutional considerations and safeguards.
We know from a large number of published cases that lawful critics, illegally spied upon, have subsequently been arrested, tried and jailed – their lives and those of their friends and family members shattered. We know that hundreds of homes, workplaces and offices of suspects have been raided in ‘fishing expeditions’. We know that family members, associates, neighbors, clients, and employers of “suspects” have been interrogated, pressured and intimidated. Above all, we know that tens of millions of law abiding citizens, critical of domestic economic and overseas war policies, have been censored by the very real fear of the massive operations carried out by the police state. In this atmosphere of intimidation, any critical conversation or word spoken in any context or relayed via the media can be interpreted by nameless, faceless spies as a “security threat” – and one’s name can enter into the ever growing secret lists of “potential terrorists”. The very presence and dimensions of the police state is intimidating. There are citizens who would claim that the police state is necessary to protect them from terrorists – but how many others feel compelled to embrace their state terrorists just to fend off any suspicion, hoping to stay off the growing lists? How many critical-minded Americans now fear the state and will never voice in public what they whisper at home?
The bigger the secret police, the greater its operations. The more regressive domestic economic policy, the greater the fear and loathing of the political elite.
Even as President Obama and his Democratic and Republican partners boast and bluster about their police state and its effective “security function”, the vast majority of Americans are becoming aware that fear instilled at home serves the interest of waging imperial wars abroad; that cowardice in the face of police state threats only encourages further cuts in their living standards. When will they learn that exposing spying is only the beginning of a solution? When will they recognize that ending the police state is essential to dismantling the costly empire and creating a safe, secure and prosperous America?
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From the Archives
Genetic baloney in thick slices
MAYBE COULD BE INC.
By Jon Rappoport | No More Fake News | July 8, 2021
Gene research companies tend to come and go. They start out banging and popping like fireworks in the sky, and then they fade out—selling themselves to larger outfits who’ve hired better liars…
Once upon a time, it sounded easy. Start with a disease, find the gene responsible for the disease, and correct the problem.
Then, researchers wondered, was disease the result of one gene or a group of genes acting together?
Either way, the proof would be in devising cures for diseases using gene therapy. “Not yet, but soon…”
And regardless, the major need was: money. Lots and lots of money.
This need required good PR people. “We have to pump up the idea that we’re on the edge of tremendous breakthroughs. We’re always on that edge…”
This hype also needed to obscure the fact that there wasn’t (and isn’t) ANY gene cure for ANY disease. … continue
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