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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 26, 2013 19:51:56 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 26, 2013 19:51:56 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 26, 2013 19:51:56 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 26, 2013 19:50:24 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 26, 2013 11:57:39 GMT -6
from the Guardian UK
www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/20/fisa-court-nsa-without-warrant
The top secret rules that allow NSA to use US data without a warrantby Glenn Greenwald "Top secret documents submitted to the court that oversees surveillance by US intelligence agencies show the judges have signed off on broad orders which allow the NSA to make use of information "inadvertently" collected from domestic US communications without a warrant. The Guardian is publishing in full two documents submitted to the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (known as the Fisa court), signed by Attorney General Eric Holder and stamped 29 July 2009. They detail the procedures the NSA is required to follow to target "non-US persons" under its foreign intelligence powers and what the agency does to minimize data collected on US citizens and residents in the course of that surveillance. The documents show that even under authorities governing the collection of foreign intelligence from foreign targets, US communications can still be collected, retained and used. The procedures cover only part of the NSA's surveillance of domestic US communications. The bulk collection of domestic call records, as first revealed by the Guardian earlier this month, takes place under rolling court orders issued on the basis of a legal interpretation of a different authority, section 215 of the Patriot Act. The Fisa court's oversight role has been referenced many times by Barack Obama and senior intelligence officials as they have sought to reassure the public about surveillance, but the procedures approved by the court have never before been publicly disclosed. The top secret documents published today detail the circumstances in which data collected on US persons under the foreign intelligence authority must be destroyed, extensive steps analysts must take to try to check targets are outside the US, and reveals how US call records are used to help remove US citizens and residents from data collection. However, alongside those provisions, the Fisa court-approved policies allow the NSA to: • Keep data that could potentially contain details of US persons for up to five years; • Retain and make use of "inadvertently acquired" domestic communications if they contain usable intelligence, information on criminal activity, threat of harm to people or property, are encrypted, or are believed to contain any information relevant to cybersecurity; • Preserve "foreign intelligence information" contained within attorney-client communications; • Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machine Access the content of communications gathered from "U.S. based machines" or phone numbers in order to establish if targets are located in the US, for the purposes of ceasing further surveillance. The broad scope of the court orders, and the nature of the procedures set out in the documents, appear to clash with assurances from President Obama and senior intelligence officials that the NSA could not access Americans' call or email information without warrants. The documents also show that discretion as to who is actually targeted under the NSA's foreign surveillance powers lies directly with its own analysts, without recourse to courts or superiors – though a percentage of targeting decisions are reviewed by internal audit teams on a regular basis. Since the Guardian first revealed the extent of the NSA's collection of US communications, there have been repeated calls for the legal basis of the programs to be released. On Thursday, two US congressmen introduced a bill compelling the Obama administration to declassify the secret legal justifications for NSA surveillance. The disclosure bill, sponsored by Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, and Todd Rokita, an Indiana Republican, is a complement to one proposed in the Senate last week. It would "increase the transparency of the Fisa Court and the state of the law in this area," Schiff told the Guardian. "It would give the public a better understanding of the safeguards, as well as the scope of these programs." Section 702 of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which was renewed for five years last December, is the authority under which the NSA is allowed to collect large-scale data, including foreign communications and also communications between the US and other countries, provided the target is overseas. FAA warrants are issued by the Fisa court for up to 12 months at a time, and authorise the collection of bulk information – some of which can include communications of US citizens, or people inside the US. To intentionally target either of those groups requires an individual warrant. One-paragraph order One such warrant seen by the Guardian shows that they do not contain detailed legal rulings or explanation. Instead, the one-paragraph order, signed by a Fisa court judge in 2010, declares that the procedures submitted by the attorney general on behalf of the NSA are consistent with US law and the fourth amendment. Those procedures state that the "NSA determines whether a person is a non-United States person reasonably believed to be outside the United States in light of the totality of the circumstances based on the information available with respect to that person, including information concerning the communications facility or facilities used by that person". It includes information that the NSA analyst uses to make this determination – including IP addresses, statements made by the potential target, and other information in the NSA databases, which can include public information and data collected by other agencies. Where the NSA has no specific information on a person's location, analysts are free to presume they are overseas, the document continues. "In the absence of specific information regarding whether a target is a United States person," it states "a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States or whose location is not known will be presumed to be a non-United States person unless such person can be positively identified as a United States person." If it later appears that a target is in fact located in the US, analysts are permitted to look at the content of messages, or listen to phone calls, to establish if this is indeed the case. Referring to steps taken to prevent intentional collection of telephone content of those inside the US, the document states: "NSA analysts may analyze content for indications that a foreign target has entered or intends to enter the United States. Such content analysis will be conducted according to analytic and intelligence requirements and priorities." Details set out in the "minimization procedures", regularly referred to in House and Senate hearings, as well as public statements in recent weeks, also raise questions as to the extent of monitoring of US citizens and residents. NSA minimization procedures signed by Holder in 2009 set out that once a target is confirmed to be within the US, interception must stop immediately. However, these circumstances do not apply to large-scale data where the NSA claims it is unable to filter US communications from non-US ones. The NSA is empowered to retain data for up to five years and the policy states "communications which may be retained include electronic communications acquired because of limitations on the NSA's ability to filter communications". Even if upon examination a communication is found to be domestic – entirely within the US – the NSA can appeal to its director to keep what it has found if it contains "significant foreign intelligence information", "evidence of a crime", "technical data base information" (such as encrypted communications), or "information pertaining to a threat of serious harm to life or property". Domestic communications containing none of the above must be destroyed. Communications in which one party was outside the US, but the other is a US-person, are permitted for retention under FAA rules. The minimization procedure adds that these can be disseminated to other agencies or friendly governments if the US person is anonymised, or including the US person's identity under certain criteria. A separate section of the same document notes that as soon as any intercepted communications are determined to have been between someone under US criminal indictment and their attorney, surveillance must stop. However, the material collected can be retained, if it is useful, though in a segregated database: "The relevant portion of the communication containing that conversation will be segregated and the National Security Division of the Department of Justice will be notified so that appropriate procedures may be established to protect such communications from review or use in any criminal prosecution, while preserving foreign intelligence information contained therein," the document states. In practice, much of the decision-making appears to lie with NSA analysts, rather than the Fisa court or senior officials. A transcript of a 2008 briefing on FAA from the NSA's general counsel sets out how much discretion NSA analysts possess when it comes to the specifics of targeting, and making decisions on who they believe is a non-US person. Referring to a situation where there has been a suggestion a target is within the US. "Once again, the standard here is a reasonable belief that your target is outside the United States. What does that mean when you get information that might lead you to believe the contrary? It means you can't ignore it. You can't turn a blind eye to somebody saying: 'Hey, I think so and so is in the United States.' You can't ignore that. Does it mean you have to completely turn off collection the minute you hear that? No, it means you have to do some sort of investigation: 'Is that guy right? Is my target here?" he says. "But, if everything else you have says 'no' (he talked yesterday, I saw him on TV yesterday, even, depending on the target, he was in Baghdad) you can still continue targeting but you have to keep that in mind. You can't put it aside. You have to investigate it and, once again, with that new information in mind, what is your reasonable belief about your target's location?" The broad nature of the court's oversight role, and the discretion given to NSA analysts, sheds light on responses from the administration and internet companies to the Guardian's disclosure of the PRISM program. They have stated that the content of online communications is turned over to the NSA only pursuant to a court order. But except when a US citizen is specifically targeted, the court orders used by the NSA to obtain that information as part of Prism are these general FAA orders, not individualized warrants specific to any individual. Once armed with these general orders, the NSA is empowered to compel telephone and internet companies to turn over to it the communications of any individual identified by the NSA. The Fisa court plays no role in the selection of those individuals, nor does it monitor who is selected by the NSA. The NSA's ability to collect and retain the communications of people in the US, even without a warrant, has fuelled congressional demands for an estimate of how many Americans have been caught up in surveillance. Two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall – both members of the Senate intelligence committee – have been seeking this information since 2011, but senior White House and intelligence officials have repeatedly insisted that the agency is unable to gather such statistics."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 26, 2013 11:24:38 GMT -6
Below is a yahoo news story describing Snowden's current status, and the problems he's having trying to obtain safe passage to out of Russia to a country that won't allow for US extradition. from Yahoonews.yahoo.com/snowden-stuck-moscow-airport-becoming-headache-russia-160155640.htmlSnowden, stuck in Moscow airport, becoming headache for Russia Wed, June 26, 2013 by Fred Weir "Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden may be trapped indefinitely in the extraterritorial limbo of the transit zone in Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport, as a high level US-Russia diplomatic tug-of-war over his fate continues to show little hope of agreement. WikiLeaks, the radical transparency organization that's apparently sponsoring Mr. Snowden's travels, tweeted the suggestion Wednesday that US efforts to thwart Snowden's flight could actually be leaving him no alternative but to seek political asylum in Russia: "Cancelling Snowden's passport and bullying intermediary countries may keep Snowden permanently in Russia. Not the brightest bunch at State," it said. The US reportedly has sent a high-level team to Moscow, under William Burns, deputy secretary of state and former ambassador to Russia, to try to convince the Russians that they have sufficient legal and practical reasons to expel the passport-less fugitive into US custody. But President Vladimir Putin, who has plenty of domestic political incentives to hang tough, has staked out a position that appears to preclude that. "We can only extradite any foreign citizens to such countries with which we have signed the appropriate international agreements on criminal extradition," Mr. Putin told a press conference in Finland Tuesday. "Snowden is a free person. The sooner he chooses his final destination, the better it is for him and Russia," he added. 'THE LONGER HE STAYS, THE BIGGER THE HEADACHE' Snowden arrived in Moscow Sunday on an Aeroflot flight from Hong Kong that he apparently boarded without a valid passport or Russian visa, though he did apparently have an onward ticket to Cuba which he never used. Putin and other Russian officials have insisted that the Kremlin knew nothing at all about Snowden's trip to Sheremetyevo until they learned it from the media – a claim that has attracted skepticism from US authorities and others. But, in practical terms, Snowden's options appear painfully limited. To begin with, there are very few commercial flights he could board in Sheremetyevo that would take him directly to a country where US influence doesn't hold sway. His only gateway to Latin America, the regular Aeroflot flight to Havana – which Snowden skipped on Monday – passes over US airspace near the coast of New York state, and could legally be forced down by air controllers if US authorities ordered it. Snowden's destination of preference, Ecuador, said Wednesday that it could take months to decide about his application for asylum. That raises the prospect that he could be stranded for the foreseeable future, in Sheremetyevo's no-man's land. In any case, Snowden has no passport or other valid travel papers, which he would need to purchase a ticket or enter Russia legitimately. Russia does have a rule requiring foreign transit passengers to either board an outgoing plane or pass through border control within 24 hours; but experts say it is frequently waived and is often taken up on a case-by-case basis. "This appears to be a real problem for Russian leaders and, just as Putin suggested, the longer Snowden stays in Sheremetyevo the bigger will be the headache he causes," says Alexander Konovalov, president of the independent Institute for Strategic Assessments in Moscow. "I don't know how he ended up here, and I wouldn't put it past Russian secret services to have played a role in this. He's stuck here now, with no documents or means to buy an onward ticket. If some country, perhaps Iceland, Venezuela or Ecuador issues him valid travel papers, then he can theoretically leave. But even that wouldn't be so easy, because there are not many routes he can safely take," he adds. Many analysts have speculated on the possible hidden rent Russia may charge Snowden for his extradition-free stay in Sheremetyevo. Mr. Konovalov suggests that Russia's FSB security service, given the former KGB's track record, probably wouldn't have passed up the opportunity to interview Snowden upon his arrival. But Putin insisted Tuesday that Russian security agencies "have never worked with and are not working with" Snowden. And WikiLeaks tweeted Wednesday that "Mr. Snowden is not being 'debriefed' by the FSB. He is well and WikiLeaks' [Sarah] Harrison is escorting him at all times." WikiLeaks detailed its views on Snowden's situation in a lengthy online press conference Wednesday, which featured an impassioned plea by founder Julian Assange to all world governments to aid Snowden's search for a safe haven. A RISK FOR RUSSIA Possible secret service intrigues aside, most Russian analysts say the Snowden saga has ceased to be amusing for the Kremlin. The Russian media has had a field day with Snowden's disclosures of mass NSA spying on the world, including the revelation that British and US agencies tried to listen to former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's phone calls during a 2009 G20 summit in London. But official jeers that the US engages in "double standards" by describing Russian defectors as "political refugees," while hounding those like Snowden who have leaked intelligence to the ends of the earth, have been replaced by much more cautious rhetoric such as Putin's oddly colorful metaphor whose meaning appears to be that he wishes Snowden had never turned up in Russia. "Just like Snowden, [Mr. Assange] considers himself a rights advocate and fights for sharing information. Ask yourself: should or should not people like these be extradited to be later put to jail?" Putin said. "In any case, I would like not to deal with such issues because it is like shearing a pig: there's lots of squealing and little fleece," he added. Experts say the basic reason for the change of tone may be fear of diplomatic consequences. Russia has stepped up its security cooperation with the US in the wake of the Boston marathon bombings, and experts say it's seriously counting on American cooperation to help secure the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, which face a range of potential terrorist threats. In September, Russia will host the 2013 leaders' summit of the G20 in St. Petersburg – a major prestige event for the Kremlin, and one in which Putin is expected to hold important sideline talks with US President Obama. "If Snowden stays in Russia, it's going to have a bad impact on US-Russia relations. I know, you might have said a month ago that they could hardly get worse. But they can," says Andrei Piontkovsky, a frequent Kremlin critic and researcher at the official Institute of Systems Analysis in Moscow. "Even for Putin, it's getting to be too much. That's why he's expressing hope that this affair will die down, and not harm relations with the US," he adds. Mr. Konovalov suggests there could be a reason closer to home for Russian authorities to hold Snowden at arms length. It's one thing for the Kremlin's English-language satellite news network Russia Today, known as RT, to lionize information leakers such as Assange and Snowden, and quite another for domestic Russian audiences to see Putin openly embracing an idealist bent on ripping the lid off government secrets. "This is a new situation in the world, where a lot of the younger generation support behavior that favors complete transparency even in violation of state laws," he says. "Russian authorities are definitely not interested in encouraging such actions, because we too have a younger generation who are Internet-savvy and attracted to this new global culture."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 25, 2013 23:15:25 GMT -6
from Global ResearchJune 23, 2013 by Chris Floyd "No one, anywhere, has been writing about the deeper and wider implications of the Snowden revelations than Arthur Silber. (I hope you’re not surprised by this.) In a series of powerful, insightful essays, Silber has, among other things, laid bare the dangers of the oddly circumscribed ‘gatekeeper’ approach of the journalistic guardians (at, ironically, the Guardian) of Snowden’s secrets, particularly their slow drip-feed of carefully self-censored tidbits from the famous Powerpoint presentation that Snowden secreted from the bowels of the United Stasi of the American intelligent apparat. Eschewing the Wikileaks approach, the guardians at the Guardian have not let us judge the material for ourselves, opting instead to adopt, unwittingly, the same approach of the apparat: “we are the keepers of knowledge, we will decide what you need to know.” As Silber notes, this doesn’t vitiate the worth of the revelations, but it does dilute their impact, leaving gaps that the apparat — and its truly repulsive apologists all through the ‘liberal media’ — can exploit to keep muddying the waters. He explores these ramifications, and others, in “In Praise of Mess, Chaos and Panic” and “Fed Up With All the Bullshit.” In his latest piece, “‘Intelligence, Corporatism and the Dance of Death,” he cuts to the corroded heart of the matter, the deep, dark not-so-secret secret that our secret-keepers are trying to obscure behind their blizzards of bullshit: it’s all about the Benjamins. After noting the gargantuan outsourcing of “intelligence” to private contractors like Booz Allen — the very firm that employed Snowden — Silber gives a quick precis of the essence of state-corporate capitalism (see the originals for links): The biggest open secret all these creepy jerks are hiding is the secret of corporatism (or what Gabriel Kolko calls “political capitalism”): There is nothing in the world that can’t be turned into a huge moneymaker for the State and its favored friends in “private” business, at the same time it is used to amass still greater power. This is true in multiple forms for the fraud that is the “intelligence” industry. The pattern is the same in every industry, from farming, to manufacturing, to every aspect of transportation, to the health insurance scam, to anything else you can name. In one common version, already vested interests go to the State demanding regulation and protection from “destabilizing” forces which, they claim, threaten the nation’s well-being (by which, they mean competitors who threaten their profits). The State enthusiastically complies, the cooperative lawmakers enjoying rewards of many kinds and varieties. Then they’ll have to enforce all those nifty regulations and controls. The State will do some of it but, heck, it’s complicated and time-consuming, ya know? Besides, some of the State’s good friends in “private” business can make a killing doing some of the enforcing. Give it to them! Etc. and so on. Silber then goes on: … But that’s chump change. The real money is elsewhere — in, for instance, foreign policy itself. You probably thought foreign policy was about dealing with threats to “national security,” spreading democracy, ensuring peace, and whatever other lying slogans they throw around like a moldy, decaying, putrid corpse. The State’s foreign policy efforts are unquestionably devoted to maintaining the U.S.’s advantages — but the advantages they are most concerned about are access to markets and, that’s right, making huge amounts of money. Despite the unending propaganda to the contrary, they aren’t terribly concerned with dire threats to our national well-being, for the simple reason that there aren’t any: “No nation would dare mount a serious attack on the U.S. precisely because they know how powerful the U.S. is — because it is not secret.” How does the public-”private” intelligence industry make foreign policy? The NYT story offers an instructive example in its opening paragraphs: When the United Arab Emirates wanted to create its own version of the National Security Agency, it turned to Booz Allen Hamilton to replicate the world’s largest and most powerful spy agency in the sands of Abu Dhabi. It was a natural choice: The chief architect of Booz Allen’s cyberstrategy is Mike McConnell, who once led the N.S.A. and pushed the United States into a new era of big data espionage. It was Mr. McConnell who won the blessing of the American intelligence agencies to bolster the Persian Gulf sheikdom, which helps track the Iranians. “They are teaching everything,” one Arab official familiar with the effort said. “Data mining, Web surveillance, all sorts of digital intelligence collection.” See how perfect this is? All the special people are making tons of money — and, when the day arrives that the U.S. wants to ramp up its confrontational stance with Iran, well, there’s the UAE helping to “track the Iranians” with all the tools that the U.S. has given them and taught them to use. And how easy would it be to get the UAE to provide the U.S. with just the right kind of new and disturbing “intelligence” that would get lots of people screaming about the “grave Iranian threat”? You know the answer to that: easy peasy. A wink and a nod — and off the U.S. goes, with bombing runs or whatever it decides to do. But whatever it does will be determined in greatest part not by a genuine threat to U.S. national security (there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Iran’s leaders are all suicidal), but by what will make the most money for the State and its good friends. Silber then underscores once more the highly instructive principle laid out by Robert Higgs: I remind you once again of what I call The Higgs Principle. As I have emphasized, you can apply this principle to every significant policy in every area, including every aspect of foreign policy. Here is Robert Higgs explaining it: As a general rule for understanding public policies, I insist that there are no persistent “failed” policies. Policies that do not achieve their desired outcomes for the actual powers-that-be are quickly changed. If you want to know why the U.S. policies have been what they have been for the past sixty years, you need only comply with that invaluable rule of inquiry in politics: follow the money. When you do so, I believe you will find U.S. policies in the Middle East to have been wildly successful, so successful that the gains they have produced for the movers and shakers in the petrochemical, financial, and weapons industries (which is approximately to say, for those who have the greatest influence in determining U.S. foreign policies) must surely be counted in the hundreds of billions of dollars. So U.S. soldiers get killed, so Palestinians get insulted, robbed, and confined to a set of squalid concentration areas, so the “peace process” never gets far from square one, etc., etc. – none of this makes the policies failures; these things are all surface froth, costs not borne by the policy makers themselves but by the cannon-fodder masses, the bovine taxpayers at large, and foreigners who count for nothing. ….It’s all about wealth and power. Here and there, in episodes notable only for their rarity, “the intelligence world” might actually provide a small piece of information actually related to “national security.” Again, I turn to Gabriel Kolko: It is all too rare that states overcome illusions, and the United States is no more an exception than Germany, Italy, England, or France before it. The function of intelligence anywhere is far less to encourage rational behavior–although sometimes that occurs–than to justify a nation’s illusions, and it is the false expectations that conventional wisdom encourages that make wars more likely, a pattern that has only increased since the early twentieth century. By and large, US, Soviet, and British strategic intelligence since 1945 has been inaccurate and often misleading, and although it accumulated pieces of information that were useful, the leaders of these nations failed to grasp the inherent dangers of their overall policies. When accurate, such intelligence has been ignored most of the time if there were overriding preconceptions or bureaucratic reasons for doing so. Silber concludes: …The intelligence-security industry isn’t about protecting the United States or you, except for extraordinarily rare, virtually accidental occurrences. It’s about wealth and power. Yet every politician and every government functionary speaks reverently of the sacred mission and crucial importance of “intelligence” in the manner of a syphilitic preacher who clutches a tatty, moth-eaten doll of the Madonna, which he digitally manipulates by sticking his fingers in its orifices. Most people would find his behavior shockingly obscene, if they noticed it. But they don’t notice it, so mesmerized are they by the preacher with his phonily awestruck words about the holy of holies and the ungraspably noble purpose of his mission. Even as the suppurating sores on the preacher’s face ooze blood and pus, his audience can only gasp, “We must pay attention to what he says! He wants only the best for us! He’s trying to save us!” What the preacher says — what every politician and national security official says on this subject — is a goddamned lie. The ruling class has figured out yet another way to make a killing, both figuratively and literally. They want wealth and power, and always more wealth and power. That’s what “intelligence” and “national security” is about, and nothing else at all. When you hear Keith Alexander, or James Clapper, or Barack Obama talk about “intelligence” and surveillance, how your lives depend on them, and why you must trust them to protect you if you wish to continue existing at all, think of the preacher. Think of his open sores, of the blood and pus slowly dribbling down his face. All of them are murdering crooks running a racket. They are intent on amassing wealth and power, and they’ve stumbled on a sure-fire way to win the acquiescence, and often the approval, of most people. They are driven by the worst of motives, including their maddened knowledge that there will always remain a few people and events that they will be unable to control absolutely. For the rest of us, their noxious games are a sickening display of power at its worst. For us, on a faster or slower schedule, in ways that are more or less extreme, their lies and machinations are only a Dance of Death. There is much more in Silber’s essays; go read them all now, if you haven’t done already."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 25, 2013 23:10:22 GMT -6
from Paul Craig Roberts.org A New Beginning Without Washington’s Sanctimonious Maskby Paul Craig Roberts "It is hard to understand the fuss that Washington and its media whores are making over Edward Snowden. We have known for a long time that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying for years without warrants on the communications of Americans and people throughout the world. Photographs of the massive NSA building in Utah built for the purpose of storing the intercepted communications of the world have been published many times. It is not clear to an ordinary person what Snowden has revealed that William Binney and other whistleblowers have not already revealed. Perhaps the difference is that Snowden has provided documents that prove it, thereby negating Washington’s ability to deny the facts with its usual lies. Whatever the reason for Washington’s blather, it certainly is not doing the US government any good. Far more interesting than Snowden’s revelations is the decision by governments of other countries to protect a truth-teller from the Stasi in Washington. Hong Kong kept Snowden’s whereabouts secret so that an amerikan black-op strike or a drone could not be sent to murder him. Hong Kong told Washington that its extradition papers for Snowden were not in order and permitted Snowden to leave for Moscow. The Chinese government did not interfere with Snowden’s departure. The Russian government says it has no objection to Snowden having a connecting flight in Moscow. Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino responded to Washington’s threats with a statement that the Ecuadorian government puts human rights above Washington’s interests. Foreign Minister Patino said that Snowden served humanity by revealing that the Washington Stasi was violating the rights of “every citizen in the world.” Snowden merely betrayed “some elites that are in power in a certain country,” whereas Washington betrayed the entire world. With Hong Kong, China, Russia, Ecuador, and Cuba refusing to obey the Stasi’s orders, Washington is flailing around making a total fool of itself and its media prostitutes. Secretary of State John Kerry has been issuing warnings hand over fist. He has threatened Russia, China, Ecuador, and every country that aids and abets Snowden’s escape from the Washington Stasi. Those who don’t do Washington’s bidding, Kerry declared, will suffer adverse impacts on their relationship with the US. What a stupid thing for Kerry to say. Here is a guy who once was for peace but who has been turned by NSA spying on his personal affairs into an asset for the NSA. Try to realize the extraordinary arrogance and hubris in Kerry’s threat that China, Russia, and other countries will suffer bad relations with the US. Kerry is saying that amerika doesn’t have to care whether “the indispensable people” have bad relations with other countries, but those countries have to be concerned if they have bad relations with the “indispensable country.” What an arrogant posture for the US government to present to the world. Here we have a US Secretary of State lost in delusion along with the rest of Washington. A country that is bankrupt, a country that has allowed its corporations to destroy its economy by moving the best jobs offshore, a country whose future is in the hands of the printing press, a country that after eleven years of combat has been unable to defeat a few thousand lightly armed Taliban is now threatening Russia and China. God save us from the utter fools who comprise our government. The world is enjoying Washington’s humiliation at the hands of Hong Kong. A mere city state gave Washington the bird. In its official statement, Hong Kong shifted the focus from Snowden to his message and asked the US government to explain its illegal hacking of Hong Kong’s information systems. China’s state newspaper, The People’s Daily, wrote: “The United States has gone from a model of human rights to an eavesdropper on personal privacy, the manipulator of the centralized power over the international internet, and the mad invader of other countries’ networks. . . The world will remember Edward Snowden. It was his fearlessness that tore off Washington’s sanctimonious mask.” China’s Global Times, a subsidiary of The People’s Daily, accused Washington of attacking “a young idealist who has exposed the sinister scandals of the US government.” Instead of apologizing “Washington is showing off its muscle by attempting to control the whole situation.” China’s official Xinhua news agency reported that Snowden’s revelations had placed “Washington in a really awkward situation. They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age.” The Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made it clear that Russia’s sympathy is with Snowden, not with the amerikan Stasi state. Human rights ombudsman Vladimir Lukin said that it was unrealistic to expect the Russian government to violate law to seize a transit passenger who had not entered Russia and was not on Russian soil. RT’s Gayane Chichakyan reported that Washington is doing everything it can to shift attention away from Snowden’s revelations that “show that the US has lied and has been doing the same as they accuse China of doing.” Ecuador says the traitor is Washington, not Snowden. The stuck pig squeals from the NSA director–”Edward Snowden has caused irreversible damage to US”–are matched by the obliging squeals from members of the House and Senate, themselves victims of the NSA spying, as was the Director of the CIA who was forced to resign because of a love affair. The NSA is in position to blackmail everyone in the House and Senate, in the White House itself, in all the corporations, the universities, the media, every organization at home and abroad, who has anything to hide. You can tell who is being blackmailed by the intensity of the squeals, such as those of Dianne Feinstein (D, CA) and Mike Rogers (R, MI). With any luck, a patriot will leak what the NSA has on Feinstein and Rogers, neither of whom could possibly scrape any lower before the NSA. The gangster government in Washington that has everything to hide is now in NSA’s hands and will follow orders. The pretense that amerika is a democracy responsible to the people has been exposed. The US is run by and for the NSA. Congress and the White House are NSA puppets. Let’s quit calling the NSA the National Security Agency. Clearly, NSA is a threat to the security of every person in the entire world. Let’s call the NSA what it really is–the National Stasi Agency, the largest collection of Gestapo in human history. You can take for granted that every media whore, every government prostitute, every ignorant flag-waver who declares Snowden to be a traitor is either brainwashed or blackmailed. They are the protectors of NSA tyranny. They are our enemies. The world has been growing increasingly sick of Washington for a long time. The bullying, the constant stream of lies, the gratuitous wars and destruction have destroyed the image hyped by Washington of the US as a “light unto the world.” The world sees the US as a plague upon the world. Following Snowden’s revelations, Germany’s most important magazine, Der Spiegal, had the headline: “Obama’s Soft Totalitarianism: Europe Must Protect Itself From America.” The first sentence of the article asks: “Is Barack Obama a friend? Revelations about his government’s vast spying program call that into doubt. The European Union must protect the Continent from America’s reach for omnipotence.” Der Spiegal continues: “We are being watched. All the time and everywhere. And it is the Americans who are doing the watching. On Tuesday, the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented is coming for a visit. If Barack Obama is our friend then we really don’t need to be terribly worried about our enemies.” There is little doubt that German Interior Minister Hans Peter Friedrich has lost his secrets to NSA spies. Friedrich rushed to NSA’s defense, declaring: ”that’s not how you treat friends.” As Der Spiegal made clear, the minister was not referring “to the fact that our trans-Atlantic friends were spying on us. Rather, he meant the criticism of that spying. Friedrich’s reaction is only paradoxical on the surface and can be explained by looking at geopolitical realities. The US is, for the time being, the only global power–and as such it is the only truly sovereign state in existence. All others are dependent–either as enemies or allies. And because most prefer to be allies, politicians–Germany’s included–prefer to grin and bear it.” It is extraordinary that the most important publication in Germany has acknowledged that the German government is Washington’s puppet state. Der Spiegel says: “German citizens should be able to expect that their government will protect them from spying by foreign governments. But the German interior minister says instead: ‘We are grateful for the excellent cooperation with US secret services.’ Friedrich didn’t even try to cover up his own incompetence on the surveillance issue. ‘Everything we know about it, we have learned from the media,’ he said. The head of the country’s domestic intelligence agency, Hans-Georg Maassen, was not any more enlightened. ‘I didn’t know anything about it,’ he said. And Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger was also apparently in the dark. ‘These reports are extremely unsettling,’ she said. With all due respect: These are the people who are supposed to be protecting our rights? If it wasn’t so frightening, it would be absurd.” For those moronic amerikans who say, “I’m not doing anything wrong, I don’t care if they spy,” Der Spiegal writes that a “monitored human being is not a free one.” We have reached the point where we “free americans” have to learn from our German puppets that we are not free. Here, read it for yourself: www.spiegel.de/international/world/europe-must-stand-up-to-american-cyber-snooping-a-906250.htmlPresent day Germany is a new country, flushed of its past by war and defeat. Russia is also a new country that has emerged from the ashes of an unrealistic ideology. Hope always resides with those countries that have most experienced evil in government. If Germany were to throw off its amerikan overlord and depart NATO, amerikan power in Europe would collapse. If Germany and Russia were to unite in defense of truth and human rights, Europe and the world would have a new beginning. A new beginning is desperately needed. Chris Floyd explains precisely what is going on, which is something you will never hear from the presstitutes. Read it while you still can: www.globalresearch.ca/follow-the-money-the-secret-heart-of-the-secret-state-the-deeper-implications-of-the-snowden-revelations/5340132There would be hope if Americans could throw off their brainwashing, follow the lead of Debra Sweet and others, and stand up for Edward Snowden and against the Stasi State. www.opednews.com/populum/printer_friendly.php?content=a&id=167695 "
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 25, 2013 23:02:07 GMT -6
Nothing has changed since I first posted this.
Except for Obama's declaration that he can "legally" murder US citizens via drone attacks, and that the 4th Amendment is, again, just another g**-d*** piece of paper.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 25, 2013 22:44:25 GMT -6
Fresh cut bank instrument for lease 39 minutes ago Sorin Lassmann said: We arrange Following Bank Instruments Letter of Credit ( LC) From Various Banks in Singapore / HongKong / Europe /USA Used For Import / Export Business and Trade Finance . 90/180DAYS Bank Guarantee ( BG ) Fresh Cut Slightly Seasoned Seasoned Stand By Letter of Credit ( SBLC ) 90DAYS / 180/ 365DAYS Regards Contact : Mr. Sorin Lassmann Email: providermandate.ls@gmail.com Skype ID: ls.nicu spam by broker selling financial items Read more: www.unlawflcombatnt.proboards.com/thread/12666/fresh-cut-bank-instrument-lease?page=1#scrollTo=39749#ixzz2XEbEkTKWThanks for letting me know, Jeff. ProBoards has essentially destroyed this forum with their unnecessary, ass-holy changes. I can't exalt anyone, and I can't even find posts. Talk about "change-for-the-sake-of-change" mentality. There is no benefit whatsoever to the new, twit-brain, text-message-friendly garbage Pro-Boards has imposed upon this forum. The trend-tards that made these changes are exemplary of exactly what's wrong with this country, and why we're going down the tubes. The new changes have simply dumbed-down this forum, the same way I-phones and text-messaging have dumbed down all other communications. All that this worthless, new technology has done has made us a nation of short-attention span, attention-deficit disorder morons.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 25, 2013 11:47:54 GMT -6
from oftwominds.com via Patrick.net www.oftwominds.com/blogjun13/yields-rise6-13.html?source=Patrick.netEvery Asset That Depends on Cheap, Abundant Credit (Housing, Bonds, Stocks) Is Doomed June 21, 2013 By Charles Hugh Smith "Four words: financialization, debtocracy, diminishing returns. About a month ago I asked What If Stocks, Bonds and Housing All Go Down Together? (May 24, 2013). Why would such an outrageous thought even occur to me? 4 words: financialization, debtocracy, diminishing returns. The entire global economy, developed and developing nations alike, is now dependent on cheap, abundant credit for everything: for "growth," for asset inflation, and ultimately for central state deficit spending, which props up all the cartels, rentier arrangements, fiefdoms and armies of toadies, lackeys, apparatchiks and embezzlers that suck off the Status Quo. I have long endeavored to explain the harsh reality of neofeudal, neocolonial financialization: Neofeudalism and the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (May 24, 2012) and the neofeudal debtocracy that depends on low yields (interest rates) to enable enormous deficit spending: Why Krugman and the Keynesians Are Lackeys for the Neofeudal Debtocracy (April 24, 2013). The wheels fall off the entire financialized debtocracy wagon once yields rise. There's nothing mysterious about this: 1. As interest rates/yields rise, all the existing bonds paying next to nothing plummet in market value 2. As mortgage rates rise, there's nobody left who can afford Housing Bubble 2.0 prices, so home prices fall off a cliff 3. Once you can get 5+% yield on cash again, few people are willing to risk capital in the equities markets in the hopes that they can earn more than 5% yield before the next crash wipes out 40% of their equity 4. As asset classes decline, lenders are wary of loaning money against these assets; if the collateral for the loan (real estate, bonds, stocks, etc.) are in a waterfall decline, no sane lender will risk capital on a bet that the collateral will be sufficient to cover losses should the borrower default.... [Mortgage] Rates were pushed to 17+% to snuff inflation in the early 1980s, and they've dropped over the past 30 years to historic lows: the rate for a fixed-rate 30-year conventional mortgage was about 3.5% a few weeks ago. It has now risen above 4%. In the golden age of growth from 1991 to 2002, mortgages rates bounced between about 7% and 9%. The band from 1970 to 1979 was about 7.5% to 10%. In other words, in eras of strong growth and low inflation, mortgage rates have been around 7% to 9%. So what happens to the monthly payments when the mortgage rate doubles from 4% to 8%? The monthly payments rise by about 54%. And what happens to the price of houses when rates double? They fall to the point that households borrowing money at 7.5% - 8% can afford to buy a house, i.e. a price much lower than today's Housing Bubble 2.0 prices. Here's mortgage debt. If mortgage debt had expanded at the previous rate, total debt would be closer to $5 trillion instead of $10 trillion. You see what happens when debt becomes cheap and abundant: debt rises faster than wages or assets. But hasn't household wealth increased mightily in the past decades? Here is a chart that plots the relationship of household net worth and total credit owed, i.e. debt: Household wealth may be rising, but what this chart reveals is debt is rising even faster--that's why the line is declining. Put another way, every dollar of new debt is generating less and less wealth. You might think that The Federal Reserve's policy of making credit cheap and abundant would goose people to consume and invest more money. Alas, the velocity of money is hitting historic lows: the Fed may be creating credit but people and enterprises aren't putting that money into circulation. It's called diminishing returns: every dollar of debt creates interest payments, but it's no longer doing households or enterprises any good. The Fatal Disease of the Status Quo: Diminishing Returns (May 1, 2013). That's why all asset classes that depend on cheap, abundant credit are doomed: once yields/rates rise, the valuations of those assets implode. And once valuations implode, there's not enough collateral left to support the loans used buy all those cheap-credit-inflated assets. So the financial system also implodes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Things are falling apart--that is obvious. But why are they falling apart? The reasons are complex and global. Our economy and society have structural problems that cannot be solved by adding debt to debt. We are becoming poorer, not just from financial over-reach, but from fundamental forces that are not easy to identify or understand."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 24, 2013 22:53:06 GMT -6
from Yahoo/AP Police Stater Nancy Pelosi barfs up her own defense of the Great One and defense of warrantless, un-Constitutional spying on Americans accused of no wrongdoing. Pelosi's defense of NSA surveillance draws boos"House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has disappointed some of her liberal base with her defense of the Obama administration's classified surveillance of U.S. residents' phone and Internet records."Ahem. She's disappointed a lot more than 'some of her liberal base.' She's disappointed her core constituency and everyone that has any interest in Constitutional protections against warrantless searches and without any probable cause whatsoever.
Our forefathers wrote the 4th Amendment for exactly this reason--to prevent the Government from sweeping up large amounts of information on completely innocent American citizens, that could later be used against them to build false criminal cases on misinformation & partial information that it had no reason to have ever collected in the first place."Some of the activists attending the annual Netroots Nation political conference Saturday booed and interrupted the San Francisco Democrat when she commented on the surveillance programs carried out by the National Security Agency and revealed by a former contractor, Edward Snowden, The San Jose Mercury News reports (http://bit.ly/19fB6U4).
The boos came when Pelosi said that Snowden had violated the law and that the government needed to strike a balance between security and privacy.
As she was attempting to argue that Obama's approach to citizen surveillance was an improvement over the policies under President George W. Bush, an activist, identified by the Mercury News as Mac Perkel of Gilroy, stood up and tried loudly to question her, prompting security guards to escort him out of the convention hall.
"Leave him alone!" audience members shouted. Others yelled "Secrets and lies!," ''No secret courts!" and "Protect the First Amendment!," according to the Mercury News.
Perkel told the newspaper that he thinks Pelosi does not fully understand what the NSA is up to.
Several others in the audience walked out in support of Perkel.
"We're listening to our progressive leaders who are supposed to be on our side of the team saying it's OK for us to get targeted" for online surveillance, said Jana Thrift of Eugene, Ore. "It's crazy. I don't know who Nancy Pelosi really is."
Netroots Nation is an organizing and training convention for progressive political leaders. Pelosi was Saturday's keynote speaker at the event, which opened Thursday at the San Jose Convention Center and was scheduled to conclude Sunday.
Her remarks criticizing the Republican majority in the House and encouraging powerful women brought applause, cheers and laughs."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 24, 2013 11:59:06 GMT -6
from Bloomberg via Patrick.net www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-18/mortgage-bond-auction-failures-reach-most-in-2013-as-prices-drop.html?source=Patrick.netMortgage-Bond Auction Failures Reach Most in 2013 as Prices DropJune 18, 2013 By Jody Shenn "U.S. home-loan bonds without government backing are failing to trade at investor auctions at the fastest pace this year as prices tumble after a rally. The share of non-agency bonds reported by dealers as not trading after being included in widely marketed auctions rose to 44% in the first half of June, up from 18% last month, according to data from New York-based Empirasign Strategies LLC, which tracks the information. A total of $9.5 billion of the debt was offered, about the same pace as in the first four months this year, after $32.3 billion in all of May. Typical prices for senior securities backed by option adjustable-rate mortgages dropped to 68 cents on the dollar last week from 74 cents a month earlier, as concern that the Federal Reserve will curb its bond buying roils financial markets, Barclays Plc data show. Such declines are slowing trading as potential buyers offer bids that sellers consider too low, and Wall Street banks fail to take up the slack. “The Street is long from a lot of customer sales in the last six weeks, and the move down in price has had an impact on their ability to provide liquidity,” Scott Buchta, head of fixed-income strategy at New York-based brokerage Brean Capital LLC, said today in a telephone interview. Potential buyers are being “much more opportunistic,” while some sellers are trying to “execute at yesterday’s levels.” Others are seeking bids simply to gauge current prices, he said. Values Drop Values in the $900 billion non-agency market are slumping after soaring through early May as the Fed’s stimulus efforts drove investors to seek potentially higher returns and housing rebounded with the fastest gains in prices since 2006.... The option ARM securities, which fell as low as 33 cents on the dollar in 2009, rose from 65 cents at the start of the year. The underlying loans can allow borrowers to pay less than the interest due by increasing how much they owe. Investor auctions of non-agency bonds known as bids wanted in competition are slowing again. Volumes earlier this year were depressed by holders seeking to benefit from later gains. Trading was boosted last month by an $8.7 billion sale from Lloyds Banking Group Plc.... Non-agency securities lack guarantees from government-supported Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or U.S.-owned Ginnie Mae. Bonds backed by the riskiest subprime mortgages issued to borrowers with poor credit before housing collapsed have fallen 3.7% this month.... “Given the increased volatility in the markets and concerns over Fed policy, further price declines in non-agencies cannot be ruled out,” Barclays analysts including Jasraj Vaidya and Sandeep Bordia wrote in a June 14 report."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 24, 2013 11:39:56 GMT -6
from the NY Times via Patrick.net www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/business/the-federal-reserves-framers-would-be-shocked.html?source=Patrick.net&_r=0The Federal Reserve’s Framers Would Be ShockedJune 22, 2013 By ROGER LOWENSTEIN "One hundred years ago today, President Woodrow Wilson went before Congress and demanded that it “act now” to create the Federal Reserve System. His proposal set off a fierce debate. One of the plan’s most strident critics, Representative Charles A. Lindbergh Sr., the father of the aviator, predicted that the Federal Reserve Act would establish “the most gigantic trust on earth,” and that the Fed would become an economic dictator or, as he put it, an “invisible government by the money power.” Had the congressman witnessed Ben S. Bernanke’s news conference last week, he surely would have felt vindicated. Investors, traders and ordinary citizens listened with rapt attention as Mr. Bernanke, the Fed chairman, spoke of his timetable for scaling down stimulative bond purchases. “If things are worse, we will do more,” he said of the nation’s economy. “If things are better, we will do less.” In 1913, few of the framers of the Fed anticipated that the institution would do anything of the sort. The preamble to the act specified three purposes: to furnish “an elastic currency,” to provide a market for commercial paper so that banks would have more liquidity, and to improve supervision of banks. Regulating the economy was not among them. The framers saw that the banking system needed reform, but they were sorely divided about how to go about it. Wall Street wanted a strong central bank — preferably under private control. Populists like William Jennings Bryan, Wilson’s secretary of state, insisted that banks answer to the public. But many people from the farm belt, like Lindbergh, were opposed to any powerful financial agency. The backdrop to the legislation was that the United States, in the late 19th century, suffered frequent financial panics. In 1907, banks ran out of cash and the panic snowballed into a depression. The nation had no central reserve — no agency that, in a crisis, could allocate credit where needed. All it had was J.P. Morgan Sr., who arranged for a private loan syndicate. That was not enough, and, anyway, in the spring of 1913 Morgan died. Leading financiers, like Paul Warburg, a German immigrant who wanted to replicate the Reichsbank in his adopted home, thought the United States needed some coordinating agency. They thought that the system was too decentralized. Many ordinary Americans disagreed. They thought banking was too centralized already, and that credit shortages were the fault of uncompetitive practices on Wall Street. Over the winter of 1912-13, Congress staged sensational hearings to unmask the “money trust” — a supposed conspiracy among the biggest banks. The hearings did not uncover evidence tying credit shortages to collusive behavior. They did establish that Wall Street tycoons were overly clubby with one another — especially in the distribution of securities — and not exactly beacons of free competition. The Democrats, who won control of Congress in 1912, promised in their platform to free the country “from control or domination by what is known as the money trust.” What’s more, they specifically opposed the creation of a “central bank,” which the delegates saw as a stalking horse for the money trust. THUS, supporters of the Federal Reserve legislation faced a delicate problem: how to fashion a centralizing agency and not run afoul of the strong popular sentiment against centralization. Representative Carter Glass of Virginia, the chief sponsor of the Federal Reserve Act, embodied this dichotomy. Before 1913, his claim to fame was helping to draft a state constitution that had disenfranchised African-Americans. He was an ardent champion of states’ rights. Like most Southern Democrats, he wanted to restrain federal authority — in banking as well as in race relations. Laissez-faire Democrats since Jefferson and Jackson had opposed central banks, and Glass embraced that tradition. But he recognized a need for banking reform, and wanted a more elastic currency to avert money panics and moderate depressions. His solution was to propose privately owned regional reserve banks that would be new centers of banking strength, away from Wall Street. Wilson horrified him by insisting that a Reserve Board sit atop the individual banks. To Glass, this federalist design looked too much like a central bank. Then Wilson horrified Wall Street by insisting that Reserve Board members be named by the president, rather than by banks. “History and experience unmistakably show that governments are not good bankers,” hissed The New York Times, which typically toed the Wall Street line. The Washington Post accused Wilson of engineering “a colossal political machine.” Facing Congress on June 23, Wilson touched a popular chord when he said banks should be “the instruments, not the masters, of business.” But he also said that “our banking laws must mobilize reserves.” This had been Warburg’s main goal — to pool banking reserves so they could be tapped as needed. Historians still debate what the Fed’s framers intended because many details were left vague, and the Fed evolved over time. When the act was signed, in December 1913, few anticipated that the Federal Reserve Board would become so central to the economy, though it did have authority over interest rates. And Glass pledged that the new agency would be restrained by the requirements of the gold standard — which the nation eventually abandoned. The current Fed would dismay the framers. Glass would be shocked at the power of Mr. Bernanke. Warburg might applaud the Fed’s efforts to temper a recession, while frowning on its printing of “fiat money.” For some of the same reasons, “end the Fed” is a rallying cry among Tea Partyers, and among critics with a fondness for the gold standard. Representative Kevin Brady, a Texas Republican who is chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, has marked the Fed’s centennial by calling for a commission “to examine the United States monetary policy” and “evaluate alternative monetary regimes.” The trenchant question is whether nostalgia for “originalism” is a useful guide to policy. Wilson knew well that the Second Bank of the United States — a 19th-century precursor to the Fed — had been left to die, at the insistence of President Andrew Jackson. But Wilson was trying to govern for the present, not to placate his party’s ghosts. Congress today should receive reform proposals in the same spirit."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 23, 2013 21:35:09 GMT -6
from Yahoo News Analysis: For Obama, a world of Snowden troublesnews.yahoo.com/former-nsa-contractor-snowden-leaves-hong-kong-moscow-080843121.htmlBy James Pomfret and Lidia Kelly "HONG KONG/MOSCOW (Reuters) - Fugitive former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden was seeking asylum in Ecuador on Sunday after Hong Kong allowed his departure for Russia in a slap to Washington's efforts to extradite him on espionage charges. In a major embarrassment for President Barack Obama, an aircraft thought to have carried Snowden landed in Moscow on Sunday, and the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said he was "bound for the Republic of Ecuador via a safe route for the purposes of asylum." Earlier, Ecuadorean Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino, visiting Vietnam, tweeted: "The Government of Ecuador has received an asylum request from Edward J. #Snowden." It was a blow to Obama's foreign policy goals of resetting ties with Russia and building a partnership with China. The leaders of both countries were willing to snub the American president in a month when each had held talks with Obama. The United States continued efforts to prevent Snowden from gaining asylum. It warned Western Hemisphere nations that Snowden "should not be allowed to proceed in any further international travel, other than is necessary to return him to the United States," a State Department official said. U.S. Senator Charles Schumer charged that Russian President Vladimir Putin likely knew and approved of Snowden's flight to Russia and predicted "serious consequences" for a U.S.-Russian relationship already strained over Syria and human rights. "Putin always seems almost eager to stick a finger in the eye of the United States - whether it is Syria, Iran and now of course with Snowden," Schumer, a New York Democrat, told CNN's "State of the Union" program. He also saw "the hand of Beijing" in Hong Kong's decision to let Snowden leave the Chinese territory despite the U.S. extradition request. ECUADOR ROLE Ecuador, which has been sheltering WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange at its London embassy for the past year, once again took center stage in an international diplomatic saga over U.S. data secrecy. Ecuador's ambassador to Russia, Patricio Alberto Chavez Zavala, told reporters at a Moscow airport hotel he would hold talks with Snowden and Sarah Harrison, a WikiLeaks representative. Hours later, shortly after midnight (2000 GMT Sunday), the ambassador emerged from a business-class lounge near the hotel and refused to say whether he had met Snowden or make any other comment. Shortly before he appeared, a cart with three plates of salmon and a Starbucks bag were rolled into the lounge. Snowden, who had worked at a U.S. National Security Agency facility in Hawaii, had been hiding in Hong Kong, the former British colony that returned to China in 1997, since leaking details about secret U.S. surveillance programs to news media. U.S. authorities had said on Saturday they were optimistic Hong Kong would cooperate over Snowden. U.S. authorities have charged Snowden with theft of federal government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence to an unauthorized person, with the latter two charges falling under the U.S. Espionage Act. A source at Russian airline Aeroflot said on Sunday that Snowden was booked on a flight scheduled to depart for Havana on Monday at 2:05 p.m. (1005 GMT) from the same Moscow airport where the flight from Hong Kong arrived, Sheremetyevo. The chief of Cuba's International Press Center, Gustavo Machin, said he had no such information though pro-government bloggers heaped praise on Snowden and condemned U.S. spying activity. Venezuela, Cuba and Ecuador are all members of the ALBA bloc, an alliance of leftist governments in Latin America that pride themselves on their "anti-imperialist" credentials. HONG KONG VIEW In their statement announcing Snowden's departure, the Hong Kong authorities said they were seeking clarification from Washington about reports of U.S. spying on government computers in the territory. The Obama administration has previously painted the United States as a victim of Chinese government computer hacking. At a summit this month, Obama called on his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping to acknowledge the threat posed by "cyber-enabled espionage" against the United States and to investigate the problem. Obama also met Putin in Northern Ireland last week. A spokesman for the Hong Kong government said it had allowed the departure of Snowden - considered a whistleblower by his supporters and a criminal or even a traitor by his critics - as the U.S. request for his arrest did not comply with the law. However, a U.S. Justice Department official said at no point in discussions through Friday did Hong Kong raise issues about the sufficiency of the U.S. arrest request. "In light of this, we find their decision to be particularly troubling," the official said. U.S. sources familiar with the issue said Washington had revoked Snowden's U.S. passport. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said revoking the passport of someone under a felony arrest warrant was routine and does not affect citizenship status.... The issue has been a major problem for Obama, who has found his domestic and international policy agenda sidelined as he has scrambled to deflect accusations that U.S. surveillance practices violate privacy protections and civil rights. The president has maintained that the measures have been necessary to thwart attacks on the United States. The White House had no comment on Sunday's developments. WikiLeaks said Snowden was accompanied by diplomats and that Harrison, a British legal researcher working for WikiLeaks, was "accompanying Mr Snowden in his passage to safety." "The WikiLeaks legal team and I are interested in preserving Mr Snowden's rights and protecting him as a person," former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon, legal director of WikiLeaks and lawyer for Assange, said in a statement. "What is being done to Mr Snowden and to Mr Julian Assange - for making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest - is an assault against the people." WIKILEAKS CASE Assange, an Australian, said last week he would not leave the sanctuary of Ecuador's London embassy even if Sweden stopped pursuing sexual assault claims against him because he feared arrest on the orders of the United States. The latest drama coincides with the court-martial of Bradley Manning, a U.S. soldier accused of providing reams of classified documents to WikiLeaks, which Assange began releasing on the Internet in 2010, and, according to some critics, put national security and people's lives at risk. A spokesman for WikiLeaks said the decision on Ecuador was made by Snowden and that "various governments were approached." Hong Kong's South China Morning Post newspaper earlier quoted Snowden offering new details about U.S. surveillance activities, including accusations of U.S. hacking of Chinese mobile phone firms and targeting of China's Tsinghua University. Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Snowden needed to be brought back for trial. "He could have a lot, lot more that may really put people in jeopardy," she told CBS's "Face the Nation." Documents previously leaked by Snowden revealed that the NSA has access to vast amounts of Internet data such as emails, chat rooms and video from large companies, including Facebook and Google, under a government program known as Prism.The head of the NSA, General Keith Alexander, said he did not know why it failed to prevent Snowden leaving Hawaii for Hong Kong with the secrets. "We are now putting in place actions that would give us the ability to track our system administrators, what they're doing, what they're taking, a two-man rule," he told ABC's "This Week." "We've changed the passwords. But at the end of the day, we have to trust that our people are going to do the right thing." "
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 23, 2013 21:24:38 GMT -6
The US Government will stop at nothing to silence Eric Snowden, who revealed how the NSA is illegally spying on Americans (despite all the official claptrap about it being "legal".) Snowden had previously fled to Hong Kong, but is now thought to be enroute to Ecuador for asylum--thanks to the Obamatocracy's pukish obsession about security leaks when it illegally spies on Americans. Heaven forbid that Snowden's revelations might lead to even more insight about the Obama administrations' murder of American citizens and foreign citizens via drone strikes. (At least Nazi Germany had fake trials before they executed their own citizens. The US isn't even doing that.) From AP"HONG KONG (AP) — A former National Security Agency contractor says that U.S. hacking targets in China included the nation's mobile-phone companies and two universities hosting extensive Internet traffic hubs in the latest allegations as Washington pushes Hong Kong to extradite the ex-contractor. The latest charges from Edward Snowden came in a series of reports published over the weekend by the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong's leading English-language daily. The newspaper, which appears to have access to Snowden, said Saturday he is still in Hong Kong and not in police custody. On Saturday, the Obama administration warned Hong Kong against dragging out the extradition of Snowden, reflecting concerns over a possible long legal battle before he ever appears in a U.S. courtroom to answer espionage charges for revealing two highly classified surveillance programs. A formal extradition request would also pit Beijing against Washington at a time China is trying to deflect U.S. accusations that it carries out extensive surveillance on American government and commercial operations. The U.S. has contacted authorities in Hong Kong to seek Snowden's extradition, the National Security Council said Saturday in a statement. The NSC advises the president on national security. Snowden told the South China Morning Post that "the NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cellphone companies to steal all of your SMS data." It added that Snowden said he had documents to support the hacking allegations, but the report did not identify the documents. It said he spoke to the paper in a June 12 interview. With a population of more than 1.3 billion, China has massive cell-phone companies. China Mobile is the world's largest mobile network carrier, with 735 million subscribers, followed by China Unicom with 258 million users and China Telecom with 172 million users. Snowden said Tsinghua University in Beijing and Chinese University in Hong Kong, home of some of the country's major Internet traffic hubs, were targets of extensive hacking by U.S. spies this year. He said the NSA was focusing on so-called "network backbones" in China, through which enormous amounts of Internet data passes. Snowden is believed to be hiding in an unknown location in Hong Kong, where he has been holed up since admitting to providing information to the news media about highly classified NSA surveillance programs. He has not been seen publicly since he checked out of a Hong Kong hotel on June 10. The newspaper reports came after a one-page criminal complaint against Snowden was unsealed Friday in federal court, revealing he had been charged with espionage and theft. The Obama administration on Saturday warned Hong Kong against slow-walking his extradition, with White House national security adviser Tom Donilon saying in an interview with CBS News: "Hong Kong has been a historically good partner of the United States in law enforcement matters, and we expect them to comply with the treaty in this case." Some Hong Kong lawmakers have called on Beijing to intervene and instruct the Hong Kong government on how to handle the situation before his case goes through the courts, but Beijing has yet to comment. The Hong Kong government has also not commented. But China's state-run media have used the case to poke back at Washington after the U.S. had spent the past several months pressuring China on its international spying operations.. A commentary published Sunday by Xinhua News Agency said Snowden's disclosures of U.S. spying activities in China have "put Washington in a really awkward situation." "Washington should come clean about its record first. It owes ... an explanation to China and other countries it has allegedly spied on," it said. "It has to share with the world the range, extent and intent of its clandestine hacking programs." "
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 21, 2013 11:38:44 GMT -6
from the CBO www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44346-Immigration.pdfI'll insert the CBO language here later. In general, the CBO admits that the new bill, with it's amnesty provisions, will suppress wages. However, the suppression is grossly underestimated, due to the CBO's focus only on Capital-per-worker. In fact, the biggest suppression will come from the increased supply of labor, which is GUARANTEED to suppress wages (labor price), as does an increase in the supply of anything.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 19, 2013 23:02:10 GMT -6
from the National Review: www.nationalreview.com/article/351212/rubios-folly-cont-editorsRubio's Folly"It is painful to watch Marco Rubio’s maneuverings on immigration. He is refusing to say whether he will vote “yes” on his own Gang of Eight bill after spending months drafting, defending, and helping shepherd it to the floor. He has supposedly discovered that the enforcement provisions are inadequate, although he has done countless interviews touting that the bill contains the “toughest immigration-enforcement measures in the history of United States” (which is what his website still says). At the same time, Rubio declares the bill 95–96 percent perfect. This is all very confusing, but perhaps we can help the senator get his story straight: He should vote against the bill. It is an amnesty-first, enforcement-maybe program drawn up mainly to reflect the priorities of 11 million citizens of other countries rather than the concerns of more than 300 million citizens of the United States. Most of the so-called security triggers in the bill are paper tigers. The requirement that those applying for amnesty have clean criminal records in fact allows for two misdemeanor convictions and, like most of the triggers, can be waived by the Department of Homeland Security. Senator John Cornyn of Texas has sought to have those with drunk-driving convictions excluded, but he is meeting resistance — Senator John McCain called the Cornyn amendment, which modestly strengthens other security provisions as well, a “poison pill.” The bill as written excludes only those with three or more drunk-driving convictions — “habitual” drunk drivers. Likewise, the fines for illegal immigrants contemplated by the Gang of Eight can, under the current bill, be waived by DHS, and the collection of unpaid taxes applies only to levies already assessed by our dear friends at the IRS. The main security provisions of the legislation require only that DHS draw up a plan for security. (That is classic Washington: a plan to have a plan.) The much-vaunted requirement that DHS achieve 90 percent effectiveness for border security requires only self-certification by the DHS; in the unlikely event that DHS does not give itself a passing score, the only result under the law would be the creation of a commission to study the problem. Completing a border fence is left to the discretion of the DHS, which does not support doing so. Likewise, the requirement that the federal government institute a system of controls on those who overstay their visas — which already is a legal requirement and has been since 1996 — is left largely to the discretion of DHS. All of the concerns above are problematic on their own, but they are rendered especially troublesome by the fact that the legalization of millions of illegal immigrants happens first, immediately and irreversibly. If this bill should be signed into law, the amnesty would go into effect immediately, and the most that any of the so-called triggers would do is delay the process of allowing the formerly illegal immigrants to apply for green cards and citizenship. That is the fundamental flaw of Senator Rubio’s design, and none of his playing Hamlet about the issue is going to change that. The bill is not wrong only in its details, but in its fundamental architecture, including in its guest-worker program and increases in other categories of low-skilled workers. The Gang of Eight bill does not serve the economic interests of the United States. The fact is that our public schools do an excellent job of producing an abundant supply of unskilled workers with little or no proficiency in English, and the national labor force is not achingly in need of a few million more. And in failing to ensure that the borders and ports of entry are truly and robustly secure, it shortchanges the national-security interests of the country as well. Neither changing green-card rules to accommodate domestic labor-market needs nor physically securing the border requires an amnesty for those illegal immigrants who are already present. Nor does implementing E-Verify and complying with existing law on entry-exit visas. In fact, there is not a single item on the productive-immigration-reform agenda that requires an amnesty for illegals — and, remarkably, nobody in this debate has made much of a serious attempt to explain how or why that amnesty is in the interests of the citizens of the United States. By more than doubling the number of so-called guest workers admitted each year, the bill would help create a permanent underclass of foreign workers. The 2007 Bush-Kennedy proposal was rejected in part because it would have added 125,000 new guest workers. The Gang of Eight bill would add 1.6 million in the first year, and about 600,000 a year after that: That’s the population of Philadelphia in Year One and the population of Boston each year after. That is a lot of taxation without representation. And that is on top of a 50 percent or more increase in the total level of legal immigration. While life as a member of an American underclass surely would be an attractive alternative for members of the underclasses of many other countries, the creation of a large population of second-class workers is undesirable from the point of view of the American national interest, which should be our guiding force in this matter. Beyond its treatment of illegal immigrants, the very large expansion in legal immigration that the bill would establish is problematic as well. While there are some persuasive economic arguments in favor of expanding legal immigration, the United States is a nation with an economy, not an economy with a nation. Our failure to fully assimilate new immigrants over the past several decades is not a reflection of our inability but our unwillingness to do so. That some are arguing for this bill as a necessary political sop to Hispanic voters is indicative of the toxic ethnic politics that we should be working to eliminate — and that radically higher levels of immigration would almost certainly entrench. As with strengthened security measures, proposals to prudently limit the total number of new immigrants have been rejected. The Gang of Eight’s play now is clearly to come up with some fig leaf of an amendment on enforcement that won’t affect the fundamentals of the bill, while giving enough Republicans cover to vote for it to get to a supermajority of 70. (And win back the dramatically wavering Rubio — this stagecraft has all the subtlety of the WWE.) Seventy votes is considered the threshold for pressuring the House to act on a “comprehensive reform” with all the same flaws of the Senate version. A note about the political background to all this: This bill is in no small part a reaction to the 2012 election, a product of the media-consultant complex that has convinced Republicans that immigration reform is the key to the Hispanic heart, and that Hispanic votes are the key to winning future presidential elections. Republicans probably are too optimistic about their prospects among Hispanic voters. But it is worth noting that the two sides in this immigration debate are being led by Hispanic Republican senators: Marco Rubio for the Gang of Eight, Ted Cruz for the opposition. One of them, needless to say, is making more sense than the other."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 19, 2013 22:42:03 GMT -6
It appears that the above graph shows the Mortgage Purchase Application index to be at 1998 levels, with very little actual recovery since the bubble peak in 2005-6. Is that right?
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 19, 2013 11:43:03 GMT -6
from the Daily Caller Farm bill sends plenty of pork to the wealthy and well connectedJune 14, 2013 By Steve Stanek "It takes some doing to design a government program that harms the environment, fleeces taxpayers and consumers, and shovels money to some of the nation’s wealthiest families and corporations. The nearly $1 trillion farm bill — yes, trillion — that has passed the U.S. Senate and is headed to a possible vote next week in the House of Representatives does all this. First, there’s environmental harm. This results from the outrageous crop insurance program, which most people outside agriculture probably believe pays for crop damage from hailstorms and other natural disasters. Crop insurance has instead become a revenue-protection program. The so-called Agriculture Risk Coverage provision works with crop insurance to guarantee farmers nearly 90 percent of their average revenue over the last five years. Prices the past few years have been at record highs, so if prices fall to more normal levels or crop yields drop, the declines in revenue will be covered. In addition, the federal government provides huge subsidies — more than half of crop insurance premiums — for farmers to buy coverage, and further backstops the reinsurance of private companies that sell the insurance. Farmers armed with this cheap insurance take big risks, planting on marginal soils prone to erosion, flooding, or other problems, knowing if their gambles turn out bad, their losses will be covered. Such lands would be better left unplowed, reducing erosion and providing natural flood protection and habitat for plants and animals. Second, the bill would fleece taxpayers and consumers. Those crop insurance subsidies and claims payments come courtesy of taxpayers. Americans also pay higher prices on food than they should. This happens in many ways. Here are just two examples: 1.) The U.S. has some of the highest sugar prices in the world because the farm program shuts out foreign competition. Thousands of jobs in the chocolate and candy industries have been moved overseas, where sugar prices are one-half or less what they are here. 2.) The farm bill would extend a program that keeps milk prices artificially high by ordering production cuts when the government decides there’s too much milk on the market. Third, the bill shovels money to wealthy families and corporations. Farmers with incomes above $250,000 make up about 10% of subsidy recipients yet receive 1/3rd of the crop insurance money. They don’t need this taxpayer support. Earlier this year the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service reported, “After adjusting for inflation, 2013’s net farm income, forecast at $128.2 billion, is expected to be the highest since 1973.” In that same announcement, the ERS reported, “Projected median total farm household income is expected to increase by 1.2 percent in 2012, to $57,723, and by an additional 1.9 percent in 2013, to $58,845.” By comparison, “Real median household income in the United States fell between the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) and the 2011 ACS, decreasing by 1.3 percent from $51,144 to $50,502,” according to the Census Bureau. The 2012 numbers are scheduled to be released in September. These farmers include many members of Congress, such as Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.), whose business has received more than $5 million in crop subsidies. There’s also Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-Tenn.), who has received nearly $3.5 million in subsidies. The Heritage Foundation recently published an entertaining rundown, “The Rich and Famous at the Farm Bill Trough.” Consider this: “There are no farms in Manhattan, but residents there have collected subsidies totaling nearly $9 million in the past seven years. Recipients also include Mark F. Rockefeller ($356,018) and David Rockefeller ($591,057). Yes, the Rockefeller family (Standard Oil, Chase Manhattan Bank, etc.),” the report notes. There’s more: “Over on the West Coast, in Beverly Hills 90210, the estate of comedian Jack Benny has collected $18,120 for a farm in Madera County, California, while $142,933 was paid to Mary Ann Mobley (Miss America of 1959) for a farm in Madison County, Mississippi.” This money for the rich is the rule, not the exception, the report notes: “The USDA’s Economic Research Service reports that two-thirds of the farms with income exceeding $1 million annually received government payments averaging $54,745 in 2011. Meanwhile, just 27 percent of farms with income of less than $100,000 received payments — averaging just $4,420 in 2011.” Of course, most of the so-called farm bill is really a food and welfare bill, as it funds food stamps and other nutrition programs. It includes measures to address fraud problems in those programs, and it does away with direct payments to farmers, but the games being played with crop insurance and other programs could more than make up for that revenue stream going away. The farm bill caters to the wealthy and politically well connected. Sadly, this is in keeping with the tenor of the times." Steve Stanek (sstanek@heartland.org) is a research fellow at The Heartland Institute.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 18, 2013 11:40:57 GMT -6
I received an email regarding the use of child and slave labor in the nation of Ivory Coast by Harry Potter Chocolates. This is the worst form of labor arbitrage and outsourcing imaginable--involving the replacement of American workers with slave & child labor. from my Email 'When children around the world buy Harry Potter chocolates, they could be supporting child slavery in the Ivory Coast. Warner Bros. supplier Behr's Chocolates scored 1 out of 48 possible measures to ensure their operations are slavery-free. Outraged consumers have asked Warner Bros. what steps are being taken to ensure their Harry Potter Chocolates are free of slave labor - but Warner Bros. has refused to respond. We're heading into the busiest time of the year for Warner Bros. theme parks - that's why taking a stand right now will make a big impact. Please tell Warner Bros. to make sure Harry Potter chocolates are slavery-free. Thanks for all you do! Bob Fertik' ------------------------ from Democrats.com"In the Ivory Coast of Africa, children as young as 7 are forced to work long hours collecting cocoa beans, often beaten if they work too slow or don't meet their quota. Some are sold for as little as a couple of dollars, trapped into a life of slavery (1). While many chocolate brands have made public commitments to find the best solution, Warner Bros. is lagging behind: 1. An independent investigation (2) into their supplier Behr's Chocolates led to a failing score of 1 out of 48 possible measures to ensure their operations are slavery-free; 2. Warner Bros. dismissed the findings of the investigation, simply stating that they were 'satisfied’ that fair labour practices were being used in the production of their chocolates; 3. Given the conflicting information, outraged consumers asked Warner Bros. what steps were taken to ensure there was no slavery in Harry Potter Chocolates. Warner Bros. refused to respond. As we head into one of the busiest times of the year for Warner Bros. theme parks. Children excited to experience the world of Harry Potter will be asking their parents to buy these chocolates. That's why taking a stand right now will make a big impact. Ask Warner Bros. what steps they’re taking to ensure Harry Potter chocolates are slavery-free." (1) news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/946952.stm(2) thehpalliance.org/i/campaigns/nihn/behr-scorecard.pdf
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 17, 2013 23:18:16 GMT -6
Continuation of the above:
"According to the U.K. newspaper, the hour-and-a-half chat was subject to Snowden's "security concerns and also his access to a secure Internet connection." Snowden did not disclose his location.
Earlier this month, Snowden was interviewed by the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald in his hotel room in Hong Kong. After the paper revealed his identity (at his request), he reportedly checked out of the hotel and went into hiding.
"I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest," Snowden said in his original interview. "There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over, because harming people isn't my goal. Transparency is."
On Monday, Snowden was asked if he was "suggesting that Manning indiscriminately dumped secrets into the hands of WikiLeaks" and intended to harm people. Bradley Manning, whose trial by court-martial is in its third week, is a former Army intelligence analyst charged with aiding the enemy.
"No, I'm not," Snowden responded. "WikiLeaks is a legitimate journalistic outlet and they carefully redacted all of their releases in accordance with a judgment of public interest. The unredacted release of cables was due to the failure of a partner journalist to control a passphrase. However, I understand that many media outlets used the argument that 'documents were dumped' to smear Manning, and want to make it clear that it is not a valid assertion here."
[Also read: NSA whistle-blower’s girlfriend feels ‘adrift’]
He was asked to elaborate on how much "direct access" the NSA had to phone-call records and if analysts could listen to the content of domestic calls without a warrant.
"The reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on—it's all the same," Snowden replied. "The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications."
Under authorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Snowden continued, "Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as 'incidental' collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications":
All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time—and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.
Snowden was also asked why he did not fly directly to Iceland, where he told the Guardian he would have preferred to seek asylum:
Leaving the US was an incredible risk, as NSA employees must declare their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored. There was a distinct possibility I would be interdicted en route, so I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration.
Snowden, who said he had not had contact with the Chinese, scoffed at speculation that he would provide classified information to the Chinese or other governments in exchange for asylum.
"This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk 'RED CHINA!' reaction to anything involving [Hong Kong] or the [People's Republic of China] and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct," Snowden replied. "Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn't I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now."
He also responded to the argument, made by U.S. officials, that the NSA spy program has foiled dozens of terror plots:
Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we've been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it....
Snowden added that he's become disillusioned with the public debate over his leak:
Initially I was very encouraged. 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."
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 17, 2013 11:55:39 GMT -6
from Yahoo News Snowden chats live with The Guardian: ‘Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped’by Dylan Stableford "Edward Snowden, America's most-wanted whistleblower, participated in a live online chat with The Guardian on Monday. The 29-year-old former defense contractor, who exposed the National Security Agency's massive domestic surveillance program after fleeing the United States, answered a series of questions submitted through the Guardian's website and Twitter (hashtag #AskSnowden). First, Snowden stressed that his controversial leaks did not reveal any U.S. "operations against legitimate military targets": He was asked how many copies of the NSA documents he made, and "if anything happens to you, do they still exist?" "All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me," Snowden wrote. "Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped....." More at: news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/snowden-live-chat-144220722.html
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 15, 2013 13:03:04 GMT -6
from the Associated Press Secret to Prism Success: Even Bigger Data SeizureSat, June 15, 2013 news.yahoo.com/secret-prism-success-even-bigger-123031861.html"In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft Corp. more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers. Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and Internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider. The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government. Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate. Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" — not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans. This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format. The revelation of Prism this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe. But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort. Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis. Whether by clever choice or coincidence, Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information. The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the president's daily briefing. Prism makes sense of the cacophony of the Internet's raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes. Many of the people interviewed for this report insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss a classified, continuing effort. But those interviews, along with public statements and the few public documents available, show there are two vital components to Prism's success. The 1st is how the government works closely with the companies that keep people perpetually connected to each other and the world. That story line has attracted the most attention so far. The 2nd and far murkier one is how Prism fits into a larger U.S. wiretapping program in place for years. ___ Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world's phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. That's its job. But Internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That's the FBI's job and it requires a warrant. Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more.... "You have to assume everything is being collected," said Bruce Schneier,* who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for 2 decades.The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching center, a spot where fiber optic cables enter the U.S. What followed was the most significant debate over domestic surveillance since the 1975 Church Committee, a special Senate committee led by Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, reined in the CIA and FBI for spying on Americans. Unlike the recent debate over Prism, however, there were no visual aids, no easy-to-follow charts explaining that the government was sweeping up millions of emails and listening to phone calls of people accused of no wrongdoing. The Bush administration called it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was keeping the United States safe.... The government has said it minimizes all conversations and emails involving Americans. Exactly what that means remains classified. But former U.S. officials familiar with the process say it allows the government to keep the information as long as it is labeled as belonging to an American and stored in a special, restricted part of a computer. That means Americans' personal emails can live in government computers.... The government doesn't automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now. What's unclear to the public is how long the government keeps the data. That is significant because the U.S. someday will have a new enemy. 2 decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security. The Bush administration shut down its warrantless wiretapping program in 2007 but endorsed a new law, the * Protect America Act, which allowed the wiretapping to continue with changes:* The NSA generally would have to explain its techniques and targets to a secret court in Washington, but individual warrants would not be required..... When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen. ....technology officials worried aloud that the government would trample on Americans' constitutional right against unlawful searches, and that the companies would be called on to help. The logistics were about to get daunting, too. For years, the companies had been handling requests from the FBI. Now Congress had given the NSA the authority to take information without warrants. Though the companies didn't know it, the passage of the Protect America Act gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially called US-98XN. It was known as Prism. Though many details are still unknown, it worked like this: Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas. By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places. A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan. With that, the government can issue "directives" to Internet companies to turn over information. While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major Internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.... Facebook said it received between 9,000 and 10,000 demands requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of last year. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted. How many of those were related to national security is unclear, and likely classified. The numbers suggest each request typically related to one or two people, not a vast range of users. Tech company officials were unaware there was a program named Prism. Even former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials who were on the job when the program went live and were aware of its capabilities said this past week that they didn't know what it was called. What the NSA called Prism, the companies knew as a streamlined system that automated and simplified the "Hoovering" from years earlier, the former assistant general counsel said.... Any company in the communications business can expect a visit, said Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle, a company that advertises software for secure, encrypted conversations. The government is eager to find easy ways around security. "They do this every 2 to 3 years," said Janke, who said government agents have approached his company but left empty-handed because his computer servers store little information. "They ask for the moon." That often creates tension between the government and a technology industry with a reputation for having a civil libertarian bent. Companies occasionally argue to limit what the government takes. Yahoo even went to court and lost in a classified ruling in 2008, The New York Times reported Friday..... Under Prism, the delivery process varied by company. Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.... Prism, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user. With Prism, the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email...becomes government property. Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too. That's one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt. In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it's the broader operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree. "I'm much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone," said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. "I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to." One unanswered question, according to a former technology executive at one of the companies involved, is whether the government can use the data from Prism to work backward. For example, not every company archives instant message conversations, chat room exchanges or videoconferences. But if Prism provided general details, known as metadata, about when a user began chatting, could the government "rewind" its copy of the global Internet stream, find the conversation and replay it in full?.... Whether the government has that power and whether it uses Prism this way remains a closely guarded secret. ___ A few months after Obama took office in 2009, the surveillance debate reignited in Congress because the NSA had crossed the line. Eavesdroppers, it turned out, had been using their warrantless wiretap authority to intercept far more emails and phone calls of Americans than they were supposed to. Obama, no longer opposed to the wiretapping, made unspecified changes to the process. The government said the problems were fixed.... Years after decrying Bush for it, Obama said Americans did have to make tough choices in the name of safety. "You can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said. Obama's administration, echoing his predecessor's, credited the surveillance with disrupting several terrorist attacks. Leading figures from the Bush administration who endured criticism during Obama's candidacy have applauded the president for keeping the surveillance intact. Jason Weinstein, who recently left the Justice Department as head of its cybercrime and intellectual property section, said it's no surprise Obama continued the eavesdropping. "You can't expect a president to not use a legal tool that Congress has given him.... Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn't really matter how Prism works, technically. * Just assume the government collects everything, he said. He said it doesn't matter what the government and the companies say, either. It's spycraft, after all.* "Everyone is playing word games," he said. "No one is telling the truth." ___ Associated Press writers Eileen Sullivan, Peter Svensonn, Adam Goldman, Michael Liedtke and Monika Mathur contributed to this report.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 14, 2013 11:55:55 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 14, 2013 11:45:42 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 12, 2013 11:55:49 GMT -6
from the Guardian UK www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-boundless-informant-global-dataminingBoundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance dataRevealed: The NSA's powerful tool for cataloguing global surveillance data – including figures on US collection June 11, 2013 by Glenn Greenwald "The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications. The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks. The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message. The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. One document says it is designed to give NSA officials answers to questions like, "What type of coverage do we have on country X" in "near real-time by asking the SIGINT [signals intelligence] infrastructure." An NSA factsheet about the program, acquired by the Guardian, says: "The tool allows users to select a country on a map and view the metadata volume and select details about the collections against that country." Under the heading "Sample use cases", the factsheet also states the tool shows information including: "How many records (and what type) are collected against a particular country." A snapshot of the Boundless Informant data, contained in a top secret NSA "global heat map" seen by the Guardian, shows that in March 2013 the agency collected 97bn pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide. Iran was the country where the largest amount of intelligence was gathered, with more than 14bn reports in that period, followed by 13.5bn from Pakistan. Jordan, one of America's closest Arab allies, came third with 12.7bn, Egypt fourth with 7.6bn and India fifth with 6.3bn. The heatmap gives each nation a color code based on how extensively it is subjected to NSA surveillance. The color scheme ranges from green (least subjected to surveillance) through yellow and orange to red (most surveillance). The disclosure of the internal Boundless Informant system comes amid a struggle between the NSA and its overseers in the Senate over whether it can track the intelligence it collects on American communications. The NSA's position is that it is not technologically feasible to do so. At a hearing of the Senate intelligence committee In March this year, Democratic senator Ron Wyden asked James Clapper, the director of national intelligence: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" "No sir," replied Clapper. Judith Emmel, an NSA spokeswoman, told the Guardian in a response to the latest disclosures: "NSA has consistently reported – including to Congress – that we do not have the ability to determine with certainty the identity or location of all communicants within a given communication. That remains the case." Other documents seen by the Guardian further demonstrate that the NSA does in fact break down its surveillance intercepts which could allow the agency to determine how many of them are from the US. The level of detail includes individual IP addresses. IP address is not a perfect proxy for someone's physical location but it is rather close, said Chris Soghoian, the principal technologist with the Speech Privacy and Technology Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. "If you don't take steps to hide it, the IP address provided by your internet provider will certainly tell you what country, state and, typically, city you are in," Soghoian said. That approximation has implications for the ongoing oversight battle between the intelligence agencies and Congress. On Friday, in his first public response to the Guardian's disclosures this week on NSA surveillance, Barack Obama said that that congressional oversight was the American peoples' best guarantee that they were not being spied on. "These are the folks you all vote for as your representatives in Congress and they are being fully briefed on these programs," he said. Obama also insisted that any surveillance was "very narrowly circumscribed". Senators have expressed their frustration at the NSA's refusal to supply statistics. In a letter to NSA director General Keith Alexander in October last year, senator Wyden and his Democratic colleague on the Senate intelligence committee, Mark Udall, noted that "the intelligence community has stated repeatedly that it is not possible to provide even a rough estimate of how many American communications have been collected under the Fisa Amendments Act, and has even declined to estimate the scale of this collection." At a congressional hearing in March last year, Alexander denied point-blank that the agency had the figures on how many Americans had their electronic communications collected or reviewed. Asked if he had the capability to get them, Alexander said: "No. No. We do not have the technical insights in the United States." He added that "nor do we do have the equipment in the United States to actually collect that kind of information". Soon after, the NSA, through the inspector general of the overall US intelligence community, told the senators that making such a determination would jeopardize US intelligence operations – and might itself violate Americans' privacy. "All that senator Udall and I are asking for is a ballpark estimate of how many Americans have been monitored under this law, and it is disappointing that the inspectors general cannot provide it," Wyden told Wired magazine at the time. The documents show that the team responsible for Boundless Informant assured its bosses that the tool is on track for upgrades. The team will "accept user requests for additional functionality or enhancements," according to the FAQ acquired by the Guardian. "Users are also allowed to vote on which functionality or enhancements are most important to them (as well as add comments). The BOUNDLESSINFORMANT team will periodically review all requests and triage according to level of effort (Easy, Medium, Hard) and mission impact (High, Medium, Low)." Emmel, the NSA spokeswoman, told the Guardian: "Current technology simply does not permit us to positively identify all of the persons or locations associated with a given communication (for example, it may be possible to say with certainty that a communication traversed a particular path within the internet. It is harder to know the ultimate source or destination, or more particularly the identity of the person represented by the TO:, FROM: or CC: field of an e-mail address or the abstraction of an IP address). "Thus, we apply rigorous training and technological advancements to combine both our automated and manual (human) processes to characterize communications – ensuring protection of the privacy rights of the American people. This is not just our judgment, but that of the relevant inspectors general, who have also reported this." She added: "The continued publication of these allegations about highly classified issues, and other information taken out of context, makes it impossible to conduct a reasonable discussion on the merits of these programs." "
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 12, 2013 11:45:51 GMT -6
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 11, 2013 23:29:36 GMT -6
Amen.
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Post by unlawflcombatnt on Jun 11, 2013 11:50:33 GMT -6
from Paul Craig Roberts.org www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/06/11/what-is-the-governments-agenda-paul-craig-roberts/What IS the Government's Agendaby Paul Craig Roberts "It has been public information for a decade that the US government secretly, illegally, and unconstitutionally spies on its citizens. Congress and the federal courts have done nothing about this extreme violation of the US Constitution and statutory law, and the insouciant US public seems unperturbed. In 2004 a whistleblower informed the New York Times that the National Security Agency (NSA) was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by ignoring the FISA court and spying on Americans without obtaining the necessary warrants. The corrupt New York Times put the interests of the US government ahead of those of the American public and sat on the story for one year until George W. Bush was safely reelected. By the time the New York Times published the story of the illegal spying one year later, the law-breaking government had had time to mitigate the offense with ex post facto law or executive orders and explain away its law-breaking as being in the country’s interest. Last year William Binney, who was in charge of NSA’s global digital data gathering program revealed that NSA had everyone in the US under total surveillance. Every email, Internet site visited and phone call is captured and stored. In 2012 Binney received the Callaway Award for Civic Courage, an annual award given to those who champion constitutional rights at risk to their professional and personal lives. There have been a number of whistleblowers. For example, in 2006 Mark Klein revealed that AT&T had a secret room in its San Francisco office that NSA used to collect Internet and phone-call data from US citizens who were under no suspicion. www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html The presstitute media handled these stories in ways that protected the government’s lawlessness from scrutiny and public outrage. The usual spin was that the public needs to be safe from terrorists, and safety is what the government is providing. The latest whistle blower, Edward Snowden, has sought refuge in Hong Kong, which has a better record of protecting free speech than the US government. Snowden did not trust any US news source and took the story to the British newspaper, the Guardian. There is no longer any doubt whatsoever that the US government is lawless, that it regards the US Constitution as a scrap of paper, that it does not believe Americans have any rights other than those that the government tolerates at any point in time, and that the government has no fear of being held accountable by the weak and castrated US Congress, the sycophantic federal courts, a controlled media, and an insouciant public. Binney and Snowden have described in precisely accurate detail the extreme danger from the government’s surveillance of the population. No one is exempt, not the Director of the CIA, US Army Generals, Senators and Representatives, not even the president himself. Anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can find interviews with Binney and Snowden and become acquainted with why you do have very much indeed to fear whether or not you are doing anything wrong. James Clapper, the lying Director of National Intelligence, who would have been perfectly at home in the Hitler or Stalin regimes, condemned Snowden as “reprehensible” for insisting that in a democracy the public should know what the government is doing. Clapper insisted that secretly spying on every ordinary American was essential in order to “protect our nation.” news.antiwar.com/2013/06/07/us-spy-chief-slams-reprehensible-leak-of-nsa-surveillance-scheme/ Clapper is “offended” that Americans now know that the NSA is spying on the ordinary life of every American. Clapper wants Snowden to be severely punished for his “reckless disclosure” that the US government is totally violating the privacy that the US Constitution guarantees to every US citizen. President Obama, allegedly educated in constitutional law, justified Clapper’s program of spying on every communication of every American citizen as a necessary violation of Americans’ civil liberties that “protects your civil liberties.” Contrast the lack of veracity of the President of the United States with the truthfulness of Snowden, who correctly stated that the NSA spying is an “existential threat to democracy.” The presstitutes are busy at work defending Clapper and Obama. On June 9, CNN rolled out former CIA case officer Bob Baer to implant into the public’s mind that Snowden, far from trying to preserve US civil liberties, might be a Chinese spy and that Snowden’s revelations might be indicative of a Chinese espionage case. Demonization is the US government’s technique for discrediting Bradley Manning for complying with the US Military Code and reporting war crimes and for persecuting Julian Assage of Wikileaks for reporting leaked information about the US government’s crimes. Demonization and false charges will be the government’s weapon against Snowden. If Washington and its presstitutes can convince Americans that courageous people, who are trying to inform Americans that their historic rights are disappearing into a police state, are espionage agents of foreign powers, America can continue to be subverted by its own government. This brings us to the crux of the matter. What is the purpose of the spying program? Even if an American believes the official stories of 9/11 and the Boston Marathon Bombing, these are the only two terrorist acts in the US that resulted in the lost of human life in 12 years. Far more people are killed in traffic accidents and from bad diets. Why should the Constitution and civil liberty be deep-sixed because of two alleged terrorist acts in 12 years? What is astounding is the absence of terrorist attacks. Washington is in the second decade of invading and destroying Muslim governments and countries. Civilian casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are extremely high, and in those countries that Washington has not yet invaded, such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria, civilians are being murdered by Washington’s drones and proxies on the ground. It is extraordinary that Washington’s brutal 12 year assault on Muslim lives in six countries has not resulted in at least one dozen real, not fake FBI orchestrated, terrorist attacks in the US every day. How can something as rare as terrorism justify the destruction of the US Constitution and US civil liberty? How safe is any American when their government regards every citizen as a potential suspect who has no rights? Why is there no discussion of this in American public life? Watch the presstitutes turn Snowden’s revelations into an account of his disaffection and motives and away from the existential threat to democracy and civil liberty. What is the government’s real agenda? Clearly, “the war on terror” is a front for an undeclared agenda. In “freedom and democracy” America, citizens have no idea what their government’s motives are in fomenting endless wars and a gestapo police state. The only information Americans have comes from whistleblowers, who Obama ruthlessly prosecutes. The presstitutes quickly discredit the information and demonize the whistleblowers. Germans in the Third Reich and Soviet citizens in the Stalin era had a better idea of their government’s agendas than do “freedom and democracy” Americans today. The American people are the most uninformed people in modern history. In America there is no democracy that holds government accountable. There is only a brainwashed people who are chaff in the wind."
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