Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Cornered Rat and Pathological Liar Clapper Cries Wolf


Coming on the heels of the all hype and little substance State of the Union Address in which President Barack Obama once again established himself as the nation’s preeminent bullshit artist we were all today offered up the theater of the absurd of a seasoned liar engaged in standard fear-mongering. Obama may have been devoid of shame when he cynically trotted out wounded Army Ranger Cory Remsburg to a thunderous roar of bipartisan support for the perpetual warfare state but as has always been the case for our fine Director of National Intelligence James Clapper he is in a league of his own when it comes to dishonesty and waving the bloody flag to support his own lying ass.
Clapper, appearing in front of a Senate Intelligence committee was basking in his George W. Bush standing on the smoking rubble with a megaphone moment as he dodged responsibility for the illegal NSA surveillance programs and went on offense. You have to give it to the man, in addition to his set of stones he has zero scruples nor loyalty to the Constitution but when it comes to lying to Congress and playing the fear card he has few peers. The Clapper used the forum to lambaste former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden - a man whose revelations would in a decent land where the law still applies would have sent James Clapper to prison - was in rare form. He picked up the ball from where it was left by Mike Rogers, DiFi, Peter King and others far more crude who are practically masturbating over their fantasies of the murder of Snowden and rammed it down the throats of the members of a legislative body whose popularity rating is somewhere in between pedophiles and genital herpes.
He decried Snowden and “his accomplices” – being of course journalist Glenn Greenwald and other journalists who at great risk to their careers and lives have been shining a light into the teeming next of cockroaches at Fort Meade. Brashly calling for Snowden to return all of the purloined documents immediately the man had the look in his eye of a cornered animal – likely knowing fully well that what is in those documents could very likely result in even the quisling Congress holding him and his “accomplices” in the American Stasi pay for play racket accountable for the myriad of crimes that are likely contained within. I am betting that it is a lot more than data-mining Angry Birds that has Mr. Clapper’s asshole puckering today, not the least of which are Snowden’s assertions during a German public TV interview on Sunday that the NSA is also in the business of  industrial espionage. According to a story in The Guardian the DNI when asked about such a thing:
Clapper also declined to answer a question about European surveillance involving US businesses, and possibly upon them, in an open hearing.
The iron bar hotel is beckoning because if the Snowden documents aren’t returned to the scum running this country’s intelligence beast and given that it has already been revealed that industrial espionage has been conducted against Latin American interests (including Brazilian oil company Petrobas) what is still out there promises to rock the national security state in all of its resplendent rottenness to the very core. Think blackmail, market manipulation, cover for drug money laundering, political fixing, assassinations and Christ only knows what else. Were I in Snowden’s shoes, given his limited time left on the planet with numerous extrajudicial murder plots likely already being assessed I would just post it all on the internet – ALL OF IT. Because this would be the only way to get these fascists, thugs and killers under control. There is no negotiating with these people and despite his nomination for the Nobel Peace prize (far more deserving a recipient than the war criminal who resides in the White House) he is a dead man walking and really, the best way to deal with thugs is to get them first. The entire NSA is now much like the spaceport Mos Eisley in Star Wars as described by Obi-Wan Kenobi : “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy”.  This of course could apply the entire government of that perverse parasite that has sucked the very essence of all that was good about the once greatest country in history The United States of America that is “The Homeland”, an evil empire of which James Clapper is a product.
The most disgusting aspect of all of this is that Clapper and his ilk continue to cry 9/11, a day in which the National Security Agency should have been dismantled over for missing existing intel that could have shut down the entire plot. In the standard post Septermber 11, 2001 world of providing excuses for tolerating the evisceration of the U.S. Constitution to preserve their dirty little spoils system Clapper and his fellow gangsters pulled out an imminent threat to "The Homeland"  today.  According to this pack of swine there is currently an Al-Qaeda faction in Syria (one that we were arming?) that is hellbent on attacking America in the near future - perhaps this can finally be the one that the NSA Stasi is able to stop given their dismal return on investment to the American taxpayers who have been getting fleeced by these flim flam men for over a decade now and have nothing but their own enslavement, crumbling national infrastructure and looming hyperinflation to show for it.
The only thing that would have made Clapper's bottom feeding today would be if he were to have rolled out Sgt. First Class Cory Remsburg as a stage prop to justify the illegal wars abroad and usurping of the Constitution that the poor bastard was sacrificed for.
(Image credit: National Review)

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

Shameless: NSA Data Mining Includes Angry Birds


Nothing is sacred to the NSA Stasi and their Norsefire partners across the pond at GCHQ. In yet another of those very embarrassing revelations that have generated  perverse fantasies among the guilty of the murder of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden the ravenous security state monster is also conducting data-mining operations on cell phone apps including the  extremely popular Angry Birds game series. In a collaborative effort by The Guardian, The New York Times and Pro Publica it was revealed that the Anglo-American surveillance machine has been able to easily and successfully exploit in app advertisements to collect personal private data. Angry Birds, an app that reportedly has been downloaded more than 1.7 billion times globally has been hailed as a “golden nuggets” for the illegal data-mining activities as they seek to “collect it all”. What isn't stated openly in these stories at least as far as I have seen is that the games are very popular among children who are being exploited by these dirty villainous agencies as surely as some garden variety pederast trolling through chat rooms.
Not that the foray into the world of video games is an earth-shattering piece of news, the agency that engages in illegal spying already was outed for infiltrating online games such as World of Warcraft several months ago. Hell, given the level of sophistication and the urge for penetration of every aspect of the personal privacy of millions would it truly be any surprise were the news to break that they even had the capability to use the digital television of millions of law abiding citizens to actually watch them? Where exactly will James Clapper, Michael Hayden, General Keith Alexander and their minions be during this Sunday's Super Bowl broadcast?
The Angry Birds intrusion is yet the latest piece of blatant disregard for the Constitution that Obama’s Stasi ( he defends it, he owns it)  has been caught perpetrating with and as such there is the duty to chronicle it as another one of those road signs along the highway to Hell that keep whipping by at lightning speed. The story of course is given the best coverage in The Guardian (sorry NYT but you helped lie us into the Iraq war)  given the increasingly deplorable descent of the domestic corporate-state media into into the netherworld it is the ultimate irony that freedom loving Americans must now get their news from abroad.  It was just the other day that NBC’s Andrea Mitchell  who as former Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan’s wife is an illustration of how the elite intermingle and breed so to produce a more entitled form of life form than possible to be produced from the rabble. During an interview with former Congresswoman Jane Harman over the NSA abuses Mitchell broke away for a NEWSFLASH of great national import that was the breaking story of manufactured celebrity Justin Bieber’s legal plight. You just cannot make stuff like this up as our once educated society continues the long slow crawl into the fever swamps of Idiocracy, a movie that is among the most potent social critiques of the modern era.
The Guardian story, by James Ball entitled “Angry Birds and ‘leaky’ phone apps targeted by NSA and GCHQ for user data” will likely have little to no affect on the complacent, sheeplike citizens of the star-spangled, god-kissed Homeland. Perhaps the would be some degree of restiveness amongst the bewildered herd but with Andrea Mitchell’s cutaway from matters of serious news to the Bieber Alert serving as ‘Exhibit A’ it does not exactly bode well for that informed public that is critical for a functional democracy and free country. So I excerpt the following from the foreign news source that continues to provide excellent coverage of our ongoing national existential crisis:
GCHQ documents use Angry Birds – reportedly downloaded more than 1.7bn times – as a case study for app data collection.
The National Security Agency and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of "leaky" smartphone apps, such as the wildly popular Angry Birds game, that transmit users' private information across the internet, according to top secret documents.
The data pouring onto communication networks from the new generation of iPhone and Android apps ranges from phone model and screen size to personal details such as age, gender and location. Some apps, the documents state, can share users' most sensitive information such as sexual orientation – and one app recorded in the material even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger.
Many smartphone owners will be unaware of the full extent this information is being shared across the internet, and even the most sophisticated would be unlikely to realise that all of it is available for the spy agencies to collect.
Dozens of classified documents, provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden and reported in partnership with the New York Times and ProPublica, detail the NSA and GCHQ efforts to piggyback on this commercial data collection for their own purposes.
This has zilch to do with preventing terrorism and it is unimaginable to one with any degree of functional gray matter that serious jihadists with a huge ax to grind against western decadence would spend much time playing freaking Angry Birds. This goes more to the NSA’s aforementioned fervor to ‘collect it all’  for storage as a part of some vague future need which would be - and this is not exactly venturing out on a limb here - retroacatively building a case for persecution against dissidents, political opposition and civil liberties advocates who challenge the system in the fairly near future.
The collection of the personal data through these apps will of course be thrown under the umbrella of “metadata” when it comes to defending the legality of the collections yet that is fairly dishonest. The great hidden secret of all of this (or Easter Egg in video game parlance) is that the “metadata” only serves as an indexing system and what is also being collected here is the actual content of phone calls, emails etc. despite the ongoing denials of the national security state mouthpieces including Barack Obama himself. That is the key - that all of this data is going into a massive database (perhaps something along the lines of MAIN CORE) for when the day comes to conduct the Last Roundup. Perhaps some of the real stuff that is out there on these programs, the as yet undisclosed serious stuff may contain details on a program exactly like that. It not as if it hasn’t already been thought of (REX 84) and as we continue to careen towards the inevitable collapse of an unsustainable the lists grow daily. Why do you think that the immense NSA complex in Utah was built?  
It IS happening here. 
(Image: The Guardian) 

Monday, January 27, 2014

Bush Era Goons Issue Open Letter to Decry RNC's NSA Resolution


Remember, remember the eleventh of September. That is the message being delivered by Bush era thugs in an open letter to RNC Chairman Reince Preibus over Friday’s daring  “Resolution To Renounce The National Security Agency’s Surveillance Program”.  The letter invokes nearly every bullshit talking point that Americans were fed after the September 11, 2001 attacks that were then seized upon by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats (including the signatories) and used to launch two ruinous Middle East wars and redistribute billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the national security state spoils system. The attacks also allowed for the massive expansion of big government creating the decidedly anti-American Department of Homeland Security, paramilitary police forces and legions of private contractors of enormously more expense had their functions been performed by civil servants. If you want to see exactly why this once great country is on the verge of collapse and goose-stepping towards insolvency you only need to read the open letter to the RNC.
The letter, obtained and published by the website The Daily Beast is stunning in its callous disregard for constitutional principles as well as a blanket denial that the NSA programs are illegal, as it as open letter and fairly brief here it is:
Dear Chairman Priebus:
As Republicans who are familiar with the threat that terrorism still poses to this country, we are compelled to dissent from the ill-considered resolution adopted by the Republican National Committee on January 24 by voice vote.
The Republican National Committee plays a vital role in political campaigns, but it has relatively little expertise in national security.  Unfortunately, that lack of expertise is on full display in the resolution. The RNC condemns “the secret surveillance program called PRISM,” and claims that it “monitors [the] searching habits of virtually every American on the internet.”  In fact, there is no program that monitors the searches of all Americans.  And what has become known as the PRISM program is not aimed at collecting the communications of Americans. It is targeted at the international communications of foreign persons located outside the United States and is precisely the type of foreign-targeted surveillance that Congress approved in 2008 and 2012 when it enacted and reauthorized amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The errors in the resolution do not end there.  The resolution falsely implies that NSA collects and has easy access to telephone metadata, when in fact every search of the data requires a reasonable and articulable suspicion and is strictly limited by the courts, with oversight by the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress.
The resolution says that the program violates the Constitution, something that will come as news to the many judges who have found to the contrary – and to the Supreme Court, which has said that such limited billing data is not protected by a constitutional expectation of privacy.  The resolution’s claim that the program violates section 215 also runs counter to the rulings of practically every court to address the issue.
As far as we can tell, none of these facts was presented to the RNC before it adopted the resolution.  It is  a shame that the resolution reached the Committee without correction of its many errors.
Worse, the RNC resolution threatens to do great damage to the security of the nation.  It would be foolhardy to end the program without ensuring that we remain safe from attack. This database provides a uniquely valuable capability for discovering new phone numbers associated with international terrorist organizations, including numbers that may be used by terrorist cells within the United States.  Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morrell has testified that having this capability might have prevented 9/11 and could help to prevent the next 9/11. 
This is not a Democratic or a Republican program.  Protecting Americans from terrorism should not be a partisan issue.   The program was first launched under President George W. Bush. It was approved by Congressional leaders of both parties. And for good reason.  It helps to keep Americans safe.
It may be appropriate to modify the program in certain respects, if that can be done without a significant loss in effectiveness, but abolishing it without any idea how to close the intelligence gap that 9/11 exposed is not a recipe for partisan advantage.  It is a recipe for partisan oblivion.
Count us out.
The seven signatories are led by the three-headed monster of Michael Chertoff, Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey. That latter is Bush’s former Attorney General who was an apologist for the grotesque torture programs of that administration and the other two have in their post government careers on the other side of that infamous revolving door become profiteers off of the same national security state that they themselves helped to create. With former government contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden having just given an interview to German public television in which he stated that the NSA programs are used for industrial espionage it is no surprise to see rats like Chertoff and Hayden getting restive. Clearly the revelations of NSA criminality that have already been made public only scratch the surface of what is to come and both of these men given their ability to reap the financial profits from the years when their salaries came courtesy of the American taxpayer stand to be outed as the corrupt swine that they truly are. Don’t forget that it was the lobbying firm inconspicuously named The Chertoff Group that opportunistically seized on the Christmas Day “Underwear Bomber” plot to bilk taxpayers into putting those nifty naked body scanners into the nation’s airports.
The open letter, following the deranged Peter King’s opening salvo will provide a platform for the other defenders of the rampant criminality of the NSA and the fascist state propaganda machine will be churning out jeremiads and screeds from their shills like link sausage made with tainted skunk meat. It is imperative to the corrupt system that has hijacked constitutional government in The Homeland to beat back the coming threat to their secret state and all of the tools that they use to protect it. The invocation of ‘the day that changed everything’ will be all inclusive but the RNC’s bold (although still suspect) move to begin to punch back at Leviathan is evidence that when it comes to the phony war on terror that the zeitgeist has already changed.
When the dam finally does burst on those other activities, aside from industrial espionage that these illegal and anti-American programs have been used for there will be no stopping the waves of outrage and revulsion and this is what truly terrifies the signatories of the open letter and their ilk. 

Sunday, January 26, 2014

Fanatical Peter King Explodes over Republican NSA Resolution


Predictably the RNC’s resolution to restrain the unconstitutional activities of the NSA has already met with fierce resistance from one of the more deranged defenders of the fascist security state. Representative Peter King of Long Island (as well as the terrorist Irish Republican Army) exploded over the brand new “Resolution To Renounce The National Security Agency’s Surveillance Program” before the ink had even had time to dry. For a very brief time the first step upward out of the gigantic hole that has been dug for the Republican party by the likes of George W. Bush, Karl Rove, Lee Atwater and others who had seen the at one time huge political benefit of yoking the party to the religious right only to see it turn into a millstone around their necks as time passed, demographics shifted and elderly voters died. It was a brilliant idea even if largely motivated by political considerations to go on record as opposing the NSA data-mining and spying given the growing popularity of libertarian ideals among the young and the terminal corruption of the current system that has alienated the majority of the population.
But even a suggestion of a return to constitutional principles infuriated the lunatic King who according to an article in the ‘inside baseball’ gospel of the beltway Politico ranted in his usual incoherent manner as he savaged the resolution:
“We’re going to make the Democrats and Barack Obama the party of national security,” he said. “It’s signing our own death warrant as a party.”
“Republicans are supposed to be the party of national defense,” King said. “It would be one thing if people wanted to pass legislation [posing] questions. But to talk about ‘spying’ and unconstitutionality … it’s basically repudiating the policies of the Republican Party over the last 12 years, policies that kept us safe.”
In his rage at the prospect of a return to a saner land where the Constitution actually is something other than “a goddamned piece of paper” King had that rare moment where he let the truth slip when uttering the line that: “We’re going to make the Democrats and Barack Obama the party of national security … It’s signing our own death warrant as a party.” BINGO! The Bush administration played the terrorism card early and often in consolidating political power and smearing opponents as unpatriotic and terrorist sympathizers and it worked brilliantly, the same arguments are currently being made to protect the illegal activities of the NSA. Never forget how loathsome establishment politician Saxby Chambliss smeared Democrat Max Cleeland, a decorated Vietnam veteran who lost three limbs in service to the country during the 2002 Georgia Senate race.  A Chambliss ad compared him to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein at the height of the national insanity that was triggered by the 9/11 attacks. Chambliss like so many others who have supported sending others to die in wars of their creation never served in the military. For that matter neither did the chickenhawk Peter King unless you count the National Guard which has long been a refuge for those seeking to avoid being shot at.
There will be several other warmongering apple pie authoritarian Republicans following King as they attack any sort of party effort to address the gutting of the Constitution and put an end to the unconstitutional mass surveillance led of course by the McCarthy style blowhard Mike Rogers.
Also according to the Politico story:
King has indicated he is weighing what would be a long-shot presidential bid in part because he wants the 2016 Republican debates to include a more aggressive perspective on defense issues.
God help us.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

If Serious, Republican Interest in Curtailing NSA is a Winner


Let us assume just for the sake of argument that the Republican party’s sudden interest in protecting the privacy of Americans isn’t just a political gimmick. This is after all a political party that has time and again showed that they would be willing to sell their own grandmothers and any serious proposal that comes from this entity should be viewed with extreme skepticism. But the demographics are rapidly changing and the pandering to racists, religious fanatics, cranks and outright idiots is increasingly becoming not only a recipe for losing elections but for becoming a shrinking, southern based permanent minority that can only survive by changing the laws to suppress voting and that can't last forever. The culture wars are over or to put it more succinctly they have shifted over to the Democrats with their ongoing concealment of the moral bankruptcy of their own party by focusing on using the government to address the grievances of many identity based groups with crusades for the legalization of same sex marriage and preserving women’s reproductive rights. The Republicans reliably ruled on these very issues and used them to muster the loyal shocktroops come election day but times change – we should all be very happy that the GOP lost the culture wars because they provided a cover to avoid addressing very real and serious issues and created a political vacuum that was rapidly filled by corruption.
With the announcement that Republican National Committee (RNC) has adopted a resolution to investigate the out of control and unconstitutional NSA programs, formally titled  “Resolution To Renounce The National Security Agency’s Surveillance Program” the party has finally taken a big step back towards relevance. That is if it is not just playing politics which it usually is with this group and it is an interesting bit of hypocrisy that none of these programs which were being used during the George W. Bush-Dick Cheney administration and did not elicit any such consideration. Barack Obama did inherit the NSA Stasi but instead of bringing about reforms and the promised “transparency” he doubled-down, just gave a major speech defending the ongoing Orwellian operations and his administration is denouncing Thursday’s report by the government’s own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. It was also reported by beltway ‘Inside Baseball’ rag Politico that the administration also  believed that the surveillance review report produced by Obama's own hand picked panel was too – gasp –“liberal” and sided with guardians of the NSA illegal surveillance programs.
The Politico piece, citing University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone one of the five members of the The President's Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology that recommended changes to NSA programs that Obama is going to ignore states:
A member of President Barack Obama’s hand-picked surveillance review group said Friday the White House was swayed by U.S. intelligence officials sympathetic to the National Security Agency and ultimately viewed the group’s findings “as a liberal report.”
University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey Stone said that, after receiving the surveillance group’s report, Obama spent a month meeting “with many of the same people we had met with at great length, members of the intelligence community, members of the intelligence committees from Congress largely on one side of the picture.”
“And instead of our report being truly understood as a middle ground, based upon taking into account all of those perspectives on both sides of the spectrum, I think the White House got moved by thinking of our report as a liberal report,” Stone said.
Stone, speaking during a panel discussion at the National Press Club in Washington, said intelligence officials were “pushing [Obama] and the White House generally more to what we can call the right.”
So once again Obama the narcissist, ever conscious of his precious legacy has chosen political calculus over doing what is necessary to protect the constitutional rights of the American people. Having already sold out to Wall Street gamblers who need $85 billion dollars a month pumped into their gambling casinos just to stave off another too big to fail megabank implosion, to the parasitical insurance industry with the corporate giveaway that is Obamacare, ending the wars in a real manner not concealed by smoke and mirrors and now the NSA the man is every bit the criminal that Bush ever was. Now he and his Democratic party hacks have done the exact one thing that any savvy politician, businessperson and warrior would never do - give your enemy the knife with which they will cut your own throat. These oppressive big government surveillance programs are now owned by Obama and if the GOP is serious in opposing them they would now have the most ass-kicking club in the bag going into the 2014 and 2016 elections.
I remain a skeptic on all of this though, especially when considering that the GOP is the party of Karl Rove, Roger Ailes, Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee,Sarah Palin and Reince Priebus and that it contains some of the biggest warmongers on the planet, notably bloodthirsty Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham. RNC opposition to the NSA Stasi will also run afoul of the two most prominent television friendly shills for the fascist surveillance state in Representatives Peter King and Mike Rogers so this is going to be quite an interesting show and can only accelerate the ongoing inner party conflict between libertarians such as Rand Paul and Justin Amash and the corrupt warmongering establishment that now is interchangeable with the Obama regime.
I recently wrote a post citing a Financial Times story on the rise of libertarian ideals with younger Americans who are turned off by the culture wars of old and business as usual.  Now a smart political party with an eye on the future would use this opportunity to capitalize on American anger at the NSA excesses, purge the corrupt establishment and begin to run solely on reinstating the rule of law as well as beginning to restore the Constitution. Whether the GOP is that smart remains to be seen but a major party opposing the post September 11, 2001 doppelganger of what used to be at least theoretically a free country could provide just the type of vehicle that Americans need to roll back the National Security State. 

Friday, January 24, 2014

Coming to America? Ukraine Burns as Crackdown Looms


In an ominous sign of what will soon be coming to America the Ukranian government has begun targeting protesters through the tracking of cellphone metadata. The ongoing unrest that was sparked by President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to reject overtures by the European Union to enter into a trade pact  in favor of a rapprochement with mother Russia continues to rage in the streets of Kiev with no end in sight. The pictures and video that are put out show a surreal and twisted winter wonderland scene of fire, paramilitary riot police forces in the traditional Darth Vader regalia in a pitched battle with citizens seeking to prevent being absorbed by the cruel and oppressive land from which they won independence from when the USSR imploded.
The protests have been ongoing although going through the phases of both heavy and more restrained moves and counter-moves by opponents on both sides of what could rapidly deteriorate into a bloody civil war much like the one that is ongoing in Syria. The ruling faction as they always are prone to do are  desperate to hold onto power lest they find their heads mounted on pikes but in the modern world of global telecommunications it would not be good public relations were the state to just send in the tanks and begin firing into the crowds at random with live ammo. In what is certainly a sign of the times the harnessing of technology is now being introduced in an attempt to quell the unrest reverberating among the peasants.
According to a New York Times report the besieged government is now taking a page from the NSA Stasi’s playbook and using cellphone metadata to identify people who happen to be near what the state deems to be a violent protest. Shortly after a new laws restricting rights to speech and public assembly went into affect the cellphones of people in the vicinity of a location where protesters were fighting with police were sent a mass text message stating that “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance”. This introduction of what are certainly yet to be revealed NSA tactics show just how easily that a government can use the ability of technology to create their watch lists and scramble the goon squads to arrest, imprison and even potentially disappear dissenters. There has also been an introduction of violence into the protests that in turn smacks of both the tactics of Nazi brownshirts and government backed agent provocateurs.
The use of violence to both splinter the opposition to a tyrannical regime as well as to use such actions to tar all protesters (even relatively peaceful ones) as anarchists thereby justifying the full fury of the state to put down the uprising in the interests of the safety of the general population is an ancient one. It is the introduction of the modern technological use of cellphone tracking that is the most ominous though. I excerpt the following from a story that was published in the Washington Post by Andrea Peterson that is  entitled "Ukraine’s 1984 moment: Government using cellphones to track protesters":
As eerie as the text message may seem, it was likely not technically difficult to achieve. Presumably, authorities could determine who was in the vicinity of the protest by going through the records of nearby cell towers. In the United States, that type of information can be requested from mobile providers in the form of "tower dumps" which reveal the locations of hundreds or thousands of innocent citizens associated with a specific cell tower, along with suspects. A recent congressional inquiry shows that U.S. law enforcement made more than 9,000 requests for tower dumps in 2012.
Cell site location data is considered metadata. The U.S. government denies that it is currently tracking mobile phone locations domestically, although it admits to running a test project on the subject in recent years. And documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden show the NSA tracks 5 billion mobile device locations daily around the world.
While the situation in Ukraine is not likely to soon be repeated in The Homeland - at least barring a black swan event that could trigger the imminent collapse - those who understand why these police state programs have truly been launched would do well to cast a wary eye upon Kiev. The future of America is on display there and despite the ongoing failure of the corrupt corporate state domestic media to cover such things the world has been besieged by uprisings, protests, revolutions and insurrections in recent years. The continuing redistribution of wealth into the coffers of the most corrupt that comprise a global elite is causing misery begat by skyrocketing food prices, massive unemployment, blatantly corrupt governments and their oppressive police state policies all of which are fueling a backlash the swine who run the big con are terrified by.
For some interesting Friday night bedtime reading I would recommend the following, make of them what you will but if pay attention you will very clearly see that the coming crackdown once the Ukraine situation spreads has already been taken into consideration by the elites:  "Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future" a 2007 article from The Guardian and the referenced and  updated version of the report itself .
And this is just what the Brits are predicting, the contingency plans for putting down dissent in The Homeland is going  be far worse simply due to the increasingly dreadful but unavoidable fact that we have the worst type of lunatics running the asylum with the full power of the state behind them.
(Image: The Guardian)

Return of “the Decider” - Obama Disagrees With Privacy Board Report


Former U.S. President George W. Bush was widely mocked for his now infamous utterance in the course of defending Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld -  "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best". Bush passed into history as one of the least popular and disastrous leaders in American history but now his once immensely popular successor, Barack Obama is giving the man a run for his money.  Obviously more than a bit miffed over Thursday’s bombshell report by the report released by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board rebutting Obama’s ongoing defense of the indefensible the current occupant of the White House bristled, disagreeing with the report. Delivering the message through chief flack Jay Carney (a paid liar) our great leader, sold to a gullible public as a constitutional law professor demonstrated that he has just as much actual reverence for the principles expressed in that document as his predecessor (“a goddamned piece of paper”) with the following:“On the issue of [Section] 215, we simply disagree with the board’s analysis on the legality of the program”. So there we have it, the return of the unaccountable unitary executive but you could say that he never really left.
The specters of Bush and Cheney have hovered over the Obama administration since day one, the NSA programs, especially the data-mining and storage of metadata (which is an index to actual content) all a part of a tragic enabling act that was urgently pushed through a supine Congress while the scent of rotting flesh still hung in the lower Manhattan air after 9/11. The USA PATRIOT Act laid the foundation for the final implementation of the surveillance/police state as well as punched our collective ticket to demise as our once vibrant democracy and system of checks and balances were reduced to wreckage much as the twin towers themselves.  Wars were started, the NSA snooping and compiling of the most intimate details of tens of millions of law-abiding Americans picked up steam and the public was mentally bludgeoned into accepting their own eventual enslavement by a government gone rogue through the greatest mind control device known to mankind, their televisions. For years Republicans had a chokehold on the political system fueled by keeping the befuddled masses in a state of constant dread thanks to regular ‘terrorist’ alerts as well as a color coded threat level matrix that was used largely at times for political gain.
Americans saw that the Bush-Cheney regime had overstepped their bounds and done so badly so in 2008 they put their faith into a young Senator from Illinois who promised hope and change as well as transparency and voted Barack Obama into office. Now in the first year of his second term Obama has not only failed to provide the promised transparency but has become one of the greatest defenders of the secret state, secret courts and the massive and illegal surveillance colossus that holds it all together. Never has one man failed so many and the rejection of Thursday’s report by his rotten administration is just the latest example that he has been fully assimilated by the corrupt system, that is if he wasn’t just being a politician and lying his ass off about everything in the first place.
With Barry and the boys now firmly in control with three years to go and not having to worry about being re-elected the mask is now off and Americans will just have deal with having to finance their own government spying on them. Obama is on record as being committed to only the most meager and vague cosmetic changes to the NSA Stasi’s compiling their electronic dossiers for the day when the order comes to deal with the troublemakers, only they will by then be called “terrorists”, as Hermann Goering once famously summed it up: “It works the same way in any country.” But Obama is doing immense and irreparable damage to liberalism itself, not the Rush Limbaugh/Fox News/John Bircher definition but the classic concept itself. Never one to shy away from scathing broadsides delivered to hypocrites libertarian Justin Raimondo weighs in today at Antiwar.com in his column “The Snowden Effect and the Liberal Implosion” from which I excerpt:
We haven’t seen anything like this since the Vietnam war era: an administration caught red-handed illegally and systematically spying on Americans in the midst of an increasingly unpopular war. At that time, too, the political class was badly divided, with the hard-liners circling their wagons against the rising tide of popular outrage and the dissenters auguring a new and not-so-Silent Majority.
AND –
With the news that the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) has handed in a report declaring the National Security Agency’s meta-data dragnet flat out illegal it is clear that Edward Snowden’s revelations have badly split a political class that was once pretty much united in its fulsome support for the national security status quo. This comes on the heels of a new poll that shows the majority of Americans oppose the NSA’s data dragnet – with an even larger majority contending that the main danger to their welfare is their own government.
AND –
We saw this Janus-faced persona in Obama’s mien as he campaigned against the Bush administration’s overreach in the Middle East – and then tried to pull a fast one in Syria, a scheme nixed by an outbreak of popular outrage. We saw it as he looked us straight in the eye and told us his is the most transparent administration in modern times – and then did nothing when his Director of National Intelligence denied collecting data on American citizens and was exposed as a liar practically the next day.
Power as we have been made so painfully aware of in the era after “the day that changed everything” is corrosive and corrupting, it can be said that only the worst are attracted to it. Obama’s defense of the ongoing disemboweling of the Constitution shows that power will do everything to not only erect systems of totalitarianism to protect it and those who finance the corrupt politicians make the laws but that will destroy whatever vestiges of the America that existed on September 10, 2001 to ensure that it is never threatened by the rabble.
The most damning part of our rapidly collapsing society is that the same ‘liberals’ who decried all of the abuses of Bush and Cheney in a full-throated roar are now lining up behind Obama as he continues to lead the march to the gates of Hell itself.

Thursday, January 23, 2014

After Obama’s Big Speech NSA Programs are Still Illegal


The latest blow to the ongoing national disgrace of unconstitutional mass surveillance that is being conducted with zero oversight by the NSA came Thursday morning. The government’s own Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board released a report that confirms what any rational, thinking American who is not in the bag for big surveillance already knew: that the NSA programs to collect phone metadata are illegal. Not that this is a big deal to President Barack Obama who is still riding high after basically telling everyone to go to hell in his overly hyped speech last Friday at the Justice Department. It was a real stem-winder filled with obfuscations, hedged admissions, vague half promises and the type of sheer malarkey that is the coin of the realm in the sad remnants of a once great country that has been turned into something abominable and called The Homeland. His speech earned him accolades from those who are most guilty in aiding and abetting the criminal conduct of the National Security Agency, in particular House Intelligence Committee overlord Mike Rogers and Senate Intelligence Committee queen Dianne Feinstein who both belong in prison.
According to an article in the Guardian by Spencer Ackerman entitled "US government privacy board says NSA bulk collection of phone data is illegal":
According to the report, first published by the Washington Post and the New York Times, the privacy board found that the mass phone data collection was at best marginally useful for US counter-terrorism, a finding that went further than similar assessments by a federal judge and Obama’s own surveillance advisory board.
Not only did the board conclude that the bulk surveillance was a threat to constitutional liberties, it could not find “a single instance” in which the program “made a concrete difference in the outcome of a terrorism investigation”.
“Moreover, we are aware of no instance in which the program directly contributed to the discovery of a previously unknown terrorist plot or the disruption of a terrorist attack.” 
That one has to smart for Barry and the boys especially after they were finally starting to gain a bit of traction in the massive counter-offensive to preserve the obscenity that is the NSA and to prevent further revelations of the boat load of illegal activities being conducted from being exposed. Obama fudged and punted the ball last week but what he did not do was to put any sort of at least a temporary restraint on the wanton criminality being conducted out of American Stasi HQ at Fort Meade. The programs are still in place and while the current 'debate' is over metadata what is not being discussed at all is that the metadata is likely just an indexing system that allows the instantaneous review of the real content that is within that data. This was brought up in an interview by Rob Kall of the progressive website OpEd News with NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake who calls the metadata collection the "cloak and cover" of the real secrets that involve "content collection". It comes at around the 40 minute mark in what is a very informative discussion with a patriotic American. Obama and his minions as well as the guardians and profiteers of the surveillance state's data-mining programs would love to keep the national discussion based solely on metadata but this is a truly a snakepit without a bottom.
Today's report is not going to sit well with the establishment. It was the same type of rebuke that was rudely issued to the Obama regime in December by federal judge Richard Leon who ruled that the NSA programs are “Orwellian” and “likely unconstitutional” raising the hopes of privacy rights advocates that the data-mining for undefined future purposes would be checked. That was not to happen though as the wagons were circled immediately and the propaganda pushback came after another ruling, this one by Manhattan based federal judge William Pauley saved the day for the fascists who have been playing offense ever since.
The report which is the latest example of how far these people have gone will now be attacked, smeared and targeted by the legal eagles within the bowels of this corrupt administration just as Judge Leon’s ruling was. Already Obama’s flacks in the White House have taken to the media podium to denounce it with the same obscene indignity of the entitled that we have been forced to swallow for well over a decade over the terms of two presidents running now. Were this a decent country then neither George W. Bush nor Barack Obama would have ever been able to rise to the highest office in the and and both of whom in their ongoing authorization of these programs should have been impeached and removed from office.
(Image: AP)

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Blowhard Mike Rogers Can’t Back Up Russian Spy Charges

With the Sunday morning appearance of the two members of Congress that are the most derelict of their official duties to uphold and protect the Constitution Mike Rogers and Dianne Feinstein both accusing Edward Snowden of essentially being a Russian spy the system continues to fail. Despite these serious allegations, more likely than anything the part of a rapidly growing narrative to paint the former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower as an enemy of the state there has been absolutely no effort from the state-corporate media to confront either of the two NSA toadies for actual proof of the charges. Sunday morning TV is among the worst forums for state propaganda ever invented and each week continues to plumb the depths to protect the corrupt system and provide high visibility for those who are responsible for destroying America to spew their lies.
The most reliable weapon in the NSA Stasi’s arsenal has always been Über fascist Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers, the mac daddy of the House Intelligence Committee. Rogers, a former FBI thug who managed to slither his way into office has set his sights on supplanting Senators McCain and Graham as the most strident voice on the Sunday morning bloviation circuit. The lunatic Rpgers blasted Snowden as he appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press with David Gregory as a “thief” who had foreign assistance while DiFi tut-tutted to the delight of the always oily beltway ass-kisser David Gregory. Rogers then popped up on CBS’s Face the Nation to spout that “This wasn’t a random smash and grab, run down the road, end up in China, the bastion of internet freedom, and then Russia, of course the bastion of internet freedom”. He conveniently omits the same sarcastic reference to our very own land of desecrated privacy rights which he of course has been instrumental in stealing away.
While Rogers was spewing his crap, Texas Republican Michael McCaul Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee appeared on ABC's This Week where he accused Snowden of being “cultivated by a foreign power” and “helped by others”. This is all just more of the same distractions meant to wave the blessed flag which is now serves primarily as a symbol designed to be desecrated by the scum like Rogers and McCaul who wrap themselves in it while then destroying the very principles that this country is supposed to stand for. By attempting to smear Snowden as a Russian spy they deftly turn the conversation from the true outrage which is the very existence of these unrestrained and unconstitutional surveillance programs.
Obviously seeing the writing on the wall that a manipulation of public opinion would green light his state sanctioned murder which many are braying for Snowden himself surfaced to defend himself. In an interview with Jane Mayer published by The New Yorker online the prey of the fascists who run The Homeland not only rebutted the accusations but pointed out the obvious which I excerpt from Mayer’s piece:
“It’s not the smears that mystify me,” Snowden told me. “It’s that outlets report statements that the speakers themselves admit are sheer speculation.” Snowden went on to poke fun at the range of allegations that have been made against him in the media without intelligence officials providing some kind of factual basis: “ ‘We don’t know if he had help from aliens.’ ‘You know, I have serious questions about whether he really exists.’ ”
Snowden went on, “It’s just amazing that these massive media institutions don’t have any sort of editorial position on this. I mean these are pretty serious allegations, you know?” He continued, “The media has a major role to play in American society, and they’re really abdicating their responsibility to hold power to account.”
It should be noted that this corrupt media has allowed the country to be lied into two illegal and immoral wars of choice since September 11, 2001 and continues to agitate for more attacks on countries such as Syria and Iran on hearsay, innuendo, propaganda and trumped up ‘evidence. This media has also completely abrogated its collective responsibility (as put forth in the First Amendement) to hold power accountable. Consequently our economy has been gutted by high rolling, politically connected gamblers playing with house money that is pumped into Wall Street casinos to the tune of $85 billion a month, there is NO recovery only lies and propaganda and the living standard of the average American continues to get worse while the corrupt media is out shilling for wars and engaging in tabloid panty-sniffing. The media has stood by while our civil liberties have been stripped away, torture that would have had one hung at Nuremberg codified and covered up and Habeas Corpus eliminated and most of it done in secret, approved by secret courtes and all on the basis of lies and hide behind the biggest lie of all which is providing equal time to both sides of any given story even if one side’s arguments are nothing but lies. So yeah, basically fuck the media.
I do give some credit for Mayer whose piece specifically cites followup done on those who make and allow such claims that Snowden is a Russian spy with zero evidence. Excerpting again from the New Yorker piece:
Asked about this, George Stephanopoulos, the host of ABC’s “This Week,” defended the coverage. Stephanopoulos pointed out that when the congressman Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican and the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, alleged that Snowden was “cultivated by a foreign power” and “helped by others,” Stephanopoulos pressed him for details, twice. “I did two follow-ups,” Stephanopoulos said, “and got as much as the congressman was going to give up.”
AND
Asked today to elaborate on his reasons for alleging that Snowden “had help,” Congressman Rogers, through a press aide, declined to comment.
An aide to Senator Feinstein, meanwhile, stressed that she did no more than ask questions. “Senator Feinstein said, ‘We don’t know at this stage.’ In light of the comments from Chairman Rogers, it is reasonable for Senator Feinstein to say that we should find out.”
As the saying goes - we get the government that we deserve - but the vast majority of Americans did not vote for either Feinstein or Rogers to be put into critical oversight positions and then to act as elements of a relentless fifth-column bent on eradicating every principle that is embodied within the Constitution.
It would be nice to see the voters in the State of California and the Eighth Congressional District in Michigan to be good Americans and vote those two enemies of the republic out of office as it is the only way that we can be saved from this madness.
Michigan voters, you are now on the clock. 

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Obama's Dilemma: How to Best Kill Snowden


Barack Obama has a problem, with his heralded Friday announcement of NSA "reforms" being just the latest bill of goods foisted off on a doomed public by a professional con artist it should now be crystal clear that there will be no attempts to reign in the American Stasi. What Obama now has to do is to find an acceptable way to eliminate the source of the surveillance state's problems which is of course former government contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden from the equation. Barry's dilemma is that with Snowden continuing to receive public support - including what is likely a higher approval level than the pope of hope himself - he can't risk assassinating the man and turning him into a martyr.
While an apprehension of Snowden followed by torture and a huge spectacle of a public show trial that would send a message to any who may have similar ideas would have just a short while back been ideal that is just not going to happen. This is especially so now that even the naive idea of serious oversight let alone meaningful reform of the rogue spying behemoth has been dismissed by El Presidente as though he were flicking a fly off of his collar. With the worst stuff yet to come out and it is going to make what has thus far been revealed look like amateur hour the need to eliminate him as well as others is imperative for the cancer that is eating this country from within to avoid any chance at being cut out. What has yet to break is of course still the subject of much speculation but a recent piece by writer and historian Alfred McCoy (The Politics of Heroin) posted at the website Tom Dispatch under the headline that  "It's About Blackmail, Not National Security" has finally interjected a topic that has been obvious about all of this surveillance from the get go.  McCoy's piece, itself tiled "Surveillance and Scandal" reveals at least one of those functions of the NSA and it's tentacles that is hidden under the star spangled facade of what has always been the phony war on terror.
The escalation of the anti-Snowden smears, especially in the last month by such enemies of the state as the preening little Nazis like Michael Hayden and the fanatical House Intelligence Committee head Mike Rogers who just this week has pretty much accused Snowden of being a Russian spy without a shred of proof which was dutifully promoted by the corrupt state media as fact. Rogers, who is hell bent on destroying every last shred of American privacy is a fascist thug who on a good day does a hell of a good Reinhard Heydrich impersonation has been given to us all by the fine voters in Michigan’s Eight Congressional district.  One would hope that these people will suddenly rise up come November and oust this menace to society and common decency from office but as is so often with these swine they are ensconced for perpetuity in gerrymandered districts and their ability to exert enormous influence of the country at large despite only being a true representative of a very small amount of actual voters. Like Heydrich, Rogers seems like he would do "Night and Fog" very well and as a former FBI agent his jones for unconstitutional voyeurism is only slightly behind that of the maniacal J.Edgar Hoover.
Snowden understandably is scared, you don't spit in Leviathan's face and get away with it. This is especially so when he is one who spiked the ball, proclaimed victory and called out both Rogers and the morally bereft sow Dianne Feinstein aka DiFi for not doing their jobs when it comes to oversight of the surveillance industrial complex. The hydra of malevolence will always rapidly reconfigure itself, especially when it has the greatest propaganda machine in human history, blackmail cards to play on all who have been spied upon and black ops specialists whose primary reason for existence is to follow orders without question, search and destroy and terminate with extreme prejudice. Obama already has become the first U.S. President to openly authorize extrajudicial killings of American citizens and Snowden has now obviously made this very, very personal.
It is of much interest that as the Winter Olympics in Sochi are increasingly becoming the target of what will be some incredibly savage terrorist attacks, the hype today is over the "Black Widow" suicide bombers but notable also that the U.S. government has now ordered planes and warships sent to the Black Sea to "assist" the hated Putin regime in managing the "terrorist" problem. Perhaps if some accounts are true that the Russian leader is even now regretting not taking Bandar Bush up on his alleged offer for in exchange for Putin's cooperation in the preempted war on Syria. It is however a very ominous sign, especially for the cornered whistleblower that Rogers is not only engaging in the promulgating of talking points that he pulled out of his ass about Snowden being Putin's spy but also engaged in the following exchange with CNN's Candy Crowley on the Sunday morning propaganda circuit:
ROGERS:  Yeah.  I am very concerned about the security status of the Olympics.  I do believe that the Russian government needs to be more cooperative with the United States when it comes to the security of the games.  We have found a departure of cooperation that's very concerning to me.
CROWLEY:  Can you tell me what a departure of cooperation is?  What does that mean?  What are they doing?
ROGERS:  Well, think about the problems they've had.  So they've had several bombings.  They disrupted plots.  They've now moved some 30,000 armed troops down to the region.  That tells you that their level of concern is great, but we don't seem to be getting all of the information we need to protect our athletes in the games.  I think this needs to change, and it should change soon.  This is not going to be a political problem for the Russians to share, although they apparently don't think so.  It will be a problem–
CROWLEY:  They don't want to share their intelligence with U.S. intelligence.
ROGERS:  That's correct.  So what we're finding is they aren't giving us the full story about what are the threat streams, who do we need to worry about, are those groups, the terrorist groups who have had some success, are they still plotting?  There's a missing gap, and you never want that when you go into something I think as important as the Olympic Games and the security of the athletes, and the participants and those who come to watch the games.
CROWLEY:  Just quickly if I can, if that does not change, would you worry about U.S. participation in the Olympics?
ROGERS:  If I don't see a higher level of cooperation, I'm concerned today.  I don't think anything would abate that concern short of full cooperation from the Russian security services.
Cooperation likely including the whereabouts of one Edward Snowden whose remaining lifespan at this point may very well be measured in weeks.