Report: Obama's NSA Stasi Destroying Free Press in USA

President Barack Obama's Nixonian war on journalism received an ironic seal of approval today in a joint report issued by watchdog groups Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union that points out the obvious in that the very basis of the First Amendment, a free press is well on the way to extinction in The Homeland. The Founding Fathers understood that it was imperative to establish that most important check on the government to restrain the corruption of entrenched power and the ability of journalists to be able to inform the populace of what elected officials were up to at any given time is the cornerstone upon which a free society and a healthy democracy rests. Obama and the rest of the greatest enemies that the American people have faced in US history - a venal and thoroughly rancid gaggle of  crooks, liars, perverts, gangsters and prostitutes in the US Congress along with a judicial system that has been sold to the highest bidder -  loathe the very concept of a free and unfettered press and have arrayed in 2014 to snuff it out lest it ever challenge their mounting crimes against the republic.

The HRW-ACLU report is entitled "With Liberty to Monitor All" (subtitled How Large-Scale US Surveillance is Harming Journalism, Law, and American Democracy) is just the latest example of how decades of political corruption, legal chicanery and an indolent, slothful and willfully ignorant populace have allowed this once great country to be stealthily destroyed from within, the very pillars of the foundation of a once free society eaten away as if by a ravenous army of Formosan termites. The report comes on top of over a year of leaks of documents on the programs and procedures of the unaccountable (and completely enabled by Congress) NSA that were procured by former government contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden. The always fraudulent war on terror has from day one been a war on the American people and there are many within the Washington establishment who want to see him murdered or even worse - Obama probably has a hard on for the day that the targeting coordinates of the man will be delivered to him along with his orange juice and the morning kill list.

From an article on the report written by former Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin (he was rudely run out of town in 2009 when his "White House Watch" column no longer was exposing the lies of the Bush regime) over at the new online magazine The Intercept (you know that it won't be altered unlike stories at NBC) on the report I excerpt the following:

Even before the Snowden revelations, reporters trying to cover important defense, intelligence and counter-terrorism issues were reeling from the effects of unprecedented secrecy and attacks on whistleblowers.

 But newfound awareness of the numerous ways the government can follow electronic trails –  previously considered the stuff of paranoid fantasy — has led sources to grow considerably more fearful.

 “It used to be that leak investigations didn’t get far because it was too hard to uncover the source, but with digital tools it’s just much easier, and sources know that,” said Washington Post contributor Barton Gellman, one of the 46 journalists interviewed for the survey.

Sources are “afraid of the entire weight of the federal government coming down on them,” New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer is quoted as saying. “The added layer of fear makes it so much harder. I can’t count the number of people afraid of the legal implications [of speaking to me].”

Jonathan Landay, a McClatchy Newspapers reporter covering national security and intelligence, told Human Rights Watch that some sources have grown reluctant to talk to him about anything, “even something like, ‘Please explain the rationale for this foreign policy.’ That’s not even dealing with classified material; that’s just educating readers.”

Methods reporters use to avoid surveillance are time-consuming, difficult, off-putting  to sources — and ultimately futile, the surveyed journalists reported. “If the government wants to get you, they will,” Washington Post reporter Adam Goldman said.

But when journalists can’t do their jobs, the effect is felt well beyond the profession alone. Insufficiently informed journalism can “undermine effective democratic participation and governance,” the report states.

It is actually one hell of a lot easier to dispense with freedom of the press these days even without the heavy hand of the government applying the garrote and giving it a hard good twist. The top "reporters" and "news" people in America -thanks largely to the massive media consolidation spree that then President Bill Clinton set into motion with the odious Telecommunications Act of 1996 - are largely comprised of a pack of power-suckling careerists, rank sycophants, sleazy on the payroll government shills, self-obsessed celebrity pundits and ghoulish electronic ambulance chasers like the pride of CNN, Nancy Grace.  

It is very simple to manufacture consent in America and Nazi propaganda czar Paul Joseph Goebbels would be proud of the 'most trusted talking heads in US media' these days. Take  for example the all-star lineup of the Sunday morning masters of electronic fellatio including the ever scummy David Gregory of NBC's Meet the Press, longtime political insider Bob Schieffer of CBS's Face the Nation, the dynamic duo at CNN being former AIPAC lobbyist Wolf Blitzer and that insipid blathering sow Candy Crowley, former Clinton flack George Stephanopoulos over at ABC's this week with neocon liar and PNAC founder William Kristol now riding shotgun and of course FOX's Chris Wallace. When the carcass of this rapidly collapsing empire is one day hauled upon the autopsy table by future historians to determine where it all went wrong a generous smattering of video from the ongoing beltway circle jerk on the Sabbath will likely be a key part of the study. As for the rest of the liars, snakes and bunco artists in the corrupt state-corporate media there are more to name than there is the time and space. Suffice it to say that in America, nothing sells quite as cheaply as integrity - just tune into MSNBC some night around the time that Rachel Maddow comes on to whore herself out to provide cover for the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Obama administration.

For the rest there is the NSA - the ultimate trump card of the fascist state and the perfect apparatus to suppress and target honest journalists trying to make a living and whistleblowers who attempt to get the truth out about the massive and metastasizing cancer within the government and every other prominent industry in America these days. They are the ultimate enemies of the state, at least the gangster state as it exists today - forget about al Qaeda, ISIS or even the current Emanuel Goldstein/New Hitler that is Russian President Vladimir Putin, the target of the new "two minutes hate" beamed into the living rooms of television addicted Americans 24/7. If we lived in a decent society with a functional poltical system - WE DON'T - The HRW-ACLU report would provide a serious warning to Americans that it is all slipping away and unless they wake up soon they will be as startled as the sheep when they round that final corner in the gleaming maze of steel chutes to confront the captive bolt pistol and their destiny.

But there is always another season of Dancing With the Stars upcoming and the NFL's preseason slate kicks off next week. Bread and circuses baby!

Goebbels shrugged.

LINKS to the report:

Human Rights Watch 

ACLU

Is There a Second NSA Leaker in Addition to Edward Snowden?

A very interesting question has come out regarding a story on the NSA's targeting of those who utilize internet privacy tools, specifically the browser Tor (The Onion Router) and portable Linux based operating system Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) as potential "terrorists" and "extremists". The question being is that the copy of the XKeyscore code published by German website Das Erste apparently was not a part of the collection of NSA documents procured by whistleblower Edward Snowden but may actually have come from a second leaker. If true this would be a bombshell as well as a game-changer that could reverberate throughout the world and shake the US national surveillance state to its very roots.

The big story which is written by Lena Kampf, Jacob Appelbaum and John Goetz originally broke in Germany's Tagesschau (you will need Google Translate) and cites the NSA targeting of a German student and internet privacy activist named Sebastian Hahn who is involved with the Tor Project. The NSA has determined that anyone who even searches for information on internet encryption and privacy tools is deemed to be an "extremist". They are then flagged for a higher level of monitoring, data-mining and retention of content instead of the limited hangout of only the metadata. This goes far beyond what has been openly admitted to by the Obama administration and the array of national intelligence goons - even if they did manage to retroactively legalize their snooping as divulged in the report by that independent executive branch internal oversight office the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board.

This is where it begins to get really scary now that NSA has been outed for officially crossing over into thought crime. Internet privacy organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has called out NSA for infringing upon the First Amendment "Dear NSA, Privacy is a Fundamental Right, Not Reasonable Suspicion":

Learning about Linux is not a crime--but don't tell the NSA that. A story published in German on Tagesschau, and followed up by an article in English on DasErste.de today, has revealed that the NSA is scrutinizing people who visit websites such as the Tor Project's home page and even Linux Journal. This is disturbing in a number of ways, but the bottom line is this: the procedures outlined in the articles show the NSA is adding "fingerprints"--like a scarlet letter for the information age--to activities that go hand in hand with First Amendment protected activities and freedom of expression across the globe.

The EFF also encourages the continued use of Tor and Tails:

One question that is sure to come up is whether this means people desiring anonymity should stop using Tor or Tails. Here's the bottom line: If you're using Tor or Tails, there is a possibility that you will be subject to greater NSA scrutiny. But we believe that the benefits outweigh the burdens.

In fact, the more people use Tor, the safer you are. That's why we're continuing to run the Tor Challenge. The ubiquitous use of privacy and security tools is our best hope for protecting the people who really need those tools--people for whom the consequences of being caught speaking out against their government can be imprisonment or death. The more ordinary people use Tor and Tails, the harder it is for the NSA to make the case that reading about or using these tools is de facto suspicious.

My personal take on this is that if you are currently using these tools or otherwise engaged in fighting the surveillance state then you are already on their list so just f*ck the NSA. At this point activists and those who challenge the system still have a relative degree of freedom to do exactly that so why retreat into the sheep pack when you have a vested interest in challenging the bastards - especially when that vested interest is in saving one's own skin. If someone is already on the pickup list, the primary objective is to do everything possible to keep the black vans from rolling on that day when it becomes politically acceptable to give the order - such as the next "terrorist" attack like the one that Dick Cheney has promised.

The key aspect of this story - anyone who gets it has understood for a long time that the NSA is lying their asses off and has been using their surveillance systems to build electronic dossiers on journalists, activists, bloggers, political dissidents and anyone who may one day pose a threat to the gangster state - is that the code apparently did not come from Mr. Snowden. According to a piece at the blog Boing Boing, written by Cory Doctorow and entitled "If you read Boing Boing, the NSA considers you a target for deep surveillance" I except the following:

I have known that this story was coming for some time now, having learned about its broad contours under embargo from a trusted source. Since then, I've discussed it in confidence with some of the technical experts who have worked on the full set of Snowden docs, and they were as shocked as I was.

One expert suggested that the NSA's intention here was to separate the sheep from the goats -- to split the entire population of the Internet into "people who have the technical know-how to be private" and "people who don't" and then capture all the communications from the first group.

Another expert said that s/he believed that this leak may come from a second source, not Edward Snowden, as s/he had not seen this in the original Snowden docs; and had seen other revelations that also appeared independent of the Snowden materials. If that's true, it's big news, as Snowden was the first person to ever leak docs from the NSA. The existence of a potential second source means that Snowden may have inspired some of his former colleagues to take a long, hard look at the agency's cavalier attitude to the law and decency.

Doctorow then cites security expert Bruce Schneier (who has worked with Glenn Greenwald) who writes at the blog Schneier on Security who has stated in his recent post "NSA Targets the Privacy-Conscious for Surveillance" that "And, since Cory said it, I do not believe that this came from the Snowden documents. I also don't believe the TAO catalog came from the Snowden documents. I think there's a second leaker out there." Greenwald himself seems to acknowledge this possibility in a Tweet.

That would be huge - particularly now that Greenwald's big story -that promised "fireworks show" - has been shut down by the US government which has gotten to either the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist himself or to the decision makers at the abysmal (at least to this point anyway) Pierre Omidyar backed venture The Intercept. The prospect of a second NSA leaker - who if he/she is smart, will avoid outing themselves and then being subjected to the concerted campaigns of media and establishment demonization and vilification - must send cold chills up the spines of the American Stasi high command over at Ft. Meade and the rotten to the core political class that protects it from any form of oversight.

It would be even better if there were more than two and with the website Cryptome having alluded to the coming release of all the Snowden material nothing could make for a bigger and better party than a couple of wild cards floating around out there with more seriously explosive evidence like the set of XKeyscore instructions that shows the lengths to which this monstrous surveillance colossus is prepared to go in order to lock down its gains.

Anti-Spying Blimp Flown Over Massive NSA Data Storage Facility in Utah

In an attempt to bring publicity to the mass surveillance and data-mining activities of the American Stasi a blimp with the message "Illegal Spying Below" was flown over that massive data storage facility that the NSA has built in Bluffdale, Utah. The blimp was a joint venture between three disparate activist groups Greenpeace, The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tenth Amendment Center in an alliance that confounds the corrupt two-party power structure and the phony left-right paradigm and proves that people can set aside differences and unite against a shared enemy. I have long advocated for a coming together of libertarians, progressives and principled conservatives to push for a restoration of the rule of law as set forth in the US Constitution and the defeat of the creeping fascism that is now evolving into full-blown totalitarianism - largely thanks to the NSA - because if it isn't stopped or at least significantly slowed, then nothing else is really going to matter.

The Bluffdale center provides the government and those with the money to purchase political clout as well as vested special interests with a veritable wet dream of locking down their power for perpetuity by allowing for the hoarding and storage of every aspect of a person's life so that when a threat to the system is identified then a case will be able to be built for their prosecution and imprisonment. There has already been a revelation of "parallel construction" activities in which law enforcement uses data illegally provided by the NSA for targeting purposes and then goes about building a completely phony case against the individual. This is what one might expect to exist in a classical totalitarian state where government goons like the Gestapo, the NKVD, SAVAK or actual Stasi operated with impunity to crush dissent and to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis - it can happen here.

The world of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report and Pre-Crime is coming and coming soon once that data center is fully operational and stocked with information and the political climate dictates it. The NSA has always been about going after dissent and not any bullshit war on terror unless one realizes that the rogue state views us, it's own citizens as the "terrorists".  The real targets - and I am anxiously awaiting the "imminent" Glenn Greenwald story on Snowden's list - will be environmentalists, anti-government activists and writers, human rights activists and lawyers, supporters of Wikileaks, Anonymous and the Occupy movement, antiwar activists, climate change activists, privacy advocates, anti-corporate activists, ACLU members, bloggers and journalists, BDS activists and any other organization that serves to challenge the corrupt elite and those sympathetic to anti-establishment views. The crimes of hijacking the system, destroying democracy and stealing from the poor and middle class to enrich the elite have already been perpetrated and it is the job of the NSA and it's corporate partners to ensure that they are never discovered or challenged.

Other than the "Illegal Spying Below" blimp another NSA related story from Friday is the findings of a transparency report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) which is the agency headed up by pathological liar James Clapper. For what it's worth the report claims that the NSA only actually queried the phone records of 248 Americans, a ridiculously low number considering the extent of the mass surveillance and probably more of the total bullshit that has been shoveled down the throats of Americans by an agency that has no inclination to provide anything remotely resembling the truth. Per a story from The Guardian entitled "NSA queried phone records of just 248 people despite massive data sweep" from which I excerpt:

The National Security Agency was interested in the phone data of fewer than 250 people believed to be in the United States in 2013, despite collecting the phone records of nearly every American.

As acknowledged in the NSA's first-ever disclosure of statistics about how it uses its broad surveillance authorities, released Friday, the NSA performed queries of its massive phone records troves for 248 "known or presumed US persons" in 2013.

AND

The number of "selectors" NSA queried from that data trove, a term referring to an account and not necessarily an individual user, was 423 in 2013, an increase from the "less than 300 times" it searched through the data trove in 2012, according to former deputy NSA director John Inglis.

"This transparency report is significant because it shows for the first time on an annual basis both targets of business-record orders and the number of US persons specifically targeted with these metadata queries," said Alan Butler, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"These are critical numbers to review when talking about a program that sweeps in the records of hundreds of millions of Americans."

Considering the billions if not trillions of dollars invested in the surveillance colossus the "248" number is suspect for several reasons. First and foremost is that if that is a true number (just for argument's sake let's say it is) then the entire surveillance state Gomorrah is an enormous waste of money that exists to loot the American taxpayers to create jobs for the millions who are employed by the intelligence agencies, their extensive networks of contractors and the infrastructure that the politicians who benefit continue to fund. We have far too many legitimate problems in this country to throw money into an domestic surveillance apparatus that only finds "248" targets. Secondly, these are ODNI figures and again, James Clapper is a man who perjured himself in front of Congress so really, how much credence can possibly be put into such a report. Thirdly, the numbers are subject to being cooked in that the NSA has that extensive network of contractors as well as foreign partners such as the UK's GCHQ which as has been already revealed by the Snowden documents as engaged in critical activities such as sexual blackmail so as to ostensibly lend the NSA plausible deniability. The report just doesn't pass the smell test, again I excerpt from The Guardian: story:

"These are critical numbers to review when talking about a program that sweeps in the records of hundreds of millions of Americans."

Some privacy advocates expressed scepticism about how genuine and accurate an account of NSA surveillance the report actually provides.

"The ODNI report calls itself into question by saying they're providing numbers, but immediately saying those numbers are only true to the extent the intelligence community believes it can release them without compromising sensitive information," said Amie Stepanovich of the digital rights group Access.

"The numbers could be much greater, and made to look smaller because of what the intelligence community calls preserving intelligence programs.

Weasel words  if there ever were any - "preserving intelligence programs" -  that is just more of the same Orwellian nonsense like calling torture "enhanced interrogation techniques" but sadly the bastards continue to get away with it all.  

Greenwald Touts Imminent Release of Shocking NSA Story

Having successfully forced the hand of the US power structure in returning to America despite threats of his arrest and imprisonment - where he likely would have been tortured - Glenn Greenwald has been hitting the media circuit to speak and promote his book "No Place to Hide". This really must burn the Obama regime although they due to their own arrogance and foolhardy recklessness have other fish to fry with percolating foreign opportunities for regime change in Russia, Syria and now Iraq but having Greenwald hauled in by government thugs and disappeared into the bowels of our massive prison system would have just been too much bad publicity - especially in an election year.

Greenwald has let slip that a new story, with shocking details as to who exactly is being spied on by the NSA Stasi and their bogus "anti-terrorist" mass surveillance and data-mining programs is "imminent". In an interview with FOX News in which the host Sheppard Smith continued to pepper Greenwald with talking points by protectors of the fascist state who still peddle the hogwash that former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower being some sort of sinister Russian operative and the most recently "why doesn't he come home to face the judicial system" or to as the insidious Skull and Bones pedigreed US Secretary of State John Kerry puts it "man up". Greenwald was attacked by the sleazy anti-Muslim bigot Bill Maher on HBO over the weekend along with the media's  go-to veteran "activist" Paul Reickhoff who accused Snowden of helping "terrorists" and posed the same question. Of course any fair trial of Snowden is a joke and only food for the lemmings because he would be disappeared into some military prison and tortured, never to be heard from again except for the obligatory show trial -where under the archaic and anti-American 1917 Espionage Act that Obama and Holder so adore - he would not even be able to defend himself. Greenwald continues to emphasize this but it will not resonate with Americans who are historically ignorant of all but the state sanctioned indoctrination of exceptionalist glory.

Waiting for Greenwald's big revelations, originally promised by the Pulitzer Prize winner in a GQ interview "The Man Who Knows Too Much" as well as in another interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now has been an exercise in frustration. It does appear from Greenwald's reference to "imminent" that something big is finally, after all of this time coming.  For reference I excerpt from the GQ article:

We published the first article [about the NSA collecting Verizon phone records] while I was in Hong Kong last June and won’t stop until we’re done. I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

As well as from Democracy Now:

AMY GOODMAN: And the document you include from October 3rd, 2012, about the NSA targeting of, quote, "radicals"?

GLENN GREENWALD: You know, one of the interesting things is, obviously, people are very aware of the COINTEL abuses. I know you’ve had people on your show who actually participated in the break-in of the FBI and took the documents that unveiled that program. People are aware of J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses. The nature of that series of events is that the United States government looks at people who oppose what they do as being, quote-unquote, "threats." That’s the nature of power, is to regard anybody who’s a threat to your power as a broad national security threat. And a lot of times people will say, "We don’t yet have the reporting in this case that shows that kind of abuse." And a lot of that reporting is still reporting that we’re working on and that I promise you is coming.

I suspect that the story will divulge what many have long suspected in that political dissidents, activists and any who represent a threat to the new post-September 11, 2001 order of fascism at home and militarism and murder abroad will be the ones who are targeted. I also suspect that journalists will be among the targets, there was a program that was revealed several years back FIRSTFRUITS that specifically targeted members of the media. Washington's Blog recently ran a series of pieces based on interviews conducted with pre-Snowden NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and I except at length from the first of the pieces:

But after 9/11, NSA instead adopted the competing “Stellar Wind” system, which didn’t protect Americans’ privacy, and was less effective and more expensive.

THOMAS DRAKE: Part of what I discovered is that part of the surveillance system, part of the Stellar Wind system – and that’s an umbrella term in itself – there were offshoots of that.

It metastasized. It grew like a cancer on the body politic.

One of the things that was done was [along the lines of]: “You know what? We’ve got to make sure” (because they were paranoid) “we’ve got to make sure that this stuff doesn’t get out … oh yeah, the press. Let’s violate the Fourth Amendment and just monitor the press.”

The whole story of that has not come out.

There was a program called “First Fruits”. They’ve no doubt changed the name of the program [since then.]

And that First Fruits program was a cutout which was designed from all of the domestic surveillance take. “Let’s just pipe off from all” that is involving designated [reporters] … or in some cases whole groups of reporters and journalists.

So you’re targeting actual newspapers. You’re targeting media outlets.

And you’re monitoring – on a persistent basis – their communications.

The surveillance of reporters and news organizations who can't simply be bought off like the plethora of dishonest and dishonorable scumbags who are eager to serve the state for money, celebrity and inclusion at the right events, dinners and cocktail parties of the Beltway elite is a given and while Obama has escalated it the programs had their roots under Bush-Cheney and even before. Obama and the longtime fixer Eric Holder have waged a war against journalism that is unprecedented in the history of this country or at least since Woodrow Wilson's filthy Espionage Act was passed. Let's hope that Greenwald's "imminent" story finally provides a wake up call that can no longer be ignored despite the thorough corruption of the domestic "mainstream" media.

NSA Collecting Millions of Online User Pictures

With the latest of the NSA stories based on documents provided by former US government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden it has been revealed that millions of facial images are being scooped up and stored away for future use. The New York Times story, “N.S.A. Collecting Millions of Faces From Web Images” by James Risen and Laura Poitras continues to lay out the steps that will inevitably lead to the final monstrous revelation that all of this information is being gathered for future use against political dissidents and all others who cross Leviathan.

I excerpt the following from the NYT story:

The National Security Agency is harvesting huge numbers of images of people from communications that it intercepts through its global surveillance operations for use in sophisticated facial recognition programs, according to top-secret documents.

The spy agency’s reliance on facial recognition technology has grown significantly over the last four years as the agency has turned to new software to exploit the flood of images included in emails, text messages, social media, videoconferences and other communications, the N.S.A. documents reveal. Agency officials believe that technological advances could revolutionize the way that the N.S.A. finds intelligence targets around the world, the documents show. The agency’s ambitions for this highly sensitive ability and the scale of its effort have not previously been disclosed.

The agency intercepts “millions of images per day” — including about 55,000 “facial recognition quality images” — which translate into “tremendous untapped potential,” according to 2011 documents obtained from the former agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. While once focused on written and oral communications, the N.S.A. now considers facial images, fingerprints and other identifiers just as important to its mission of tracking suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets, the documents show.

The pictures will be part of the massive dossiers that are being assembled and stored at facilities like that gargantuan one out on the Utah desert. The visuals for the Risen-Poitras story are here but there is one that is more disturbing than the others in that it lays out what else is being collected and stored, that one is here.

It is the slide that indicates exactly what Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald have been talking about as far as the agency's drive "collect it all" and this data, rather than being used to stop "terrorists" which has always been hogwash unless the definition of what constitutes a "terrorist" is so vaguely defined that pretty much anyone could be made to fit into that catch all phrase. From the feathered slide which divides things up into the three main categories BIOMETRIC, BIOGRAPHIC and CONTEXTUAL I provide a sampling of each of the three below:

BIOMETRIC: Familial, volitional, individual, sex, height, heat signature, genetic markers, voiceprint, blood type, language, drug use (recreational and medical), race, handwriting, typing, gait, medical devices.

BIOGRAPHIC: Address history, educational, employment, judicial, military service, family, acquired traits, spouse, children, cohabitants, employees, guests, websites, Twitter, Facebook, social affiliations.

CONTEXTUAL: Financial, media consumption/production, associates, property, political donations, credit ratings, tastes/preferences, commercial transactions, property, accounts records.

Be aware that this is only a small sample of that the slide has as the targets for collection - it is in my opinion that this illustration is even more important than the story itself in that it reveals far more than the gathering of images for facial recognition. The inclusion of family for example shows that the NSA is going to a place where not even the Mafia does and that when the political situation is right - say after a false flag terror attack or a real one given the vast number of enemies that the US now has thanks to the ongoing murder of foreign civilians this is all going to be put to use to protect the totalitarian state that has been constructed and to which the vast majority still remains unaware of .

To quote a Leonard Cohen song "Get ready for the future: it is murder"

Are Feds Behind the Cyber Attack on Libertarian Website Antiwar.com?

Today libertarian website Antiwar.com, one of the best news and foreign policy locations on the internet was hacked in the middle of a fund-raising drive. According to a notice on the website their servers were hit with a malware attack, such malicious programs have been revealed by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald as one of the myriad of tools that the American Stasi uses to prosecute their secretive war on the truth. In my years of writing I have always considered Antiwar.com to be an excellent resource on much of what really goes on in this country and regularly visit the site several times a day to keep up with breaking news that you just won't find in the corrupt US state-corporate media.

Justin Raimondo announced on Twitter today that the site had been attacked which seems a rather fortuitous coincidence in that the Greenwald book "No Place to Hide" was published yesterday and Raimondo's column to day entitled "The American Republic is Dead" calls for a revolution to stop the surveillance state. Not that the NSA would leave noticeable fingerprints but if something smells like a rat it is usually exactly the stench of a rodent. The verbiage below is what is currently showing on the homepage at Antiwar.com:

A malware assault has been launched against the server hosting news.antiwar, original.antiwar, and the blog. Of course it's just a "coincidence" that this has occurred just as we've launched our fundraising drive. Or is it? As Glenn Greenwald has reported, the NSA is now in the business of spreading "industrial strength malware" to "enable the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites."

The website had previously been targeted by the feds as was reported in a Guardian piece by Spencer Ackerman back in November of 2013 that is entitled “FBI monitored anti-war website in error for six years, documents show” from which I excerpt:

According to unredacted portions of the documents, that apparent mix-up was the first time antiwar.com came onto the FBI’s radar – a purview that would last at least six years.

Garris said he never heard back from the FBI, and had no reason to believe that the incident had any broader impact, until he saw what was in his FBI file. “It was pretty scary to think that in my FBI file, and perhaps other government agency files, there was a report that I was considered a threat based on that,” Garris said.

“That may follow me for the rest of my life. Any time I interact with any law enforcement or government agencies, they’re going to be able to see that, and make evaluations of me based on it. It’s very scary.”

The mix-up did not stay limited to the San Francisco field office. In 2004, FBI officials in Newark, New Jersey, compiled a “threat assessment” of Garris and his colleague Justin Raimondo.

The 2004 “threat assessment” took note of Raimondo and Garris’ anti-war views, listed articles and media appearances in which they made their arguments, and reported that “peaceful” anti-war protesters in the UK passed out literature referencing antiwar.com that suggested the US government was holding Israeli spies in connection to the September 11 attacks.

Contained within the file are copies of articles penned by Raimondo advancing the conspiracy theory that Israel had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks.

The FBI created profiles of both Raimondo and Garris using public records, such as those held by the Department of Motor Vehicles, to include their physical descriptions. “The rights of individuals to post information and to express personal views on the Internet should be honored and protected; however, some material that is circulated on the internet can compromise current active FBI investigations,” reads an unsigned “analyst comment” on the 2004 threat assessment.

The unnamed analyst said there were “several unanswered questions regarding www.antiwar.com,” such as the source of its funding, the presence of material on the site that is “not suitable for public release” and whether Raimondo was using “a pseudonym.”

The article also links to copies of the actual documents that show that Antiwar.com has been on the radar of the fascists who run this country for years. According to a Tweet from Raimondo today the hacking "doesn't intimidate me in the least. They did the same thing during the Kosovo War" which is the attitude that the author brings to his fine work at the site - uncompromising and tough as hell - there is nothing that a bully hates more than someone who fights back and Raimondo is that type of guy. 

I would suspect that a renewed flurry of nefarious internet action will be undertaken at any number of websites now as the bastards are losing the information war that they have invested billions of dollars that have been ripped off from the US taxpayers to do so. The more that the so-called mainstream media lies about the Obama administration supporting neo-Nazi murderers in Ukraine or polishes the oligarchic turd that Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter just landed a gig with Ukraine's top gas company or continues to suppress the abuses of the NSA the more that they continue to lose credibility. The rubes still believe it but they really don't know any better and the lies become more ridiculous and obvious by the day so there is obvious panic within the system that has been hijacked by criminals both within and without the government that operate within the Deep State infrastructure.

The only way to beat the fuckers is to continue to support websites like this one as well as Antiwar.com.

Real Purpose of NSA Programs: Targeting Dissent

These programs were never about terrorism: they’re about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They’re about power.

 -Edward Snowden

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia briefly let the mask slip during recent comments to University of Hawaii law students it was a rare moment of openness as to reveal the pathology of the leadership class here in The Homeland.  During an exchange over a World War II era case involving Japanese Americans who were rounded up and placed in internment camps such as the infamous Manzanar Scalia stated that  “…you are kidding yourself if you think the same thing will not happen again” and "In times of war, the laws fall silent." Times of war such as the permanent war on terror that is now in its thirteenth year running and still picking up steam as the oppressive apparatus of the state power of Leviathan has been exposed thanks to the sacrifices of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The ongoing flow of revelations provided by the documents that Snowden appropriated as a public service to an America that has ever since the 'day when everything changed' on September 11, 2001 has been bludgeoned by fear into a state of meek acceptance and submission to their own enslavement continue to emerge. What is starting to come out now is even worse than just the massive unconstitutional warrantless surveillance, data-mining and mass storage of all of the communications and financial information of millions of law-abiding citizens that has been a constant nuisance to the Obama administration. Now we get the real stuff, first there was the trolling of porn sites for incriminating data, the obvious involvement in economic trickery and industrial espionage, blackmail of political officials and now thanks to Polk Award winner Glenn Greenwald - targeting political dissent.

In a story that broke yesterday by Greenwald and Ryan Gallagheron First Look Media's new online magazine The Intercept entitled “Snowden Documents Reveal Covert Surveillance and Pressure Tactics Aimed at WikiLeaks and Its Supporters” it was revealed that the NSA and its foreign partners went after supporters of Wikileaks as well as other activist groups. The greatest enemy of the secret state is transparency and the relentless manner in which the U.S. government and its lackeys have gone after first Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald is an indication of just how much it fears the truth about the real intent of the surveillance programs ever getting out. The list of those who have run afoul of the secret state is long and the vengeance has been severe.

Some targets of note with the exception of the aforementioned three are the free lance journalist Danny Casolaro who was investigating high crimes involving government officials when his body was found in a West Virginia hotel room in 1991 in a blood filled bathtub. It could be speculated that he was on to something big involving the surveillance state, particularly the CIA and NSA as well as foreign intelligence services as his research included matters associated with the now forgotten PROMIS software, a powerful and advanced precursor to today's NSA surveillance and data-mining programs. He could have been the first casualty in the war on journalism and it was the era before the internet so it was much easier to simply 'shut down' a dangerous line of inquiry by eliminating a 'nuisance' than it is in 2014. Then there was Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings whose reporting brought down General Stanley McChrystal formerly of JSOC and had amassed a large list of enemies. His mysterious and fiery death in an automobile 'accident' has been relegated to the memory hole just months afterwards, it is of note that according to some reports that he was also onto something big and was allegedly in contact with Wikileaks lawyers shortly before his new Mercedes was engulfed in a ball of fire.

But l digress...

Greenwald's expose is a damning indictment of just how out of control that the rogue elements of the deep state have become in their relentless drive to forever lock down their power and the targeting of dissenters is the most critical component of their long term strategy. I excerpt from the piece:

The efforts – detailed in documents provided previously by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden – included a broad campaign of international pressure aimed not only at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, but at what the U.S. government calls “the human network that supports WikiLeaks.” The documents also contain internal discussions about targeting the file-sharing site Pirate Bay and hacktivist collectives such as Anonymous.

 One classified document from Government Communications Headquarters, Britain’s top spy agency, shows that GCHQ used its surveillance system to secretly monitor visitors to a WikiLeaks site. By exploiting its ability to tap into the fiber-optic cables that make up the backbone of the Internet, the agency confided to allies in 2012, it was able to collect the IP addresses of visitors in real time, as well as the search terms that visitors used to reach the site from search engines like Google.

Another classified document from the U.S. intelligence community, dated August 2010, recounts how the Obama administration urged foreign allies to file criminal charges against Assange over the group’s publication of the Afghanistan war logs.

 A third document, from July 2011, contains a summary of an internal discussion in which officials from two NSA offices – including the agency’s general counsel and an arm of its Threat Operations Center – considered designating WikiLeaks as “a ‘malicious foreign actor’ for the purpose of targeting.” Such a designation would have allowed the group to be targeted with extensive electronic surveillance – without the need to exclude U.S. persons from the surveillance searches.

 In 2008, not long after WikiLeaks was formed, the U.S. Army prepared a report that identified the organization as an enemy, and plotted how it could be destroyed. The new documents provide a window into how the U.S. and British governments appear to have shared the view that WikiLeaks represented a serious threat, and reveal the controversial measures they were willing to take to combat it.

Two quick things to take away from the excerpt is that the rogue agency as well as the U.S. military is not only speaking of designating WikiLeaks as a "malicious foreign actor" which would make it subject to the anti-terror (anti-dissent) secret system of laws jammed down Americans' throats after 9/11 but that it is also going after those who are even supportive of the organization - including domestic targets. This is the key component of the entire piece in my personal opinion in that all of that data-mining that will take up residence at the massive NSA Utah facility and other locations for vague future purposes has now become a little clearer. The data will be perused for going after 'enemies of the state' and the oppression will not be limited to dissenters and sympathizers but also to all of their known acquaintances, family members, friends and other associates past and present so as to intimidate, bully, threaten and extort in order to build a case against the targets.

NSA whistleblower William Binney perfectly sums it up in a recent interview with Rob Kall of the progressive website OpEd News available here:

R.K.: Anything that we haven't covered yet?  We have got to wrap this up.  Anything that we haven't covered that's really important that you would like the listeners to know about?

W.B.: Just that my major concern isn't with NSA having access to this data or having this data, it's the use of it and once they get it and store it, being used by law enforcement and our law enforcement is spreading that around the world to other law enforcement and so it's corrupting not just our democracy, we're becoming a police state because of this but it's also corrupting the countries around the world so it's really endangering the democratic process and the court systems that we have established.  That is really destroying our society.  We may not know it yet but eventually it'll get to all of us.

R.K.: Bad news.  So you told me that you're going to spend the rest of your life on this. 

W.B.: Yes.  Until my government basically starts to do the right thing, and that means become a constitutionally based operating government.

R.K.: Do you see any ideological or party differences in the way this is being handled?

W.B.: Actually no.  I think they're all basically the same.  They've been, I mean for example you know Bush would refer to have acquired the terrorists, captured them, put them in to torture them to get information; whereas Obama would kill them with a drone.  So it's the same principle, I mean they're just doing whatever they want, there are no limits to what they want to do.  Especially the latest NDAA that talks about giving the president the power to declare anybody, any US Citizen even in this country a terrorist and have the military pick them up, take them off the street, incarcerate them indefinitely, and give them no due process. 

That to me is executing something very similar to what the Nazis did in 1933, Special Order 48, that did exactly the same thing.  And that's how they got rid of all of their opposition.  All the communists and anybody else that opposed them.  But I mean they sent them to the concentration camps.  So far we have not been sending them to the concentration camps but they'll do things like send the FBI after you or maybe attempt to put you in jail like they tried to do with a number of us. 

So they're not as radical yet but the problem is that when you give people that kind of power or they hold that kind of power, sooner or later, they're going to use it. One way or another. 

R.K.: You know it seems to me that the same applies to technology.  If the technology is available or if it can be developed they're going to develop it and they're going to use it.  

The elimination of political opponents and crushing of dissent is essential for authoritarian regimes, it is notable that it was Justice Scalia, a Ronald Reagan appointee who brought up the internment camps in American's future for it was another former Reagan official, Lt. Colonel Oliver North whose REX 84 program was similarly targeting political dissidents and using the aforementioned PROMIS software to do so. I excerpt from a 1990s WIRED magazine piece "The Inslaw Octopus" by Richard Fricker:

 Lt. Col. Oliver North also may have been using the program. According to several intelligence community sources, PROMIS was in use at a 6,100-square-foot command center built on the sixth floor of the Justice Department. According to both a contractor who helped design the center and information disclosed during the Iran-Contra hearings, Oliver North had a similar, but smaller, White House operations room that was connected by computer link to the DOJ's command center.

 Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States as part of a domestic emergency preparedness program, commissioned under Reagan's Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), according to sources and published reports. Using PROMIS, sources point out, North could have drawn up lists of anyone ever arrested for a political protest, for example, or anyone who had ever refused to pay their taxes. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Sen. Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude. This operation was so sensitive that when Rep. Jack Brooks asked North about it during the Iran-Contra hearings, the hearing was immediately suspended pending an executive (secret) conference. When the hearings were reconvened, the issue of North's FEMA dealings was dropped.

The greatest yet to be asked question about the ongoing surveillance programs, given the comments by Scalia is not how much has yet to be revealed but when did it all begin in the first place?