Secret Court Reinstates Obama’s NSA Stasi Domestic Phone Spying Program

Just in time for Independence Day the Obama occupying government provided another example of just how “free” that we really are. In a ruling on Monday the ultra-secret surveillance court "temporarily" reinstated those “illegal” domestic phone data collection programs what were allegedly reformed by the USA Freedom Act last month. So much for that happy horseshit about surveillance reform bandied about by all of the political phonies and liberal elitists with their premature victory lap. It is easy to trump the courts and silly privacy advocates when the government has their own secret courts to fall back on.

Emperor Obama never wanted to do anything about his rogue NSA Stasi and now they are right back in business under the pretense of winding down the spying on everyone. This is of course another big lie straight out of Hitler 101 because in another few months the programs will simply be extended again after more anonymous government sources leak rumors about alleged terrorist plots to the corrupt and compliant media.

The website the Intercept is reporting that "Bulk Phone Surveillance Lives Again, To Die In a More Orderly Fashion in Five Months” from which I excerpt the following:

A federal judge with the top-secret surveillance court on Monday breezily reinstated the NSA bulk domestic surveillance program that was temporarily halted a month ago, allowing the agency to go back to hoovering up telephone metadata for five months while it unwinds the program for good.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court Judge Michael W. Mosman wrote in his ruling, using the French phrase that means “the more things change, the more they stay the same” to summarize the legislative and judicial back-and-forth that led to the temporary reinstatement.

In his decision, Mosman also flippantly dismissed a major appellate court ruling in May that the program was illegal. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which was the government’s legal cover for bulk collection, didn’t authorize any such thing. The decision hinged on the common-sense conclusion that when the Patriot Act gave the government power to obtain phone records “relevant to an authorized investigation,” that wasn’t power to collect all phone records everywhere.

“Second Circuit rulings are not binding on the FISC, and this Court respectfully disagrees with that Court’s analysis, especially in view of the intervening enactment of the USA FREEDOM Act,” Mosman wrote. “To a considerable extent, the Second Circuit’s analysis rests on mischaracterizations of how this program works and on understandings that, if they had once been correct, have been superseded by the USA FREEDOM Act.”

The truth is that the Orwellian surveillance/police state that was put into place after the September 11, 2001 attacks is NEVER going to end. There is too just much damned money in the business of fear and the political elite need these programs to target domestic dissenters who choose to work outside of the official scam that passes for a political system. The mass surveillance is also needed for the day that the Federal Reserve built economic house of cards finally collapses and troublemakers can be quickly identified and if need be rounded up before they can organize for change and demand that the criminals responsible be held accountable.

Who are they targeting now? Right Wing “hate groups” including those planning civil disobedience after the Supreme Court turned every opponent of gay marriage into a bigot and potential enemy of the state. The recent moves to eradicate the Confederate flag, a political agenda cynically exploited after nine worshippers were slaughtered by a lone gunman in a Charleston church two weeks ago has allowed the government to identify more potential enemies as well. These are the people who will bear the most watching by Obama’s Stasi. The New York Times ran two editorials in the space of a week lumping in domestic “extremists” with the likes of ISIS and al Qaeda so the propaganda is already being laid down.

If that takes a bit of luster off of those Fourth of July celebrations this weekend it should because we have now come full circle and are right back under the yoke of a tyrannical government just like the one that the Founding Fathers broke away from.

NSA Developed Search Engine is Another New Toy for the Surveillance State

The NSA has developed yet another tool with which to wage the ongoing war on American privacy that has escalated in intensity under the damnable presidency of Barack Obama. According to a new story based on documents provided by former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, Obama's Stasi has built the mother of all search engines. ICREACH allows for multiple government agencies to query numerous databases filled with data that has been gleaned under the pretense of the phony war on terror. The events of September 11, 2001 provided the government every excuse that it needed to engage in massive domestic surveillance of millions of law-abiding U.S. citizens, take a meat ax to the Constitution and build a costly Surveillance State Gomorrah. With the definition of "terrorism" becoming increasingly vague it is only a matter of time until it is affixed to American dissidents, political opponents and critics of the ever more tyrannical government in Washington.

The story which was originally published at the online magazine The Intercept under the title of "The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built it's Own Secret Google" was written by Ryan Gallagher. The story states that:

The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.

AND

The search tool was designed to be the largest system for internally sharing secret surveillance records in the United States, capable of handling two to five billion new records every day, including more than 30 different kinds of metadata on emails, phone calls, faxes, internet chats, and text messages, as well as location information collected from cellphones. Metadata reveals information about a communication—such as the “to” and “from” parts of an email, and the time and date it was sent, or the phone numbers someone called and when they called—but not the content of the message or audio of the call.

While Mr. Obama has continued to be quite the artful dodger on the collection of "metadata" and not the actual content of intercepted communications, it is all hogwash. After collection, the "metadata" than can then be used to reference the actual content of calls, emails, texts etc. According to former NSA executive turned whistleblower Thomas Drake, "metadata indexes content", a statement that is compatible with former NSA boss Michael Hayden's comments that "we kill people based on metadata". Billions of records are swept up daily and it is all being stored in facilities like that massive NSA complex in Bluffdale, Utah.

More according to Gallagher:

In a statement to The Intercept, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that the system shares data that is swept up by programs authorized under Executive Order 12333, a controversial Reagan-era presidential directive that underpins several NSA bulk surveillance operations that monitor communications overseas. The 12333 surveillance takes place with no court oversight and has received minimal Congressional scrutiny because it is targeted at foreign, not domestic, communication networks. But the broad scale of 12333 surveillance means that some Americans’ communications get caught in the dragnet as they transit international cables or satellites—and documents contained in the Snowden archive indicate that ICREACH taps into some of that data.

Legal experts told The Intercept they were shocked to learn about the scale of the ICREACH system and are concerned that law enforcement authorities might use it for domestic investigations that are not related to terrorism.

Which is an obviously reference of the circumventing of the Constitutional requirements of our legal system by a practice known as “parallel construction” which was revealed last year by Reuters. The Reuters story which is entitled “Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans” from which I excerpt:

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

So in addition to living in an unaccountable surveillance state that would blow George Orwell's mind, now there is a practice of government agents being able to set people up. Then there is the battlefield ready, militarized police force that may just end up being put under national control which is now being advocated. Don't forget that after 9/11 the government actively began to encourage neighbors, delivery personnel and home service companies to report "suspicious" behavior. We are not only subject to secret surveillance, secret laws and secret courts but also must exist among millions of potential rats and snitches.

Those creeping little cat footsteps of fascism grow louder by the day don't they? That is if you are listening. 

NSA Reform is Dead: Tech Companies Must Act to Protect Us Now

Not that it is surprising that the NSA Stasi is protected by a firewall of entrenched and corrupt members of our pathetic excuse for a legislative branch - the US Congress remains the number one enemy of the American people - and that any sort of effective reform in the aftermath of the Snowden leaks has always been dead on arrival. The USA Freedom Act seemed to be a perfect counterpart to the fascist USAPATRIOT Act when it was introduced, with the backing of US Representative James Sensenbrenner who was largely responsible for the latter monstrosity but as the establishment stalled enough time had passed for it to be gutted. The intelligence committee chairpersons of the House and Senate, respectively the right-wing talk radio bound fanatic Mike Rogers and the always ghastly Dianne Feinstein would be there to protect the warrentless mass surveillance and data-mining in all of its Constitution trashing glory because the protection of criminality is the main reason why the got their gigs in the first place.

The USA Freedom Act, in its watered down version which prolific security blogger Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel has brilliantly pegged as the USA Freedumber Act not only preserves the powers of the NSA but now provides them with official cover. The Freedumber Act is the Obama administration's wet dream as it would allow the narcissistic one to present himself as a champion of the American people by fixing the system and the business of getting all of the phone calls, financial data, images, book purchases, associations, family information, political affiliation, blog traffic, internet searches, sexual orientation, religious preferences, text messages and thousands of other data points to sock away in their massive storage facilities like the one out in Utah. Then Obama can get about the business of avenging the injury to his ego when Vladimir Putin prevented a war in Syria and Russia provided asylum to Snowden saving him from a US torture chamber and starting a new cold war which will ensure that military contractor money rolls in for the next election cycles.

Barring the promised bombshell revelations from journalist Glenn Greenwald - which are taking forever and making many (although not myself, at least not yet) nervous that he sold out to billionaire Pierre Omidyar and that the real stuff is never going to see the light of day - are so shocking as to make serious reform possible the great hope at this point is having to hope that Silicon Valley will come to the rescue. The NSA rampage has permanently tarnished the image of American big tech to the point that the only rational thing - at least from a business standpoint and these area after all businesses - is to improve their own security in order to prevent or at least make int more difficult for the government goons to penetrate their networks and customer communication activity.

This is currently in process and will continue to evolve as the US government has chosen to continue the programs rather than lose precious time between now and the day that the order comes down to use the data to go after those who are deemed to be threats to state power. According to a New York Times article entitled "Internet Giants Erect Barriers to Spy Agencies" that was published on Friday:

Just down the road from Google’s main campus here, engineers for the company are accelerating what has become the newest arms race in modern technology: They are making it far more difficult — and far more expensive — for the National Security Agency and the intelligence arms of other governments around the world to pierce their systems.

As fast as it can, Google is sealing up cracks in its systems that Edward J. Snowden revealed the N.S.A. had brilliantly exploited. It is encrypting more data as it moves among its servers and helping customers encode their own emails. Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo are taking similar steps.

After years of cooperating with the government, the immediate goal now is to thwart Washington — as well as Beijing and Moscow. The strategy is also intended to preserve business overseas in places like Brazil and Germany that have threatened to entrust data only to local providers.

Google, for example, is laying its own fiber optic cable under the world’s oceans, a project that began as an effort to cut costs and extend its influence, but now has an added purpose: to assure that the company will have more control over the movement of its customer data.

A year after Mr. Snowden’s revelations, the era of quiet cooperation is over. Telecommunications companies say they are denying requests to volunteer data not covered by existing law. A.T.&T., Verizon and others say that compared with a year ago, they are far more reluctant to cooperate with the United States government in “gray areas” where there is no explicit requirement for a legal warrant.

AND

Eric Grosse, Google’s security chief, suggested in an interview that the N.S.A.’s own behavior invited the new arms race.

“I am willing to help on the purely defensive side of things,” he said, referring to Washington’s efforts to enlist Silicon Valley in cybersecurity efforts. “But signals intercept is totally off the table,” he said, referring to national intelligence gathering.

“No hard feelings, but my job is to make their job hard,” he added.

There is naturally the standard fear-mongering by the US government and the implied threat of terrorist attacks is tech companies do not allow the NSA to proceed with impunity. The NYT piece cites an Obama administration official who invokes the 9/11 card once again:

Robert S. Litt, the general counsel of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all 17 American spy agencies, said on Wednesday that it was “an unquestionable loss for our nation that companies are losing the willingness to cooperate legally and voluntarily” with American spy agencies.

 “Just as there are technological gaps, there are legal gaps,” he said, speaking at the Wilson Center in Washington, “that leave a lot of gray area” governing what companies could turn over.

In the past, he said, “we have been very successful” in getting that data. But he acknowledged that for now, those days are over, and he predicted that “sooner or later there will be some intelligence failure and people will wonder why the intelligence agencies were not able to protect the nation.”

Companies respond that if that happens, it is the government’s own fault and that intelligence agencies, in their quest for broad data collection, have undermined web security for all.

BINGO on that last statement - the government to this day has yet to fire anyone who was on the job and failed to protect the nation on the morning of September 11, 2001 - why is that? Power will not be surrendered willingly and at this point, as there is ZERO chance for legitimate and serious reform of the unconstitutional practices of the NSA within the government it is incumbent on the tech companies to do what they can to go into a defensive mode and internet users to look into getting some serious encryption software installed.

Dianne Feinstein Lashes Out While Corrupt Congress Guts NSA Reforms

Apparently having now put her little snit with the CIA behind her, Senate Intelligence Committee boss Dianne Feinstein, the woman who has long served as an impenetrable firewall of cellulite between accountability and the run amok NSA Stasi is back with a vengeance. DiFi, while appearing on the Sunday morning bloviation circuit with CNN's Candy Crowley snapped while discussing the new Glenn Greenwald book "No Place to Hide" that - “It’s not a surveillance program, it’s a data-collection program”. The testy California Senator may have inadvertently let the the cat out of the bag on that one because it IS a data-collection program, specifically a data-mining program conducted on damned near the entire US population and once it has been collected it is being stored for some yet to be defined future use. That future use is to be social control and the best protection that money can buy for a system so vile and corrupt that there really is no adequate terminology to truly describe it.

The data that has been collected will be used to identify political dissidents or troublemakers challenging the imposition of fascism in America. But that is the purpose (outside of the surveillance end which likely includes sexual blackmail of political figures, industrial espionage on a grand scale, money laundering, the manipulation of financial markets and probably even state sanctioned drug trafficking) of what the NSA and the millions of private contractors - to lock down the illicit activities of those in high places when the shit finally does hit the fan and as in all tyrannies the roundup of problem people is a top priority. Criminals like Feinstein fully understand what the programs are for because she is the one charged with oversight which is pretty much like the financial oversight that has been provided by those like Timothy Geithner and Henry Paulson - the best and probably oldest scam in the book is to enable corruption by putting a crook or in Feinstein's case, a sociopath with zero morality in charge of minding the store.

Feinstein like the other treasonous swine who have hijacked the country using the September 11, 2001 attacks as an excuse continues to engage in the same fear-mongering to avoid oversight that has been used since Dick Cheney took over the show on that day while Bush was flying around the country like a scared rabbit. DiFi played the "terror" card by saying “I know they will come after us if they can, I see the intelligence” [not bothering to say exactly who "they" are nor that the "intelligence" is cooked to exaggerate such threats and keep the money rolling in] and “Terror is not down in the world, it is up" [failing to mention that the Empire's wars of aggression aren't exactly winning hearts and minds]. Call it what it is but now would be a perfect time for some sort of false flag attack that would forever end scrutiny of the rising menace of the star-spangled totalitarian state before it has finished baking, as the late Hunter S. Thompson put it "paranoia is just another word for ignorance" and nothing should ever be put beyond the capability of the lunatics who are running the system these days.

To the Obama administration and this most detestable of legislatures there has been no bigger thorn in the side than former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Just when the NSA Stasi stories had died down allowing the war machine to turn attention towards backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine and goading Russian leader Vladimir Putin into a response that would trigger a new Cold War - sending arms sales skyrocketing - there is renewed interest. This comes due to the Greenwald book and the surprisingly wide media attention that the author has been getting in The Homeland. There are also, as Greenwald promises more stories to come and soon including that really serious stuff that he has been teasing us with. In his GQ interview "The Man Who Knows Too Much" he made the statement that:

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.

I suspect that Feinstein and her ilk have an inkling about exactly what that "big missing piece" is and while it may not be the smoking gun that nails them all to the wall it may provide a sufficient piece of the puzzle that will provide other journalists, activists and bloggers with the material to begin to tie together a lot of disparate coincidences and strangeness into the damning indictment of criminals in high places that is desperately needed. The scum are likely praying for a terrorist attack - the bigger, the better - right about now.

On the "reform" front things aren't working out so well in terms of transparency and control over the surveillance AND data collection colossus. Predictably the so-called USA FREEDOM Act is being disemboweled by right-wing talk radio bound Michigan Congressmen Mike Rogers and his on the take authoritarian allies.  According to a story in The Hill entitled "Advocates fear NSA bill is being gutted":

Privacy advocates are worried that a bill intended to reform the surveillance activities of the National Security Agency (NSA) is being watered down before it heads to the House floor.

“Last stage negotiations” between members of the House and the Obama administration could significantly weaken provisions in the NSA bill, people familiar with the discussions say.

“Behind the scenes, there’s some nervousness,” one House aide said.

Earlier this month, the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees came together to approve a compromise version of the USA Freedom Act. That bill, authored by Patriot Act author Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), would scale back many of the sweeping surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden.

To win the support of NSA defenders, lawmakers abandoned some reform provisions in Sensenbrenner’s original bill. One of the major changes was dropping the appointment of a constitutional advocate to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves the NSA’s spying requests, and substituting it for a panel of experts.

The bill was also stripped of language that would have allowed tech companies to publish more specific information about the number and types of government requests for user data they receive.

During Judiciary consideration, an amendment to allow less specific reporting was added back into the bill, but some worry that provision is in danger now because the administration thinks it’s already reached a deal that allows tech companies to publish more information about the NSA requests.

While pro-reform advocacy groups and members hailed the House bill as a positive first step, many lamented the revisions and said the legislation will be in trouble on the floor if it undergoes further changes.

There is a “growing chorus of concern” that the bill that makes it to the floor for a vote could be a less meaningful version of what passed the Judiciary and Intelligence committees with overwhelming bipartisan support, the aide said.

Reform advocates warn they will withdraw their support for the bill if the final version doesn’t pass muster.

The only "muster" that will be passed is that of the status quo as those who have assumed positions of power do not surrender it willingly. The best hope would be for the forthcoming stories from Greenwald and his associates will be sufficiently shocking so as to make the case for not only reform but a movement to dismantle the NSA entirely as the enemy to a free society and affront to the US Constitution that it has become. Trials, convictions and prison sentences for the enablers of this monstrous pox on the planet would be an added bonus.  

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? 

Up Yours Rogers! Greenwald Wins Polk Award for NSA Reporting

That very nasty scowl that is permanently affixed to the fat face of Congressman and House Intelligence Committee head Mike Rogers, the thug shoved down the entire country’s throats by voters in Michigan’s 8^th congressional district is about to get even worse. In breaking news today the “thief” Glenn Greenwald who is the target of Rogers’ latest vendetta just won the prestigious George Polk Award for his reporting on the Edward Snowden story.  Along with Greenwald fellow reporters who also worked on the stories of the former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower - Ewen MacAskill and Laura Poitras as well as the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman - were honored. This is a triumph for the now on life support concept of freedom of the press in the darkest days of Obama’s war on journalism. They along with Snowden himself have all done this country a great service by outing the criminal rats at Fort Mead Stasi headquarters along with their oath breaking enablers in the most corrupt Congress in the nation’s long history.

Rogers in particular has got to be furious over this and he and his fellow usurpers of the Constitution had better tread carefully if Greenwald chooses to "force the issue" and return to the U.S. to pick up his Polk come April. According to a recent "exclusive"piece in Salon he seems to intend to do such a thing:  “I’m going to go back to the U.S. for many reasons, but just the fucking principle is enough … On principle I’m going to force the issue”. God forbid that any serious journalist dare to have principles in these sorry days of careerism, sensationalism, panty-sniffing, celebrity worship, tabloid drivel, dead child stories and acting as stenographers for the same crooked government figures that the they are supposed to be holding to account per the First Amendment. Christ knows that we certainly couldn't have accountability in this collapsing lemming colony. 

It will be time for Rogers to put up or shut up since the state-corporate media refuses to call him on his bullshit about Snowden being a Russian spy and Greenwald being a thief. If Rogers and his ilk are able to push Obama and his ruthless hatchet man Eric Holder into actually going full fascist and arresting Greenwald it may finally be that tipping point that will trigger a chain reaction against this now thirteen year running coup d’etat that started with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. There is much sentiment for stringing Greenwald up by his heels in some dank CIA torture gulag and if that is allowed to occur then we might just as well abandon any idiotic babble about ‘freedom’ and ‘checks and balances’ because it will be a sign that Orwell was dead on about that “boot stamping on a human face.. forever”.

From the moment that he first revealed that meeting with Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room and then began writing on the material provided Mr. Greenwald was an enemy of the state. He had already incurred the wrath of the corrupt political class when he was targeted several years ago by corporate wet work artists HBGary Federal as a supporter of Wikileaks in aftermath of the Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning's whistleblowing, particularly of the huge embarrassment that was the "collateral murder" video that showed our imperial stormtroopers indiscriminately firing on Iraqi civilians. Greenwald isn't easily intimidated and it is about damned time that someone who is a public figure took a principled stand against this scum. He has a king-sized chip on his shoulder which is what it takes when going up against Leviathan, a recent Rolling Stone magazine article  entitled "Snowden and Greenwald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets" quotes Greenwald who is openly gay:

"I decided to wage war against this system and institutional authority that had tried to reject and condemn me," he says. "It was like, 'Go fuck yourselves. Instead of having you judge me, I'm going to judge you, because I don't accept the fact that you're even in a position to cast judgments upon me.'"

That is something for Mike Rogers to suck on as it will be his move if Greenwald indeed chooses to "force the issue". 

Congratulations to all of the Polk Award honorees for their courageous reporting on the Snowden material despite incurring the full fury of the U.S. and British power structure and their well paid presstitutes by daring to report on the truth of just how bottomless that the snakepit has become. 

(Image: The Guardian) 

Turn It Off: Fight the NSA Stasi at State Level

What has become painfully apparent is that any effort to restrain the rogue NSA and the ongoing illegal surveillance and mass data-mining programs conducted against law-abiding Americans is doomed to fail at the federal level. With each new report based on the data procured by former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden the outrage grows even as Leviathan on the Potomac digs in to resist calls for accountability. With the stories that came out yesterday on how the Obama administration is furiously working on their next extrajudicial murder of an American citizen without due process as well as SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia's remarks on the inevitable return of internment camps it is evident that the monstrous and bloated federal government is now fully out of control. It has been poisoned by corruption, driven mad by the prospect of an eternal war and all of the accompanying spoils and now is on the brink of being fully weaponized and unleashed upon dissenters. It is time to put an end to all of this and the target should be the NSA which provides the snooping and data that makes all future repression possible.

A few months back I wrote a piece based on something that I ran across in the Salt Lake Tribune proposing that there be organizing to appeal to the state to cut off the water to that mammoth data collection center that sits in Bluffdale. The op ed written by Connor Boyack stated:

Like the eye of Sauron, the NSA’s new facility in Utah overlooks hundreds of thousands of people in the valley below. Perched on a mountainside fortress of concrete and barricades, the 1-million-square-foot complex exists solely to allow the NSA to "see all."

In the wake of the Snowden leaks and widespread concern with the pervasive surveillance activities of the federal government, many Americans have been wondering how to fight back. Can an effective opposition even be mounted against the power of the NSA? What can be done to restore privacy and protect our rights?

The strategy to succeed is quite simple. When fully operational, the NSA facility is expected to require a staggering 1.7 million gallons of water every day to cool down the computers harvesting information on people worldwide. That water is supplied by the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District, a political subdivision of the state. Without it, the facility cannot function.

It was actually a damned good idea although one that would be quickly squashed by the all powerful government that is located in Mordor or as it is formally known Washington D.C. The idea however has been gaining traction and there is now a national movement known as OffNow that is pushing for the nullification of the unconstitutional and illegal activities at the state level. No invading force can operate without water and resources and wherever possible laws prohibiting access to thwart what are blatantly illegal incursions on the civil liberties and rights of law-abiding, taxpaying, loyal Americans there needs to be local resistance. As history shows invaders are vulnerable to guerrilla warfare tactics and while the power may be centralized in the official confines of the elitist beltway there is much to the dismay and surprise to the ensconced transgressors a very large country out there. OffNow has a website that from first examination is not at this point as comprehensive as it needs to be (particularly in terms of locations where the NSA has set up criminal operations) but with support and the spreading of the word could experience a rapid spurt of growth. 

While I am aware of similar nullification efforts on other matters undertaken by groups that I do not agree with as well as the ongoing operations of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) which creates cookie cutter laws to be implemented at the state level by defacto corporate lobbyists disguised as legislators OffNow is different. ALEC is nothing more than a pack of wealthy corporate interests funding a system to circumvent the democratic process and should be shunned as such. The push for the implementation of state laws fighting the anti-American NSA however is about as democratic as it gets, especially so when the federal government not only ignores the vast majority of it's citizens but holds them in open in full contempt. 

It is time to take the fight to these bastards now while we still have a chance before the next war or 'terrorist' attack creates the conditions necessary for the mother of all crackdowns to preserve their power. 

The website is offnow.org.

Image: Wired)

Time for Mike Rogers to Put Up or Shut Up

The preeminent defender of the gross illegality of the intrusions on privacy by the NSA Stasi, Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers who lords it over the House Intelligence Committee needs to put up or shut up. His ongoing accusations that former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is a Russian spy and that journalist Glenn Greenwald is a “thief” are thanks to the dismal dregs of what was once a free press continue to go unchallenged despite Rogers having no evidence to back up either claim.

Being a former FBI agent (which is rarely if ever noted) he displays the hammerhead type of mentality befitting of a seasoned government thug, the bull in a China shop that shits on what it doesn’t break during a rampage. He also exhibits a reverence for the type of snooping and hoarding of information for reasons of repression, harassment and blackmail for political purposes that mimic those for former FBI leader J. Edgar Hoover, a very sick man who abused the powers imbued in him by the government. Hoover not only presided over COINTELPRO but engaged in such tactics as threatening Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with exposure of extramarital affairs to induce the civil rights leader to commit suicide. This is a twisted man and it is long past time for him to be called out to produce proof to back up his endless series of accusations.

What Rogers and his fellow apple pie authoritarians, for example the insipid former NSA/CIA boss and probable felon Michael Hayden are attempting to do is to criminalize journalism. It is so obvious that even a blind man should be able to see it yet it evades the entrenched lazy, careerists who largely comprise the mainstream domestic media to whom protecting their own jobs is the apparent driving factor. There was a day when being a journalist actually meant something in this sick country, the First Amendment specifically mentions freedom of the press and that there should be no law infringing upon this. That is about as concrete as it gets but as with so many other rights that were once taken for granted today's rancid political class holds the Constitution in sneering contempt and has used the phony war on terror as the overriding reason to unchain the government from the founding document.

The urgency to take down Greenwald in particular is of the utmost of urgency to the corrupt controllers of the NSA intelligence colossus, his new venture First Look Media is set to debut this week and will most certainly want to roll out with a huge story. Greenwald contributed to the recent NBC News piece that the NSA's partners across the pond regularly engaged in spying for the purposes of sexual blackmail as well as launched cyber  'false flag' attacks to discredit activist groups such as Anonymous. Snowden already stated that the programs were utilized for the conducting of industrial espionage and it is only a matter of time until the really ugly stuff comes out - I personally suspect the manipulation of financial markets and the facilitating of the laundering of drug related money througth the banking system and even worse operations so vile that even normally disengaged and apathetic Americans could be driven to outrage. When it comes to the use of NSA programs to track and compile information on law-abiding citizens engaged in political activity for future persecution and which has been ongoing since before September 11, 2001 in the finest traditions of Hoover and COINTELPRO it may finally be a bridge too far. The IRS targeting of tea party related groups pales in comparison to what is coming and probably sooner rather than later if the pathological liar James Clapper is to be believed about an imminent Syrian based plot for terrorist attacks on The Homeland.

Both Snowden and Greenwald have been the targets of relentless smear campaigns outside of Rogers' unchallenged accusations.  Greenwald, obviously tiring of all of the malicious bullshit that is spewed forth by corrupt cretins like Rogers and his ilk may be preparing to “force the issue” according to his Slate piece and may soon visit the United States, risking arrest and torture. It would however put Rogers on the spot as well as the rest of the rogue government that has engaged in mass data-mining and unconstitutional warrantless spying on millions of law abiding citizens. The arrest of Greenwald could be the tipping point where the pushback finally begins but it also puts an enormous burden on Rogers and his fellow fascists in that if they don't arrest him that all of their bluster and bullying will be exposed as just so much hot air.

The demagogic Rogers is scheduled to make his normal rounds of the Sunday propaganda circuit later this morning and you can bet the proverbial farm that he will continue to build his case for the dismantling of a free press based on more of his lies and bombastic rhetoric.

(Image: The Nation)

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)