Email Giants Unite to Thwart Government Snooping

By now it is painfully apparent that there will be no legitimate government oversight of the NSA Stasi. There are now over a years worth of stories based on the documents procured by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that show the culture of contempt towards the privacy of law-abiding Americans that exists at the agency. Rather than engage in working  to implement serious reforms that limit NSA programs to their stated purpose of tracking of suspected terrorists, there are only attempts to further erect a firewall around the NSA.  Choosing to engage in demagoguery and obfuscation rather than to correct the problems order to protect privacy rights, the Obama administration has only doubled down. The NSA continues to be allowed to spy on everyone with complete impunity and nothing is going to be done about it by congress outside of cosmetic changes. The corrupt media has already moved on to bigger and better things like the latest Kardashian sighting and the Oscar Pistorius endgame along with shilling for wars while the surveillance machine continues to metastasize like a cancer through what is supposed to be a free society.

Despite the Obama regime's complete disregard towards the long-term interests of U.S. tech businesses - they will be the most affected by NSA spying in terms of lost future revenue - they represent our best hope at fighting back. It is greatly encouraging to see the news that internet giants Google and Yahoo have just announced that they are joining forces to create a secure email system. According to a story in The Wall Street Journal entitled “Yahoo and Google Plot Spy-Free Emails”:

Yahoo Inc. said Thursday it will join an effort by rival Google Inc. to create a secure email system by next year that could make it nearly impossible for hackers or government officials to read users' messages. Even the email providers themselves won't be able to decrypt messages.

If the companies are successful, it would mark a first step in bringing advanced privacy technology to a widely used consumer service. It is also a stark example of how tech giants are rethinking their business plans after Edward Snowden began leaking secrets from the National Security Agency last year. Until February, Yahoo didn't have a C-suite level executive dedicated to information security.

Yahoo's move comes as large technology companies put increased emphasis on warding off government spies and hackers. Google on Thursday announced encrypted websites now will fare better in its search results. Microsoft Corp. recently unsuccessfully fought a U.S. government request for data stored in Ireland.

The WSJ story, by Danny Yadron goes on to quote cyber-security expert Bruce Schneier as saying that such pushback against the government spying will represent a huge blow to Big Brother.  Schneier states that “"What's going to happen when the FBI goes to Google or Yahoo and says, 'I want the email from this guy,' and Google or Yahoo says, 'We can't give it to you?'" I am sure that this is really going to go over well with the NSA Stasi and it’s government enablers.

This is great news for all Americans who have no real elected representation and therefore no voice which becomes as becomes more obvious by the day. The Fourth Amendment is pretty clear when it comes to the power of the government to conduct warrantless surveillance:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That the Founding Fathers could not possibly have envisioned the technologically advanced United States of the 21^ST century is not the point. We still at least in theory have the right to be free of such bulk searches under what amounts to a general warrant – that is unless we are all suspected “terrorists” now.

Executive Order 12333: The Root of All Evil

The cornerstone of the post-September 11, 2001 new order of unaccountable mass surveillance, data-mining and the transformation of the United States of America into a land of war and woe called The Homeland truly began on December 4, 1981 with then President Ronald Reagan's Executive Order 12333. Long before the USA PATRIOT Act was rammed through a cowardly Congress in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks with no legitimate debate there was 12333 or "twelve-triple-tree" as insiders refer to it. With the continuing unveiling of different aspects of what is now obviously a "turnkey totalitarian" fascist state lurking just below the surface of the increasingly thinner outer veil that is the public government by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, William Binney and Thomas Drake - as well as others who are still working anonymously (according to recent stories on NSA documents not provided by Snowden) we are on the precipice of losing even the pretense of freedom and democracy.

Executive Order 12333, which gave the intelligence apparatus a blank check to operate with impunity, to the point where it is arguable that it essentially created a shadow government  has been getting some long-deserved attention as of late. A story in McClatchy last year entitled "Most of NSA’s data collection authorized by order Ronald Reagan" is where the highly secret circumvention of the US Constitution broke out of the darkness and a recent follow-up editorial was published in the Washington Post entitled "Meet Executive Order 12333: The Reagan rule that lets the NSA spy on Americans" further shedding light on this most anti-American of diktats.  That 12333 was unleashed by Reagan, whose administration served as an incubator for the neocons who would resurface during the Bush-Cheney years after 9/11 was used as both a political cudgel to batter critics of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as to implement new NSA domestic surveillance programs that far exceeded the legitimate governing principles of the US. Reagan's administration also spawned the Iran-Contra cowboys, in particular Lt. Colonel Oliver North who facilitated covert arms and drug sales to finance extremist right-wing militias in Nicaragua.

North also had a fetish for surveillance, notable a program called REX 84 that was a prototype for martial law in America and dabbled with the advanced PROMIS software to spy on political dissidents and under a vaguely defined "national emergency" would suspend the constitution and put the control of the government under FEMA. Several years back journalist Christopher Ketcham did an outstanding piece entitled "The Last Roundup" which addressed the metastasizing cancer of the authoritarian surveillance-police state and the lists that were then being compiled for potential internment when that "national emergency" was declared. I excerpt the following from Ketcham:

The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in post-war American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to "accumulate the names, identities, and activities" of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding "security index," according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by "the National Military Establishment." By 1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included "professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid" to unnamed "subversive elements." This same FBI "security index" was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time).

FEMA, however—then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency—already had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford's character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans, which contained information gleaned from wideranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency's secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's databases were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate."

Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan,"—code named REX 84—which called "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run

state and local governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.

North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas Congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir." Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.

Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for example—by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist looks downright crude." Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.

In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it, "The gloves seemed to come off." What is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, "How extreme were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?" Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.

12333 was very fortuitous for the opportunist North, a traitor if there ever were one and the rest of his Iran-Contra cabal who are to this day turning up in positions of influence as the Obama regime relentlessly targets that longtime neocon object of hatred Russia. Reagan's executive order is now even more dangerous given the ridiculous criteria that the US government is using to place law-abiding citizens on an ever expanding "terorist" watch list as was just documented in a huge story by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux at The Intercept entitled  "Blacklisted: The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist" where the secret Obama administration enhanced rulebook was published. What we have here is absolute power with absolutely no accountability and with the courts and congress being weaponized against the people no realistic chance to effect any meaningful reform of these out of control agencies and programs.

While it is somewhat encouraging that "twelve-triple-three" is finally getting noticed and according to a story that was published yesterday in The Guardian entitled "US warned: surveillance reform hinges on change to Reagan executive order" the same former State Department official who wrote the Washington Post editorial on 12333 is pushing for awareness that any serious reform must start with the rollback of this crown jewel of the fascist state. I excerpt from The Guardian piece:

Like Snowden, Tye means to spark a debate on the proper boundaries of NSA authorities. His focus is on an obscure, Reagan-era executive order that serves as a foundational set of rules for the intelligence apparatus. The order, known as Executive Order 12333, renders the current surveillance debate hollow, he said, even as it shows signs of traction in the Senate.

"Without reform of activities under 12333, changes to the 215 program won't address the major challenges to Americans' privacy from the NSA," Tye, who until April worked on promoting internet freedom issues at Foggy Bottom, told the Guardian, using legal shorthand for the domestic phone data collection.

Without recourse to the trove of documentation Snowden disclosed to journalists – and speaking somewhat obliquely to underscore his stated refusal to discuss classified information – Tye said that 12333 provides NSA with a pathway to collect and retain Americans' data without a warrant, routing around laws intend to restrict and control both.

Tye is correct but the clock is ticking and time is rapidly running out. With half the world ablaze with war and social unrest - largely due to a deranged US foreign policy - and Obama and Kerry hellbent on starting World War III to avenge personal slights by Putin we very well are nearing that "national emergency" that Lt. Colonel North was setting up a response for. Any "terrorist" attack - either legitimate or that promised Dick Cheney special will firmly lockdown this country forever and all of that data that has been mined will be used to generate the pickup lists. If you are even reading this there is a damned good chance that you will be on one.

NSA Employees Get Off on Nude Pics Per New Snowden Interview

Not that it is any great surprise considering the level of corruption and abuse of power that permeates the entire American system these days but one of the fringe benefits of the NSA snooping programs is the ability to gather and drool over amateur pornography and naked pictures to take the edge off of a boring day at work. In a new exclusive interview conducted by The Guardian with former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden the perusing of such personal and intimate material for fun is but one of the many bits of information discussed with the American hero. It is good to see Snowden actually getting the opportunity to speak at length in an honest forum unlike that over-hyped and heavily edited sit down with the state lackey Brian Williams of NBC back in May.

The interview, conducted in Moscow by Alan Rusbridger and Ewen MacAskill won't get any coverage in the USA!, USA!, USA! where the narrative has mostly already been set that Snowden is a "traitor" and "Russian spy" which at least among many who I know personally is taken as the immutable truth as if spoken by God himself. The Guardian however for the most part still manages to publish and report the truth (with the exception of how even this venerable institution has now been transmitting unchallenged the lies of the US and Kiev regimes about the downing of MH17) but is largely unknown to the US public who remain safely enclosed within their red, white and blue cocoons of ignorance and exceptionalism, I excerpt the following from the transcript of the Snowden interview but please go and check it out yourself and pass it around to others:

ON NUDE PHOTOS

Many of the people searching through the haystacks were young, enlisted guys and … 18 to 22 years old. They’ve suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work, for example an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation but they’re extremely attractive. So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker. And their co-worker says: “Oh, hey, that’s great. Send that to Bill down the way.” And then Bill sends it to George, George sends it to Tom and sooner or later this person’s whole life has been seen by all of these other people. Anything goes, more or less. You’re in a vaulted space. Everybody has sort of similar clearances, everybody knows everybody. It’s a small world.

It’s never reported, nobody ever knows about it, because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak. Now while people may say that it’s an innocent harm, this person doesn’t even know that their image was viewed, it represents a fundamental principle, which is that we don’t have to see individual instances of abuse. The mere seizure of that communication by itself was an abuse. The fact that your private images, records of your private lives, records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private communication stream, from the intended recipient, and given to the government without any specific authorisation, without any specific need, is itself a violation of your rights. Why is that in the government database?

I’d say probably every two months you see something like that happen. It’s routine enough, depending on the company you keep, it could be more or less frequent. But these are seen as the fringe benefits of surveillance positions. 

[Kind of like the "fringe benefits" of government TSA goons feeling up little children at airport checkpoints]

ON HIS LEAKING OF THE NSA DOCUMENTS TO JOURNALISTS

Snowden wanted the revelations to be published as fast as possible.] So I was very concerned about all these delays. You’ve got to remember I knew nothing of the press. I’d never talked to a journalist … I was a virgin source basically.

It was a nervous period. You have no idea what the future’s going to hold and I was all right because I knew things would get out but I wanted them to get out in the best way, and that was [why] I didn’t want any mistakes. It was what I called the zero fuck-ups policy…

It’s that concept of herd immunity. They run cover for the others. And particularly once you start splitting them over jurisdictions and things like that it becomes much more difficult to subvert their intentions. Nobody could stop it.

But as an engineer, and particularly as somebody who worked in telecoms and things like that on these systems, the thing that you’re always terrified of when you’re thinking about reliability is SPOFs – Single Point Of Failure, right?

This was the thing I told the journalists: “If the government thinks you’re the single point of failure, they’ll kill you.”

[Think about that statement “If the government thinks you’re the single point of failure, they’ll kill you” and it is as terrifying as anything else and the list of bodies of those who got too close to the truth before they published it is as long as it is evident that there are elements of the US government that engage in maintaining death squads for "wet ops"]

ON THE PROGRAMS THEMSELVES & THE US GOVERNMENT

I began to move from merely overseeing these systems to actively directing their use. Many people don’t understand that I was actually an analyst and I designated individuals and groups for targeting.

I was exposed to information about the previous programs like Stellar Wind [used during the presidency of George W Bush] for example. The warrantless wire-tapping of everyone in the United States, including their internet data – which is a violation of the constitution and law in the United States – did cause a scandal and was ended because of that.

When I saw that, that was really the earthquake moment because it showed that the officials who authorised these programs knew it was a problem, they knew they didn’t have any statutory authorisation for these programs. But instead the government assumed upon itself, in secret, new executive powers without any public awareness or any public consent and used them against the citizenry of its own country to increase its own power, to increase its own awareness.

We constantly hear the phrase “national security” but when the state begins … broadly intercepting the communications, seizing the communications by themselves, without any warrant, without any suspicion, without any judicial involvement, without any demonstration of probable cause, are they really protecting national security or are they protecting state security?

What I came to feel – and what I think more and more people have seen at least the potential for – is that a regime that is described as a national security agency has stopped representing the public interest and has instead begun to protect and promote state security interests. And the idea of western democracy as having state security bureaus, just that term, that phrase itself, “state security bureau”, is kind of chilling.

[The machine is fully out of control and there are no overseers in the government, only enablers and cover-up artists]

ON HIS EXILE TO RUSSIA COURTESY OF JOHN KERRY'S STATE DEPARTMENT

So this is the thing that nobody realises. They think there was some masterplan to get out safely and avoid all consequences. That’s what Hong Kong was all about. But it wasn’t. The purpose of my mission was to get the information to journalists. Once I had, that I was done.

That’s why I was so peaceful afterwards, because it didn’t matter what happened … Going to Ecuador and getting asylum there, that would have been great … And that would have just been a bonus. The fact that I’ve ended up so secure is entirely by accident. And as you said, it probably shouldn’t have happened. If we have anybody to thank, it’s the state department. The whole key is, the state department’s the one who put me in Russia.

And

I’m much happier here in Russia than I would be facing an unfair trial in which I can’t even present a public interest defence to a jury of my peers. We’ve asked [the] government again and again to provide a fair trial and they’ve declined. And I feel very fortunate to have received asylum. Russia’s a modern country and it’s been good to me so, yeah, I have a pretty normal life and I would absolutely like to continue to be able to travel as I have in the past. I’d love to be able to visit western Europe again but that’s not a decision for me to make, that’s for the publics and the governments of each of those independent countries.

ON GEORGE ORWELL

Contrary to popular belief I don’t think we are exactly in the Nineteen Eighty-Four universe. The danger is that we can see how [Orwell’s] technologies that are [in] Nineteen Eighty-Four now seem unimaginative and quaint. They talked about things like microphones implanted in bushes and cameras in TVs that look back at us. Nowadays we’ve got webcams that go with us everywhere. We buy cell phones that are the equivalent of a network microphone that we carry around in our pockets with us voluntarily as we go from place to place and move about our lives.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is an important book but we should not bind ourselves to the limits of the author’s imagination. Time has shown that the world is much more unpredictable and dangerous than that.

[I have often remarked that Orwell was an optimist and as Snowden points out - he was limited by his inability to fully anticipate the huge advances in technology that would make his Oceania a reality]

Edward Snowden is a patriot and a true American hero whose risk of everything has provided an invaluable service in helping to expose the nefarious criminal activities of an unaccountable and unconstitutional Deep State shadow government that operates with full impunity.  This anti-democratic nest of vipers uses the visible components of the US government as an exoskeleton, just a costume to trick the masses that all is still right until the day comes for the changes in policy (say a "terrorist" attack or world war) that will bring about the "turnkey totalitarianism" that will be the final evolution of the warfare state.

LINKS

Edited Transcript of Guardian Exclusive Interview

Video Teaser for Guardian Interview

Treacherous Senate Rolls Out New Cybersecurity Bill

The number one enemy of the American people and enablers of the ongoing spree to gut the US Constitution is at it again with yet another attack on privacy. The Senate, led by the impenetrable firewall of cellulite that protects the NSA Stasi - California's Dianne Feinstein - has just passed out of committee a new cybersecurity bill that represents the institutionalized rottenness of the legislative body in all of it's resplendent putrescence. The onerous bill, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) was voted on in secret to avoid that always pesky public scrutiny and with a 12-3 win is headed to the full Senate in an election year where it should easily pass given the renewed climate of fear-mongering and demagoguery since the magnificently fortuitous appearance of ISIS and the return of US troops to Iraq. The Republicans will bludgeon the always feckless Democrats as being weak on terrorism and the party of Obama and Hillary, terrified at being called chicken will submit.

The bill is a resurrection of CISPA which while passing the House of Representatives - it was championed by the puffy fascist from Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers who will soon be leaving for a right-wing talk radio career - didn't make through the Senate which allowed Feinstein and her fellow snakes ample opportunity to scheme and CISA was the result. This bill is nothing but one more betrayal by the US Congress and a sellout to corporate America, which will have bestowed upon it the gift of immunity as customer data is passed onto the NSA without a warrant under the guise of protection against cyber attacks - the newest version of WMD which serve as justification to sell out Americans for political gain.

According to a story in The Guardian, "Senate committee adopts cybersecurity bill opposed by NSA critics":

Pushed by Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss, the California Democrat and Georgia Republican who lead the committee, the bill would remove legal obstacles that block firms from sharing information "in real time" about cyber-attacks and prevention or mitigation measures with one another and with the US government.

Worrying civil libertarians is that the NSA and its twin military command, US Cyber Command, would receive access to vast amounts of data, and privacy guidelines for the handling of that data are yet to be developed.

A draft of the bill released in mid-June would permit government agencies to share, retain and use the information for "a cybersecurity purpose" – defined as "the purpose of protecting an information system or information that is stored on, processed by or transiting an information system from a cybersecurity threat or security vulnerability" – raising the prospect of the NSA stockpiling a catalogue of weaknesses in digital security, as a recent White House data-assurance policy permits.

It would also prevent participating companies from being sued for sharing data with each other and the government, even though many companies offer contract terms of service prohibiting the sharing of client or customer information without explicit consent.

AND

Champions of a similar bill that passed the House of Representatives last year despite a White House veto threat urged the full Senate to follow the intelligence panel's lead.

"These attacks cost our country billions of dollars through the loss of jobs and intellectual property. We are confident that the House and the Senate will quickly come together to address this urgent threat and craft a final bill that secures our networks and protects privacy and civil liberties," said Mike Rogers of Michigan and Dutch Ruppersberger of Maryland, the Republican and Democratic leaders of the House intelligence committee.

[That would be the same Dutch Ruppersberger whose  Congressional district happens to include the Fort Meade command center of the NSA Stasi and Mike Rogers whose wife is a lobbyist - isn't it a conflict of interest to have a husband who presides over the House Intelligence Committee?]

But digital rights advocates warn that the measure will give the government, including the NSA, access to more information than just that relating to cyberthreats, potentially creating a new avenue for broad governmental access to US data even as Congress and the Obama administration contemplate restricting the NSA's domestic collection.

The bill contains "catch-all provisions that would allow for the inclusion of a lot more than malicious code. It could include the content of communications. That's one of the biggest concerns," said Gabriel Rottman, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union.

The CISA data-sharing agreement is nothing more than a convenient end-around, a circumvention of any sort of legal restraint that will throw open the door to increased data-mining and content grabbing of millions of innocent US citizens/consumers which will be delivered to an unaccountable NSA without any oversight. But then again that is what Congress, particularly the high-powered committee heads are there for, to grease the rails and use every sort of legal trickery in the book to violate their oaths to uphold the Constitution while selling out their constituents for a dollar a dozen.

There is still an opportunity to stop CISA by bringing immense public pressure and utilizing privacy organization petitions and mailing tools but it is going to be a pitched, uphill battle against an entrenched enemy that in no way other than lip-service represents regular Americans. 

Blacked Out by US Media NSA Whistleblowers Testify in Germany

During the Fourth of July holiday and all of the phony patriotic excesses in The Homeland - I happened to catch a brief portion of Friday's nationally televised New York City fireworks display and was sickened and astonished at the overt worship of militarism - why don't they just do away with the subtlety next year and just roll the tanks and missiles across the Brooklyn Bridge like the old USSR. What passes for patriotism, loyalty and sacrifice to country here on the star-spangled lemming colony is putrid rot, distilled down into a potent brew of American exceptionalism from which to dispense from the electronic Kool Aid vat. For real patriotism one had to look towards Germany where several NSA whistleblowers not named Edward Snowden were providing testimony before the Bundestag on the criminal acts of the American Stasi.

Testifying before a committee to investigate NSA spying in Germany in German Bundestag were former NSA employees and whistleblowers William Binney, a technical genius who was instrumental in building the machines but quit out of disgust and conscience after it became apparent that the agency was in gross violation of the Constitution and Thomas Drake. Both men were subsequently targeted ruthlessly by the US establishment in an attempt to crush and make examples of them. Like Edward Snowden - who didn't testify because the US puppet government would not provide asylum to him - these two men are patriots of the highest order and not that red, white and blue baloney that gets trotted out every July 4th for mass consumption by the sheeple.

While it was nowhere to be found in the corrupt, US state-corporate media which is a tool of the rogue government other than occasional limited-hangouts like Barton Gellman's NSA story in the Washington Post on Sunday the foreign media and alternative media blogs in the USA! USA! USA! provided coverage and the testimony was chilling - take for example Mr. Binney's opening statement alone:

I’ve worked for the NSA as a technical director.

I live four miles away from NSA headquarters.

The relationship between NSA and BND is still very good and important.

The complete surveillance of the society is the biggest threat to democracy since the American Civl War.

Total Information Awareness – NSA wants every information from everybody. But they don’t understand it completely, it’s prone to errors on a high level.

The whole world is in peril.

This behavior of our government is totalitarian. To spy on your own people is the beginning of totalitarism.

It began mid October 2001. After two weeks, I resigned. I’ve spied against the Soviet Union for thirty years, but after 9-11, it went way too far.

Your questions?

Binney makes reference to "Total Information Awareness" or TIA, for those who don't recall this was the DARPA program that was presided over by former Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter (ever notice how often some of the turds associated with that subversion of the Constitution keep popping up?) that was allegedly suspended after the Orwellian nature of the program was questioned. Well, it never really stopped as we can see by the NSA's drive under General Keith Alexander to "collect it all". Binney has been one of the most credible and outspoken critics of the coming totalitarian state although he sadly and predictably gets zero attention from the domestic media.

German site DW (Deutsche Welle) provides coverage on Binney in English in stories "Snowden leaks only tip of the iceberg" and "NSA 'totalitarian,' ex-staffer tells German parliament" which also cites Drake.  There is a very good series of short interviews with Binney available courtesy of monetary system critic Bill Still that are worth a listen no matter what your opinion bay be of the interviewer: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Binney earlier this year sat down for an extensive interview with Rob Kall of progressive website OpEd News which can be found here and from which I excerpt the following from the transcript:

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.  

Binney and Drake are absolutely correct on where this is going and for proof of their validity one only has to note the absence of testimony from the US mainstream media. Ironic in that with all of the monstrous aspects of it's history that it is Germany of all places that is giving them an opportunity to testify.

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"

Smearing of Snowden Begins after NBC Interview

The most hated man in America today, at least  by the unprincipled charlatans in the establishment is former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and the lackeys of the corrupt National Security State and the polluted Obama regime have attacked him as they were a pack of mange crazed dogs. The running man managed to hit the big time - at least in America where television is the drug of choice - in an exclusive interview with NBC's Brian Williams. It was Snowden's big public relations opportunity after months of being kicked around by scum the likes of Peter King, Mike Rogers, Michael Hayden and on Wednesday Secretary of Skull and Bones John Kerry who is befitting to wear the crown of king of American assholes after his last nine or ten months on the job. Kerry hit the Wednesday morning television circuit to repeatedly and dishonestly trash Snowden as a "traitor" and a "coward" in much the same way that the angel of death Dick Cheney did to the 2004 version of Kerry himself. Seems like once a particular level is achieved in the American political class that a truly putrescent rottenness blooms and Kerry is resplendent as he practically glows with hypocrisy, moral debauchery and elitist decadence.

The massive smear job on Snowden started early yesterday, well before the airing of the interview based on a sneak preview segment (one wonders if NBC picked it out) where he made comments to the effect that he was trained as a spy. The usual suspects pounced on that to mock the top target on Obama's kill list as living in a fantasy world and other horseshit - the number one tactic of the pigs who run this star-spangled sty is to discredit and turn their vast propaganda apparatus loose. But really, considering what Snowden really said: “I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word — in that I lived and worked undercover, overseas, pretending to work in a job that I’m not and even being assigned a name that was not mine”. While Snowden's official duty with the Central Intelligence Agency remains mysterious when one is working either directly for or as a contractor for the US government, under a fake name, at a fake business in a foreign country and conducting surveillance I would venture to say that such a person would in fact be a "spy" in the truest sense of the world. It is lost on millions of meat heads though but those really aren't the type of people that you really want to try to convince of anything anyway. As the old saying goes, "never try to teach a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig".

But I digress...

After the exclusive NBC interview with the celebrity talking head Williams it was time to pile on Snowden and the attacks, while ridiculous and predictable were particularly nasty. NBC News has the Snowden interview on their website with the subtitle "Traitor or Patriot", the New York Times slyly floated the innuendo that Snowden was an agent of Putin (with special bonus points for kicking Glenn Greenwald in the balls as "smug and unreasonable") and the gaggle of vermin like Peter King, the unhinged terrorist supporter called the interview an "infomercial". On top of it all, after Snowden stated that he had attempted to use formal channels to report an NSA run amok the American Stasi came out today and released some bullshit email from Snowden as 'proof' that he never attempted to utilize the proper channels. According to a story in The Guardian the NSA stated that it was the only record it could find. This is the same agency that lies about everything and performs duties for a government that sends forth perjurers like Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to lie to Congress about the unconstitutional mass surveillance and data-mining programs that the patriot Snowden exposed.

The deck is stacked in the US media, one who opposes Leviathan is never going to get a fair trial in the court of public opinion and over the next few days Snowden will be electronically lynched, likely culminating with an all star lineup of fascist scum on the Sunday morning 'news' show circuit. A truth teller will never get any sort of honest treatment in the US corporate-state media and while Snowden may be smart he is naive to have afforded a fully vested servant of the establishment such as Brian Williams serve as his Judas Goat.

More NSA Mischief: Purchased Products Intercepted and Tampered With

In another revelation  on still more NSA malfeasance that was published in the just released Glenn Greenwald book "No Place to Hide" the American Stasi has been intercepting computer hardware purchases and implanting spying tools before repackaging the product in the original wrapping. Not this should be a surprise to anyone who has been following the wanton criminality of Obama's out of control surveillance state and an earlier piece that was published in Germany's Der Spiegel back in December already had revealed the hijacking of laptop deliveries but the book adds it to the pile of damning evidence courtesy of heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden that is also available online here in a large file but one that is well worth the space. This story of what is basically theft of a customer's paid for item by government goons and which should be a felony along the lines of mail fraud is not going to go over well with American tech companies, one of which, Cisco Systems just published a stinging letter on exactly what is thought of such sleazy chicanery.

Other than the inclusion in "No Place to Hide" the story is getting increasing circulation as a caveat emptor to all who which to purchase US manufactured network hardware with the expectation that the product will arrive as promised and without surveillance mechanisms illegally implanted. The Guardian in a piece from Greenwald's book has the following in a story entitled "Glenn Greenwald: how the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers" from which I excerpt the following:

For years, the US government loudly warned the world that Chinese routers and other internet devices pose a "threat" because they are built with backdoor surveillance functionality that gives the Chinese government the ability to spy on anyone using them. Yet what the NSA's documents show is that Americans have been engaged in precisely the activity that the US accused the Chinese of doing.

The drumbeat of American accusations against Chinese internet device manufacturers was unrelenting. In 2012, for example, a report from the House Intelligence Committee, headed by Mike Rogers, claimed that Huawei and ZTE, the top two Chinese telecommunications equipment companies, "may be violating United States laws" and have "not followed United States legal obligations or international standards of business behaviour". The committee recommended that "the United States should view with suspicion the continued penetration of the US telecommunications market by Chinese telecommunications companies".

AND

But while American companies were being warned away from supposedly untrustworthy Chinese routers, foreign organisations would have been well advised to beware of American-made ones. A June 2010 report from the head of the NSA's Access and Target Development department is shockingly explicit. The NSA routinely receives – or intercepts – routers, servers and other computer network devices being exported from the US before they are delivered to the international customers.

The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some "SIGINT tradecraft … is very hands-on (literally!)".

Eventually, the implanted device connects back to the NSA. The report continues: "In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network."

It is quite possible that Chinese firms are implanting surveillance mechanisms in their network devices. But the US is certainly doing the same.

This by the way has not jack shit to do with "terrorism", the justification of this monstrous and ongoing invasion of privacy by a long out of control NSA and the trillion dollars of taxpayer subsidized bottom feeders that contribute to our Surveillance State Gomorrah. This is just plain and simple using a technological advantage as well as laws that have been hollowed out by the phony war on terror - which Obama and others paid homage to today at the grand opening of the obscenity that is the 9/11 Museum - to commit industrial espionage and gain unfair competitive advantage but hey that is the American way now in the land of fuck you, I got mine. The 9/11 Museum is just grotesque and sickening and only perpetuates the myth of the day that everything changed but that is a story for another time - be sure and get your T-shirts, coffee mugs, beer coolers and key chains at the gift shop. 

Greenwald is everywhere right now promoting the book and is getting the well deserved attention that he deserves as an investigative journalist, the careerist, power-sucking scum here in The Homeland would do well to take some lessons from the man who harkens back to the good old days of muckraking and non-celebrity journalists who shined a light on corrupted power like a blowtorch. Two great extended interviews of Greenwald were done by Amy Goodman at the liberal Democracy Now - here are the links (transcripts also available): May 13, 2014 and May 14, 2014 - check them out and pass them around to others. Now may be the last time that we have to really hit these bastards hard and put a choke chain on them while there is still a slim chance to do so.

I have always maintained that the only way that any serious restraint of the cancerous surveillance industrial complex can only be made possible by an alliance of American tech businesses (fuck the corrupt telecoms who are in on the con) to engage in awareness campaigns, implementing stronger encryption and pooling their vast resources to sue the hell out of the US government and fund the campaigns of political opponents of those that protect the NSA - like California's own Dianne Feinstein. If this is the case there is hope in the aforementioned Cisco Systems communique by Mark Chandler which I excerpt from at length:

Today’s security challenges are real and significant.  We want governments to detect and disrupt terrorist networks before they inflict harm on our society, our citizens, and our systems of government.   We also want to live in countries that respect their citizens’ basic human rights.  The tension between security and freedom has become one the most pressing issues of our day.  Societies wracked by terror cannot be truly free, but an overreaching government can also undermine freedom.

It is in this context that I want to offer some thoughts on actions by the US Government that in Cisco’s eyes have overreached, undermining the goals of free communication, and steps that can be taken to right that balance, and I do so on behalf of all of Cisco’s leadership team.

Confidence in the open, global Internet has brought enormous economic benefits to the United States and to billions around the world.  This confidence has been eroded by revelations of government surveillance, by efforts of the US government to force US companies to provide access to communications of non-US citizens even when that violates the privacy laws of countries where US companies do business, and allegations that governments exploit rather than report security vulnerabilities in products.

As a matter of policy and practice, Cisco does not work with any government, including the United States Government, to weaken our products. When we learn of a security vulnerability, we respond by validating it, informing our customers, and fixing it.  We react the same when we find that a customer’s security has been impacted by external forces, regardless of what country or form of government or how that security breach occurred.  We offer customers robust tools to defend their environments against attack, and detect attacks when they are happening. By doing these things, we have built and maintained our customers’ trust.  We expect our government to value and respect this trust.

This past December, eight technology companies expressed concern to the President of the United States and Members of Congress that the US government’s surveillance efforts are in fact harmful. They stated, in part, “We urge the US to take the lead and make reforms that ensure that government surveillance efforts are clearly restricted by law, proportionate to the risks, transparent and subject to independent oversight.”  We agree and support these positions – without customer confidence in the privacy and security of communications, the extraordinary steps toward freedom, productivity and prosperity that is the promise of the Internet can be lost.

This week a number of media outlets reported another serious allegation: that the National Security Agency took steps to compromise IT products enroute to customers, including Cisco products. We comply with US laws, like those of many other countries, which limit exports to certain customers and destinations; we ought to be able to count on the government to then not interfere with the lawful delivery of our products in the form in which we have manufactured them.   To do otherwise, and to violate legitimate privacy rights of individuals and institutions around the world, undermines confidence in our industry.

As our malignantly rotten Supreme Court has made evident: money is speech and there shall be no constraints on those who have a shitload of it. Silicon Valley has an abundance of it and in the best interests of not only keeping the internet free but for just the sake of ensuring that American business won't take another big hit due to crony capitalism and outright fascism should invest as much of it as possible to carpet bomb the corrupt Democrat and Republican criminals back to the stone age in 2014, 2016 and forever after in favor of pro-American, pro-civil liberties and pro-business libertarians and independents.

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)