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. 

Second Source of Surveillance State Leaks is Big Trouble for Obama

A new story that was published yesterday by the online magazine The Intercept  has the potential of being big trouble for President Barack Obama and the national surveillance state. The piece, by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux is entitled "Barack Obama's Secret Terrorist-Tracking System  by the Numbers" and expands on their earlier piece "The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist". The latest set of leaked secret documents come from 2013, after former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden had fled Hawaii with his cache of information. The timing makes for a very nice birthday present for Mr. Transparency, especially since the massive expansion of the terrorist watchlist and the TIDE database has taken place on his watch.  TIDE is an acronym for Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment.

According to Scahill and Devereaux "Nearly half of the people on the U.S. government’s widely shared database of terrorist suspects are not connected to any known terrorist group" and the story quotes a former FBI special agent as saying that “If everything is terrorism, then nothing is terrorism”. This is the point when one realizes that tracking potential "terrorists" is only a cover for a massive expansion of government surveillance and the compiling of detailed dossiers on millions of law-abiding Americans. The targets are people whose grave offense is in having views that are not compatible with those of  the criminals who are running the show. What do you think that massive NSA storage facility in Utah is for? 

With technology continuing to advance in condensing the amount of physical space that is needed to store more and more data, a facility of that size is not needed to house only that of suspected "terrorists". The phony war on terror has always been a war on Americans themselves. It is only a matter of when the conditions are right for the official government policies to be changed and the contingency plans implemented. It could be a massive financial collapse (which is coming), a war with Russia, another 9/11 style of terrorist attack as former Vice President Dick Cheney has predicted or a wild card like an Ebola virus outbreak.

CNN has confirmed that there is now a second leaker. In a story published on Tuesday entitled "New leaker disclosing U.S. secrets, government concludes" from which I excerpt:

The federal government has concluded there's a new leaker exposing national security documents in the aftermath of surveillance disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, U.S. officials tell CNN.

Proof of the newest leak comes from national security documents that formed the basis of a news story published Tuesday by the Intercept, the news site launched by Glenn Greenwald, who also published Snowden's leaks.

The Intercept article focuses on the growth in U.S. government databases of known or suspected terrorist names during the Obama administration.

The article cites documents prepared by the National Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden left the United States to avoid criminal charges.

Greenwald has suggested there was another leaker. In July, he said on Twitter "it seems clear at this point" that there was another.

Government officials have been investigating to find out that identity.

Those who trivialize the surveillance as being largely directed towards Muslims are short-sighted and living in denial. This is not the only government database or tracking system, there are other more secret ones buried deep within the bowels of the alphabet soup agencies. Take for example "Main Core" which was revealed in 2008 by Christopher Ketcham in his story for Radar Magazine, "The Last Roundup" about a top secret U.S. government database that targeted political dissidents in a time of "national emergency". "Main Core" is in all probability housed within some component of the massive Department of Homeland Security. I strongly encourage readers to check out the Ketcham story as it offers the context missing in the stories based on the Snowden leaks. I excerpt briefly from "The Last Roundup":

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a "national emergency." Executive orders issued over the last three decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a trigger.

Given the uproar from conservatives over the apparent targeting of political groups, primarily the so-called Tea Party by Obama's IRS Gestapo, it is both surprising and dismaying that there isn't similar outrage over the NSA surveillance programs. Liberals are also largely silent, when it is their guy who is running amok everything is fine but they would have been shrieking for George W. Bush's head on a platter for something like this.

This is a time when Americans need to be made aware of the massive abuses of power of the Executive Branch under Obama who is able to get away the expansion of the surveillance-police state in ways that no other U.S. President ever has before.

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.

The War on Snowden Continues as Does NSA Spying

Given the amount of coverage churned out by the sycophantic gravy trainers in the US state-corporate media about the latest Republican Benghazi spectacle, the 24/7 Putin bashing, missing flight MH-370 and assorted celebrity driven swill the biggest story of the last year has been buried int he bullshit. The story of course are the startling revelations of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden of the massive domestic surveillance and data-mining programs being conducted against tens of millions of law-abiding Americans. Outside of the random drive by denunciations of Snowden as a "traitor" by the criminal political class there has been an absence of the sort of breaking stories of unconstitutional malevolence by the American Stasi, most of them the work of the award winning journalist Glenn Greenwald. That is about to change as Mr. Greenwald's long awaited book on Snowden and the NSA entitled "No Place to Hide" is due to come out on Tuesday.

Therefore the uptick in smearing Snowden is a predictable response by the rogue state and its foreign partners in crime and I have no doubt that this weekend's Sunday morning bloviation circuit will be filled with the most vile freaks that the US political system has to offer with all of them peddling the usual unproven horseshit that Snowden is a Russian spy. The point man in the coming attack is former NSA commandant General Keith Alexander, the man with the Star Trek fetish and a seething contempt for the US Constitution.  The now retired Alexander, who has previously called for the control and censorship of the media (and these pigs call Putin an authoritarian?) surfaced in an extended interview for the Australian Financial Review to launch the line of attack that Mr. Snowden is being manipulated by Russian intelligence. It is never mentioned thought that Snowden only ended up in Russia because the freedom loving Obama administration revoked his passport and was closing in on the man for one of those now as American as apple pie extraordinary renditions. Snowden fled Hong Kong and was holed up in Moscow's airport transit area for weeks until the demonized Russian leader offered him temporary asylum.

Rather than attempt to pick through Alexander's hogwash myself I excerpt from the fine piece on the Australian interview done by Greenwald over at The Intercept entitled "Keith Alexander Unplugged: on Bush/Obama, 1.7 million stolen documents and other matters":

The just-retired long-time NSA chief, Gen. Keith Alexander, recently traveled to Australia to give a remarkably long and wide-ranging interview with an extremely sycophantic “interviewer” with The Australian Financial Review. The resulting 17,000-word transcript and accompanying article form a model of uncritical stenography journalism, but Alexander clearly chose to do this because he is angry, resentful, and feeling unfairly treated, and the result is a pile of quotes that are worth examining, only a few of which are noted below:

AFR: What were the key differences for you as director of NSA serving under presidents Bush and Obama? Did you have a preferred commander in chief?

Gen. Alexander: Obviously they come from different parties, they view things differently, but when it comes to the security of the nation and making those decisions about how to protect our nation, what we need to do to defend it, they are, ironically, very close to the same point. You would get almost the same decision from both of them on key questions about how to defend our nation from terrorists and other threats.

The almost-complete continuity between George W. Bush and Barack Obama on such matters has been explained by far too many senior officials in both parties, and has been amply documented in far too many venues, to make it newsworthy when it happens again. Still, the fact that one of the nation’s most powerful generals in history, who has no incentive to say it unless it were true, just comes right out and states that Bush and The Candidate of Change are “very close to the same point” and “you would get almost the same decision from both of them on key questions” is a fine commentary on a number of things, including how adept the 2008 Obama team was at the art of branding.

The fact that Obama, in 2008, specifically vowed to his followers angered over his campaign-season NSA reversal that he possessed “the firm intention — once I’m sworn in as president — to have my Attorney General conduct a comprehensive review of all our surveillance programs, and to make further recommendations on any steps needed to preserve civil liberties and to prevent executive branch abuse in the future” only makes that point a bit more vivid.

This underlines a point that I have spent endless hours of frustration attempting to convince my liberal friends of in that Obama is simply a more refined extension of Bush and that in reality very little has actually changed - except for the worse - since the pope of hope was elected. The warrantless surveillance continues, the Wall Street gamblers and connected corporate parasites continue to feed at the taxpayer funded trough, our civil liberties continue to be diminished and the war machine keeps running. Then there is also Obama's escalation of the drone assassination programs, the precedent set for the extrajudicial killing of a US citizen and not even Bush would be so vile as to not speak out in condemnation of that atrocity that took place in Odessa last week where US backed neo-Nazi militias ambushed and slaughtered a yet to be determined number of anti-austerity protesters then set the trade union hall in which it took place on fire.

I look forward to the Tuesday release of the Greenwald book once again putting a spotlight on the cockroaches at the mammoth nest in Fort Meade and the scumbags in Washington who provide cover for this most un-American of agencies and its ongoing fascist conduct.

Brit Spooks Get Knickers in a Wad by Spying on Yahoo Sex Videos

GCHQ, the American Stasi’s overseas counterparts across the pond have just been busted for their theft and storage of webcam images and videos - including sexually explicit images - from millions of law-abiding Yahoo users. This latest transgression against privacy and basic human dignity from the Norsefire arm of the U.S. Surveillance machine smacks of the type of perverted voyeurism that in most decent societies would have the perps arrested and in more regressive ones have the offenders penises chopped off in a public exhibition of what dirty perverts can expect. Here in the land of lies, woes and high government criminality that is now called The Homeland however and in the U.K.  where the obscene concept of royalty not only exists but is actually embraced such lewdly criminal conduct never results in the lawbreakers being arrested or for that matter fired from their jobs for abuse of power.

The program is codenamed “OPTIC NERVE” [suggested codename of "PENILE-ERECTION"] and is the latest gift delivered to those who still believe in the concept of transparency in government by former government contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden was revealed in a story published by The Guardian entitled “Yahoo webcam images from millions of users intercepted by GCHQ” by Spencer Ackerman and James Ball states that:

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicity state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery - including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications - from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

AND

Optic Nerve, the documents provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden show, began as a prototype in 2008 and was still active in 2012, according to an internal GCHQ page accessed that year.

The system, eerily reminiscent of the telescreens evoked in George Orwell’s 1984, was used for experiments in automated facial recognition, to monitor GCHQ’s existing targets, and to discover new targets of interest.

AND

 The agency did make efforts ot limit analysts’ ability to see webcam images, restricting bulk searches to metadata only.

 However, analysts were shown the faces of people with similar usernames to surveillance targets, potentially dragging in large numbers of innocent people. One document tells agency staff that they were allowed to display “webcam images associated with similar Yahoo identifiers to your known target”

So in essence people who are totally innocent of anything save the indiscretion of posting sexually suggestive or explicit pictures of themselves on the internet and who don’t have a goddamned thing to do with “terrorism” are being spied on and their personal communications stored by a cyber army of government goons. Hell, this is right up there in government abuse with the American taxpayer funded freaks, perverts and pedophiles who work for the TSA. For Christ's sake - why are these people and their online travels, sexual preferences and backgrounds not a matter of public record? Who is it exactly that is watching the watchers?

The Guardian piece also cites Yahoo’s response to the revelations:

“We were not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported activity.” said a spokeswoman. “This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users’ privact that is completely unacceptable, and we strongly call on the world’s governments to reform surveillance law consistent with the principles we outlined in December.

“We are committed to preserving our  users’ trust and security and continue our efforts to expand encryption across all of our services.”

Well I hate to be the one to burst the bubble of the "spokeswoman" but fat fucking chance lady - do you Silicon Valley types actually think that Obama and his rogue administration nor that of his predecessor George W. Bush give a rat’s ass about what you want? They just farm it out to their fascist cronies across the pond to skirt the laws and provide plausible deniability for their unconstitutional surveillance programs.

Yet another black eye for American tech businesses to go along with that nice dagger in the back that Obama has implanted with his cynical all seeing eye cast upon his damned legacy. It is going to take some time but at some point there will be surely be an accurate figure as to the amount of business dollars that have been lost to U.S. based technology corporations over all of this and it will be in the billions. Any sane person or business will never trust domestic tech corporations with their security and privacy again after all of this nor should they because they an offer no real assurance that the government isn't getting every bit of consumer data in real time. I have said before that the best remedy for the tech giants would be to pool their substantial resources and not only sue the bastards responsible for all of this but also get into the political activism business by plowing money into primaries that target the scum of society like the impenetrable wall of cellulite that is Senator Dianne Feinstein and the uber-fascist lying bastard of a Congressman Mike Rogers, two of the most bloated parasites that have long fed themselves at the public trough while betraying their oaths of office.

While that idea is admittedly just a wild hair up my ass that makes sense to a peon like me  if those who are far smarter and richer than I ever want to stop this crap and engage in some long-term strategic business planning this would be one hell of a damned good place to start.

As for Yahoo users or anyone else for that matter  it is definitely not very wise to engage in the passing back and forth of sexually suggestive and nude pictures and video on the internet there will always be a good number of horny, drunk and lonely people on any given day who choose to engage in such behavior. Really though, as long as such activity is practiced by consenting adults engaged in behavior that does not involve child pornography or other sick forms of sexual exploitation they should be free do do so and fully accept the risk that one day one of those pictures could be a career killer or end up used as ‘revenge porn’. It is however none of the government’s damned business and the data-mining for such content is just the latest in a series of outrages that cannot continue to go unchallenged if we are to remain a 'free' society'.

While it was Queen's subjects at GCHQ that got popped for this one in particular the NSA is most certainly involved in similar if not worse forms of exploitation as they gather up every possible piece of information for yet undefined future usage and store it in massive data warehouses such as the one in Bluffdale, Utah. It is obvious to anyone who has been paying attention to the slow-rolling fascist juggernaut that roared forth from the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center that a new and virulent form of government has used the opportunity of the attacks to imbue itself with unprecedented power that is abetted by influential members of a corrupt Congress and draped in secrecy. These images and videos are to be used for future sexual blackmail and coersion to find and eliminate troublemakers when the shit really does hit the fan.

Per the Guardian story:

In a statement, a GCHQ spokesman said: “It is a longstanding policy that we don not comment on intelligence matters”.

Especially when said “intelligence matters” pertain to the flagrant abuse of anti-terrorism laws to conduct fishing expeditions, engage in political vendettas and protect the royal rottenness of a society drunk on power and gone to hell in a bucket. The capture of nudity and sexual content also meshes very well with the yet to be fully revealed blackmail operations of the NSA/GCHQ and other intelligence services of which we have only gotten a small taste of to this point. 

This is an outrage but if you are looking for any coverage in the corrupt American state-corporate media forget about it - the Oscar Pistorius trial is about to get the O.J. Simpson media treatment. 

Move along.... nothing to see here. 

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) 

New Revelations Show that NSA Spied on Top Ally Israel

Stunning new revelations from former government contractor Booz-Allen-Hamilton employee turned whistleblower Edward Snowden have shown the NSA has been spying on that most indispensable ally of them all – Israel.  In a Guardian story that broke Friday it was reported that the American Stasi and their partners in crime across the pond GCHQ were spying on former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the latest addition to the list of “allies” that been targets of the rogue intelligence agency. U.S. intelligence thugs also maintained an apartment across the street from then Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak as well.  It is going to be very interesting to see how this goes over particularly with the normal public proclamations that United States leaders are in ‘lockstep’ with the Israelis and that there is “no daylight” between the most critical as well as most high maintenance country in the Middle East. I can’t imagine that Israel would be in the least bit shocked that the NSA is spying on their leaders, after all General Alexander’s electronic goon squads already have a sharing agreement or a "memorandum of understanding" to provide the data of millions of law-abiding Americans to the Israeli intelligence services as was previously reported. The spying on Jewish leaders should send a chill down the spines of all who have an awareness of history and any comparisons to the German Gestapo would be fair to make despite protestations by the politically correct who regularly invoke Godwin's Law to stifle free speech against tyrannical actions of out of control governments.

The spying on Israeli leaders is only a part of the investigative tale conducted jointly by the Guardian, Der Spiegel and the New York Times that also outed other targets including charities and the vice president of the European Commission none of which have a damned thing to do with 'terrorists' but rather industrial espionage and using the power of the U.S. state surveillance apparatus to create an unfair competitive balance. Hell, given that free enterprise has effectively been killed here in The Homeland where ingenuity, hard work and the once taken for granted virtue of American fair play have been replaced by bribery, lying, cheating, legal chicanery and buying political influence have replaced what was once capitalism only schmucks play fairly and those who are the most successful continue to destroy the system that at one time made this country into an economic power second to none. That  however is a story for another time which most assuredly will be coming soon as more documents are leaked debunking the corrupt government's ongoing sale of these monstrous programs as being necessary to keep us all safe.

Interestingly the normally demagogic paranoid right wing Israeli leader  Bibi Netanyahu was at first strangely muted on this gross breach of trust from a critical ally but has now vented, calling the snooping “unacceptable” and has called for an investigation of the activities. Not that there should be much sympathy for Netanyahu given his bellicose rhetoric, refusal to allow for a diplomatic solution over the Iranian nuclear program and the outright summoning of his loyal winged monkeys in the U.S. Congress to sabotage the talks but he is absolutely correct it is “unacceptable”. Being criticized for aggressive intelligence gathering by the Israelis though is pretty goddamned hypocritical given the existende of the aforementioned “memorandum of understanding” as well as the currently incarcerated American citizen Jonathan Pollard, a civilian intelligence employee who was a spy for Israel and convicted to a life sentence. Mr. Netanyahu has long been a top advocate for the release of Pollard and he is already using the news about the NSA’s spying on Olmert and Barak to push for his release, cynically posting a video of him meeting with Pollard's wife on You Tube. There is also the ugly history of Israeli meddling in domestic U.S. politics notably the AIPAC spy case in which two pro-Israeli lobbyists, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman were receiving transfers of classified information from former Defense Department employee Lawrence Franklin. Franklin was charged under the Espionage Act before the Obama administration’s flagrant abuse of it but the case against the AIPAC lobbyists was dropped, one can only imagine how much dirty laundry would have been aired had the trial been allowed to proceed. Bibi has a valid point but in the constitutional wasteland of the post-September 11. 2001 world hypocrisy has become the coin of the realm. So far he has yet to formally accuse Obama of running a Gestapo unlike German Chancellor Angela Merkel who has rightly affixed the Stasi label to Barry and the boys and their fascist surveillance machine.

I would wonder where all of the ardent defenders of both the NSA Stasi and waging wars that are more in the national interest of Israel than the United States stand on this, in particular the Senate renegades who are going to ring in the new year with the Iran negotiation killing bill that will set the stage for the war with Iran. Democrat New Jersey Senator and alleged prostitute chaser Robert Menendez and Israeli toady Senator Mark Kirk of Illinois and the 26 co-sponsors of their anti-American bill to effectively nuke the P5+1 negotiations have an interesting conundrum that only can only further expose their corruption, hypocrisy and disloyalty to their American constituents. How can they condemn the mass NSA surveillance that most of those fascists so adore only when it includes spying on Israel at the same time that they are hellbent on an unprecedented subversion of American interests in order to deliver Netanyahu his war? Were this a sane country where the rules of law were respected then Jonathan Pollard would soon have 27 new buddies in his cell block.