Rand Paul Promises to Shut Down NSA Data Center if Elected President

Desperately trying to remain relevant as he sinks in the polls, the amazing shrinking candidate Rand Paul has vowed to close down that massive NSA data storage center in Utah if he becomes president. Paul has proven to be an enormous disappointment to many who saw in him someone who would take a stand to restore our lost civil liberties and reign in the American Stasi and the surveillance of millions of law-abiding Americans. At this point it is hard to believe anything that comes out of Senator Paul’s mouth because he has spent all of his once bountiful political capital by flip-flopping, compromising and engaging in acts of Clintonian triangulation to the point where it is hard to tell where he stands on anything anymore.

Paul’s comments were reported by the website The Inquisitr in the story “Rand Paul Promises to Shut Down NSA Data Center if He Becomes President”:

Republican Senator Rand Paul has been one of the few vocal critics of the U.S. government’s spying programs. He’s the only presidential candidate that has made NSA spying a central topic of their campaign.

NSA spying is so important to Rand that he’s promised to shut down the NSA data center if he becomes president. After he stops the indiscriminate collection of Americans’ data, he’ll convert the data center into a “Constitutional Center” where the Fourth Amendment will be studied.

“I’m on my way to the airport, but we decided to stop by the NSA facility in Utah. When I become President, we’ll convert it into a Constitutional Center to study the Fourth Amendment! Bulk data collection must end!”

Questions of whether the spying programs were unconstitutional have been swirling since 2013 when Edward Snowden made details about the programs public. Snowden is the NSA contractor who copied large amounts of classified documents onto a thumbdrive and leaked the information to journalists.

For those that are bothered by the NSA spying programs, Paul seems to be the only candidate that would work to stop it. For the Senator, it’s a major problem that affects virtually all Americans.

Last year, Paul filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records. Paul hoped that his class-action lawsuit would bring the issue of bulk collection of phone records to the Supreme Court.

Paul also staged a filibuster to delay the renewing of the Patriot Act, which authorizes bulk data collection. He was only partially successful in his efforts. While Congress decided to let the Patriot Act expire, they replaced it will a very similar bill. The new bill, the USA Freedom Act, put a few more restrictions on how the government conducts its spying.

The federal government's snooping on Americans is indeed a travesty and a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment but it isn’t going away – especially after a federal appeals court just put the kibosh on a lawsuit brought against it's illegal spying on a technicality. The game is rigged and when it comes to controlling the NSA the horse has long since run off and it’s too late to close the barn door now. 

Talk is cheap, especially to Rand Paul who continues to be a disappointment to those who supported his father who was a man of deeply held principles unlike his flaky son with the hairdo that resembles Woodstock's nest. You can file this latest one of his promises under the moon is made out of green cheese category.

Big Surprise: Jeb! Wants More Power for NSA Stasi

Now that Rand Paul is imploding there are no prospective Republican nominees who will take his place to defend the Constitution and reign in Emperor Obama’s out of control NSA Stasi. On the contrary, there will be many candidates who will now resort to using the fear of terror to double down on the surveillance state powers that rose from the ruins of the World Trade Center only to be exploited and turned into a highly lucrative boom industry.

While Marco Rubio has already called for making the USA PATRIOT Act permanent – before it was replaced by the tepid crock of piss Freedom Act – and Chris Christie worships the authoritarian powers of the state, it is none other than the chosen one “Jeb!” who has now called for a vast expansion of the NSA. The rogue intelligence agency has long been operating with impunity to spy on, monitor and engage in the data-mining of millions of law-abiding Americans and that is just fine with Mr. Bush who like Obama and his brother before him, wants that power at his own disposal if elected president.

According to the Associated Press via Yahoo News “Jeb Bush: NSA needs broader powers to combat 'evildoers'”:

Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush said Tuesday that the government should have broad surveillance powers of Americans and private technology firms should cooperate better with intelligence agencies to help combat "evildoers."

At a national security forum in the early voting state of South Carolina, Bush put himself at odds with Republican congressional leaders who earlier this year voted to end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of phone records.

The former Florida governor said Congress should revisit its changes to the Patriot Act, and he dismissed concerns from civil libertarians who say the program violated citizens' constitutionally protected privacy rights.

"There's a place to find common ground between personal civil liberties and NSA doing its job," Bush said. "I think the balance has actually gone the wrong way."

Nobody has to my knowledge ever said that the feds shouldn’t go after those who are truly trying to plot to attack or harm Americans but the illegal practice of stockpiling telephone metadata (an indexing system), all internet activity including emails, social media activity, reading lists, personal and financial data and everything else that the NSA can scoop up without bothering to get a warrant takes a dump on everything that we are supposed to stand for. This is the type of raw power that Hitler or Stalin had at their command only without state of the art technology and it is what is going to put the final stake into the heart of what was once a free country - and guys like Jeb Bush will be pounding it in.

The establishment is desperate right now to fight off a mass uprising that could shake them to their roots and break up their corrupt political rackets. It is evident in the reaction to the rise of Donald Trump and to a lesser degree, Bernie Sanders that millions of folks have had enough of the lies, graft and bullshit. It is imperative to prevent the people from ever wresting control of the political system back from those who have hijacked it and like any totalitarian would, the key for it is the ability to spy on and target political dissenters. That’s what all of this is about, not about fighting “terrorism”, that is just something to sell to the suckers and the easily scared, there will always be a bogeymen that can be whipped out by the politicians.

If the establishment is really so concerned about the “terrorists” then why in the hell has the southern border been left wide open since September 11, 2001? That is the dead giveaway that the phony war on terror has been a crock of horseshit since day one. 

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.

Secretive Senate Committee Rubber Stamps CISA Cybersecurity Bill

There is an acronym that is very descriptive of life in Obamastan and that is BOHICA which stands for Bend Over Here It Comes Again. The most recent example is the secretive Senate committee that just put their seal of approval on the brand new cybersecurity bill. It is just the latest stomping down of the big government jackboot on the privacy rights of law-abiding citizens. Not that the average American even has a say in the shredding of the Constitution by our rancid and rogue political system because when you have thinks like secret courts, secret panels, secret deliberations and secret deals then how can you really have a "free" country? The merger of state and corporate power has a name and that is fascism. The coming accord between big government and big business to put Americans under the watchful eye of big brother is just another step closer to the edge of that abyss.

According to the leading tech website CNET in a story entitled “Senate panel approves controversial cybersecurity bill”:

The Senate Intelligence Committee approved a controversial cyberscurity bill on Thursday that's designed to help companies and the federal government better defend against the growing threat of data breaches.

Approved by a 14-1 vote, the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) aims -- by providing expanded legal liability protections to companies sharing data -- to encourage US companies to share information about security breaches with each other and government agencies. Supporters argue that the legislation is necessary to reduce the impact of an uptick in the theft of customers' personal information.

"This current bill is critically important both for our agencies that keep the country safe, and the institutions that hold millions of Americans' personal information," Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican and chairman of the panel, said in a statement.

The committee passed a similar bill last year by a 12-3 vote, but the measure stalled after privacy advocates raised concerns that it would reinforce government powers to conduct surveillance on US citizens, particularly after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released details of the secret spying programs.

Sen. Ron Wyden, the only lawmaker to vote against the new bill Thursday, said the measure "lacks adequate protections for the privacy rights of American consumers, and...will have a limited impact on US cybersecurity."

"This information-sharing is only acceptable if there are strong protections for the privacy rights of law-abiding American citizens," Wyden said in a statement. "If information-sharing legislation does not include adequate privacy protections, then that's not a cybersecurity bill -- it's a surveillance bill by another name."

Senator Wyden has consistently been one of the lone voices speaking out from inside the belly of the beast that is our Leviathan federal government. However, as the 14-1 vote to move closer to the inevitable cram down of this totalitarian wet dream shows, he is badly outnumbered. It’s notable to see how despite the official media narrative that Democrats and Republicans are at loggerheads over everything that when it comes to giving the federal government even more power to snoop on Americans they are in unison.

It’s the same way with foreign wars that have nothing to do with our national interests and everything to do with selling weapons to keep the campaign contributions flowing and not acting to control our porous borders. When do actual Americans have a voice on any of this crap? The idea that democracy still exists in the post 9/11 doppelganger of what used to be the United States of America is a hoax and a very sick one at that. Big time anti-American scams like the CISA bill and the coming ultra-secret Trans Pacific Trade Partnership (TPP) show how much influence that the ordinary Joe and Jane really have anymore. Just go and ask the conservatives who turned out in droves back in November to make a statement for change. It didn't take very long for the same corrupt “leaders” to be put right back in charge and those campaign promises rapidly reneged upon.

The corrupted system is desperately working to immunize itself from any future efforts for change if and when the star spangled sheep are ever able to wake up from their slumber and mount a challenge. The cybersecurity bill which is an extension of the NSA Stasi government power into private industry will ensure that any dissent will be rapidly squashed.

Obama Signs "Advisory" Executive Order On Cybersecurity

The push for the total surveillance society continues with El Presidente just signing another one of his decrees Friday to push for corporations to “share” data with the federal government. Obama paid a visit to Silicon Valley for a public relations exercise called the “White House summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection” at Stanford University to sell the latest attack on civil liberties. This has been coming ever since the alleged North Korean involvement in the Sony hack that to this day has never been backed up by evidence. The allegations accompanied the holiday media frenzy over the movie The Interview. The whole thing smacked of a false flag operation from the beginning with the end result being the imposition of the latest version of CISPA (The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act) on the American public.

As reported by The Washington Post in a story entitled “Obama signs executive order on sharing cybersecurity threat information”:

President Obama signed an executive order Friday that urges companies to share cybersecurity-threat information with one another and the federal government.

Obama signed the order, which is advisory in nature, at the first White House summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford University here. The summit, which focused on public-private partnerships and consumer protection, is part of a recent White House push to focus on cybersecurity.

Obama said the prospect of cyberattacks are one of the nation's most pressing national security, economic and safety issues. The specter of a cyberattack crippling the nation's air traffic control system or a city with a blackout is real, and hacks such as the one on Sony Pictures last year are "hurting America's companies and costing American jobs." He also said they are a threat to the security and well-being of children who are online.

There is a word for the merger of state and corporate power and that word is fascism.  The push to get corporations to effectively meld with a government gone rogue and drunk on accumulating ever more power in the post 9/11 era is exactly that. Despite all of the controversy over the leaks by former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden there still have been no serious efforts made to slap any oversight on the unconstitutional surveillance programs.

If anything, even more sneaky ways to circumvent accountability have been implemented and Obama’s big cybersecurity drive is one of them. It is not that there isn’t a legitimate need to have intelligence agencies going after real terrorists and they should have the tools to do so. However, the Bush and Obama regimes have gone completely over the line by snooping on millions of law abiding Americans without so much as a warrant and continuing to lie about it all.

While Obama’s executive order is of an “advisory” nature and the real damage needs to be done by the criminals in congress it is a foregone conclusion that a bill will inevitably find its way to Barry’s desk.

Obama Works to Cram Cybersecurity Bill Down the Throats of Americans

The sly devil that is Emperor Barack Obama has drawn criticism over his proposed $4 trillion budget that has more shit in it than a Chinese manufactured sausage. While establishment Republicans thump their chests and wail about tax hikes on the wealthy and liberals laud his denouncing of  more “mindless austerity” the thing is a Trojan horse containing something much more odious. As has already been predicted by many who are onto the big con game, Dear Leader’s budget also includes within it the funding for even more of the Big Brother type of warrantless government snooping that Americans have been subjected to under Obama’s NSA Stasi.

While the Obama budget may please many by hitting corporations that squirrel away their profits overseas – which doesn’t benefit America – it delivers by providing immunity to companies that work hand in hand with the government on mass surveillance. As Reuters reports in the story “Obama seeks $14 billion to boost U.S. cybersecurity defenses”:

President Barack Obama's budget proposal for the 2016 fiscal year seeks $14 billion (9 billion pounds) for cybersecurity efforts across the U.S. government to better protect federal and private networks from hacking threats.
Federal cybersecurity funding has steadily increased in recent years, reflecting the intensity of threats U.S. companies and government agencies are facing from cyber intruders, both domestic and foreign.

The budget, released on Monday, calls for deployment of more intrusion detection and prevention capabilities, greater sharing of data with the private sector and other countries and more funding to beef up the government's ability to respond to attacks.

The funding would support several specific programs, such as monitoring and diagnostics of federal computer networks, the EINSTEIN intrusion detection and prevention system and government-wide testing and incident-response training.

"Cyber threats targeting the private sector, critical infrastructure and the federal government demonstrate that no sector, network or system is immune to infiltration by those seeking to steal commercial or government secrets and property or perpetrate malicious and disruptive activity," the White House summary said.

The cynics among us have questioned whether all of the ruckus over alleged North Korean involvement in the Sony hacking was just another big lie to get the cybersecurity bill passed. While Americans have very short memories and even shorter attention spans these days, it was only in December that the media was shrilly warning of alleged “terrorist” threats against theaters showing the movie The Interview. The threats were never substantiated and independent cybersecurity experts have questioned government claims that North Korea was responsible but the movie became a holiday patriotic rallying cry. Ironically, doper and liberal Seth Rogen, the star of The Interview who sang the praises of freedom for Americans to go and see his film is the same guy who was denounced by conservatives when he compared the movie American Sniper to Nazi propaganda.

Don’t expect any resistance from Republicans either because Barry has broken out the fear club and is going to beat them into submission with it. It is also being reported that Obama is going the full Göring by accusing the GOP of putting the American people in danger. According to the Reuters story “Obama proposes $3.99 trillion budget, draws scorn from Republicans”:

"I know there are Republicans who disagree with my approach. And I’ve said this before: If they have other ideas for how we can keep America safe, grow our economy, while helping middle-class families feel some sense of economic security, I welcome their ideas," Obama said.
"But their numbers have to add up. And what we can’t do is play politics with folks’ economic security, or with our national security."

Obama’s push for the new cybersecurity measures should chill Americans in that it is just the latest and greatest reincarnation of the zombie bill CISPA which has drawn opposition from civil liberties groups. In the climate of fear and dread that is early 2015 after the media overkill over the Sony hacking and then the Charlie Hebdo slayings look for Obama to continue to accuse opponents of exposing Americans to danger. So much for that election year threat to partially defund the Department of Homeland Security to stop Obama’s amnesty decree.

Fascism is the merger of state and corporate power and we are well on our way there already. If Obama is able to successfully sell Americans on sweeping new surveillance capabilities along with the corporate immunity from oversight that his cybersecurity proposals provide then we will be even closer to it.

Fozzie Bear Fascism: Obama Launches War on "Extremists"

As Chicago Mayor and former Democrat power broker Rahm Emanuel famously put it “never let a serious crisis go to waste” and Emperor Obama gets it. With the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris, a mysterious (and probably bogus) alleged ISIS hijacking of CENTCOM social media and the hysteria in the aftermath of the to this day unproven North Korean involvement in the Sony hacking a crackdown is coming. Barack Obama is about to give birth to the war on “extremism”, the definition of which is so vague so as to potentially include political foes, activist groups, bloggers, independent writers and of course any who refuse to worship at the altar of absolute government power. Keep in mind that Obama has already used the Internal Revenue Service to go after Tea Party affiliated political opposition groups and the police state to do crush the the Occupy movement.

Dear Leader will be hosting a “global security summit” next month in Washington that will attract world leaders including the Brits’ David Cameron whose increasingly strident rhetoric brings to mind that of Norsefire party Chancellor Adam Sutler from the movie “V For Vendetta”. Cameron shocked Brits when he advocated for the banning of encryption so that the U.K. security services and spooks will be able to monitor everything. Don’t be surprised if Obama and his NSA Stasi and their allies soon go after internet encryption in the U.S.A. too, the Holy Grail of the surveillance state has been the cracking of encrypted communications. Soon, if Obama is able to close the deal in selling the Fourth Amendment destroying cybersecurity bill to the people it will put us on a path to a society where as Orwell once wrote: "Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull".

Obama will be warming up this week for his State of the Union Address during which he will lie like a rug in pushing the new cybersecurity bill to the sheeple and it will be wrapped in the benign guise of protecting corporations. The corporations – which have armies of lobbyists and influence who gets campaign funding – will be given the green light to share EVERYTHING about you with the government. This is a very bad deal for the American people in that at least theoretically the government is supposed to have some degree of accountability while transnational corporations don’t. The kicker is that the legislation will provide total immunity to those corporations in regards to the data that is harvested and given to a fascist state that grows exponentially more powerful with every “terrorist” attack or hacking.

Libertarian financial blog has a good piece that takes a look at the implications of what Obama and his lackeys in Congress are prepared to foist off on a gullible public entitled “Obama Declares War On "Extremism" – Are You An "Extremist"?" from which I excerpt the following:

Do you know what an “extremist” is?  In the wake of the horrible terror attacks on the offices of Charlie Hebdo in France, Barack Obama is speaking very boldly about the need to win the war against “extremists”, and he has announced plans to host a major global summit on “extremism” next month.  And on the surface that sounds great.  But precisely how are we supposed to determine whether someone is an “extremist” or not?  What criteria should we use?

As you will see below, your definition of an “extremist” may be far, far different from the definition that Barack Obama is using.  When you do a Google search, you will find that an “extremist” is defined as “a person who holds extreme or fanatical political or religious views, especially one who resorts to or advocates extreme action.”  According to Wikipedia, “extremism” is “an ideology (particularly in politics or religion), considered to be far outside the mainstream attitudes of a society or to violate common moral standards.  

Extremism can take many forms, including political, religious and economic.”  Please notice that neither of those definitions uses the word violence.  In this day and age, you can be considered an “extremist” simply based on what you believe, and as you will see later in this article there are now tens of millions of Americans that are considered to be “extremists” and “potential terrorists” according to official U.S. government documents.

When you use the word “extremist”, you may have in your mind a picture of ISIS fighters or the terrorists from the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

But for elitists such as Barack Obama, the word “extremist” has a much broader meaning.  In recent years, it has become a code word for those that do not have an “enlightened” view of the world.  If your views on politics, religion or social issues are extremely different from the liberal, progressive views of “the mainstream” (as defined by the mainstream media and by “mainstream” politicians such as Barack Obama), then they consider you to be an extremist.

The writer of the piece, Michael Snyder who runs the blog Economic Collapse also has a list of who may end up on the “extremist” list and here is a very brief sampling:

Those who are anti-global, may believe in "conspiracy theories", are advocates of "states rights", opponents of illegal immigration, anti-abortion activists, those that have a negative view of the United Nations, returning veterans, those who are suspicious of centralized federal authority, people who have the wrong bumper stickers, those frustrated with "mainstream ideologies, those who are "anti-Muslim", gun rights activists, certain types of Christians and anyone that "visits extremist websites/blogs.

Chances are that many of us fit into at least one of those categories and will soon be subject to increased scrutiny by the feds for simply having beliefs that run counter to those who have usurped the U.S. Constitution and succeeded in bastardizing democracy. Not only will those who are deemed to have "extremist" views be in that big government database but once Obama and his ilk execute their deal with the devil in giving legal immunity to corporations "extremists" could be effectively blackballed in the labor market as well. It will give the government the added tool of waging economic warfare on all who question it under the cover of outsourcing the dirty work to corporations.

These are truly perilous times in which we live thanks to the moral degradation of our "leadership" class, it's just too bad that so many Americans have no clue of how rapidly that the trap is closing.

NSA District Democrat Representative Brings Fascist Back Surveillance Bill

The mysterious story swirling around alleged North Korean involvement in the Sony Hack and later the movie “The Interview” has become a bit clearer now. While there has never been any solid proof that linked the regime of Kim Jong Un to the hacking and alleged (but never substantiated) “terrorist” threats against movie theaters the Obama administration continued to push the blame North Korea narrative. Some more astute observers of the ongoing track towards full-blown fascism in The Homeland smelled a rat and speculated that the whole thing was just a pretense to impose even more Draconian domestic spying upon millions of law-abiding citizens. Well, now it is no longer just speculation as Congress has delivered their usual running drop kick to the crotch of powerless Americans.

As soon as the new Congress had returned from their latest taxpayer funded extended vacation it became obvious what the priorities truly are. The reintroduction of CISPA aka the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act was a top item on the agenda and will garner the typical bipartisan support that such criminal actions against the American people always get. Look for a barrage of laws that further erode the Constitution and restrict civil liberties and privacy rights in the coming year, especially since the media has been hysterically pushing fear in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack.

According to The Hill in a story entitled “House Dem revives major cyber bill”:

A senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee on Friday will reintroduce a controversial bill that would help the public and private sectors share information about cybersecurity threats.

“The reason I’m putting bill in now is I want to keep the momentum going on what’s happening out there in the world,” Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), told The Hill in an interview, referring to the recent Sony hack, which the FBI blamed on North Korea.

The measure — known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) — has been a top legislative priority for industry groups and intelligence officials, who argue the country cannot properly defend critical infrastructure without it.

The House passed Ruppersberger’s bill last year, but it stalled in the Senate amid concerns from privacy advocates that it would enable more collection of Americans’ private information.

Ruppersberger lost his 2014 co-sponsor of the bill, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who retired from Congress.

“I’m putting the bill in by myself,” Ruppersberger said, acknowledging it would require work to find new bipartisan support. But by reintroducing the bill, “hopefully that will create momentum,” he added.

Ruppersberger wants to ride the wave of attention on Capitol Hill driven by the cyberattack on Sony, which caused the studio to almost cancel the release of a multimillion-dollar comedy, “The Interview,” which depicts an American plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. Sony ultimately released the film to a limited number of theaters and streamed it online.

What is always left out whenever Dutch Ruppersberger is cited is that his home district happens to be the location of the headquarters of the NSA Stasi in Fort Meade, Maryland – a wretched hive of scum and villainy. The domestic spying and data-mining apparatus as well as the local economy in and around the Second Congressional District in Maryland depends on Dutch going to Washington and delivering the bacon for the expansion of the ever growing surveillance state.

The Hill piece also states that “Ruppersberger lost his 2014 co-sponsor of the bill, former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), who retired from Congress” but doesn’t mention that Rogers has taken his act to CNN. It is an example of the perverse and corrupt system that Americans now must live under that such a high-ranking figure as Rogers is able to cash in on his government experience and will now have a cable television network offering him a national forum as a pimp for the surveillance state. In regards to Rogers it is never mentioned that his wife was a lobbyist whose clients stood to profit from the very programs that he was supposed to be exercising oversight upon.

No surprise that the NSA Stasi is absolutely delighted that Ruppersberger has reincarnated CISPA with The Hill also reporting that “NSA chief wants cyber bill to fight hackers”:

The head of the National Security Agency wants lawmakers to pass a contentious cybersecurity bill to help federal officials go after hackers.

“I think it's a very important first step,” spy agency director Adm. Michael Rogers said on Fox Business Network on Friday.

“In the end, the key to our ability to be effective, I believe, as a nation in cyber, will be our ability to span the divide between the private sector and the public sector or the government.”

The controversial bill introduced by Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.) on Thursday would make it easier for private companies to share information about possible hackers and lines of attack with each other and the government. Backers say it's a critical step to ensure there are no blind spots on the country's networks.

Anyone who didn’t see where this was going with all of the sound and fury over “The Interview” and the media acting as the propagandists selling slavery repackaged as  “patriotism” while demonizing North Korea was not paying very close attention. The legislation is a wet dream for the apple pie authoritarians and their corporate allies that will profit from it. And as with everything else that this loathsome rogue government touches - a nightmare for us all.

Star Spangled Schmucks Cheer "The Interview" on Christmas Day

The war on Christmas met the unwinnable war on stupidity with the massively overhyped movie The Interview selling out in theaters across the fruited plain on Christmas Day. After a solid week of constant media and official government propaganda selling what now appears to be a hoax the stuffed to the seams stocking full of tastelessness and stupid dick jokes was incredibly turned into a  bizarre“freedom of speech” crusade. We have now passed the point of no return on our long slow crawl towards the dystopian dumbassery of Idiocracy. Nothing shows how free that we are than the patriotic fervor whipped up to defend the rights of a Japanese company to make money selling garbage to Americans.

Give one thing to the repressive dictatorship in North Korea in that they don’t have to work quite so hard to feed propaganda to their people as the U.S. government does. On the day when the world celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ (smothered in consumerism) Americans turned out in droves, dressed up like fools and waving their made in China American flags to strike a blow for “freedom”.  As reported in a story from the website of Reuters entitled “Sony's 'Interview' draws U.S. moviegoers who trumpet free speech”:

"The Interview," the Sony Pictures film about a fictional plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, opened in more than 300 movie theaters across the United States on Christmas Day, drawing many sell-out audiences and statements by patrons that they were championing freedom of expression.

Co-directors Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, who also co-stars in the low-brow comedy with James Franco, surprised moviegoers by appearing at the sold-out 12:30 a.m. PT screening of the movie at a theater in Los Angeles, where they briefly thanked fans for their support.

Sony Pictures this week backtracked from its original decision to cancel the release of the $44 million film after major U.S. theater chains pulled out because of threats of violence by Guardians of Peace, a computer hacking group that claimed responsibility for a destructive cyberattack on Sony last month.

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An afternoon screening at the Van Nuys Regency Theatres in the city's San Fernando Valley was two-thirds full and drew a diverse crowd ranging from teens to senior citizens, who laughed loudly throughout at Rogen and Franco's antics.

"It was much better than I thought it would be," said Carlos Royal, 45, a professor who came with a friend dressed in Santa hats and took selfies for the occasion in front of the theater's Hollywood sign marquis. "I wanted to support the U.S."

The movie, which is playing in theaters in major metropolitan areas as well as in smaller cities ranging from Bangor, Maine, to Jasper, Indiana, features Rogen and Franco as journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate the North Korean leader.

In Asia, online audiences seemed to find the movie tedious.

"There is no drama and not much fun," said a blogger in South Korea. "It's all about forced comedy that turns you off. Couldn't they have done a better job making this movie?"

The Christmas Day premieres were the culmination of what appears to be one of the sleaziest domestic propaganda campaigns in American history. While the true story of the alleged North Korea hacking and vague “terrorist” threats against theaters may never be known there are by now enough holes in the official government fairy tale to show that Americans have been punked again. Whether our trustworthy “leaders" - President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry –were both sucked into the big con or were a part of it from the get go is open for speculation. Both were able to make big gains though, especially setting up the inevitable shoving of yet another Draconian restrictions on free speech in the waiting in the wings cybersecurity bill down the throats of the sheeple.

But sheep, even if they wrap themselves up in red, white and blue trappings are at the end of the day still sheep and as such are easily led to the slaughterhouse. A Washington Post story on the big event entitled “Seeing ‘The Interview’ on Christmas, for fun and patriotism” shows  just how easy it is to dupe the idiots:

From D.C. to Culpeper, they left their cozy Christmases at home to head out to a Manassas movie theater and — they said — to stand up for free speech.

“I’d normally be making music with my boys on Christmas,” said Ron Oley, 64, of Manassas. But this year, he told them that he wouldn’t be showing up at the recording studio. He had to see “The Interview,” a Seth Rogen-James Franco comedy around which a real-life drama has swirled for weeks.

North Korea didn’t like the story line, a plot to assassinate its leader, Kim Jong Un. Sony Pictures Entertainment was so deeply embarrassed by revelations after hackers broke into the company’s computer systems that it briefly hesitated to release the movie.

“This is a free country. I’m sorry they don’t have that over in their country, but we do. I’m an American,” Oley said while he waited in line at the concession stand.

I am sure that Mr. Oley is unable to see the irony in his silly statement of defiance that he was so easily manipulated to abandon his family on Christmas Day to put money into the pockets of a foreign company but as he says this is a "free country". With a populace like this it is easy to see how we have ended up with the Patriot Act as well as an Orwellian NSA surveillance state that expands daily. There really is nothing quite as pathetic as seeing morons boasting that the dictator Kim Jong Un doesn't tell them what to do yet so meekly surrendering their own civil liberties to a government that is far more refined in it's methods.

Merry Christmas and God Bless America Too!!

America F*CK YEAH! Team America Movie Pulled as Panic Grips Nation

The increasingly bizarre story of the terrorist threats against movie theaters showing the now effectively banned film The Interview continues. Shortly after the movie – which depicts the assassination of loony North Korean leader Kim Jong Un - was pulled from distribution the 2004 flick Team America: World Police was also yanked. The stomping on the latter, that a few theaters chose to show in place of  The Interview is notable because the movie has been out for ten years now and is widely available on DVD and streaming video. It is typical in the land of fear that is post September 11, 2001 America that such overreactions so often occur. The federal government has battered the populace into a quivering mass of jelly in order to justify their gutting of the Constitution and aiding and abetting the creation of a massive and lucrative surveillance industrial complex.

While the terrorist threats against theaters were never really substantiated outside of inferences by the lie factory that is the US government that North Korea -and now Iran, China and Russia according to a FOX exclusive- (har har) were behind them, The Interview movie has now been pretty much permanently shelved by Sony but the movie likely would have been a disaster anyway. This would seem to be not only caving in to the “terrorists” but also setting a precedent that any borderline whacko group can bring American business to a screeching halt. The new era of cyber-warfare has now officially begun with the Sony hacking being the first shot. Former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says as much with his damning comments from a CNN op-ed entitled “America lost the cyberwar over Sony: Now what?”:

No one should underestimate the historic importance of the North Korean cyberwar against America and the collapse of American defenses in the Sony Pictures attack.

This was not some amusing pop culture event in which a few "hackers" played games with celebrities.

This was not an entertaining series of embarrassing leaks that allowed us to learn how viciously and nastily some senior Hollywood bosses write about famous movie stars in internal emails.

This was a deliberate assault on sovereign American soil against an American company, costing it millions of dollars in direct damages and hundreds of millions in reputational damages while blocking most of its employees from using their internal systems to get routine work done.

This was a threatened physical assault against moviegoers and movie theaters nationwide if they ignored the cyberattack and dared to laugh at the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

Some commentators criticized the movie theaters for their "cowardice" in not standing up to the threats. Others criticized the rest of the movie industry for not coming to the defense of Sony.

The column is vintage Gingrich and is chock full of the type of bombastic rhetoric that the former Speaker of the House always whips around like shovels of bloody red meat. While what Gingrich seems to be calling for are even more Draconian forms of a big government surveillance state - and a chilling smackdown of critics of censorship- he does have one thing dead right. If the North Korean regime is behind the Sony hacking as well as the threats against movie theaters then America has indeed lost the first cyber-war. Gingrich is as full of shit as anyone in this country but you have begrudgingly give him credit on this one even if it is drenched in a trough of fascist pigshit. 

This is what happens when the NSA is more interested in spying and data-mining every detail on millions of loyal, law-abiding American citizens instead of defending against foreign threats. Perhaps Obama’s Stasi should have spent less time filling that massive data storage facility out in Utah and more time focusing on defending those American companies that Gingrich is wailing about. Never mind that Sony America is a subsidiary of a Japanese corporation but hey, like Bluto in Animal House why stop him when he is on a roll. 

Give the media credit for getting The Interview and Team America effectively banned in a blow to freedom of speech and expression. The sleazy 24/7 cable driven news cycle and the armies of talking heads and big-haired bimbos staring into teleprompters are great at scaring the bejesus out of the sheeple. Quite frankly, at the end of the day their very jobs depend on it and they understand that. Americans must have whiplash from the onslaught of hyped up “terrorist” threats and dread that they are subjected to by the government, former government figures now making their coin as “experts” (like Newt Gingrich) and a propaganda machine that would make Joseph Goebbels himself proud.

It is almost like the mainstream media acts as a public relations front for any and all anti-American groups - ISIS for example - and is able to spread their hateful messages far more effectively than the groups themselves ever could. The P.R. is all free of charge too and arguably only serves to enable a continuation of threats and beheadings given the saturation coverage they are provided with.

Fear is home for Christmas. America FUCK YEAH!