risking his life to tell you about NSA surveillance [ot]

The National Security Agency’s program to bulk collect phone data breaks the law, violates civil liberties, does not make Americans more safe, and should be shut down, according to the federal government's own watchdog.

In a 238-page report obtained by the New York Times and Washington Post, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which was created by Congress in 2007, issued the strongest rebuke of NSA spying yet from within the U.S. government.

The panel's decision, reported Thursday, takes direct aim at the legal argument cited to justify the mass phone data spying: Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

The program “lacks a viable legal foundation under Section 215, implicates constitutional concerns under the First and Fourth Amendments, raises serious threats to privacy and civil liberties as a policy matter, and has shown only limited value,” reads the report, according to the New York Times.

January 23, 2014 - Watchdog Privacy Board Reports
NSA Metadata Collection Is Illegal and Should End.

“We have not identified a single instance involving a threat
to the United States in which the program made a concrete
difference in the outcome of a counterterrorism investigation.”

A 238-page report released January 23, 2014,
by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB)
established with independence by Congress in 2004 to advise the
President and other senior executive branch officials about privacy
and civil liberties issues post-911 as impacted by new U. S.
anti-terrorism policies such as the Patriot Act.

"P.S. Couch, if I ever do manage to climb again you're always welcome. You're one of the most competent and capable climbers I've roped up with even if somewhat naively optimistic on the 'smaller government' front."

ANNAPOLIS, Md., February 10, 2014– It’s lights out for the National Security Agency (NSA). State lawmakers in Maryland have filed emergency status legislation that seeks to cut the NSA’s Ft. Meade headquarters off from all material support stemming from the state.

“Maryland has almost become a political subdivision of the NSA,” Tenth Amendment Center Executive Director Michael Boldin said in a statement. “The agency relies heavily on state and local help. This bill bans all of it.”

House Bill 1074 (HB1074) would ban the NSA facility from all public state utilities, ban the use of NSA collected evidence in court, ban universities from partnering with the NSA and ban all political subdivisions from assisting the NSA from within the state.

Any state entity, employee or contractor refusing to comply with the law would be immediately fired and banned from all future contracts within the state.

The bill has eight Republican sponsors and has been referred to the House Judiciary Committee.

Multiple states join Maryland in their attempt to enforce anti-commandeering legislative measures against the NSA. Tennessee, Arizona, California and Washington have all filed legislation. Utah is expected to file legislation within the coming weeks.

Read more: http://benswann.com/breaking-maryland-legislators-move-to-kill-nsa-headquarters/#ixzz2szwsKLQ9
Follow us: @BenSwann_ on Twitter

Queen Bee Lorde at the Grammy Awards:

Thankyou soo much everyone for making this song explode because this world is mental. (Laughter). Planet Earth is run by psychopaths that hide behind slick marketing, ‘freedom’ propaganda and ‘economic growth’ rhetoric, while they construct a global system of corporatized totalitarianism.

As American journalist Chris Hedges has identified, a corporate totalitarian core thrives inside a fictitious democratic shell. This core yields an ‘inverted’ totalitarian state that few recognize because it does not look like the Orwellian world of Nineteen Eighty-four.

This corporate totalitarian core is spreading outward from America. Planet Earth is being rapidly militarized by the world’s major and significant states, including their police forces. Meanwhile, state surveillance is becoming universal and torture is outsourced to gulags.

Can we not imagine that in past times, simple folk found it hard to work out exactly how they were being manipulated by the Royal monarchies, and the Papal monarchy, who claimed a ‘divine right to rule’? Ordinary people from classical times through to the demise of Ancien Regime could not see how the rivalrous network of elites and oligarchs were linked, not least because the illiterate masses were indoctrinated to believe in their humble lot, to obey divinely-endorsed authority and to live in fear of damnation.

So, in today’s mental world, it should become clearer now that Planet Earth is ruled by super-wealthy people, who use their outrageous fortunes to steer the trajectories of whole societies for their own material and political gain. These oligarchs are, in fact, colluding for economic gain and conspiring to augment more political power. Armies of professional, political, religious and military elites serve them. Together, they comprise a highly-networked transnational capitalist class that has been traced in studies by: Peter Phillips and Brady Osborne; William K. Carroll; David Rothkopf; Daniel Estulin; and Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter.

As Canadian journalist Naomi Klein has argued in her book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, ‘free markets’ were slickly marketed in the 1980s and 1990s with the idea that they would deliver individual freedom and prosperity for all. Klein also wrote that the use of military violence to facilitate the spread of ‘free markets’ in the field-testing stage from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s has continued into the 2000s. Her view is supported in Eugene Jarecki’s documentary Why We Fight, which compellingly showed that America fights wars to make the world secure for its corporations. So, get reading and viewing! (Lorde giggles and half the audience rises to their feet applauding. The other half remain fixed in their chairs. Some reluctantly clap).

Thankyou soo much everyone for giving a sh#t about our song, ‘Royals’. May you all find the balls to help construct a world based on resilient community, bona-fide freedom, and peace. To do that, we will need to redeploy the psychopaths that currently run the world to the planet’s prisons. Peace cannot happen with reconciliation. That was Nelson Mandela’s mistake. The first step to peace is justice firmly served.

One of the many pressing stories that remains to be told from the Snowden archive is how western intelligence agencies are attempting to manipulate and control online discourse with extreme tactics of deception and reputation-destruction. It’s time to tell a chunk of that story, complete with the relevant documents.

Over the last several weeks, I worked with NBC News to publish a series of articles about “dirty trick” tactics used by GCHQ’s previously secret unit, JTRIG (Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group). These were based on four classified GCHQ documents presented to the NSA and the other three partners in the English-speaking “Five Eyes” alliance. Today, we at the Intercept are publishing another new JTRIG document, in full, entitled “The Art of Deception: Training for Online Covert Operations.”

By publishing these stories one by one, our NBC reporting highlighted some of the key, discrete revelations: the monitoring of YouTube and Blogger, the targeting of Anonymous with the very same DDoS attacks they accuse “hacktivists” of using, the use of “honey traps” (luring people into compromising situations using sex) and destructive viruses. But, here, I want to focus and elaborate on the overarching point revealed by all of these documents: namely, that these agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, are compromising the integrity of the internet itself.

Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation of its targets; and (2) to use social sciences and other techniques to manipulate online discourse and activism to generate outcomes it considers desirable. To see how extremist these programs are, just consider the tactics they boast of using to achieve those ends: “false flag operations” (posting material to the internet and falsely attributing it to someone else), fake victim blog posts (pretending to be a victim of the individual whose reputation they want to destroy), and posting “negative information” on various forums.

A day after U.S. intelligence said there would be no Russian invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s troops started coming over the border.

On Thursday night, the best assessment from the U.S. intelligence community—and for that matter most experts observing events in Ukraine—was that Vladimir Putin’s military would not invade Ukraine.

U.S. intelligence said there would be no Russian invasion of Ukraine