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

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

World News
03.02.14
Ukraine’s Revolutionary Lesson for Russia
Vladimir Putin isn’t sending troops into Ukraine merely to protect Russian interests abroad. He’s also trying to protect his regime at home.

As Russian forces seize key objects in Crimea, their objective is not just to create chaos in Ukraine but also to protect kleptocratic rule in Russia itself.

Russia and Ukraine under Yanukovych shared a single form of government – rule by a criminal oligarchy. This is why the anti-criminal revolution that overthrew Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych is a precedent that is perfectly applicable to Putin’s Russia. It is also the reason why, from the Russian regime’s point of view, the Ukrainian revolution must be stopped at all costs.

Russia is presently quiescent and opinion polls show that 75 percent of respondents believe that what happened in Ukraine could not happen in Russia. Public sentiment in Russia, however, is subject to dramatic shifts and, in the wake of the overthrow of Yanukovych, Russian authorities were taking nothing for granted.

Hours after the closing ceremonies of the Sochi Olympics, a Russian court sentenced opposition activists to prison terms of two to four years for taking part in a protest rally in May 2012 against President Vladimir Putin’s inauguration. When demonstrators took to the streets to protest the verdict, hundreds were detained.

This is why the anti-criminal revolution that overthrew Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych is a precedent that is perfectly applicable to Putin’s Russia

Russia also restricted what is left of the independent press. Yuri Fedutinov, the veteran director of the independent Ekho Moskvy radio station, was removed in what chief editor Alexei Benediktov said was a “political” decision aimed at changing the station’s editorial policy. The independent television channel “Dozhd” was removed from satellite and cable networks and I was expelled from Russia, where I had been serving as an adviser to Radio Liberty.

Russia and Ukraine reflect the legacy of communism, which destroyed any sense of moral values. In both countries, the rulers place the accumulation of wealth far ahead of the welfare of the nation.

In Ukraine, Yanukovych took power and began to reprivatize for the benefit of himself and the members of his immediate family. In three years, his son Olexander, a dentist, became a multi-billionaire. The owners of businesses were offered below market prices for their enterprises under threat of being ruined by courts and government inspectors.

In Russia the process was similar. The seizure of property began in earnest in 2003 after the arrest of the president of the Yukos oil company, Mikhail Khodorkovsky. At present, thousands of businessmen are in pretrial detention in Russia on false charges and at the behest of their competitors.

To accumulate wealth so fast and on such a scale, it is necessary to eliminate independent law enforcement. The result was that in Russia and Ukraine, each person was aware that he was at the mercy of the authorities who could imprison him and seize his property at any time.

It was this condition that, in Ukraine, inspired the revolt against Yanukovych. The “European choice” was popular in Ukraine not only for economic reasons but because it offered the possibility that European practices including the rule of law would be introduced there. When Yanukovych refused on November 30 to sign an association agreement with the European Union after years of promising to do so, he provoked a revolt by eliminating hope for a more democratic future.

The Putin regime has traditionally been protected by high rates of economic growth, but the conditions that previously made growth rates of 7.2 percent possible no longer exist. The increase in well-being in Russia was guaranteed by the rise in the price of oil and gas, the decline in the price of imported goods, and huge underinvestment that was compensated for by the using up of the Soviet inheritance. In the absence of these factors, growth has slowed to 1.2 per cent, with little prospect of improvement.

In 2011 and 2012, Moscow witnessed the biggest protests since the fall of the Soviet Union over the falsification of elections and Putin’s decision to run for a third term as president. The protests eventually fizzled but, given the worsening economic situation, they could be reignited.

In February 2010, two doctors, Vera Sidelnikova and Olga Aleksandrina, a mother and daughter, were killed in Moscow when their car collided head on with a car driven by Anatoly Barkov, a vice president of the Lukoil oil company who, according to witnesses, was trying to jump the morning traffic. There was an explosion of outrage on the internet, but no demonstrations. Under the right conditions, a similar incident today might bring tens of thousands into the street.

The Ukrainian revolution is a powerful example of the capacity of a people to take charge of its own destiny. The lesson would be of great benefit to Russia if it inspired Russia’s leaders to undertake real reforms. The invasion of Crimea, however, shows that the Putin has chosen to forestall change with the help of foreign aggression. This portends not only a crisis in Ukraine but a dangerous future confrontation between rulers and ruled in the world’s second nuclear power.

David Satter is a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and an adviser to Radio Liberty. He is the first U.S. correspondent to be expelled from Russia since the Cold War.

Smart meters/phones/tv/, Smart everything, is a means of mass surveillance