Puppet MastersS


Laptop

Best of the Web: NSA Deception operation? Questions surround leaked PRISM document's authenticity

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Was Edward Snowden spotted before he decided to leak documents, and set up by the NSA?
"I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building." - Edward Snowden
Intelligence services have been feeding false information to known enemy informants in their own ranks for a long time, and they are very good at it.


Comment: Indeed, just think of Wikileaks...

Wikileaks and the War for your Mind


Today, the potential whistleblower is one of the most dangerous informants an intelligence service can confront.

Was Edward Snowden spotted before he decided to leak documents, and set up by the NSA?

Substantial evidence supports the possibility that he was. Numerous questions cast doubt on the authenticity of the Power Point slide show describing PRISM, but the UK Guardian has not seen fit to release it to the public. Perhaps Glenn Greenwald should anonymously leak this file: In the words of Snowden himself, "The public needs to decide."

Was Edward Snowden under surveillance at intelligence contractor Booz Allen in advance of releasing the PRISM document?

In the wake of the Wikileaks scandals, the U.S. intelligence community has answered "Who shall watch the watchmen?" by introducing active surveillance and detailed profiling of their own analysts and contractors, looking for potential whistleblowers.[1] By his own account, Snowden often discussed perceived Agency wrongdoing with his co-workers, which suggests that he should have been profiled and flagged as a potential leaker by the NSA's internal surveillance process.

Comment:
Is it possible that the PRISM leak was set up by the NSA as a deception operation in support of the Obama Administration's ongoing wars against whistleblowers and the 4th Amendment?
Very possible!
Is it possible that the PRISM leak was intended to mislead the American people into dramatically under-estimating the real domestic surveillance capabilities of our National Security Agency?
Also very possible!

Something to bear in mind is that the NSA, like all US government organs of state, is heavily privatized. This means that far from being a 'national agency', it is in fact a corporate entity representing private interests.

Which private interests?

Well, let's just say that it provides the ideal 'backdoor' for certain interests to marshall the NSA's and other government resources in their favor...

PRISM for your Mind: NSA, WikiLeaks and Israel


Pistol

'Hell to pay:' Residents angry as RCMP sieze guns from High River homes

Evacuees confronted the RCMP
© Lorraine Hjalte , Calgary Herald Evacuees confronted the RCMP on the northwest corner of town in a bid to enter the Town of High River on Thursday, June 27th 2013, one week after the Highwood River Flooded leaving the whole town empty. RCMP laid a spike belt down across the road to prevent them from travelling down
'It's just like Nazi Germany,' says resident

RCMP revealed Thursday that officers have seized a "substantial amount" of firearms from homes in the evacuated town of High River.

"We just want to make sure that all of those things are in a spot that we control, simply because of what they are," said Sgt. Brian Topham.

"People have a significant amount of money invested in firearms ... so we put them in a place that we control and that they're safe."

That news didn't sit well with a crowd of frustrated residents who had planned to breach a police checkpoint northwest of the town as an evacuation order stretched into its eighth day.

"I find that absolutely incredible that they have the right to go into a person's belongings out of their home," said resident Brenda Lackey, after learning Mounties have been taking residents' guns. "When people find out about this there's going to be untold hell to pay."

USA

New NSA leaks show email surveillance under Obama

Obama
© Reuters/Larry DowningU.S. President Barack Obama.

The Obama administration permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and Internet usage of Americans for more than two years, new documents reveal.

According to two leaked NSA documents published by The Guardian on Thursday, a secretive surveillance program that put email and Internet metadata into the hands of the United States government was authorized after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by President George W. Bush and continued under President Barack Obama through 2011.

Since then, claims The Guardian, the NSA has initiated new systems that collect and analyze the records of email communications sent in and out of the United States.

The leaked evidence comes three weeks to the day after The Guardian first began publishing classified NSA documents attributed to Edward Snowden, a 30-year-old former intelligence analyst from the US who is now wanted there for espionage. He is reportedly in Moscow and has sought asylum from at least two foreign countries.

On June 6, journalist Glenn Greenwald detailed how telephony metadata - basic information about the phone habits of millions of Americans - was being regularly supplied to Washington under a secretive orders authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In this week's article, Greenwald and co-author Spencer Ackerman say the latest revelation involves the collection of metadata involving emails that may have been sent or received by Americans.

USA

Snowden, NSA, blackmail, and the boys in the back room

NSA Logo
© PCWorld

The NSA is spying on everybody.

That includes a major, major, prime target: Congress.

So imagine this conversation taking place, in a car, on a lonely road outside Washington, late at night. The speakers are Congressman X and a private operative representing a covert unit inside the NSA:

"Well, Congressman, do you remember January 6th? A Monday afternoon, a men's room in the park off - "

"What the hell are you talking about!"

"A stall in the men's room. The kid. He was wearing white high-tops. A Skins cap. T-shirt. Dark hair. Scar across his left cheek."

"Jesus."

"We have very good audio and video. Anytime you want to watch it, let me know."

Dead silence.

"What do you want?"

Attention

Push back on misinformation!

Obama
© Alex Wong/Getty ImagesU.S. President Barack Obama speaks as he unveils his plan on climate change, June 25, 2013 at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
With his recent address to students at Georgetown University, Washington DC, President Obama has commanded: "Push Back on Misinformation. Speak up for the facts."

What a wise command! In the following, let me provide some examples of misinformation:

Examples of Misinformation

I."Carbon Pollution"

In this very address, President Obama used the term "carbon pollution" 30 times or so.

There really is no such thing as "carbon pollution." Carbon is a vital constituent of all living organisms on earth. If the term "carbon pollution" is meant to be a short form for the term "carbon dioxide pollution," then it ought to be spelled out, at least once in the address. However, assuming that that's what he actually meant, let's look at carbon dioxide.

II. "Carbon Dioxide Pollution"

There really is no such thing as "carbon dioxide pollution." Except for some bacteria that use other carbon sources, all life on earth is derived from and requires continued presence of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the earth's atmosphere. If the concentration of CO2 in the air, currently around 0.04%, were to fall by one half, say to 0.02%, most life on earth would come to a screeching halt. The partial pressure of CO2 at 0.02% in the atmosphere would be insufficient to sustain photosynthesis in most plants. Without growing plants, the bottom of the food-chain would disappear.

Wall Street

Best of the Web: Abby Martin and Ben Swann: Real journalists in an 'ice age' of journalism

Abby Martin talks to with investigative journalist, and former host of 'Reality Check', Ben Swann, about the war on journalism, the mainstream media's failure to hold the establishment accountable, being labeled fringe for asking questions and his new independent media venture 'Liberty is Rising Truth in Media Project'.


Pirates

Best of the Web: 'Intelligence', corporatism, and the Dance of Death

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You may at first think the following is a bad joke, but I assure you it is not a joke at all. At the very end of this NYT story about Booz Allen and the complex interconnections between nominally "private" business and the national intelligence community, we read:
But the legal warnings at the end of its financial report offered a caution that the company could be hurt by "any issue that compromises our relationships with the U.S. government or damages our professional reputation."

By Friday, shares of Booz Allen had slid nearly 6 percent since the revelations. And a new job posting appeared on its Web site for a systems administrator in Hawaii, "secret clearance required."
Yes, that appears to be Edward Snowden's old job.

Crappy spy fiction doesn't look quite so crappy now, does it? In many respects -- in fact, I would argue in every critical respect -- the spy business is actually that dumb.

In an earlier post about the NSA/surveillance stories, I discussed the profoundly offensive elitism involved in the argument that "special" people in both government and journalism, people endowed with understanding and judgment that is the envy of the gods and forever denied to all us ordinary schlubs, should decide what information will be provided to the motley mass of humans who merely pay for all of it, and for whose benefit all this godlike work is supposedly undertaken. Talk about idiocies: "We're doing all this for you! You're too stupid to be told most of what we're doing!" Put it on a bumper sticker, baby, so we can throw rotten eggs at it.

Star of David

Unattainable peace: Illegal West Bank settlements expansion continues

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But for the chap from Khan Younis refugee camp in Gaza who emerged earlier this week as the winner of the "Arab Idol," the news from Palestine is grim.

The newly appointed Palestinian Prime Minister resigned and Israel still insists it should be able to negotiate over dividing the pie while it continues to eat it.

By the end of April, US Secretary of State John Kerry succeeded in tailoring another peace plan to entice Israel. Arab ministers supposedly agreed to amend a decade-old peace plan to satisfy Israeli demand for legalising major illegal Jewish colonies in the West Bank.

In May 2009, Israel responded to the US mediated overture by issuing permits to build 296 illegal new homes in the Jewish-only colony of Beit El near Ramallah. This week the Secretary of State was scheduled to arrive on his fifth visit since February in an attempt to restart the Palestinian and Israeli negotiation.

The visit seems to be on hold to give time to Palestine's President to consider a new US economic peace plan and for Israel to give Abbas a face-saving cover to return to the negotiation table.

Israel is already sending mixed messages.

USA

'Hypocrite of the century': Irish MP blasts US president's G8 visit

Obama
© AFP PhotoUS President Barack Obama waves as he poses for the family picture of the G8 summit at the Lough Erne resort near Enniskillen in Northern Ireland on June 18, 2013.
Barack Obama is a "war criminal" and a "hypocrite," an Irish politician has said in a damning attack on the US president. The MP slammed the Irish treatment of Obama during his G8 visit as akin to 'prostituting' Ireland for a "pat on the head."

Irish MP Clare Daly took no prisoners in her heated attack on the visit of the Obama family to Ireland during this year's G8 summit, which was held in the five-star resort of Lough Erne, Northern Ireland.

During a session of the Irish parliament last Tuesday, Daly slammed media coverage of the visit as tantamount to "a nation of pimps, prostituting ourselves in return for a pat on the head."

"It's hard to know which is worse, whether it's the outpourings of the Obamas themselves, or the sycophantic fawning over them by sections of the media and the political establishment," said Daly, saying that the Irish nation had been subjected to "unprecedented slobbering" over the presidential family.

Che Guevara

Whistleblower Snowden seeks asylum in Ecuador

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© APA banner supporting Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who leaked top-secret documents about sweeping US surveillance programs, is displayed in Hong Kong
Admitted leaker Edward Snowden took flight in evasion of US authorities, seeking asylum in Ecuador and leaving the Obama administration scrambling to determine its next step in what became a game of diplomatic cat-and-mouse.

The former National Security Agency contractor and CIA technician fled Hong Kong and arrived at the Moscow airport, where he planned to spend the night before boarding an Aeroflot flight to Cuba. Ecuador's Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said his government received an asylum request from Snowden, and the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks said it would help him.

"He goes to the very countries that have, at best, very tense relationships with the United States," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., adding that she feared Snowden would trade more US secrets for asylum. "This is not going to play out well for the national security interests of the United States."

The move left the US with limited options as Snowden's itinerary took him on a tour of what many see as anti-American capitals. Ecuador in particular has rejected the United States' previous efforts at cooperation, and has been helping WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, avoid prosecution by allowing him to stay at its embassy in London.