Google is amassing huge amounts of personal user data while simultaneously accruing big-time political clout, a new report from Public Citizen confirms.

"Mission Creep-y: Google Is Quietly Becoming One of the Nation's Most Powerful Political Forces While Expanding Its Information-Collection Empire" (pdf) looks at the ways Google is accumulating political power - through high-powered lobbying and sizable campaign donations - as well as massive amounts of personal information that make the company a "treasure trove for agencies like the NSA."

"Google is becoming exponentially more powerful in federal and state governments," said Sam Jewler, author of the report and communications officer for Public Citizen's U.S. Chamber Watch. "At the same time, it's pushing boundaries in technology, and it has shown that it can't always be trusted to do the right thing with people's information. When we see such massive influence, it raises the question, will regulators and lawmakers be reluctant to rein in Google?"

The G20 summit is to start Saturday in Australia's Brisbane. Leaders of the world's 19 biggest states and the EU will discuss issues of global economy. Ahead of the summit Russian President Vladimir Putin in an exclusive interview with TASS spoke about challenges that Russia and other participants of the summit will face.

TASS: You are going to another G20 summit. To what extent is this format still in demand and relevant, and is it logical that some G20 countries, while striving to cooperate and develop the global economy, have been taking sanctions against one of the G20 members?

Putin: Is this format still in demand or not? I believe it is. Why? The G20 is a good place for meeting each other, for discussing both bilateral relations and global problems, and for developing at least some sort of common understanding what this or that problem is all about, and how to resolve it. To make a road map for joint work. This is the most important. Hoping that everything that may be said there will be implemented is absolutely unrealistic, especially if one remembers that the decisions themselves are not mandatory. To an extent they are neglected. They are defaulted on then and there, when and where they are in conflict with somebody's interests. First and foremost this applies to the interests of global players.

For instance, at one of the G20 meetings a decision was made to enhance the role of developing economies in the activities of the IMF and to redistribute quotas. The US Congress blocked that decision. Full stop. Both the negotiators and our partners are saying: well, we would be glad, we signed everything, we made that decision, but the Congress will not let it through. There you have it.

And yet, the very fact that a certain decision has been formulated, that all international actors involved in the G20 found it right and fair and consonant with the current realities, this fact alone shapes the international public opinion and the experts' minds in a certain way, and this has to be taken into account. The very fact that the US Congress has refused to pass this law indicates that it is the United States that drops out of the general context of resolving the problems facing the international community. One little thing: nobody cares to recall this. Some capitalize on their world mass media monopoly to hush up this information, to produce an impression it ostensibly does not exist.

You know what I mean. Everybody is talking about some current problems, including the sanctions and Russia, but in reality, in global terms it is the United States that defies decisions being made. This is a fundamental thing, by the way. But it is being neglected. That does not mean, though, that it is a useless format. I have already explained why. It does yield benefits.

Sanctions introduced by members of the G20 against Russia contradict the very principles of the summit's activities, as well as international law, Russian President Vladimir Putin told TASS ahead of the G20 meeting in Brisbane, Australia.

TASS: You're going to attend another G20 summit. To what extent is this format still in demand and relevant, and is it logical that some G20 countries, while striving to cooperate and develop the global economy, have been taking sanctions against one of the G20 members?

VLADIMIR PUTIN: Is this format still in demand or not? I believe it is. Why? The G20 is a good platform to meet each other, discuss both bilateral relations and global problems, and develop at least some sort of common understanding of what this or that problem is all about, and how to resolve it. A good place to make a road map for joint work.

This is the most important thing because it is totally unrealistic to expect that everything that may be said there will be implemented, especially since the decisions themselves are not mandatory. To a certain degree they are neglected. They are not observed whenever and wherever they are not in line with somebody's interests. First and foremost, this means the interests of global players.

Devices on planes that mimic cellphone towers used to target criminals, but also sift through thousands of other phones The Justice Department is scooping up data from thousands of mobile phones through devices deployed on airplanes that mimic cellphone towers, a high-tech hunt for criminal suspects that is snagging a large number of innocent Americans, according to people familiar with the operations.

The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program.

The Wall Street Journal has learned of a new federal law enforcement program that uses planes and cell signals to track criminal suspects.

Vladimir Putin says the G20 must address global imbalances together, and economic isolation, especially in the case of sanctions, which not only leads nowhere but is a crude violation of international economic law.

Here are the Russian president's top takeaways he gave in an interview to TASS ahead of the G20 summit being held in Brisbane, Australia from November 14-15.

G20 great for ground work, but decisions often just hot air

Putin believes the G20 is still a good and relevant platform for world leaders, however, decisions at the summit are often nothing but words. Decisions made there are only carried out when there are in line with the interests of certain global players, like the US. Decisions are neglected if they don't fit the agenda of an individual power.

Washington no longer wishes to overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic because it considers that the National Coalition as unable to govern and it does not want to see the country falling into unmanageable anarchy. Indeed, unlike Libya and Iraq, Syria and Israel are adjacent, so chaos in this place could be fatal to the US protégé.

Gradually, the US General Chiefs of Staff have reviewed their remodeling project, the Greater Middle East Initiative, as defined in 2001, and whose map was published by Colonel Ralph Peters during the debates of the Baker-Hamilton Commission [1]. A faction within the Obama administration is pushing for the creation of a new plan: the simultaneous remodeling of Iraq and Syria into five states, including two cross-border states.

The representative of Ban Ki-moon in Iraq, German neo-conservative Martin Kobler, strangely reported the merger of the Iraqi and Syrian battlefields to the Security Council in July 2013. [2]

The continuing attacks on Vladimir Putin and Russia by members of the western political, military and journalistic elite tell us one thing - the Russian President is doing a good job both for the people of his country and in the international arena.

For it is a rule which invariably holds true - if the Western elites praise the leader of a foreign country it means he is doing something which is good for those elites and bad for his country. If he's demonized, as Putin is, it's the other way round.

The latest attack has come from Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The US Army general said that Russia was "pushing on the limits of international order."

Dempsey talked of the need to "deter Russian aggression against our NATO allies" - and said that Russia had "kind of lit a fire of nationalism."

"Once you light that fire, it's not controllable," the General said. "I am worried about Europe."

It's worth reflecting on Dempsey's words as they provide a classic example of what psychologists call 'projection'. The US General was accusing Russia of what his own country has been guilty of.

Police departments across California spent more than $45 million on surveillance equipment over the course of a decade with little to no legislative or public oversight - and without the public's knowledge, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.

The ACLU report, titled 'Making Smart Decisions about Surveillance: A Guide for Communities,' reveals how California law enforcement took advantage of millions of dollars' worth of federal surveillance gear to sidestep city council oversight and boards of supervisors. Police also avoided consideration of costs and benefits and left the public in the dark as to how law enforcement was using the equipment to track their lives.

RT Californi4News: #California#News ACLU: police surveillance gadgets lack oversight: The American Civil Libert... http://t.co/TceZ7yQNxs

- Anthony Hiberts (@Anthonyhead13) November 12, 2014

"After revelations of mass surveillance by the NSA, the public isn't buying the 'just trust us' approach anymore. The public expects to know why surveillance is being considered, how it is going to be used and what safeguards are in place to guard against misuse before any decisions are made," Nicole Ozer, technology and civil liberties policy director for the ACLU of California, said in a statement.

New radar data indicating that military aircraft were in the air near Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 when it crashed in eastern Ukraine on July 17 has been released by a Russian air safety consultancy.

The consultancy provided a snapshot representing the readings taken by a radar station located in Russia's Rostov, near the Ukrainian border, shortly before and about 20 minutes after the MH17 crash.

According to Sergey Melnichenko, CEO of Aviation Safety consultancy, there were one or two warplanes in the air close to the Malaysian airliner. The data casts doubt on the version of the tragedy favored by Western nations, which claims the plane was shot down from the ground by rebel forces with a sophisticated surface-to-air missile.

The data "came from an air traffic control center in Rostov," Melnichenko told Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, declining to reveal which one and whether it was civilian or military. He assured that "we have full trust in the sources, which helped us make it available to the public."

"The data clearly shows that at the moment of the crash and after it there were planes moving north of the Boeing course. Most likely, they were military, because the spots are very close to each other. The conclusion is that there were either one or two aircraft there," Melnichenko told the daily.

Israel has officially declined to cooperate with the UN Human Rights Council committee's investigation into the country's 50-day Operation Protective Edge over possible war crimes committed, saying it is obvious the probe will find it guilty.


The Israeli government refused entry to the investigation team on Wednesday, which arrived in Jordan's capital of Amman with plans to travel through Israel and into the Gaza Strip.

The decision not to cooperate was due to the team's "one-sided" view of the events, Haaretz reported, citing Foreign Ministry spokesman Emmanuel Nachshon.

"The council's obsessive hostility toward Israel, the committee's one-sided mandate and committee chairman William Schabas' declared anti-Israeli positions" were listed as reasons for refusal by Nachshon.

The spokesman referred to the investigation as "a pretense that some inquiry is being held before the conclusions are published."

"While Hamas launched thousands of rockets at Israel, the UN's Human Rights Council made a decision stating Israel's guilt in advance and set up a probe as a rubber stamp for its known positions,"he said.