Puppet MastersS


Coffee

Flashback NSA Whistleblower Russell Tice: US government is spying on ordinary Americans all the time, targeted journalists

Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA's warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists.


"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications -- faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications," Tice claimed. "It didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications."

Chess

Maduro: Venezuela Will Offer NSA wistleblower Edward Snowden Political Asylum

Maduro
© Reuters / Miraflores PalaceVenezuela's President Nicolas Maduro
"As head of state and of government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, I have decided to offer humanitarian asylum to the US youth Edward Snowden," President Nicolás Maduro announced today at Caracas' military academy at the start of a parade for Venezuela's Day of Independence.

"To be independent, we must feel it," he said. "We must exercise our independence and sovereignty. Our discourses are meaningless if they aren't exercised with force at the national level. I announce to the friendly governments of the world that we have decided to offer this statute of international humanitarian law to protect the young Snowden from the persecution that has been unleashed from the most powerful empire in the world,the United States," he said.

"Let's ask ourselves: who violated international law?" he continued. "A young man who decided, in an act of rebellion, to tell the truth of the espionage of the United States against the world? Or the government of the United States, the power of the imperialist elites, who spied on it?"

Stormtrooper

Turkish police fire teargas, water cannons to disperse protesters re-Occupying Istanbul

Taksim, Istanbul, protest
© Reuters/Murad Sezer Taksim square in central Istanbul July 6, 2013.
Turkish police fired teargas and water cannon to disperse hundreds of protesters in an Istanbul square on Saturday as they gathered to enter a park that was the center of protests against Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan last month.

Taksim Solidarity, combining an array of political groups, had called a march to enter the sealed off Gezi park, but the governor of Istanbul warned that any such gathering would be confronted by the police.

"We are going to our park to open its doors to its real owners ... We are here and we will stay here ... We have not given up our demands," the umbrella group said in a statement.

Arrow Down

Jon Corzine will not face criminal charges over MF Global: report

Corzine
© MarketWatch
There will be no criminal charges for former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine over the use of customer funds leading up to collapse of MF Global.

The criminal probe into whether there was wrongdoing on the part of Corzine by the Department of Justice will now be dropped due to lack of evidence, said a report in The New York Post, citing a person with knowledge of the matter.

But the former CEO of Goldman Sachs is not out of the woods.

Corzine is facing civil charges by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission for illegally using customer funds in the last few days of MF Global to help keep the company afloat. The firm's former assistant treasurer Edith O'Brien is also caught up in the scandal and charged by the CFTC for making the transfers.

Ultimately Corzine was charged by the regulator for failure to segregate and misuse of customer funds and failure to supervise diligently. O'Brien was charged with one count failure to segregate and misuse of customer funds.

To support the allegations, the CFTC used a recorded telephone conversations to support their charges that Corzine was fully aware of the transfers.

Both Corzine and O'Brien have denied any wrongdoing.

Bullseye

Research shows that Monsanto's big claims for GMO food are probably wrong

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It's going to be a tough row to hoe, from here on out for Monsanto.

Oops. The World Food Prize committee's got a bit of egg on its face - genetically engineered egg. They just awarded the World Food Prize to three scientists, including one from Syngenta and one from Monsanto, who invented genetic engineering because, they say, the technology increases crop yields and decreases pesticide use. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Monsanto and Syngenta are major sponsors of the World Food Prize, along with a third biotech giant, Dupont Pioneer.)

Monsanto makes the same case on its website, saying, "Since the advent of biotechnology, there have been a number of claims from anti-biotechnology activists that genetically modified (GM) crops don't increase yields. Some have claimed that GM crops actually have lower yields than non-GM crops... GM crops generally have higher yields due to both breeding and biotechnology."

USA

Best of the Web: Yasiin Bey (aka Mos Def) force-fed under standard Guantánamo Bay procedure - video

As Ramadan begins, more than 100 hunger-strikers in Guantánamo Bay continue their protest. More than 40 of them are being force-fed. A leaked document sets out the military instructions, or standard operating procedure, for force-feeding detainees. In this four-minute film made by Human Rights organisation Reprieve and Bafta award-winning director Asif Kapadia, US actor and rapper Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), experiences the procedure


Headphones

SOTT Focus: Behind the Headlines: Meteor fireballs, mass demonstrations, and the science of crowds

Sott Talk Radio logo
This week on SOTT Talk Radio we looked back through world events in the last few weeks. With the US celebrating 237 years of 'independence', what is the state of the nation? With meteor fireballs appearing at the mass demonstrations in Egypt and Brazil, we discussed the 'human-cosmic' relationship and the likely connection between global suffering and our increasingly strange climate. What global suffering? Well, if it isn't wars or economic austerity, it's cops out-of-control cops abusing - killing even - people.

Running Time: 02:13:00

Download: MP3


Bad Guys

Flashback Ex-official: CIA helped jail Mandela

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For nearly 28 years the U.S. government has harbored an increasingly embarrassing secret: A CIA tip to South African intelligence agents led to the arrest that put black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela in prison for most of his adult life.

But now, with Mandela en route to the U.S. to a hero's welcome, a former U.S. official has revealed that he has known of the CIA role since Mandela was seized by agents of the South African police special branch on Aug. 5, 1962.

The former official, now retired, said that within hours after Mandela's arrest Paul Eckel, then a senior CIA operative, walked into his office and said approximately these words: ''We have turned Mandela over to the South African security branch. We gave them every detail, what he would be wearing, the time of day, just where he would be. They have picked him up. It is one of our greatest coups.''

With Mandela out of prison, the retired official decided there is no longer a valid reason for secrecy. He called the American role in the affair

Stormtrooper

These are supposedly the words that make the NSA think you're a terrorist

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This is an (admittedly huge) list of words that supposedly cause the NSA to flag you as a potential terrorist if you over-use them in an email.

We found this on Reddit, where James Bamford, a veteran reporter with 30 years experience covering the NSA, is answering questions from the community. He just wrote a big profile for Wired on NSA director Keith Alexander that's really good and well worth a read.

This list comes from Reddit user GloriousDawn, who found it on Attrition.org, a site that purports to follow the security industry, but the page was last updated in 1998. Take it with a grain of salt.

You may want to peruse this entire list yourself, but here are some of our favorites that stick out:
dictionary
sweeping
ionosphere
military intelligence
Steve Case
Scully

Eye 1

Ecuador embassy bug unlikely to be work of security services, say experts


Expert in covert techniques says off-the-shelf plug socket device is unlikely to have been planted by state agency

Surveillance experts have described the bugging device that Ecuador says was hidden behind a plug socket in its London embassy as rudimentary and unlikely to have been the work of the British police or security services.

Photographs of the device were revealed late on Wednesday in Quito by Ecuador's foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, who claimed it had been installed by a Worcester surveillance and security firm, The Surveillance Group Limited.

The firm's chief executive, Timothy Youngs, said on Thursday that the allegation was "completely untrue".

The WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange lives and works in a different room in the embassy in Knightsbridge where he has been granted diplomatic asylum.

After analysing the images, one expert in covert techniques who has worked for UK law enforcement agencies told the Guardian: "We do not do plug sockets, that's old hat. It's the first place people look. The bug is one you can buy off the shelf. If we do something, most likely we would custom build it. My first thought [is] it would not be a state agency."

Comment: Another possibility is that, while the embassy bug could be considered rudimentary, certain intelligence services could have planted the bug there knowing it would be found in order to send a message to Ecuador that they are being watched. They also likely have far more advanced surveillance technology in use not only in the Ecuadorean embassy but for every other countries' embassies.