Puppet MastersS


Eye 1

Still no answers on the CIA's unconstitutional mass surveillance of Americans

Matthew Guariglia and Andrew Crocker
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Fri, 11 Feb 2022 00:01 UTC
mobile surveillance illustration
The Central Intelligence Agency has been collecting American's private data without any oversight or even the minimal legal safeguards that apply to the NSA and FBI, an unconstitutional affront to our civil liberties.

According to a declassified report released yesterday by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB), the CIA's surveillance program is reminiscent of the mass surveillance programs conducted by the NSA, though the details released thus far paint a disturbing picture of potential wide-scale violations of people's privacy. To start, the CIA program has apparently been conducted outside the statutory reforms and oversight of the intelligence community instituted after revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013. The newly declassified CIA data collection program is carried out in conjunction with Executive Order 12333 and is therefore subject to even less oversight than the woefully under-supervised NSA surveillance programs subject to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Comment: See also: Well imagine that: Senators say CIA has secret program that collects American data

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Pirates

UK gov't pressured anti-fraud Lord to drop efforts to tackle financial crime


The Guardian
Tue, 15 Feb 2022 11:00 UTC
City of London
© Nathaniel Noir/Alamy‘I can only think there is a deluded desire to protect the City of London has led to all these delays,’ says Lord Faulks.
A former Conservative minister, once at the heart of efforts to clamp down on money laundering in London, has revealed that during Theresa May's premiership, No 10 "leant on him" when he tabled amendments to introduce a public register of overseas property owners.

Lord Faulks said he had first tried to put the register into the criminal finances bill in 2017 and then again into a government bill on money laundering in 2018. He had described the overseas ownership of dirty money in London as an obscenity.

Faulks, a distinguished barrister and now an independent peer, told the Guardian he was rung by Downing Street during May's tenure and told to go to a meeting where he met civil servants from four government departments including the Foreign Office, business officials and the Home Office. They told him to drop the amendments - for which he had a voting majority in the Lords - because they assured him Whitehall had the issue in hand.

Comment: The Kremlin doesn't need the UK's dirty money, moreover, Putin actually gave the oligarchs an ultimatum, bring Russian money back to Russia, or face consequences. This Russian wealth was was snatched during the country's collapse back in the 90's, in part due to Western meddling.

If the UK wasn't so dependent on Russian wealth and relying on the profits, the Brits would have blocked these avenues long ago. As it is, Russia is largely self-sufficient, and the UK is heavily dependent on a business model founded on fraud and dodgy dealing: Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Perfidious Albion: If Russia is a Rogue State, What is the UK?

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Cult

Rex Murphy: Trudeau's monumentally misguided emergency measures are an insult to Canadians

Rex Murphy
National Post
Wed, 16 Feb 2022 00:00 UTC
Ottawa Feb 15, 2022 protest
Truck drivers and their supporters block streets during an anti vaccine mandate protest near the Parliament Buildings on February 15, 2022 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. PHOTO BY SCOTT OLSON /Getty Images
This is the most monumentally stupid, monumentally arrogant, and monumentally misguided decision by a prime minister since 1867.

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in his sophomoric musings on the nature of Canada some years back, famously declared that Canada has "no core identity," most of us thought he was stating his opinion, however ridiculous, of the country as he saw it at the time.

We were wrong, ever so wrong. He was stating an ambition. He was declaring a goal.

After six years of the most amateur government this country has ever suffered, with the invocation of the most crushing legislation any government can call upon, the Emergencies Act, to attack and subdue a group of ordinary Canadian workers, he's well on the way to achieving his "post-national" ambitions.

That's one core value out the window: the right to peaceful protest. The invocation of wartime-like emergency powers by the national government to deal with a workers' protest is grotesquely overwrought, something very close to lunatic.
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Bullseye

'What's happening in Donbass is genocide' - Putin

Layla Guest
RT
Wed, 16 Feb 2022 20:49 UTC
Putin
© Getty Images / Kay NietfeldRussian President Vladimir Putin speaks at a joint press conference with German Chancellor O. Scholz (SPD) after several hours of one-on-one talks in the Kremlin.
Fierce fighting that has killed thousands of people in eastern Ukraine, home to a large number of ethnic Russians, constitutes a genocide, President Vladimir Putin has claimed as parliamentarians push for the Kremlin to recognize the independence of Donetsk and Lugansk.

Speaking on Tuesday at a press conference at the end of crunch talks with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the Russian leader weighed in on the heightened tensions unfolding in the war-torn region.

"I can only add that what is happening in Donbass is genocide," he said. When asked by reporters about whether the push for the recognition of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics was guided by public opinion and sympathy from Russians, and how such a move could impact a major peace plan, Putin said it was still possible to solve the problems in the region by applying the Minsk agreements.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal: Ukraine Gambit - US Attempting to Destroy Russia



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Question

Best of the Web: House Judiciary member's query about Jan. 6 inmates goes ignored by Dept. of Corrections

Penny Starr
Breitbart
Tue, 15 Feb 2022 21:18 UTC
greg steube
© Greg Nash/Getty ImagesRep. Greg Steube (R-FL)
Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) has yet to hear from the D.C. Department of Corrections, whose director he queried in July of 2021, about the status of the men and women who remain in the agency's custody for charges related to the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

Steube is on the House Judiciary Committee, which has oversight of the nation's federal prisons and jails in the District of Columbia.

Steube told Breitbart News that he did get a response from the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), but that his inquiry to the D.C. agency has gone unanswered. His letter was addressed to Michael Carvajal, Director of BOP, and Quincy Booth, Director of D.C. Department of Corrections.

"It's very demonstrative of a willful and intentional intent on behalf of the D.C. jail system to avoid oversight, to avoid accountability, and to avoid transparency, even with members of Congress, as to what is occurring in the D.C. jail with the January 6 prisoners. If you don't have anything to hide, then why are you not responding to a member of Congress who sits on the Judiciary Committee, the committee that has oversight authority over the D.C. prison?"
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Attention

How we became what we despised: Turning the West into a new Soviet Union


The Seneca Effect
Sun, 13 Feb 2022 00:00 UTC
Statue
© UnknownFor everything that happens, there is a reason for it to happen. Even for turning the former Free World into something that looks very much like the old "Evil Empire," the Soviet Union. I understand that this series of reflections will be seen as controversial, but I thought that this matter is important and fascinating enough to deserve a discussion.
It all started two years ago when we were asked to stay home for two weeks "to flatten the curve." Two years later, we are looking, bewildered, at the wreckage around us and asking ourselves: 'what the hell has happened?'

In such a short time, we found that our world had turned into something very similar to one that we used to despite. The old Soviet Union, complete with heavy-handed police, censorship of the media, criminalization of dissent, internal passports, and the state intruding on matters that, once, were thought to be part of every citizen's private decision sphere.

Surprising, perhaps. But it is a rule of the universe that everything that happens has a reason to happen. The Soviet Union was what it was because there were reasons for it to be that. It was not an alien world populated by little green men. It was an empire similar to the Western one, just a little smaller, and it concluded its cycle a few decades before us. We can learn a lot from its story.

Comment: Brilliant.

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Sheeple

Dishonesty is a bad business plan

James Howard Kunstler
kunstler.com
Fri, 11 Feb 2022 00:00 UTC
"Perhaps for the ruling class the only thing that would be more terrifying than seeing children go to school without masks is the idea of losing elections." — Grace Curley, The Spectator
Off the cliff
© The Christian Web
The whopping untruths launched onto the people of Western Civ by their governments reformatted the brains of millions so badly that they shuffled obediently into a mass formation and ran over a buffalo jump. What a stampede it has been!

But suddenly, the remaining buffaloes are balking at the cliff's edge, seeing the bodies pile up below. Some of the bulls have even turned the other way and started charging back across the darkling prairie at the creatures driving the herd with their klaxons of deceit. All authority, from Vienna to Vancouver, stands revealed as psychopathic — it apparently seeks to kill and injure as many as possible. Talk about the needle and the damage done! Why else persist with vaccines that don't work and which provoke the most lethal disease mechanisms as side-effects?
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Red Flag

The January 6 pipe bombs look like another FBI hoax

Julie Kelly
American Greatness
Mon, 14 Feb 2022 00:00 UTC
Pipe bomb/suspect
© ABC NewsPipe bomb suspect • alleged pipe bomb
No one still trying to convince the public that two pipe bombs were planted near the Capitol in advance of January 6 can be believed. In the 15-minute time span before the joint session of Congress convened at 1:00 p.m. on January 6, 2021, two incidents that set the stage for the day's ensuing chaos happened simultaneously.

First, a man named Ryan Samsel, after taking some sort of direction from Ray Epps, overran a thin line of police and metal racks in what would be the first official breach of Capitol grounds around 12:50 p.m. (Samsel was charged and has been incarcerated for more than a year; Epps faces no charges.) Joining Samsel were members of the Proud Boys and a still-unknown number of FBI informants.

Around the same time, a woman named Karlin Younger who just happened to be walking to a laundry facility near the Republican National Committee headquarters just happened to look down and see what she believed was a pipe bomb nestled between a dumpster and a fence right next to the building.

Both events fueled panic in the nation's capital just as a contentious meeting to certify the Electoral College vote in the 2020 presidential election got underway in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives. Then, the news got worse. Capitol police reportedly discovered another explosive outside the DNC headquarters.

Comment: Many questions still not answered and may never be - at least until all relevance fades to zero.

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Better Earth

One of the Five Eyes has blinked over China

Tom Fowdy
RT
Wed, 16 Feb 2022 14:42 UTC
Xi/Ardern
© Getty Images/Kenzaburo FukuharaChinese President Xi Jinping and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
New Zealand has defied the wrath of its Anglosphere allies to sign a big new trade deal with Beijing

China and New Zealand this week completed the ratification of their upgraded free-trade agreement, which will come into force in April. Although the deal was a long time in the works, it expands the number of tariff-free goods New Zealand is able to export into China, securing what is its largest market and a key source of income for its farmers.

The agreement comes despite the growing tensions between Beijing, the United States and its allies, with Washington seeking to put the brakes on China's expanding economic ties with its allies, in a view towards strategic containment.

This has led to claims that New Zealand, a member of the Five Eyes Anglosphere intelligence alliance involving Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, has not been sufficiently 'loyal' to their agenda. Jacinda Ardern's more cautious approach towards Beijing, as opposed to the absolutely relentless hostility to China seen in neighboring Australia, has seen her country mocked as 'New Xi-land.'

Comment: There are global lessons to be learned when small countries lead the way.

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Георгиевская ленточка

Russia's Lower House of Parliament asks Putin to recognize breakaway Ukraine regions


DPA
Tue, 15 Feb 2022 19:01 UTC
Duma lower house parliament Russia
© Russian parliament/dpaA general view during a plenary session at the Russia's lower house of parliament
Russian lawmakers on Tuesday called on President Vladimir Putin to recognize the two breakaway eastern Ukrainian regions of Luhansk and Donetsk as "people's republics."

If the resolution is approved by Putin, it would essentially give diplomatic recognition to the regions and treat them as independent states from Ukraine. Russian-backed separatists have been fighting with Ukrainian government forces since 2014 in Luhansk and Donetsk.

Such an act by Moscow would dramatically escalate tensions at a time when the world is on edge over fears Russia could invade its neighbour.

Parliament's move was met with swift international criticism.
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