Puppet MastersS


Bad Guys

Hypocrats: U.N. plans to legalize coup post facto

EDITH M. LEDERER
Associated Press
Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:23 UTC
The U.N. Security Council is discussing a possible resolution that would reaffirm Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity and address Sunday's referendum on whether its Crimean Peninsula should become part of Russia, a council diplomat said Wednesday.

The diplomat said the resolution would aim to show the strong opposition in the U.N.'s most powerful body to a Russian takeover of the pro-Russia Crimea - even though permanent council member Russia is virtually certain to veto any resolution.

Another U.N. diplomat said supporters of the resolution also hope that China - a close ally of Russia which has spoken out in favor of Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity - would abstain rather than join Russia in vetoing a resolution.

Comment: Legally. You keep using this word. I do not think it means what you think it means. U.N. resolutions are not legally anything. There is NO SUCH THING AS INTERNATIONAL LAW. It's convention. Kind of a loose grouping of informal guidelines. Every country violates it with impunity when they are popular and in power. Or uses it to harangue other countries when they are not.

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Stormtrooper

Kiev snipers were shooting from building controlled by Maidan forces - Ukraine's ex-security chief


RT
Thu, 13 Mar 2014 02:25 UTC
kiev snipers
© Reuters / Konstantin Chernichkin
Former chief of Ukraine's Security Service has confirmed allegations that snipers who killed dozens of people during the violent unrest in Kiev operated from a building controlled by the opposition on Maidan square.

Shots that killed both civilians and police officers were fired from the Philharmonic Hall building in Ukraine's capital, former head of the Security Service of Ukraine Aleksandr Yakimenko told Russia 1 channel. The building was under full control of the opposition and particularly the so-called Commandant of Maidan self-defense Andrey Parubiy who after the coup was appointed as the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Yakimenko added.

Furthermore the former security chief believes that Parubiy has been in contact with US Special Forces that could have coordinated the assault.

"Shots came from the Philharmonic Hall. Maidan Commandant Parubiy was responsible for this building. Snipers and people with automatic weapons were 'working' from this building on February 20. They supported the assault on the Interior Ministry forces on the ground who were already demoralized and have, in fact, fled," Yakimenko said in an interview with Russian television.

The police officers were chased by a group of rioters armed with various weapons and at that point, Yakimenko says snipers fired at pursuers themselves.

"When the first wave of shootings ended, many have witnessed 20 people leaving the building," former chief says, noting that they were well-equipped and were carrying military style bag for carrying sniper and assault rifles with optical sights. Not only the law enforcers, but people from the opposition's Freedom, Right Sector, Fatherland, and Klitschko's UDAR party have also seen this, Yakimenko claims.
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Binoculars

Big Brother Surveillance - It is not just for governments anymore

Michael Snyder
End of The American Dream
Wed, 12 Mar 2014 20:33 UTC
Surveillance
© End of The American Dream
Traditionally, when we have thought of "Big Brother technology" we have thought of government oppression. But these days, it isn't just governments that are using creepy new technologies to spy on all of us.

As you will see below, "Big Brother surveillance" has become very big business. In the information age, knowledge is power, and big corporations seem to have an endless thirst for even more of it.

So it isn't just governments that are completely obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that we do.

Corporations have discovered that they can use Orwellian technologies to make lots of money, and this is likely only going to get worse in the years ahead.

Below, I have shared a few examples of this phenomenon...
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Eye 1

Sensitive personal information for Sale: "Data Brokers" know more about you than you know


CBS
Sun, 09 Mar 2014 00:00 UTC

The following script is from "The Data Brokers" which aired on March 9, 2014. Steve Kroft is the correspondent. Graham Messick and Maria Gavrilovic, producers.

Over the past six months or so, a huge amount of attention has been paid to government snooping, and the bulk collection and storage of vast amounts of raw data in the name of national security. What most of you don't know, or are just beginning to realize, is that a much greater and more immediate threat to your privacy is coming from thousands of companies you've probably never heard of, in the name of commerce.

60 Minutes Overtime How to defend your privacy online They're called data brokers, and they are collecting, analyzing and packaging some of our most sensitive personal information and selling it as a commodity...to each other, to advertisers, even the government, often without our direct knowledge. Much of this is the kind of harmless consumer marketing that's been going on for decades. What's changed is the volume and nature of the data being mined from the Internet and our mobile devices, and the growth of a multi billion dollar industry that operates in the shadows with virtually no oversight.
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Bad Guys

How the West lost Putin: It didn't have to be this way

Mark MacKinnon
The Globe and Mail
Fri, 07 Mar 2014 15:55 UTC
Image
It's a narrative that's growing in popularity in the West: Vladimir Putin as a 21st-century Adolf Hitler, an unhinged dictator bent on collecting lost Russian lands.

It was floated first on CNN last week, where former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili - who fought and lost a war with Russia six years ago over a place called South Ossetia - compared Mr. Putin's stealth takeover of the Crimean Peninsula to the Nazi annexation of Sudetenland in 1938. The Canadian government has since embraced the storyline, with Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird using the Sudetenland comparison while denouncing Russian military moves in the Ukraine.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made similar remarks, and former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton told a fundraiser in California: "If this sounds familiar, it's what Hitler did back in the '30s."

We are, worryingly, in a situation where such comparisons can't immediately be laughed off. Mr. Putin's own press conference this week was characterized by two things: his alarming insistence that Russia had a right to use its military to protect ethnic Russians living in other post-Soviet countries, and his bitterness at the West for ignoring him until he was pushed into a corner.
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Safe

Bank of England shocks Parliament: crisis era records shredded

Pam Martens
Wall Street on Parade
Wed, 12 Mar 2014 15:42 UTC
bank of England shredded documents 1
Andrew Tyrie, Chair of the Treasury Select Committee of Parliament in the U.K.
Mark Carney, the head of the Bank of England, and other officials from the BOE were put through a five hour marathon of questioning yesterday by Parliament's Treasury Select Committee covering everything from how long the BOE plans to continue Quantitative Easing (QE), to the potential for Scotland to vote for its independence, to what it knew and when it knew it about the rigging of the Foreign Exchange market by colluding global banks.

The bombshell of the day, however, did not occur during the session on the Foreign Exchange scandal, which is stacking up to be a more serious matter than the rigging of the Libor interest rate benchmark which occurred under the nose of the Bank of England and the British Bankers Association. (London now seems to be in competition with itself for the prize of the century for overseeing the rigging of the greatest number of markets.)

The bombshell came in the following exchange between the Chair of the Treasury Select Committee, Andrew Tyrie, and a very frightened appearing Paul Fisher, the Executive Director of Markets at the BOE, who has served in that position since 2009. Apparently neither Parliament nor the public knew prior to this exchange that the records of the pre-crisis year of 2007, the financial collapse in 2008, and the monetary policy maneuvers in subsequent years to prevent another Great Depression had been destroyed in one of the world's most important financial centers; not to mention the fact that critical recordings potentially relevant to the Foreign Exchange probe are also gone.
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Stock Down

Israel: A significant shift in U.S. public opinion: Americans are fed up with Israel

Alan Hart
alanhart.net
Sat, 08 Mar 2014 15:42 UTC
Image
A recent public opinion poll asked Americans which of two options they would favour if a two-state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict was no longer on the table. (It is in the rhetoric of leaders and diplomats but not in reality). The two options were:

"The continuation of Israel's Jewish majority (presumably this assumes permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and continuing ethnic cleansing of it by stealth) even if it means that Palestinians will not have citizenship and full rights."

"One democratic state for all in which Jews and Arabs would be equal." Only 24 percent supported the continuation of things as they are.

According to the poll, 65 percent of those asked for their opinion preferred the one state option.

What explains this?

Is it that an apparent majority of Americans are at last understanding and supporting the need and rights of the Palestinians for justice, or is it something else - an indication that while they are not much concerned about the rights of the Palestinians, an apparent majority of Americans are fed up with an Israel they rightly perceive to be the obstacle to peace?
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Eagle

Best of the Web: Crimea: Democracy is not Democracy... Unless Obama says it is

Eric Draitser
NEO - New Eastern Outlook
Wed, 12 Mar 2014 15:08 UTC
Image
Victoria Nuland and Jeffrey Pyatt handing out candy to security forces in Kiev a month before the neo-Nazis their government funded would attack and kill many of those same forces.
As Crimea prepares to vote on Saturday March 16th in a crucial referendum on its future, the rhetoric coming from the West and its propaganda machine has hit a new and ridiculous low. Not only has US President Barack Obama and his administration done everything to undermine democracy in Ukraine, they have now resorted to the most naked forms of hypocrisy in an attempt to delegitimize the democratic process.

On Thursday March 6th President Obama spoke at the White House on the referendum and the issue of Crimea. In his prepared remarks, Obama stated categorically that the United States would not recognize the results of the Crimean referendum. He argued that the it would violate both the "Ukrainian Constitution and international law." Obama kept the comedy coming when he noted that, "In 2014 we are well beyond the days when borders can be redrawn over the heads of democratic leaders." As with all statements made by the US government, and the President specifically, this must be contextualized and deconstructed in order to be effectively critiqued.

First and foremost is the question of democracy and, more specifically, how exactly Washington is choosing to define this gravely abused word. In referring to the so-called "interim government" in Kiev, headed by Yatsenyuk and his associates, as "democratic leaders", Obama demonstrates either a complete lack of understanding of the word democracy, or as I think is more likely, an utter contempt for democratic principles. By referring to an unelected entity that has seized political power in Kiev by force, and through collaboration with Nazi elements, as "democratic leaders," Obama exposes himself and his administration to be cynical opportunists whose interests rest not in democracy but in a geopolitical agenda guided solely by strategic interests.
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Arrow Down

Ukraine: Oligarch appointments at odds with claims of fairness - upsets protesters who hoped for new era

Harriet Salem and Ludmila Makarova
The Guardian
Sat, 08 Mar 2014 16:03 UTC
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© Sergei Chuzavkov/APOligarch, Serhiy Taruta is the newly appointed governor of Ukraine's Donetsk region.
Appointment of super wealthy to positions of political power upsets protesters who hoped for new era

After losing control of Crimea, the embattled new Ukrainian government in Kiev has turned to the nation's oligarchs in a bid to calm secessionist sentiment in the pro-Russian east. But the appointment of oligarchs to positions of political power has not been welcomed in all quarters, and certainly not by the protesters who hoped last month's ousting of President Viktor Yanukovych heralded a new era.

Following days of unrest, including pro-Russia rallies and the storming of the parliament building in Donetsk by Moscow's supporters, the region now seems to be slowly calming down. Pro-Russia squatters have now been removed from the administration building, and on the orders of the newly appointed regional governor and Ukraine's 16th-richest man, Serhiy Taruta, the pro-Kremlin activists' leader, Pavel Gubarev, has been arrested.

In a further sign that the environment in the east is stabilising, boxing heavyweight turned politician Vitali Klitschko has a visit to Donetsk scheduled for Sunday. "People here respect power, the oligarchs are wealthy, well known and well respected. They are seen as guarantors of stability," says local journalist Denis Tkachenko.

But for those active in Kiev's Euromaidan, or Independence Square, protests, putting businessmen into positions of power may not have been what they dreamed of. "This is the most controversial step of the new government - it is a risky gamble," says Serhiy Leshchenko, deputy chief editor of Ukrainian newspaper Pravda, and an investigative journalist who has spent decades analysing Ukraine's business and political elite.

Comment:
Ukraine's fascist Neo-Nazi color revolution backed by U.S.
In Ukraine, fascists, oligarchs and western expansion are at the heart of the crisis

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Eye 1

Surveillance state: NSA using Facebook to hack into your computer

Dustin Volz
National Journal
Wed, 12 Mar 2014 13:47 UTC
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© Getty ImagesIs the Facebook you log in to the real one?
The spy agency is not above infecting networks with malware by posing as the social-media site, according to newly released Snowden files.

This just in from the Edward Snowden vault of government secrets: The National Security Agency is breaking into "potentially millions of computers worldwide" and infecting them with malware "implants" as part of an effort that is increasingly relying on automated systems and not human oversight, according to a by First Look Media report published Wednesday.

And the NSA is pretending to be Facebook to get the job done.

"In some cases the NSA has masqueraded as a fake Facebook server, using the social-media site as a launching pad to infect a target's computer and exfiltrate files from a hard drive," First Look reported on Glenn Greenwald's Intercept channel, citing a classified slide presentation from 2009. "In others, it has sent out spam emails laced with the malware, which can be tailored to covertly record audio from a computer's microphone and take snapshots with its webcam. The hacking systems have also enabled the NSA to launch cyberattacks by corrupting and disrupting file downloads or denying access to websites."

As part of the "industrial-scale exploitation," the agency is leveraging Facebook's global appeal to trick targets into logging in to a doppelganger version of the site, a technique dubbed "Quantumhand."

Comment: Facebook says:
"In any case, this method of network level disruption does not work for traffic carried over HTTPS, which Facebook finished integrating by default last year."
Not so fast! Why HTTPS and SSL are not as secure as you think

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