Puppet MastersS


Eye 1

Digital Blackwater: How the NSA gives private contractors control of the surveillance state

Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:05 UTC
As the Justice Department prepares to file charges against Booz Allen Hamilton employee Edward Snowden for leaking classified documents about the National Security Agency, the role of private intelligence firms has entered the national spotlight. Despite being on the job as a contract worker inside the NSA's Hawaii office for less than three months, Snowden claimed he had power to spy on almost anyone in the country. "I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant to a federal judge, to even the president, if I had a personal email," Snowden told The Guardian newspaper.

Over the past decade, the U.S. intelligence community has relied increasingly on the technical expertise of private firms such as Booz Allen, SAIC, the Boeing subsidiary Narus and Northrop Grumman. About 70 percent of the national intelligence budget is now spent on the private sector. Former NSA Director Michael V. Hayden has described these firms as a quote "digital Blackwater." We speak to Tim Shorrock, author of the book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence.

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Eye 1

More intrusive than eavesdropping? NSA collection of metadata hands government sweeping personal information

Amy Goodman
Democracy Now!
Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:59 UTC
As the American Civil Liberties Union sues the Obama administration over its secret NSA phone spying program, we look at how the government could use phone records to determine your friends, medical problems, business transactions and the places you've visited.

While President Obama insists that nobody is listening to your telephone calls, cybersecurity expert Susan Landau says the metadata being collected by the government may be far more revealing than the content of the actual phone calls. A mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer, Landau is the author of the book Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies.

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Heart - Black

Horror: One Palestinian child has been killed by Israel every 3 days for the past 13 years


Middle East Monitor
Tue, 04 Jun 2013 16:39 UTC
Palestinian child
Almost half of the Palestinian population is under 18.
Official statistics from the Ministry of Information in Ramallah have revealed that 1,518 Palestinian children were killed by Israel's occupation forces from the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000 up to April 2013. That's the equivalent of one Palestinian child killed by Israel every 3 days for almost 13 years. The ministry added that the number of children injured by the Israelis since the start of the Second Intifada against Israel's occupation has now reached 6,000.
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Dollar

Everything is rigged, Vol. 9,713: This time, it's currencies

Matt Taibbi
Rolling Stone
Thu, 13 Jun 2013 10:35 UTC
Money
© Chung Sung-Jun/Getty ImagesA foreign exchange banker.
I'll get into this in more detail later (I'm on deadline for a magazine feature), but this story just landed. Given the LIBOR story, the Interest Rate Swap manipulation story, the Euro gas price manipulation story, the U.S. energy price manipulation story, and (by now) countless others of the "Everything is Rigged" variety, this screams out for immediate notice. Via Bloomberg:
Traders at some of the world's biggest banks manipulated benchmark foreign-exchange rates used to set the value of trillions of dollars of investments, according to five dealers with knowledge of the practice . . .

Employees have been front-running client orders and rigging WM/Reuters rates by pushing through trades before and during the 60-second windows when the benchmarks are set, said the current and former traders, who requested anonymity because the practice is controversial. Dealers colluded with counterparts to boost chances of moving the rates, said two of the people, who worked in the industry for a total of more than 20 years.
This time the rates allegedly being rigged are in the foreign-exchange or "FX" markets, meaning that if this story is true, it would almost certainly trump LIBOR for scale/horribleness.
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Arrow Down

Best of the Web: See you on the dark side

Pepe escobar
Asia Times Online
Thu, 13 Jun 2013 12:51 UTC
The lunatic is in my head / The lunatic is in my head
You raise the blade / you make the change
You re-arrange me 'til I'm sane.
You lock the door / And throw away the key
There's someone in my head but it's not me
- Pink Floyd, Brain Damage

Pink Flyod
© Fanpop
Let's talk about PRISM. And let's see some implications of the Edward Snowden-leaked National Security Agency (NSA) Power Point presentation for Total Cyber-Domination.

What's in a name? A prism breaks light into a spectrum of color. PRISM, as expressed in its Dark Side of the Moon-ish logo, is no less than a graphic expression of the ultimate Pentagon/neo-con wet dream; the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine.

The NSA - also known as No Such Agency - is part of the Pentagon.

Full Spectrum Dominance was conceptualized in the Pentagon's 2002 Joint Vision 2020. [1] It's the Pentagon/NSA blueprint for the foreseeable future; in trademark Pentagonese, it identifies "four capabilities - "dominant maneuver, precision engagement, focused logistics and full-dimensional protection". In sum: Total Information Awareness (TIA).
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Cowboy Hat

Is Edward Snowden a hero? A debate with journalist Chris Hedges & law scholar Geoffrey Stone


Democracynow.com
Wed, 12 Jun 2013 11:02 UTC

Edward Snowden's decision to leak a trove of secret documents outlining the NSA's surveillance program has elicited a range of reactions. Among his detractors, he's been called "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison," (Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker), who's committed "an act of treason," (Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee).
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Light Sabers

By design? Snowden's selection of Hong Kong to break NSA Prism spying scandal will test China-US ties

Jonathan Kaiman
The Guardian
Thu, 13 Jun 2013 05:41 UTC
Image
© Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty ImagesEdward Snowden told the South China Morning Post he is in Hong Kong to 'reveal criminality'. In Hong Kong, of all places?!
Chinese press awash with news of scandal as whistleblower Edward Snowden says he plans to remain in territory

Hong Kong is bracing itself for what could become a protracted legal battle after the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed to a local newspaper that he had no plans to leave the territory.

"I am not here to hide from justice, I am here to reveal criminality," Snowden told the South China Morning Post, adding that he had evidence of US-led cyberespionage in both Hong Kong and mainland China and that Washington had been "trying to bully" the territory into extraditing him.

Regina Ip, a member of Hong Kong's legislative council who was once the city's top security official, said: "It's not a question of bullying or not bullying. I can't speak for the Hong Kong government now, but if the US gives a request, the government will deal with it in accordance with due process."
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MIB

NSA surveillance is not used for 'finding terrorists' at all, so what exactly IS it used for then?

Ed Pilkington & Nicholas Watt
The Guardian
Thu, 13 Jun 2013 05:24 UTC
Image
Lawyers and intelligence experts with direct knowledge of two intercepted terrorist plots that the Obama administration says confirm the value of the NSA's vast data-mining activities have questioned whether the surveillance sweeps played a significant role, if any, in foiling the attacks.

The defence of the controversial data collection operations, highlighted in a series of Guardian disclosures over the past week, has been led by Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, and her equivalent in the House, Mike Rogers. The two politicians have attempted to justify the NSA's use of vast data sweeps such as Prism and Boundless Informant by pointing to the arrests and convictions of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009 and David Headley, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for his role in the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Rogers told ABC's This Week that the NSA's bulk monitoring of phone calls and internet contacts was central to intercepting the plotters. "I can tell you, in the Zazi case in New York, it's exactly the programme that was used," he said.

Comment: Of course they had to throw Headley to the wolves once his identity was outed, but his profile is in fact the typical one for a spy: a drug-dealing, mass-murdering maniac with a penchant for harming others.

Now that we know Big Brother is neither interested in finding 'terrorists' by storing everyone's information, nor could find 'terrorists' that way even if it wanted to, we're left with the question: what was the real purpose behind erecting this global mass surveillance police state?

Tune in to SOTT Talk Radio this Sunday!

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Robot

Hypocrisy much? Government snitches Google and Microsoft call for government to be more transparent

Charles Arthur & Dominic Rushe
The Guardian
Wed, 12 Jun 2013 05:17 UTC
Image
Technology companies join Google and Facebook in wanting government's permission to give public a more detailed list of demands for data from their servers

Microsoft and Twitter have joined calls by Google and Facebook to be able to publish more detail about how many secret requests they receive to hand over user data under the controversial Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (Fisa).

"Permitting greater transparency on the aggregate volume and scope of national security requests, including Fisa orders, would help the community understand and debate these important issues," Microsoft said in an emailed statement to the Reuters news agency.

At Twitter the chief lawyer, Alex Macgillivray, tweeted: "We'd like more NSL [national security letter] transparency and Twitter supports efforts to make that happen."

A national security letter is used by US government agencies such as the FBI and NSA to demand access to data from companies - who are forbidden from revealing that they have been served such a request.

Google, Microsoft and Twitter publish "transparency reports" detailing how many government requests they receive for user data in various countries, but those for the US do not include Fisa requests or other NSL demands. Facebook has not so far published a transparency report.
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Control Panel

Astronomically large amount of data storage capacity inside the NSA's secret Utah data center

John Brandon
Fox News
Tue, 11 Jun 2013 16:39 UTC
NSA Utah data center
© AP Photo/Rick BowmerAn aerial view of the NSA's Utah Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. The government is secretly collecting the telephone records of millions of U.S. customers of Verizon under a top-secret court order, according to the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
As Americans demand answers about the government's wholesale electronic snooping on its citizens, the primary snooper -- the National Security Agency (NSA) -- is building a monstrous digital datacenter in Utah capable of sorting through and storing every e-mail, voicemail, and social media communication it can get its hands on.

This top-secret data warehouse could hold as many as 1.25 million 4-terabyte hard drives, built into some 5,000 servers to store the trillions upon trillions of ones and zeroes that make up your digital fingerprint.

But that's just one way to catalog people, said Charles King, principal analyst at data center consulting firm Pund-IT.

"The NSA -- like any large organization -- is using numerous kinds of storage systems," King told FoxNews.com, including "innovative SSD and in-memory systems for high performance applications like real time analytics."

Some reports have suggested the data center could hold as much as 5 zetabytes, an astronomical sum equivalent to 62 billion stacked iPhone 5s. King called that number "difficult, if not impossible to conceive."

"That would mean deploying about 5 million storage systems running roughly 1.25 billion, 4-terabyte hard drives," he said.


Comment: Geez, we wonder what those astronomically large zetabytes at the disposal of the agency that is spying on everyone's emails, phone calls and online activity on the planet will be used for! Oh wait - we get it.

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