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Ecuador breaks U.S. trade pact to thwart 'blackmail' over Edward Snowden

Rory Carroll
The Guardian
Thu, 27 Jun 2013 10:22 UTC
Image
© Edgar Su/Reuters
Ecuador's foreign minister Ricardo Patino (centre left). Snowden's asylum request has yet to be processed.
Government renounces Andean Trade Preference Act even as Snowden's prospects of reaching Ecuador from Moscow dimmed.

Ecuador has ramped up its defiance of the US over Edward Snowden by waiving preferential trade rights with Washington even as the whistleblower's prospect of reaching Quito dimmed.

President Rafael Correa's government said on Thursday it was renouncing the Andean Trade Preference Act to thwart US "blackmail" of Ecuador in the former NSA contractor's asylum request.

Officials, speaking at an early morning press conference, also offered a $23m donation for human rights training in the US, a brash riposte to recent US criticism of Ecuador's own human rights record.

Betty Tola, the minister of political coordination, said the asylum request had not been processed because Snowden, who is believed to be at Moscow airport, was neither in Ecuador nor at an Ecuadorean embassy or consulate. "The petitioner is not in Ecuadorean territory as the law requires."

Tola also said Ecuador had not supplied any travel document or diplomatic letter to Snowden, who is reportedly marooned in Moscow airport's transit lounge because his US passport has been invalidated.

A document leaked to Univision on Wednesday showed that someone at Ecuador's consulate in London did issue a safe conduct pass for the fugitive on June 22, as he prepared to leave Hong Kong. The name of the consul general, Fidel Narvaez, was printed but not signed.
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Eye 2

British government sanctions rape of its own subjects as a matter of domestic terrorism policy

Mark Townsend and Tony Thompson
The Guardian
Sat, 22 Jan 2011 10:32 UTC
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Mark Kennedy: sexual predator, environmental activist, government snitch, and wonky-eyed psychopathic undercover British police officer.
Undercover police officers routinely adopted a tactic of "promiscuity" with the blessing of senior commanders, according to a former agent who worked in a secretive unit of the Metropolitan police for four years.

The former undercover policeman claims that sexual relationships with activists were sanctioned for both men and women officers infiltrating anarchist, leftwing and environmental groups.

Sex was a tool to help officers blend in, the officer claimed, and was widely used as a technique to glean intelligence. His comments contradict claims last week from the Association of Chief Police Officers that operatives were absolutely forbidden to sleep with activists.

The one stipulation, according to the officer from the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a secret unit formed to prevent violent disorder on the streets of London, was that falling in love was considered highly unprofessional because it might compromise an investigation. He said undercover officers, particularly those infiltrating environmental and leftwing groups, viewed having sex with a large number of partners "as part of the job".


Comment: Yes, developing normal humans relationships (i.e., a conscience) was not allowed, but they could emotionally rape as many women as they wanted.


Comment: So the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) was a secret unit "formed to prevent violent disorder"?

Its real role of course was to actually foment, instigate and propagate violent disorder that would then justify regular uniformed police intervening to 'save the public'.

Psychopathic government; who needs it?

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Crusader

Vatican official arrested in money-laundering corruption plot

Nicole Winfield
Associated Press via Yahoo News
Fri, 28 Jun 2013 10:12 UTC
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Monsignor Nunzio Scarano
A Vatican official has been arrested by Italian police for allegedly trying to illegally bring 20 million euros ($26 million) in cash into the country from Switzerland with a private jet. Prosecutor Nello Rossi says
Monsignor Nunzio Scarano is accused of corruption and slander stemming from the plot and was being held at a Rome prison.

He was allegedly asked by friends to bring back the money that had been given to financier Giovanni Carenzio in Switzerland. Scarano is supposed to have asked Giovanni Zito, a military official, to bring the money back by jet, avoiding customs.

Scarano was allegedly due to pay Zito a commission of 600,000 euros for the work. He paid only an initial installment of 400,000 euros before being arrested.
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Laptop

NSA Deception operation? Questions surround leaked PRISM document's authenticity

Steve Kinney
globalresearch.ca
Sat, 15 Jun 2013 04:57 UTC
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Was Edward Snowden spotted before he decided to leak documents, and set up by the NSA?
"I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building." - Edward Snowden
Intelligence services have been feeding false information to known enemy informants in their own ranks for a long time, and they are very good at it.


Comment: Indeed, just think of Wikileaks...

Wikileaks and the War for your Mind


Today, the potential whistleblower is one of the most dangerous informants an intelligence service can confront.

Was Edward Snowden spotted before he decided to leak documents, and set up by the NSA?

Substantial evidence supports the possibility that he was. Numerous questions cast doubt on the authenticity of the Power Point slide show describing PRISM, but the UK Guardian has not seen fit to release it to the public. Perhaps Glenn Greenwald should anonymously leak this file: In the words of Snowden himself, "The public needs to decide."

Was Edward Snowden under surveillance at intelligence contractor Booz Allen in advance of releasing the PRISM document?

In the wake of the Wikileaks scandals, the U.S. intelligence community has answered "Who shall watch the watchmen?" by introducing active surveillance and detailed profiling of their own analysts and contractors, looking for potential whistleblowers.[1] By his own account, Snowden often discussed perceived Agency wrongdoing with his co-workers, which suggests that he should have been profiled and flagged as a potential leaker by the NSA's internal surveillance process.

Comment:
Is it possible that the PRISM leak was set up by the NSA as a deception operation in support of the Obama Administration's ongoing wars against whistleblowers and the 4th Amendment?
Very possible!
Is it possible that the PRISM leak was intended to mislead the American people into dramatically under-estimating the real domestic surveillance capabilities of our National Security Agency?
Also very possible!

Something to bear in mind is that the NSA, like all US government organs of state, is heavily privatized. This means that far from being a 'national agency', it is in fact a corporate entity representing private interests.

Which private interests?

Well, let's just say that it provides the ideal 'backdoor' for certain interests to marshall the NSA's and other government resources in their favor...

PRISM for your Mind: NSA, WikiLeaks and Israel

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Pistol

'Hell to pay:' Residents angry as RCMP sieze guns from High River homes

Trevor Howell
Calgary Herald
Thu, 27 Jun 2013 16:06 UTC
Evacuees confronted the RCMP
© Lorraine Hjalte , Calgary Herald
Evacuees confronted the RCMP on the northwest corner of town in a bid to enter the Town of High River on Thursday, June 27th 2013, one week after the Highwood River Flooded leaving the whole town empty. RCMP laid a spike belt down across the road to prevent them from travelling down
'It's just like Nazi Germany,' says resident

RCMP revealed Thursday that officers have seized a "substantial amount" of firearms from homes in the evacuated town of High River.

"We just want to make sure that all of those things are in a spot that we control, simply because of what they are," said Sgt. Brian Topham.

"People have a significant amount of money invested in firearms ... so we put them in a place that we control and that they're safe."

That news didn't sit well with a crowd of frustrated residents who had planned to breach a police checkpoint northwest of the town as an evacuation order stretched into its eighth day.

"I find that absolutely incredible that they have the right to go into a person's belongings out of their home," said resident Brenda Lackey, after learning Mounties have been taking residents' guns. "When people find out about this there's going to be untold hell to pay."
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USA

New NSA leaks show email surveillance under Obama


RT.com
Thu, 27 Jun 2013 19:03 UTC
Obama
© Reuters/Larry Downing
U.S. President Barack Obama.

The Obama administration permitted the National Security Agency to continue collecting vast amounts of records detailing the email and Internet usage of Americans for more than two years, new documents reveal.

According to two leaked NSA documents published by The Guardian on Thursday, a secretive surveillance program that put email and Internet metadata into the hands of the United States government was authorized after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks by President George W. Bush and continued under President Barack Obama through 2011.

Since then, claims The Guardian, the NSA has initiated new systems that collect and analyze the records of email communications sent in and out of the United States.

The leaked evidence comes three weeks to the day after The Guardian first began publishing classified NSA documents attributed to Edward Snowden, a 30-year-old former intelligence analyst from the US who is now wanted there for espionage. He is reportedly in Moscow and has sought asylum from at least two foreign countries.

On June 6, journalist Glenn Greenwald detailed how telephony metadata - basic information about the phone habits of millions of Americans - was being regularly supplied to Washington under a secretive orders authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. In this week's article, Greenwald and co-author Spencer Ackerman say the latest revelation involves the collection of metadata involving emails that may have been sent or received by Americans.
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USA

Snowden, NSA, blackmail, and the boys in the back room

Jon Rappoport
NoMoreFakeNews
Thu, 27 Jun 2013 18:43 UTC
NSA Logo
© PCWorld

The NSA is spying on everybody.

That includes a major, major, prime target: Congress.

So imagine this conversation taking place, in a car, on a lonely road outside Washington, late at night. The speakers are Congressman X and a private operative representing a covert unit inside the NSA:

"Well, Congressman, do you remember January 6th? A Monday afternoon, a men's room in the park off - "

"What the hell are you talking about!"

"A stall in the men's room. The kid. He was wearing white high-tops. A Skins cap. T-shirt. Dark hair. Scar across his left cheek."

"Jesus."

"We have very good audio and video. Anytime you want to watch it, let me know."

Dead silence.

"What do you want?"
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Attention

Push back on misinformation!

Dr. Klaus L.E. Kaiser
Canada Free Press
Thu, 27 Jun 2013 17:54 UTC
Obama
© Alex Wong/Getty Images
U.S. President Barack Obama speaks as he unveils his plan on climate change, June 25, 2013 at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
With his recent address to students at Georgetown University, Washington DC, President Obama has commanded: "Push Back on Misinformation. Speak up for the facts."

What a wise command! In the following, let me provide some examples of misinformation:

Examples of Misinformation

I."Carbon Pollution"

In this very address, President Obama used the term "carbon pollution" 30 times or so.

There really is no such thing as "carbon pollution." Carbon is a vital constituent of all living organisms on earth. If the term "carbon pollution" is meant to be a short form for the term "carbon dioxide pollution," then it ought to be spelled out, at least once in the address. However, assuming that that's what he actually meant, let's look at carbon dioxide.

II. "Carbon Dioxide Pollution"

There really is no such thing as "carbon dioxide pollution." Except for some bacteria that use other carbon sources, all life on earth is derived from and requires continued presence of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the earth's atmosphere. If the concentration of CO2 in the air, currently around 0.04%, were to fall by one half, say to 0.02%, most life on earth would come to a screeching halt. The partial pressure of CO2 at 0.02% in the atmosphere would be insufficient to sustain photosynthesis in most plants. Without growing plants, the bottom of the food-chain would disappear.
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Wall Street

Abby Martin and Ben Swann: Real journalists in an 'ice age' of journalism

Breaking the Set
Russia Today, U.S. Edition
Thu, 27 Jun 2013 16:10 UTC
Abby Martin talks to with investigative journalist, and former host of 'Reality Check', Ben Swann, about the war on journalism, the mainstream media's failure to hold the establishment accountable, being labeled fringe for asking questions and his new independent media venture 'Liberty is Rising Truth in Media Project'.

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Pirates

'Intelligence', corporatism, and the Dance of Death

Arthur Silber
Once Upon A Time
Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:26 UTC
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You may at first think the following is a bad joke, but I assure you it is not a joke at all. At the very end of this NYT story about Booz Allen and the complex interconnections between nominally "private" business and the national intelligence community, we read:
But the legal warnings at the end of its financial report offered a caution that the company could be hurt by "any issue that compromises our relationships with the U.S. government or damages our professional reputation."

By Friday, shares of Booz Allen had slid nearly 6 percent since the revelations. And a new job posting appeared on its Web site for a systems administrator in Hawaii, "secret clearance required."
Yes, that appears to be Edward Snowden's old job.

Crappy spy fiction doesn't look quite so crappy now, does it? In many respects -- in fact, I would argue in every critical respect -- the spy business is actually that dumb.

In an earlier post about the NSA/surveillance stories, I discussed the profoundly offensive elitism involved in the argument that "special" people in both government and journalism, people endowed with understanding and judgment that is the envy of the gods and forever denied to all us ordinary schlubs, should decide what information will be provided to the motley mass of humans who merely pay for all of it, and for whose benefit all this godlike work is supposedly undertaken. Talk about idiocies: "We're doing all this for you! You're too stupid to be told most of what we're doing!" Put it on a bumper sticker, baby, so we can throw rotten eggs at it.
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