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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 Images
Edward 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 Bowmer
An 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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Water

Nestle chairman wants water privatized

Elizabeth Renter
Natural Society
Wed, 12 Jun 2013 01:56 UTC
Water
© NaturalSociety
Companies should own every single bit of water on the planet, according to Nestle's former CEO and now-Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe. His position, shared by many others in his ranks, is one of profits over people and corporate rights over human rights. They advocate a sort of survival-of-the-richest, where only those with money should have access to "privileges" like water.

Making rounds several years after its creation, a video depicting Brabeck-Letmathe suggests that while 1.5% of the world's water is for human usage, the other 98.5% "is not a human right". He states that it's this majority of water that should be "valued" through privatization. In other words, because the water is being treated as a human right (when in his mind it isn't), it is being taken for granted. In order to ensure it's used in an efficient manner, he suggests private corporations have access to owning it.

As if this isn't frightening enough, Brabeck-Letmathe equates his position to that of Monsanto (another vile corporation who puts profits above people).

Nestle's position on owning water is not new. A few years ago they began buying up property and water rights in Colorado to turn the world's greatest natural resource into a bottled commodity. The Arkansas River Basin in Chaffee County, Colorado was ground zero for millions in land acquisitions. Private landowners sold their plots for as much as $1.1 million for 1.4 acres, according to a news report from the Colorado Independent at the time.
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Bad Guys

What is the U.S. government's agenda?

Paul Craig Roberts
paulcraigroberts.org
Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:57 UTC
US imperialism
It has been public information for a decade that the US government secretly, illegally, and unconstitutionally spies on its citizens. Congress and the federal courts have done nothing about this extreme violation of the US Constitution and statutory law, and the insouciant US public seems unperturbed.

In 2004 a whistleblower informed the New York Times that the National Security Agency (NSA) was violating the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) by ignoring the FISA court and spying on Americans without obtaining the necessary warrants. The corrupt New York Times put the interests of the US government ahead of those of the American public and sat on the story for one year until George W. Bush was safely reelected.

By the time the New York Times published the story of the illegal spying one year later, the law-breaking government had had time to mitigate the offense with ex post facto law or executive orders and explain away its law-breaking as being in the country's interest.

Comment: Though Paul Craig Roberts alludes to it, he doesn't come out and say it plainly: the agenda has been, is and will be, imperialism. It's all about amassing power and control at the expense of humanity by the few psychopaths in power - the pathocrats, as Andrew Lobaczewski calls them:
Pathocracy has other internal reasons for pursuing expansionism through the use of all means possible. As long as that "other" world governed by the systems of normal man exists, it inducts into the non-pathological majority a certain sense of direction. The non-pathological majority of the country's population will never stop dreaming of the reinstatement of the normal man's system in any possible form. This majority will never stop watching other countries, waiting for the opportune moment; its attention and power must therefore be distracted from this purpose, and the masses must be "educated" and channeled in the direction of imperialist strivings. This goal must be pursued doggedly so that everyone knows what is being fought for and in whose name harsh discipline and poverty must be endured. The latter factor - creating conditions of poverty and hardship - effectively limits the possibility of "subversive" activities on the part of the society of normal people.

The ideology must, of course, furnish a corresponding justification for this alleged right to conquer the world and must therefore be properly elaborated. Expansionism is derived from the very nature of pathocracy, not from ideology, but this fact must be masked by ideology. Whenever this phenomenon has been witnessed in history, imperialism was always its most demonstrative quality.


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Eye 1

Big Brother Obama 'defends' sweeping surveillance efforts

Peter Finn and Ellen Nakashima
The Washington Post
Fri, 07 Jun 2013 11:42 UTC

President Obama on Friday defended the government's collection of data on the phone records of millions of Americans, saying that it was a modest encroachment on privacy and one he thinks is both lawful and justified in order to identify terrorists plotting to attack the United States.

Obama emphasized that the government does not collect information on individual callers or eavesdrop on Americans' conversations without a warrant. He said he would welcome a debate on the classified surveillance effort as well as the previously secret workings of a second program that gathers the e-mails and other digital content of targeted foreigners outside the United States from major American Internet companies.

Comment: Andrew Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology, has the perfect explanation for what we witness today:
Pathocracy has other internal reasons for pursuing expansionism through the use of all means possible. As long as that "other" world governed by the systems of normal man exists, it inducts into the non-pathological majority a certain sense of direction. The non-pathological majority of the country's population will never stop dreaming of the reinstatement of the normal man's system in any possible form. This majority will never stop watching other countries, waiting for the opportune moment; its attention and power must therefore be distracted from this purpose, and the masses must be "educated" and channeled in the direction of imperialist strivings. This goal must be pursued doggedly so that everyone knows what is being fought for and in whose name harsh discipline and poverty must be endured. The latter factor - creating conditions of poverty and hardship - effectively limits the possibility of "subversive" activities on the part of the society of normal people.

The ideology must, of course, furnish a corresponding justification for this alleged right to conquer the world and must therefore be properly elaborated. Expansionism is derived from the very nature of pathocracy, not from ideology, but this fact must be masked by ideology. Whenever this phenomenon has been witnessed in history, imperialism was always its most demonstrative quality.


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Eye 1

Neither shocking or surprizing: NSA orders Verizon to hand over ALL US call records

Faith Merino
VatorNews
Thu, 06 Jun 2013 11:20 UTC
patriot act
What's up, Obama? You want to know if I'm talking about you behind your back? Why don't you just ask me? Why you gotta sneak around and court order Verizon to give you my phone records?

Actually, I don't think the Obama administration cares much about the goings-on of a suburban work-at-home mom who can't seem to keep any of her plants alive. Nonetheless, the National Security Administration ordered a Verizon subsidiary to hand over all phone records of its clients on a daily basis.

The court order is wide-sweeping and all encompassing, as it calls for all phone records between the U.S. and foreign countries, as well as all domestic calls, including local calls. While the data collected doesn't include substantive information (the content of the call), or the name, address, or financial information of the subscribers, it does include routing information, such as originating and terminating phone numbers, Mobile Subscriber Identity number, International Mobile Station Equipment Identity number, trunk identifier, calling card numbers, and time and duration of the calls.

The order was issued to Verizon Business Network Services in April and expires on July 19, 2013, unless it is extended. Verizon is the largest U.S. wireless provider.

Comment: As Zoya Klebanova comments in her latest SOTT Focus article, Through the PRISM of public amnesia:
[...] I read an article that mentions how "in the wake of recent revelations regarding the secret National Security Agency surveillance program known as PRISM, George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984 has seen a surge in sales on Amazon.com." I find it quite ironic, because this book's main line of force has to do with the deficiency in collective memory and the abundance of amnesia. We clearly forget who we are dealing with. But they surely haven't.


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