Information operations

Gerald Posner quits over plagiarism! Olympics Indymedia repression; 1001 Club, Pilgrims Society & Le Cercle; sovereign debt crisis; Ron Paul on Tea Party corporatist/neocon vanguards

Submitted by HongPong on Fri, 2010-02-12 06:16

Here's a good one: Gerald Posner was a convenient weathervane for conspiracy coverups, much as Howard Fineman is a convenient weathervane for Safe Establishment Thinking. You can just look for Fineman and Posner for the exact line the mockingbirds are supposed to push. Everyone else seems to water the Koolaid down more than these guys.

Posner taunts 9-11 people, JFK people, etc., but it turns out he can't say jack about Miami sleaze without plagiarizing from the Miami Herald. Author quits Daily Beast after plagiarism claims:

MIAMI (AP) - A Miami Beach-based author of several best-selling books has resigned from his job as chief investigative reporter for the Internet news site The Daily Beast following allegations of plagiarism.

Gerald Posner announced the resignation on his own Web site this week.

Last week, a writer for Slate.com reported that there were several instances in which Posner took material from Miami Herald articles without attribution.

Posner wrote on his Web site that he "inadvertently" copied the passages into master files and that he "lost sight" that the material belonged to a published source.

Posner is the author of "Case Closed," a book about the John F. Kennedy assassination, and more recently, "Miami Babylon," a history of Miami Beach.

Hilarious! CASE CLOSED, SUCKA!!

Here are quick notes on 2010 Olympics resistance: US/Canadian joint homeland security suppression of Indymedia journalists for controversial, widely opposed 2010 Olympics | Twin Cities Indymedia

Reminding us of the Olympics' nationalist/fascist roots, as the carefully stage-managed 2010 Olympics gets underway in Vancouver, around a billion dollars have been expended on security theater measures. While Canadian authorities want to encourage people to attend the Olympics, Canadian border and customs officials (Canadian Border Services Agencies) have teamed up to suppress the movement of Indymedia and other independent media reporters into Canada.

Anti-Olympic organizers point out the International Olympic Committee is a corrupt globalist institution parallel with the WTO, IMF and other organizations that funnel public money into private hands. Police repression, budget-busting graft, and gentrification/displacement are the three major features of the Olympics wherever they go, as noted by sports writer Dave Zirin (EdgeofSports.com) interviewed on Submedia.tv. After hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns leading to massive austerity measures including teacher layoffs in Vancouver, a poll estimated forty percent of BC residents support anti-Olympic protests. (Zirin in SI: People dreading Games)

The deeply corrupt US Department of Homeland Security has also been hassling indy reporters denied entry overland into Canada. Indy journalists John Weston Osburn (Interview), Dawn Zuppelli and Ted Forsyth from Rochester NY IMC, and Martin Macias Jr. have all been harassed. Osburn was refused entry into Canada and abused by DHS; Macias was deported, then treated abusively by the DHS lunatics controlling entry on the Canadian border.

There has been plenty of fodder for independent journalists to cover, as US & Canadian authorities gear up yet another 'live exercise' style mega-security psychological operation, featuring 'Medium' Range Acoustic Device sound cannon (MRAD, similar to the G20 LRAD), and the usual inept police attempts at false-flag provocateur and infiltration operations.

More: Live portal: 2010.mediacoop.ca | No2010.com | Vancouver Media Co-op | Submedia.TV | Committee to Protect Bloggers | Student Activism and the Olympics | OlympicResistance.net: About | Crossing the Border into Canada | Schedule | Censorship Gallery - 2010 Legal Observer Program | CJFE Olympic Watch.

The Vancouver Integrated Security Unit has been the highest-profile police unit hassling people, and apparently has refused to publicly rule out deploying agent provocateurs. Dec. 3: ORN Responds to Police Allegations of Undercover Cop | Vancouver Sun: Jamie Graham disclosed Olympic undercover operation.

More there. Also: Canadian customs refuse to disclose laptop border search policy @ boingboing.

Speaking of hit pieces, see Tea Party Movement Is Full of Conspiracy Theories - Newsweek.com

Tea Party notes: Ron Paul Warns Of Neo-Con Takeover Of Tea Party Movement

Ferguson and Faber: Sovereign Debt Crisis Will Spread World-Wide, U.S. Debt Is Unsafe. Much more with PIIGS to watch, plz look thru ZeroHedge for MOAR!

Neat notes from the cable TV lobbyist industrial complex: The Lobbying-Media Complex @ The Nation.

Slumburbia - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

There was a scam-tastic proposal for 'volatility insurance' which of course would have to be government-backstopped in order to 'pay'. Citi's Financial Crisis Derivatives Should Be Banished From Earth.

Tech side: 20 Great Project Management Tools

Hey that's it for now... Let's kick... and push... and coast. [MosDef]

BONUS POINTS FOR THE 1001 CLUB / WORLD WILDLIFE FUND ABSURD EUROTRASH CONSPIRACY COMPLEX!!!11!

For all the LOLS: meet 1001 Club, Pilgrims Society & Le Cercle!!!

Everyone will be just delighted to learn about the Pilgrims Society and the 1001 Club. These are each worth their own posts, as they are the largest quasi-European elite conspiracy circles that [almost] no one's ever heard of! What fun! :-)

The Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics briefly went offline and it's a fantastic damn site so I'm glad it's back! Amazing files, precisely done, on the huge Belgian pedophile conspiracy (Beyond Dutroux) as well as three critical European-oriented extremely low-profile elite groups -- with very Bilderberg-like stylings.

The 1001 Club is full of Iran-Contra bankers [Yeaa Robert Vesco!], Nazi barons [Thyssen] and Bin Ladens. It's fricking awesome, the secret uber sketchy inner sanctum for a ton of nasty people. And its merely Prince Bernhard's inner ring for the World Wildlife Fund, which turns out to be a globalist front to seize control of vast strategic resources, especially in Africa. Kind of a superstructure for the international elite to stage repression campaigns, a totally greenwashed front for DeBeers / neo-Rhodesian mercenaries and resource extraction families. Good times! Have a LOL with 1001 Club membership list - Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics

Le Cercle - Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics - "Formed in the Fifties... One of the most influential, secretive, and, it goes without saying, exclusive political clubs in the West... One member contacted by this newspaper said he could not talk about it "even off, off the record". Another simply put the phone down... The source of its funding is a mystery..."

Pilgrims Society - Institute for the Study of Globalization and Covert Politics - conservative social core of the Anglo-American establishment. Including! Pilgrims Society membership list - June 29, 1997, The Independent, 'Aitken dropped by the Right's secret club', one of the very few mainstream reports on Le Cercle.

MOAR: PDF ROGUE AGENTS: The Cercle Pinay complex 1951 - 1991

Well that's all for now -- to grab a loosely appropriate Hunter Thompson quote: "It Never Got Weird Enough For Me."

Controlling 9/11 "crippled epistemology" via fake 'CIA' Internet Conspiracy Theories, COINTELPRO & "cognitive infiltration of extremist groups": Huge jackass/Obama Info Czar Cass Sunstein favors infiltrating conspiracy groups, planting disinfo, diversions

Submitted by HongPong on Fri, 2010-01-15 02:43

140110top2.jpg"....we will suggest below that if the hard core arises for certain identifiable reasons, it can be broken up or at least muted by government action." .... "We suggest a role for government efforts, and agents, in introducing such diversity.  Government agents (and their allies) might enter chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine percolating conspiracy theories by raising doubts about their factual premises, causal logic or implications for political action."

SSRN-Conspiracy Theories by Cass Sunstein, Adrian Vermeule

This is one hell of a chestnut. It seems obvious, in retrospect, the best way to conceal the truth of establishment shady business and institutionalized crime is to mix in a ton of bullshit in order to turn all the skeptics and inquirers against each other. Only now it's Obama's dang 'information czar' pitching the strategy!

Interestingly, the more I broaden my sources, the more I appreciate the broad spectrum of people that have cancelled their subscriptions to Establishment Bollox and the Lies of the Mighty Wurlitzer. It's amazing how so many features of Establishment Reality are so widely loathed from within so many different worldviews.

This important fact is what people like Cass Sunstein don't understand. Like faux Establishment 'Centrists', they believe that ontological truth, or even the 'optimal' policy outcome, is like @ the 50% mark between where the dialectical left & right goalposts are placed.

It's like Howard Fineman - accurately dubbed the Weathervane because you only have to look which way he's pointing to determine what reassuring centrist reality is today's hot item. Howard Fineman is the precise opposite of a 'conspiracy theorist' in Sunstein's world.

The Establishment's Hegelian social control techniques are obvious: just set the left and right goalposts, stir and repeat. Problem-reaction-solution. If one can influence both the left and right goalposts in the great false dichotomy, it makes the product of "centrists" far more acceptable. Everything floating around outside this parlor game is the prima materia of 'conspiracy' that the State should attack professionally, Sunstein says!

Sunstein's tidy worldview brushes over the complex role of deceptive bullshit operatives around there, laying the groundwork for stupid establishment narratives. For example, what are we to make of the ever-shady Gerald Posner, spoonfed the FBI goodies on China? Or Adam Ciralski, helping Blackwater's Erik Prince perpetrate some classic exposure-threatening graymail about U.S. covert ops. Are these merely products of rotten epistomology? [PD Scott with a solid takedown of Posner - Scott's the real deal with The War Conspiracy and more here.]

*****

Anyhow Cass Sunstein was appointed by President Obama as some kind of info czar. Interestingly he wrote a paper about how to manipulate conspiracy theorists by attempting to throw their groups off the Hegelian deep end, thus opening an opportunity for defamatory information warfare. Fascinating stuff, and it's got Alex Jones incensed!!

More links, then some snippets: Obama Information Czar Calls For Banning Free Speech, Sunstein’s Paper Provides More Evidence COLINTELPRO Still Operational, etc.

This whole thing reminds me of how the JFK conspiracy scene is managed as "A Story/B Story" wherein there are two alternate, mutually irreconcilable narratives. Dribs and drabs of facts supporting A and B (roughly, CIA/Mafia and Lone Gunman, usually) can be offered and safely paddle around on the History Channel.

Let us share a few choice links about how the CIA type control system AKA the Intelligence Power controls the World of Conspiracy. This is good stuff -- this is exactly how Mama Cass wants the world of conspiracies organized.

For The Win: Fintan Dunne called the Sunstein approach years ago!

My favorite all-in-one shotgun approach comes from Fintan Dunne of BreakForNews.com: BreakForNews.com : The CIA's Internet Fakes


The CIA Fakes is a catchphrase term to describe a group which includes:

-- Covert Operatives of the CIA, NSA and DIA; of the U.S. Corporate/Military Industrial Complex; of the intelligence services of U.K. Spain, France Holland, Germany, and Russia.
-- Political Agents working within the Democratic Party, Republican Party, Democratic Black Caucus, Green Party, and Patriot Movement.
 -- Politicians in the U.S., U.K. Spain, France, Germany and Russia --who pose as 9/11 skeptics.
-- Media, including Mainstream, Alternative Media and Internet broadcasting media who either front for, cooperate with, or are directly employed by intelligence services mentioned above.

The primary objectives of the CIA FAKES are:

-- To leverage the Fakes into position as the leadership/spokespersons
    for the 9/11 skeptics movement.
 -- To splinter and divide that movement.
 -- To promote lame, tame and/or booby-trapped questions about 9/11.
 -- To be sufficiently over-the-top as to prevent the 9/11 issue getting
    any traction in the media or left-wing.
 -- To ensure that the movement would not have a politically-active
    leadership capable of turning it into an effective political lobby campaign.

The questions about 9/11 were bound to be asked, the important
aspect for the perpetrators was and is ...by whom?

Bravo, Mr. Dunne, Bravo. You scored big on this one... A general roundup to be found @ The Next Level :: View topic - Uncovered: The Rat's Nest of 9/11 of effective gatekeepers -- and its true that his set of people, in aggregate, has the 9/11 conspiracy topic cornered and setup a certain way.
More along these lines: 9/11, 7/7 & the War on Freedom :: View topic - The Planned Demolition of Alex Jones, The COUP had foreknowledge of 9-11 (YES!), the criticism about Sibel Edmonds, Scheuer, Ray McGovern, etc: WagNews: Our Good Friends in the CIA - NOT !, (i.e "The alternative media is ridden with ex-FBI, ex-CIA, ex-NSA, ex-MI5 people who are on "our side". It's all total BS.") WagNews: Alex Jones, Hopsicker & the 9/11 CIA Fakes -Audio.

This one is suddenly salient: WagNews: Ellsberg, Sibel Edmonds & The Secret Team:
WHAT FLAVOR CONSPIRACY YOU WANT?

One big corner of that overall 9/11 picture is formed by four disparate-seeming individuals: a veteran whistleblower, an attractive novice whistleblower, a campaigning journalist and a reputed lingerie model; jigsaw peices called Ellsberg, Edmonds, Hopsicker and Keller. Ellsberg supports Edmonds, confirmed by Hopsicker --backed by eyewitness accounts from Keller. But they're all telling different flavors of the same story.

To specify which story that is, let's take a look at the popular tales of 9/11. The notorious main division is between LIHOP and MIHOP. But it's much more detailed than that. Explanations come in a full range of flavors --starting with the official story:

A. Official story:
CIA/FBI were incompetent; Bush and/or Clinton were complacent.
B. Official Lame Conspiracy:
CIA/FBI were incompetent; Bush/Cheney maybe let it happen; Israelis Knew.
C. Official LIHOP Conspiracy:
CIA/FBI were compromised; Bush/Cheney did let it happen; Israelis Helped.
D. Official LIHOP Wild Conspiracy:
CIA/FBI compromised; Bush/Cheney/Neocons let it happen; Israelis Did It.
E. Official LIHOP Tinfoil Conspiracy:
Israelis/Neocons/Bush/Cheney Did It; CIA/FBI looked the other way.
F. Official MIHOP 'Serious' Conspiracy:
Israelis/Neocons/CIA/FBI/Bush/Cheney/Military-Industrial-Complex Did It.
G. Official Loony Conspiracies:
Rothschilds and/or Rockefellers and/or CFR and/or Bildebergers did it.
Globalists who want to run everything in a World Government did it.
Jews and Jewish bankers -who already run everything- did it.
Satanists, Opus Dei or Reptilians did it.
It's a terrific variety of theories.
It plays out something like this:
  • The mainstream media push version A; hint at B; sneer at G.
  • The controlled right/intellectual media pushes version B.
  • The controlled left/intellectual media pushes version C.
  • The 'moderate' Fake internet sites push versions C and D.
  • The 'softcore' Fake internet sites push versions D and E.
  • The 'independent' Fake internet sites push version F.
  • The 'loony' Fake interent sites push variations of version G.
But every single one, from A to G are OFFICIAL versions, sanctioned and promoted by the 9/11 intelligence coverup operation and their CIA Fakes network. They have a flavor for every market.

The creation of this multiplicity of explanations is a core element of the coverup. Left to their own devices, people on the Internet might have figured out the truth themselves. But with this circus in action, there is always plenty of distraction and lots of division in opinion.

The intelligence coverup is not trying to stop 9/11 conspiracy theories on the internet. It's creating them. Then playing off supporters of the different theories against each other. That's a classic Cointelpro-style tactic.

***********More from good Ol L Fletcher Prouty on CIA / Ellsberg limited hangout type conspiracy control!
Let's get to the brand-new material from the White House info czar, it's wild!!...... Conspiracy Theories by Cass Sunstein & Adrian Vermeule:

Our main though far from exclusive focus – our running example – involves

conspiracy theories relating to terrorism, especially theories that arise from and post-date

the 9/11 attacks. These theories exist within the United States and, even more virulently,

in foreign countries, especially Muslim countries. The existence of both domestic and

foreign conspiracy theories, we suggest, is no trivial matter, posing real risks to the

government’s antiterrorism policies, whatever the latter may be. Terrorism-related

theories are thus a crucial testing ground for the significance, causes, and policy

implications of widespread conspiracy theorizing. As we shall see, an understanding of

conspiracy theories has broad implications for the spread of information and beliefs;

many erroneous judgments are a product of the same forces that produce conspiracy

theories, and if we are able to see how to counteract such theories, we will have some

clues about how to correct widespread errors more generally.

Part I explores some definitional issues and lays out some of the mechanisms that

produce conspiracy theories and theorists. We begin by discussing different

understandings of the nature of conspiracy theories and different accounts of the kinds of

errors made by those who hold them. Our primary claim is that conspiracy theories

typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a “crippled

epistemology,” in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational

sources. Those who hold conspiracy theories do so because of what they read and hear. In

that sense, acceptance of such theories is not irrational from the standpoint of those who

adhere to them. There is a close connection, we suggest, between our claim on this count

and the empirical association between terrorist behavior and an absence of civil rights

and civil liberties.10 When civil rights and civil liberties are absent, people lack multiple

information sources, and they are more likely to accept conspiracy theories.

Part II discusses government responses and legal issues, in light of the discussion

in Part I. We address several dilemmas of governmental response to conspiracy theories,

such as the question whether it is better to rebut such theories, at the risk of legitimating

them, or to ignore them, at the risk of leaving them unrebutted. Conspiracy theories turn

out to be especially hard to undermine or dislodge; they have a self-sealing quality,

rendering them particularly immune to challenge. We suggest several policy responses

that can dampen the supply of conspiracy theorizing, in part by introducing diverse

viewpoints and new factual assumptions into the hard-core groups that produce such

theories. Our principal claim here involves the potential value of cognitive infiltration of

extremist groups, designed to introduce informational diversity into such groups and to

expose indefensible conspiracy theories as such.

Tell me this, Sunstein: how does all that drug money get through the Federal Reserve System? Everyone has been so eager to confront that 'conspiracy theory,' haven't they?

Blah blah blah... let's get to the good stuff: [Below the fold - favorite chunks of much of the crazy essay]

The Monckton climate battle rap; I want to speculate on Carbon Financial Instruments liquidity; 2009's top censored stories; "THROW ANOTHER SNOWBALL!!"

Submitted by HongPong on Mon, 2009-12-21 04:03
200912210011.jpg

What could possibly go wrong?! Analysis: Climate summit showcases new world order - thestar.com
Tripod operations block coal train - tripods are super funny: Copenhagen failure sparks coal terminal blockade | Rising Tide Australia. Earlier: Indymedia Danmark - If you're in, you're in, if you're out, you're out and interestingly: Activists reveal tactics used by police to 'decapitate' Copenhagen climate protests.
200912210013.jpg
Lord Monckton vs Al Gore battle rap style - can't beat that:


Lord Monckton got knocked out by one of the Danish UN-commanded goons. He explains what went down in this interview with Alex Jones; Monckton has to kind of get Jones to chill out. Lord Monckton Assaulted to the point of unconsciousness by EuroThug Police at Copenhagen. More deets from Planet Monckton if you want. British grumbles: There'll be nowhere to run from the new world government. Alex Jones style summary.

The totally fake capitalist insanity of the CCFE - Chicago Climate Futures Exchange and Chicago Climate Exchange (partly owned by who else, Goldman Sachs) is coming to a hegemonic discourse near you! I found this list of insane garbage & had to add it: Membership Categories

Offset Providers: Owners of title to qualifying offset projects that sequester, destroy or reduce GHG emissions. Offset Providers register and sell offsets directly on the CCX (learn more).

Offset Aggregators: Entities that serve as the administrative representative, on behalf of offset project owners, of multiple offset-generating projects. Offset projects involving less than 10,000 metric tons of CO2 equivalent per year should be registered and sold through an Offset Aggregator (learn more).
Liquidity Providers:Entities or individuals who trade on CCX for purposes other than complying with the CCX Emission Reduction Schedule, such as market makers and proprietary trading groups (learn more).

Exchange Participants: Entities or individuals who purchase Carbon Financial Instrument® (CFI®) contracts and retire them to offset emissions associated with special events or other specified activities (learn more).

There would NEVER be a bubble, short squeeze or other maneuvers from "liquidity providers". WOW.... The best move would be to get a bunch of these CCX securities with borrowed money and then find out someone else was 'canceling' a bunch of permits. You'd make a mint on the supply squeeze! Now THAT would be really, uh, green. In the cash sense.
Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs likely carbon bubble agenda using CCX:

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utahbased firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in greentech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energyfutures market?

"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but capandtrade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private taxcollection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedgefund director who spoke out against oilfutures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine."

*******Meanwhile, ICE has about 140 secret frickin unmarked prisons!!! America's Secret ICE Castles
2009's TOP 25 CENSORED STORIES from PROJECT CENSORED:

I'm sure it was all an accident.
200912210004.jpg
DC COP FREAKS OUT, WAVES GUN @ SNOWBALLS ETC. Wow! Gawker posts with the roundup. More. Foto via CityPaper.
STUDENT OCCUPATIONS: San Francisco State University was bangin. Occupy SFSU blog.
MOAR: Best web app available: Jersey Shore Nickname Generator - Unlikely Words

MUSIC: Our man Anders Ponders picked up a post on some German blog and even made City Pages top albums of 2009! I set up a website for Bouncer Fighter, in which Mr Ponders rawks the viola.

COLLAPSE! As noted earlier, the strikingly awesome documentary about Michael Ruppert, peak oil and social collapse is all over BitTorrent now so you can watch it if U like. Obviously it would be great for more people to pony up some cash for this but it's tangled in distribution problems unfortunately. ACE work by all concerned. Sweet trailer again:


Tarnac Ten and that Insurrection: The Tarnac Ten were accused of sabotaging a high-speed train or at least providing some anarchist justification for it. Judicial controls on the "Tarnac Ten" lightened - Infoshop News. I got a kick out of the review of the related manifesto 'The Coming Insurrection' in Adbusters. (more from Adbusters and here- also Glimpsing the Apocalypse).
Secret State: Boiling Frogs Post: Secret reports, Secret budgets, Secret operations, Secret courts … A Secret Government! This was excellent all around and includes a lot of material about how administrative secret structures operate. The part about how shady federal judge and all-around Fixer of Schemes Reggie Walton isn't to be missed. You can't have a good establishment conspiracy without at least one federal judge to keep things from spilling out.
More: Associated Press: INSIDE WASHINGTON: An anti-whistleblower culture. Whistleblowing Airline Employees Blog Talk Radio Program 12/19/2009 - Captain Dan Hanley on Blog Talk Radio. LOL Screening Management SOP » Tag Archive » The Wandering Aramean - video of silly congressman Charles Dent demanding a retroactive TSA SOP manual coverup!!

Let's watch the Parallax View: I really love Alan Pakula's classic corporatist/assassination conspiracy thriller The Parallax View (1974) and somehow it's all up on YouTube. Get it while it's hawt. Will Warren Beatty suss out the secret of the killer Parallax Corporation in time?
RANDOM HEALTHNESS: I've learned a bit more about the FDA's war on alternative medicine, a decades-long pharma-industrial racket. U of M scientists figured out Amino Acid N-Acetylcysteine Eases Compulsive Behavior Such as Hair Pulling. Also interesting: Aerosol pollution interferes with thunderstorm activity, radical weather could cause crop failures. Studies generate hundreds of leads in the fight against the H1N1 pandemic | webnewswire.com
Wow! Cryptogon: GE Attempting to Silence a Danish Academic from Discussing Dangers of Omniscan. Not on MSNBC anytime soon.
Wave of sickness and disease now striking Baby Boomers: Research is now showing that today's "baby boomers", the generation currently eclipsing age 60, is the first generation to be less healthy than the generation before them. Those in this age group are more susceptible to debilitating diseases than in years past, stemming primarily from poor diet and lack of proper exercise....... A common theme that emerged from the research is thattechnological advancements have played a significant role in creating poor health. As Americans have generally been weaned off of physical labor and instead placed in front of computer screens throughout the years, the level ofphysical activity among the population has dropped significantly.MOAR: Dailymail.
200912210009.jpg
NEPAL MAOIST MASS STRIKE : Going on: Nepal Through The Lens: First Day of Nepal Maoist Mass Strike. Democracy and Class Struggle: Maoist strike paralyses Nepal's capital. Also: Indian Air Force being used against Maoists - a cross border kind of thing going on here, UAV drones used for suppression & compliance operations.

DISGUSTING OPERATIONS IN YEMEN: WTF?! More.
It's a racket: t r u t h o u t | Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know

MISC FILE: You can win War on Terror, the board game! SIlver gonna go big? This is AWESOME: Ex-Microsoft employee remembers the last sound he heard at Microsoft Bing. Pirate Video Seattle is sweet!
Funny conspiracy classic: Alex Jones asks David Gergen about Bohemian Grove Rituals.
Notes on the surveillance state for conservative patriot movement people: Free Movement, Reaction and the Fascist State: Critical Questions for the Patriot Movement - Infoshop News. Tom Paine vs the Patriot Act: Woulda been tough...
A couple more: 4 Big Mortgage Backers Swim in Ocean of Debt // aangirfan: THE CIA IN PALESTINE
Look At This Fucking Idea For A Blog-To-Book Deal. 10 Reasons Why Your Blog Sucks
Gotta get it for OSX, snappy & solid! Socialite - All your social networks in one application (review)

There's nothing to do - just whine and complain, in bed at the hospital! -- Cold War Kids, "Hospital Beds"
Tell me the story of how you ended up here, I've heard it all in the hospital. Watch out, these snowflakes might be chemtrail MEMS nanomachines giving us Morgellons :) Google Earth Sky blacked out Nibiru / Planet X and you heard it here first. And they mighta got two pings of dark matter up in that mine too! (more)

Parallax View of the EU, G20 & climate change: There is no evidence of any wider conspiracy

Submitted by HongPong on Wed, 2009-11-25 00:11

Creepy and unelected new EU President Von Rompuy talks about the delightful new role of the EU, the G20, climate control and Global Governance (or 'global management'). I definitely heard the sound of global governance over the LRAD at the G20, that's for sure!

Some weirdo other stuff got released in the hilarious climate change email dumps which are now all over Wikileaks via surly hackers.
Duly noted by Cryptogon.com, perhaps this is all a program to generate MK assassins or maybe it's just an item for fans of The Parallax View: Military Experiment Seeks to Predict PTSD - TIME:

TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif.) — Two days before shipping off to war, Marine Pfc. Jesse Sheets sat inside a trailer in the Mojave Desert, his gaze fixed on a computer that flashed a rhythmic pulse of contrasting images. Smiling kids embracing a soldier. A dog sniffing blood oozing from a corpse. Movie star Cameron Diaz posing sideways in a midriff top. Troops cowering for safety during an ambush.

A doctor tracked his stress levels and counted the number of times he blinked. Electrode wires dangled from his left eye and right pinky finger.

Sheets is part of a military experiment to try to predict who's most at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder. Understanding underlying triggers might help reduce the burden of those who return psychologically wounded — if they can get early help.

Something like what they did to Warren Beatty at the Parallax Corporation's Division of Human Engineering, an MK lab of a classic sort:

BTW here's the intro which is outstanding. The Parallax View by Alan Pakula was a classic 70s paranoia thriller released in the middle of Watergate.

The new Boiling Frogs Post/Sibel Edmonds site; John Cole on the whole 9/11, Marc Grossman espionage complex etc.

Submitted by HongPong on Wed, 2009-10-28 20:45

Sibel Edmonds & co have set up a new website called Boiling Frogs Post and they're going to be looking at a lot of shady stuff. The podcasts that have been going for a while have been really good & detailed material from whistleblowers and journalists about what's going on.

[BTW here is a good recent roundup on the Sibel Edmonds case via SkepticalEye.com]

*****

The newest podcast, Boiling Frogs #8, in particular is really worth hearing -- it puts a lot of things in better context. John Cole worked in FBI Counter-Intelligence for quite a while, and in this podcast talks about the corruption and espionage riddling the FBI and other government departments. Cole had called for a special counsel investigation in the case.

Melek Can Dickerson, Douglas Dickerson & Marc Grossman are all getting exposed as agents of foreign powers, part of the big nasty foreign espionage complex -- I guess a shorthand way to a variety of actors that are basically protected from the FBI.

From the recent interview in American Conservative:

GIRALDI: What kind of information was Grossman giving to foreign countries? Did he give assistance to foreign individuals penetrating U.S. government labs and defense installations as has been reported? It’s also been reported that he was the conduit to a group of congressmen who become, in a sense, the targets to be recruited as “agents of influence.”

EDMONDS: Yes, that’s correct. Grossman assisted his Turkish and Israeli contacts directly, and he also facilitated access to members of Congress who might be inclined to help for reasons of their own or could be bribed into cooperation. The top person obtaining classified information was Congressman Tom Lantos. A Lantos associate, Alan Makovsky worked very closely with Dr. Sabri Sayari in Georgetown University, who is widely believed to be a Turkish spy. Lantos would give Makovsky highly classified policy-related documents obtained during defense briefings for passage to Israel because Makovsky was also working for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

GIRALDI: Makovsky is now working for the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy, a pro-Israeli think tank.

EDMONDS: Yes. Lantos was at the time probably the most outspoken supporter of Israel in Congress. AIPAC would take out the information from Lantos that was relevant to Israel, and they would give the rest of it to their Turkish associates. The Turks would go through the leftovers, take what they wanted, and then try to sell the rest. If there were something relevant to Pakistan, they would contact the ISI officer at the embassy and say, “We’ve got this and this, let’s sit down and talk.” And then they would sell it to the Pakistanis.

........GIRALDI: So the network starts with a person like Grossman in the State Department providing information that enables Turkish and Israeli intelligence officers to have access to people in Congress, who then provide classified information that winds up in the foreign embassies?

EDMONDS: Absolutely. And we also had Pentagon officials doing the same thing. We were looking at Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. They had a list of individuals in the Pentagon broken down by access to certain types of information. Some of them would be policy related, some of them would be weapons-technology related, some of them would be nuclear-related. Perle and Feith would provide the names of those Americans, officials in the Pentagon, to Grossman, together with highly sensitive personal information: this person is a closet gay; this person has a chronic gambling issue; this person is an alcoholic. The files on the American targets would contain things like the size of their mortgages or whether they were going through divorces. One Air Force major I remember was going through a really nasty divorce and a child custody fight. They detailed all different kinds of vulnerabilities.

GIRALDI: So they had access to their personnel files and also their security files and were illegally accessing this kind of information to give to foreign agents who exploited the vulnerabilities of these people to recruit them as sources of information?

EDMONDS: Yes. Some of those individuals on the list were also working for the RAND Corporation. RAND ended up becoming one of the prime targets for these foreign agents.

GIRALDI: RAND does highly classified research for the U.S. government. So they were setting up these people for recruitment as agents or as agents of influence?

EDMONDS: Yes, and the RAND sources would be paid peanuts compared to what the information was worth when it was sold if it was not immediately useful for Turkey or Israel. They also had sources who were working in some midwestern Air Force bases. The sources would provide the information on CD’s and DVD’s. In one case, for example, a Turkish military attaché got the disc and discovered that it was something really important, so he offered it to the Pakistani ISI person at the embassy, but the price was too high. Then a Turkish contact in Chicago said he knew two Saudi businessmen in Detroit who would be very interested in this information, and they would pay the price. So the Turkish military attaché flew to Detroit with his assistant to make the sale.

Central FBI management has turned up time and again to block local FBI actions against foreign intelligence agents.

It seems like the coverup basically encompasses a lot of visible neoconservatives, some scientists, some blackmailed civl servants, a few noxious former congresscritters, and shady military-industrial executives. These people have a lot of power, and it seems clear that it's not 'one agenda' so much as a ton of nasty rats in a sack, all of them pretty devious and many essentially above the law.

From Episode 3, Phil Giraldi (paraphrasing) -- "The fundamental problem: you have groups that are representing foreign governments, they are not required to register as agents of foreign powers ... which means you don't know where there money comes from, and you don't know where the money is going."

Giraldi adds a ton about AIPAC, the incident with Jane Harman and that AIPAC intelligence committee / wiretap situation -- which I called pretty early and accurately as the Scandalplex.

*****

This bit is fascinating, it's one of those crazy secrets of how DC works. Grossman's duty at the State Department, during the time he was almost certainly trafficking in all his secret goodies, he also got notified whenever the FBI was busting down on foreign agents!! In essence, Grossman was getting told when the FBI started scrutinizing possible foreign agents/ agents of influence, in case the investigation triggered an international incident, Grossman would be prepared to mitigate the 'diplomatic consequences' for the State Department. But if he's a douche spy-hack type, 'National Security' is dead before it starts!!

In reality Marc Grossman was evidently a key officer in a criminal parallel power/espionage network, involving the marquee neo-cons and a lot of fixers for foreign governments and weapons corporations. Scooter Libby & Marc Rich aren't too many nodes away...

The terrible thing is that, Cole says Douglas Feith and Richard Perle were under a lot of heat for what they'd done over the years.

Now Sibel Edmonds contends that Feith and Perle were working on extracting the 'control files' that the government compiles on people -- i.e. the flagged points of weakness over which they could be blackmailed or otherwise controlled. The blackmail intelligence on these good civil servants gets trafficked & sold, a form of privatizing the passing of sensitive information, in a 'shadow' way. (We see this happening, such as in California, with breakaway rings of devious law enforcmement fusion center workers, caught trying to sell the data.)

So according to Edmonds, the blackmail documents were offered first to the Israelis, then the Turks, then on down the line to the cheap seats of international influence peddling. Foreign agents or units could take the blackmail material, use it to get control of these loyal American workers at nuclear research sites & wherever else, ("hook" them) Whenever the FBI flagged these criminals' operations, they would have to notify Grossman!!! (This of course let Grossman tip off the criminal foreign operatives and ruin the FBI's work against them.)

*****

Interestingly, this was pretty much the same pattern with the Minneapolis FBI on 9/11, which whistleblower Coleen Rowley reiterated on a nifty segment with TheRealNews.com (which isn't too bad a new source it appears, with a lot of thoughtful videos).

In August 2001, the Minneapolis FBI was ready to roll in everything on this, they were even getting intel back from France on Zacharias Moussaoui, then the FBI headquarters management blocked the hell out of it. September 11, 2001 hits -- with the Minneapolis FBI narrowly held back from setting off against the 9-11 attack operation network (and almost certainly its handlers from the foreign intelligence agencies).

*******

In case people haven't noticed yet, a lot of foreign intelligence connections came up all over 9-11, in particular Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, but also Turkey and Israel.

Looking for links in that quadrilateral of shadiness nets a lot of data points, but it also dramatically underscores what happens every day except 9-11: These foreign governments hire operatives, lobbyists and agents to further the interests of the hawkish controlling cliques of these countries. The FBI is supposed to be the antibody to this nasty foreign flu bug, but it gets blocked time and again.

GIRALDI: So we have a pattern of corruption starting with government officials providing information to foreigners and helping them make contact with other Americans who had valuable information. Some of these officials, like Marc Grossman, were receiving money directly. Others were receiving business favors: Pentagon associates like Doug Feith and Richard Perle had interests in Israel and Turkey. The stolen information was being sold, and the money that was being generated was used to corrupt certain congressmen to influence policy and provide still more information—in many cases information related to nuclear technology.

EDMONDS: As well as weapons technology, conventional weapons technology, and Pentagon policy-related information.

GIRALDI: You also have information on al-Qaeda, specifically al-Qaeda in Central Asia and Bosnia. You were privy to conversations that suggested the CIA was supporting al-Qaeda in central Asia and the Balkans, training people to get money, get weapons, and this contact continued until 9/11…

EDMONDS: I don’t know if it was CIA. There were certain forces in the U.S. government who worked with the Turkish paramilitary groups, including Abdullah Çatli’s group, Fethullah Gülen.

GIRALDI: Well, that could be either Joint Special Operations Command or CIA.

And on it goes....

Carbon Market+Sun=FAIL? Sunspot Maunder Minimum vs. 'global warming,' bad for Alliance for Climate Protection 'mass persuasion exercise': How about dem sunspots??!

Submitted by HongPong on Fri, 2009-09-04 23:52

Another Little Ice Age? Solar activity and climate change - Ars Technica:

Some scientists are suggesting that the slow return to a more active phase of the solar cycle may portend a general decline in solar activity. If sunspots shut down, does that mean that we could stop worrying about climate change?

Over the weekend, a paper published in the American Geophysical Union's journal Eos attracted a lot of attention, as it suggested that the levels of magnetic activity associated with recent sunspots indicated that the sun might be returning to a state of low activity, similar to that of the Maunder Minimum, which occurred in the late 17th century. That change in solar activity was notable for setting off what's called the Little Ice Age, which plunged Europe into a deep chill. Left undiscussed is what that might mean in a world where greenhouse gas changes are threatening a period of extended high temperatures.

To understand how a significant change in sunspot levels might be felt in the Earth's climate, we'll back up and look at how sunspots relate to solar output, how that output gets felt on Earth, and how it interacts with changing levels of greenhouse gasses. The answer appears to be that it could reverse the climate change that occurred during past century, but would only delay the changes expected by the end of this century.

And the grand weather guy of Minnesota, Paul Douglas, weighs in with a reference: MinnPost - Paul Douglas: Picture postcard perfect:

Maybe it's because summer was so amazing. Yes, it was a couple degrees cooler than average (I blame the damn sunspots, or lack thereof) but we still had a blast.

Douglas goes on to restate that he's big on climate change, but the reference stands. A worthy question: Are climate change deniers like creationists? | The Agonist. Couldn't resist, I proceed to rattle teh cage on the thread:

At the risk of getting in trouble, has anyone had a cold summer? We sure have here. Some people are saying that the roughly 11-year sunspot cycle is becoming much quieter than usual.
While atmospheric CO2 measurement is a recent development (altho of course we can get ice cores for now), sunspot observation has been going on for centuries. Interestingly, the Little Ice Age corresponded to a period of very low sunspot activity, with the Hudson River in NY/NJ and the Thames freezing over for extended periods. (Some other people theorize that it was because an oceanic current loop halted for a while.)
Anyway it seems to me that CO2 is a coefficient for trapping heat. OK. It is not as effective by weight as many other pollutants/components of the atmosphere but it certainly has an effect.
However there are basically three thermal inputs to the whole system. One is the level of solar energy and the other would be whatever geothermal heat bleeds out of the earth's core. (a moderate amount but whatever steam you see coming off a hot spring is part of this). The third would be the heat generated by civilization itself. (not the CO2)
Sooo... if it's true that the sunspots and thermal-type solar energy are linked, then that would seem to be a way bigger deal to the whole system than the CO2 level. People were wigging out about global cooling in the '70s and also proposing overarching powerful political structures to react to the problem.

If people were presented a clear mathematical model considering the sunspot & solar side as well as the atmospheric coefficients then that seems like it would be more intellectually honest than the current PR campaign which seems to be a policy agenda oriented exclusively around carbon.
Check out this lil gem from the Internet Wayback Machine on the Alliance for Climate Protection site: (It's been deleted for some time, but I found it awesome when I spotted it originally):

Our Mission

Americans have always risen to meet the most important challenges to our nation’s and the world’s future. Our mission is to persuade the American people — and people elsewhere in the world – of the importance and urgency of adopting and implementing effective and comprehensive solutions for the climate crisis. The Alliance for Climate Protection is undertaking an unprecedented mass persuasion exercise based on scientific facts.

Through a new combination of non-partisan alliances with Americans from all walks of life and innovative and far-reaching communication techniques the Alliance will focus on presenting the facts about climate change and its solutions to the general public in an accurate, clear and compelling manner.

Americans have always risen to meet the most important challenges to our nation’s and the world’s future. Together, we can address the climate challenge domestically and provide a robust economy for now and for our children.

Say what you will about Darwin, he didn't have a bunch of PR flacks doing an 'unprecedented mass persuasion exercise,' which frankly is Rendon Group-style jargon.
And also I don't see how you can measure carbon I/O on farms -- it would take a whole staff of Goldman Sachs minions to figure out how much to pay for one farm, which appears to be precisely the whole idea of 'carbon trading.'
Matt Taibbi nailed how the almighty Carbon Market is going to Suck: The Great American Bubble Machine : Rolling Stone

And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an "environmental plan," called cap-and-trade.

The new carboncredit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that's been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won't even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

...... The feature of this plan that has special appeal to speculators is that the "cap" on carbon will be continually lowered by the government, which means that carbon credits will become more and more scarce with each passing year. Which means that this is a brand new commodities market where the main commodity to be traded is guaranteed to rise in price over time. The volume of this new market will be upwards of a trillion dollars annually; for comparison's sake, the annual combined revenues of all electricity suppliers in the U.S. total $320 billion.

Goldman wants this bill. The plan is (1) to get in on the ground floor of paradigmshifting legislation, (2) make sure that they're the profitmaking slice of that paradigm and (3) make sure the slice is a big slice. Goldman started pushing hard for cap and trade long ago, but things really ramped up last year when the firm spent $3.5 million to lobby climate issues.

......[Buying into renewables...] is convenient, considering that Goldman made early investments in wind power (it bought a subsidiary called Horizon Wind Energy), renewable diesel (it is an investor in a firm called Changing World Technologies) and solar power (it partnered with BP Solar), exactly the kind of deals that will prosper if the government forces energy producers to use cleaner energy. As Paulson said at the time, "We're not making those investments to lose money."

The bank owns a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, where the carbon credits will be traded. Moreover, Goldman owns a minority stake in Blue Source LLC, a Utahbased firm that sells carbon credits of the type that will be in great demand if the bill passes. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, who is intimately involved with the planning of cap-and-trade, started up a company called Generation Investment Management with three former bigwigs from Goldman Sachs Asset Management, David Blood, Mark Ferguson and Peter Harris. Their business? Investing in carbon offsets. There's also a $500 million Green Growth Fund set up by a Goldmanite to invest in greentech … the list goes on and on. Goldman is ahead of the headlines again, just waiting for someone to make it rain in the right spot. Will this market be bigger than the energyfutures market?

"Oh, it'll dwarf it," says a former staffer on the House energy committee.

Well, you might say, who cares? If cap-and-trade succeeds, won't we all be saved from the catastrophe of global warming? Maybe — but cap and trade, as envisioned by Goldman, is really just a carbon tax structured so that private interests collect the revenues. Instead of simply imposing a fixed government levy on carbon pollution and forcing unclean energy producers to pay for the mess they make, cap-and-trade will allow a small tribe of greedy-as-hell Wall Street swine to turn yet another commodities market into a private taxcollection scheme. This is worse than the bailout: It allows the bank to seize taxpayer money before it's even collected.

"If it's going to be a tax, I would prefer that Washington set the tax and collect it," says Michael Masters, the hedge fund director who spoke out against oil futures speculation. "But we're saying that Wall Street can set the tax, and Wall Street can collect the tax. That's the last thing in the world I want. It's just asinine."

Cap-and-trade is going to happen. Or, if it doesn't, something like it will. The moral is the same as for all the other bubbles that Goldman helped create, from 1929 to 2009. In almost every case, the very same bank that behaved recklessly for years, weighing down the system with toxic loans and predatory debt, and accomplishing nothing but massive bonuses for a few bosses, has been rewarded with mountains of virtually free money and government guarantees — while the actual victims in this mess, ordinary taxpayers, are the ones paying for it.

Random links; Deepwater SIPRNET leak exposed, Sibel Edmonds' MSM project, the IAEA nuke stuff & more

Submitted by HongPong on Fri, 2009-06-05 09:05

thin-bloat.jpg

Because ur not quite bored of it yet... Deepwater exp0sed! via cryptome.org (along with that awesome Kissinger "bloated war criminal" photo above)

This is hugely damaging to the defense industry, and most damaging to Lockheed Martin who may end up having to pay the U.S. Government several billions of dollars due to their fraud, and executives within the defense industry could go to prison for the rest of their lives over this.

I understand that the case was filed quite some time ago, but that it was just unsealed last week, and that most of the case has already been proven in other venues.

Procurement fraud and government abuse at it's finest. http://cryptome.org/deepwater-fraud.pdf

More on this here. The main thing is that signals from systems like SIPRNET -- the main military/government Secret Internet -- was leaching out all over the ocean because Lockheed and Northrop Grumman didn't get shielded wires. HUGE security breach - bigger than a bunch o' spies!

To the average person not using shielded cable may not seem like a big thing. However, in reality it is almost like a bank employee who is tasked with locking up the bank at night but fails to close the vault, fails to lock the front door and declines to set the alarm systems. If nothing happened, it would still be grounds for immediate dismissal. If something did happen and funds were stolen, then he could be sued by the bank for recovery on the grounds of his willful negligence.

In the case of TEMPEST, they have left secure communication systems open to virtually anyone with a modicum of intelligence and technical equipment. To me, it raises concerns as to why there has been no action by the FBI and/or NCIS(NIS) on the grounds of national security. Whichever way you cut it, it comes off as willful misconduct and perhaps criminal negligence. Whatever the case, it just reminds me of Toshiba. Corporate types who would sell their soul for a dollar or, as alleged, sleeper agents posing as dishonest business types.

Either way, they should have been executed. It is ridiculous for people like Martha Stewart and Conrad Black to be doing federal prison time for what was quesionable conduct at worst, while people like those involved with TEMPEST are allowed to walk.

THE IAEA CASE: (or, Doc Brown & finding nuclear items: I traded them a case of pinball machine parts!!)The feds gave away quite a chestnut! Obama IAEA nuclear sites declaration for the United States, draft, 267 pages, 5 May 2009 - Wikileaks. My favorite notes on the IAEA doc were in NPR and Ars Technica, a lot of bearing on how these documents go around on the internet nowadays. SECRECY NEWS WIN! ;-)

ProjectExposeMSM_smalllogo.jpg

Sibel Edmonds on 123 Real Change - Expose the MSM Mainstream Media dorks... Sibel set up a site to list all the bad journalists that have screwed whistleblowers. Michael Isikoff is her personal target. That guy is sketch. Etc Etc. Project Expose MSM Reports What is this about? 123 Real Change: Announcement. It was on Bradblog. Also how Edmonds got screwed by the Dems in US Congress. Couple notes from Coleen Rowley on it.

It goes like this, as Sibel posts:

films-threedaysofthecondor.jpgTurner: “they’ve got all of it”
Higgins: “What did you do?”
Turner: “I told them a story, you play games, I told them a story”
Higgins: “Ah you, you poor dumb son of a bitch”, “You’ve done more damage than you know”
Turner: “I hope so”
Higgins: “You’re about to be a very lonely man”, “It didn’t have to end this way”
Turner: “Sure it did”
Higgins: “Hey Turner”, “How do you know they’ll print it?” “You can take a walk, but how far if they don’t print it?”
Turner: “They’ll print it”
Higgins: “How do you know?”

As it turns out the New York Times didn't usually print a damn thing. Terrible choice to trust.

More stuff....

Messing with Critical Mass riders in NYC, tactical media defenders savin the day! Video: Cops Ticket More Critical Mass Cyclists, Drive on Bike Path - Gothamist

Why did Porter Goss finger Jane Harman? | Capital J | JTA - Jewish & Israel News (See Hongpong.com on the Scandalplex for the early take on this AIPAC espionage story)

An excited busybody attempts to fix North Minneapolis: The Adventures of Johnny Northside

Hilarious voting system results in nothin but marijuana and birth certificate conspiracies. Damn you Internet!! :-D Open Government Brainstorm - by IdeaScale

framework_logo.png

Unbelievably bad Eurotrash video! People with more awesome desks than me.

Techbit: Google Releases Dev Chrome For Mac And Linux. But Doesn’t Want You To Use It. GIMME Google Wave API and Testing Google Wave: This Thing is Tidal. I wish I could goto DrupalCampWI | June 5th and 6th, 2009, Madison, WI

xkcd - A Webcomic - IN UR REALITY
in_ur_reality.png

For more: I'm In Ur

Cracked.com is nice: The 7 Most Bizarrely Unlucky People Who Ever Lived and 17 Great Historical Moments Ruined by Modern Technology

I ran into these devices the other day XBee-PRO 802.15.4 OEM RF Modules - Digi International- they are freakin awesome when applied!

Alt-economics: Organizing for a Better Economy And bookporn #41: books from heaven, books from earth « a historian’s craft.

Some random stuff from the huffpo that seems relevant somehow: An earned moment for Michael Moore, he calls for saving the industrial tools and building clean techs in the old GM factories: Michael Moore: Goodbye, GM

Yuck: Gov. David A. Paterson: The Moment for Public-Private Partnerships Is Now // Avarice! Washington politicos dish on summer plans

Drugz: They're trying to nix Murtha's bullshit drugz fusion center: House GOP Wants Cuts To Drug War also Daily Kos: States Leading Way on Industrial Hemp!

Submedia is at it again! ‘Hopium’ takes the West Coast by storm at subMedia

Nice Video: Who's culture jamming the Mexican election? Annul the vote!

Viddy: Dan Dennett on dangerous memes | Video on TED.com

This was snarky but pretty funny: Rantings of a Sandmonkey » The speech!

For everything including intel, oil and other items, you can't miss Sic Semper Tyrannis including Korea War - Round 2 part 2 by Neil Richardson and the referenced article about the new DARPA-drawn tactics such as secret tracker chips at "A New Kind of War Part 1" Richard Sale.

Bloody New Battles Suit Israel by Mel Frykberg -- Antiwar.com

For more on the Israel stuff, DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security is annoyed. DEBKA is written by weird Israeli intelligence people or something -- its a classic grains of salt source.

DEBKA on Lebanon spy rollup: This is a funny story about the Lebanese using fancy French gear to bust up the Israeli spies in Lebanon:

Tuesday, June 2, Beirut announced 9 more suspected spies had been detained with another haul of communications equipment and encoded computers. Western intelligence experts say all the Lebanese counter-espionage officers have to do is install the French bugs in one sector after another, wait for it to signal the presence of electronic gear and then pick up its holder. This accounts for their sudden success in rounding up alleged spies. Suspects who have dumped their equipment in time have managed to escape detection.

The harm to Western intelligence from Lebanese president's breach of promise to Paris has ramifications: Beirut has just passed its findings together with the captured electronic paraphernalia to Syrian and Iranian intelligence, handing them the data for overhauling their defenses against foreign espionage.

Urgent inquiries are now flying between Washington and Paris to find out how Western spy agencies operating in Lebanon came to relax their guard and failed to discover their exposure to the French bugs misused against parties against which Sakrozy meant no harm.

Either way, both Washington and Paris are forced to admit that, in the final reckoning, no office-holder in Lebanon may be trusted.

So it was OK for the French bugs to be used against Hezbollah, a domestic force, but foreign spies were supposed to be unbothered. That seems like a really fair deal.

The Egyptians also rolled up a bunch of sketchy Russians too, before Obama's speech. Another false flag possibility, or just another WMR conspiracy theory? June 1, 2009 - Did Egypt roll up a plot directed against Obama? - Wayne Madsen Report

The students rounded up in Egypt were asked about the sources of their money. It appears that the Russian students apprehended were not part of an official Russian and Egypt student program. The Council of Muftis of Russia stated that none of the Russian students taken into custody by the Egyptians were at Al-Azhar as part of any officially-sanctioned program of the council. Many of the students detained were at the university in violation of the visa regime in place and were not registered with Russian Muslim authorities. [.......]

On January 11, 2009, we reported on the supply of weapons to Hamas from Russian-Israeli mafia circles in Israel. WMR also reported on the strong links between Russian-Israeli mob tycoon Boris Berezovsky and the late Russian intelligence officer Alexander Litvinenko, who died in London from polonium-210 poisoning, and Chechen guerrillas who were responsible for a number of terrorist attacks aimed at destabilizing the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

According to Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov, Berezovsky, in a major false flag operation, funded Chechen guerrillas by having Chechen warlords Shamil Basayev, Movladi Udugov, and Salman Raduyev kidnap people so that Berezovsky could finance them through the payment of ransoms totaling into the millions of dollars. Western intelligence linked "Al Qaeda" units to the Chechens funded by Berezovsky, providing yet another link between the Russian-Israel Mafia and "Al Qaeda." Berezovsky was also accused by Chechen leaders of financing extreme Wahhabi Kavkaz-TV television broadcasts designed to stir up anti-Russian passions among Chechen's Muslims. The Russian-Israeli fugitive billionaire, who enjoys asylum in Britain, was also linked to various Chechen terrorist attacks in Moscow. Berezovsky also supported Islamist radicals in the neighboring Russian Republic of Ingushetia, where some of the Chechen guerrillas found refuge.

The involvement of Russian Muslims in the Egyptian investigation of a potential threat against Obama, at the same time of souring relations between the Obama administration and Israel's government, which includes the extreme right-wing Moldovan-Israeli mob boss Avigdor Lieberman as Foreign Minister, is a strong indication that whatever the Egyptians uncovered about a threat against the President may have had "false flag" fingerprints all over it.

Using Russian and central Asian Muslims in Cairo in a false flag operation diected against Obama would have generated a backlash against Muslims and Arabs, something that Obama is trying to reverse by his speech and very presence in Cairo, and engendered both sympathy for Israel's Likud government and hostility towards Muslims from Egypt and Palestine to central Asia.

It is also likely that the Egyptian security services were tipped off by their American counterparts before the raid on Al-Azhar students. The question posed by the Egyptians to the Russians and other central Asians whether they planned a repeat of the Hussein Square bombing in February was likely prompted by either signals intelligence (SIGINT) intercepts by the National Security Agency (NSA), human intelligence evidence, or a combination of the two. A bombing anywhere in Cairo during Obama's visit would create a media frenzy that would place Egypt and Obama's wider Muslim and Arab audience in a bad light.

WHO CARES ABOUT OBL?! MORE FAKE PSYOPS VIDEO FOR FUN?: Plus just this week there were some videos supposedly from Osama bin Laden but it's kinda funny that nobody cares because the videos seem vaguely fake or irrelevant. Even gung-ho CNN seems depressed about the info punch -- an increasing trend as the War on Terror info memes burned themselves out. See Hongpong.com post on Anomalies with videos like this from exactly a year ago!

Obama took his shots at 9/11 Islamic conspiracy theories. As Jon Stewart aptly pointed out Thursday evening, he's trying to ease aside the militants in order to get engagement going with these societies. [So let's just lay conspiracies aside, and git er done... why not?]

200906050259.jpgSurely these awesome videos no one looks at anymore do not have watermarks from the IntelCenter, a shady op setup by one of Rumsfeld's go-to PSYOPS dudes, Jim Melnick. (as WIRED reported they got caught layering/messing with video logos apparently, see PrisonPlanet for a big pile of stuff on how this works, earlier Rummy stuff. etc etc)

[[Vague Backstory: Entities like IntelCenter are 4th Generation Information Warfare Fake News Machine or something, like MEMRI and the "SITE Institute", two spots that also peddle info products designed to suit the Beltway Hawk / neocon intel treadmill in Washington [PSYOPS agenda, stovepiping etc]. Slashdot last August on Tracking the Terrorists Online (in a bullshit way, it turns out).]]

Finally The Cost Of Winning In Minnesota | The Onion - America's Finest News Source. No better source. Only satire can save us now!

Pirate Bay Trial and Kopimi: The Kopimi Manifesto

Submitted by HongPong on Mon, 2009-03-02 08:24

I can't say I get it. But I like it. In these apocalyptic and bitchy times, it is high time to get some sarcastic Swedish hacker philsophy out there. Now is the time. The spectrial is apparently the place.

How could we forget the Pirate Bay Spectrial?! They released a Pirate Bay Manifesto - POwr, Broccoli and Kopimi. I don't really get it but I'm lazy.

But I like the idea of “Though seeded in prehistory, Kopimi is rooted in the future, and holds together a constantly vibrating avalanche of knowledge that forms the foundation for a discussion indifferent to the rippling changes of time and space,” reads the prelude of the manifesto." Here are some new commandments for everyone! (Kopimi homepage) VIA Spectrial » We just released a book!

************

Mackt, NET SECRET, broccoli, and KOPIMI

MAckt, —-, Broccoli, and KOPIMI

Kopimi

Internets 2009

/join #kopimi

According to Kopimi, all truths can be summarized in a single sentence: “the Internet is right”.

With prehistoric seeds, Kopimi roots itself in the future, holding together a vibrating avalanche of knowledge, creating the foundation of for a discussion untouched by the lashing shifts of time and space. A tumult where there’s no right to remain silent, you’ll have to talk to everyone.

Flocking, swarming, and noisy, we sow ourselves in new context and grow. This book is a spontaneously organised cluster swarm project with a single purpose — Kopimi will intensify, multiply, condensate. We want to reach further into ourselfs and into Kopimi. We want to penetrate into you and into the future.

Our words will, at the same time, sound like madness to deaf ears, and lovely caresses for those who see and hear, but above all: they will stick to you, you in particular — and your mother. This is a book for you who live in the moment, but seek your way forward through the ages.

001. Get the internet.

002. Start using irc.

003. Cluster, and give birth to a site.

004. Experiment with research chemicals.

005. Make a three-step program.

006. Take a powerful stand for something positive and indispensible.

007. Don’t regulate anything.

008. Say you’re going to move in two weeks, but stay seven months. Come back a year later and do the same thing.

009. Rotflol.

010. Relax, you’re already halfway there.

011. Justkiddingwithya.

012. Don’t think outside the box. Build a box.

013. Support support.

014. Make and attend parties and fairs.

015. Start 30-40 blogs about the asme things.

016. Drain the private sector of coders, graphic artists and literati.

017. Create a prize that !!som delas ut.

018. Often express youself, vaguely, in the media.

019. Spread all rumors.

020. Seek out and try [--kortning--?], and travel by expensive trains. Don’t order sushi.

021. Start a radio channel.

022. Everything you use, you can copy and give an arbitrary name, whether it’s a news portalk, search engine or public service.

023. Buy a bus.

024. Install a megahal.

025. Make sure you’re really good friends with people knowledgeble in photoshop, html, databases, and the likes of it.

026. Read a shitload of philosophy.

027. Give yourself cult status, and act accordingly.

028. Never aim.

029. Mess with everybody.

030. Invent or misuse Kopimi.

031. Do things together like an aggregation, not a collective.

032. Make your advertising confusingly similar to that of established ventures.

033. Always act with intent.

034. Claim, in all contexts, that the establishment is lagging.

035. When critizised, blame others and refer to the nonlinear time constitution swarm hierarchiality of the clustered formations.

036. Send everything to all media, no matter what niche.

037. Start an anonymous confession venture.

038. Make babies and blog their upbringing.

039. Make sure to closely study and keep ajour with substances.

040. Vividly participate in internet discussions that don’t interest you.

041. Start at least three to four irc channels about every project.

042. Fight and make up often.

043. Share files with everybody who wants to.

044. Do humor sites a lot.

045. Hang out with the left, the right, and the liberals.

046. See 23 in everything.

047. Flirt with money.

048. Very seldom by afk.

049. Threaten large American culture corporations.

050. Broadcast radio from Skäggetorp.

051. Make a 100 list of a successful project.

052. Don’t be sure about the name of the list.

053. Assume responsibility for a lot of projects.

054. Make sure to be connected to technical, aestethical, and philosophical competence of world class.

055. Regularly sleep over at each other.

056. Publish a book about Kopimi.

057. At a trial, deny everything.

058. Cultivate unfounded myths and react to them.

059. Hack sites, email accounts, and other things.

060. Always taunt and ridicule all aspects of Copyright.

061. Create an internet site where people can buy and sell votes in democratic elections.

062. I are serious cat; this is serious point!!1

063. Collect money for fraux’ trip to Iceland.

064. Confidently clain that all disconnected computers are broken.

065. DON’T go to Kurdistan.

066. Make sure to thoroughly found the claim all hardware is overpriced.

067. Affirm all words and signs.

068. Mindfuck each other to appropriate extent.

069. Care for smojyr.

070. Create and spiritualize the “snel hest” meme.

071. Found and own a think-tank.

072. Deny magnetism.

073. Found a business school. Drop out.

074. Write many press releases.

075. Use irc in underwear, and eat pizza.

076. Juggle with other people’s balls.

077. Make sure there is binding proof of Ikko giving monki advertising money by meand of volada’s helicopter.

078. Cause inflation and global financial crisis.

079. Be vague if anybody asks for the price of a bandwidth.

080. Use “dynamic” to mean “out of control”.

081. Never mention Hotmail, MSN, or Windows.

082. Conduct all project meetings on irc.

083. Claim to receive about 1265 emails a day.

084. Force a prosecutor to collate several thousand pages of claptrap.

085. Overly abstract everything.

086. Keep a liberal opinion of hell.

087. Consider yourselves overly qualified for top positions in American movie and music industry.

088. Create the world’s largest filesharing service over a night.

089. Attract international attention by mistake.

090. Control and dismiss opinion makers of all media.

091. At all levels, standardize the explanation of your modus operandi.

092. Keep 3567 anonymous confessions on your harddrive. Including the IP numbers and personal information of the authors.

093. Save the Internet.

094. Use the Internet as a source in serious discussions.

095. Seldom or never explain your IT elitism.

096. Dismiss expressions like [---?] as superstition.

097. Follow the yellow fellow.

098. Skip the last point of your 100 list.

099. Establish the Social services as a parody of the Asocial services.

100. Restart.

100. Mind burning kittens.

100. Write a book, but beginn with the cover text.

100. PROFIT.

/clear

In the shadow of the final crisis of the cultural industry in the 21st century, a larger picture grows of powehr, broccoli, and Kopimi. Every step of the failures of the cultural business is followed by the spooky successes and structurally diffuse spread of an Internet elite, all over the world. The book you’re reading has no author, no designer, no typesetter, and no means of distribution. Still it’s right before you. How did this happen?

Read the frightening instructions that a loosely connected nucleus of IT experts implanted into the network existance of an unsuspecting generation of youths, and about how the group stole the eggs, dollarsh, and jpegs away, right before the very eyes of the establishment, and powerful financial interests. Read about how serversh, seedersh, traeckers, mails, corporate contracts, foreign inverstors, Ikko’s allowance, scandalous ads, links, and search engines infiltrated and ruined a world, that had nobody to turn to, nobody to seek advice from, and nobody to trust…

This machine that is operationg below radar frequencies, moves unhindered from the jungle’s of Cambodia to the gay … of San Fransisco, by the empty beaches of Tel-Aviv, and into the internet connections of regular people of the suburbs to Jönköping or the harbour of Göteborg. It leaves nobody untouched and destroys everything in its way. Technically superior and physically independent, it continually transforms, metamorphoses, and reappears, in everchanging incarnations and under different code names. While strangling it’s opponents, it remains untouchable, and even more so — incomprehensible.

It has been said that this is the first time Kopimi frees the world, but we can rest assured that it will not be the last.

Leon Panetta and Bill Richardson dance the dance: Are there any Democratic governors *not* getting spied upon by DOJ??

Submitted by HongPong on Mon, 2009-01-05 21:50

I previously went out on a bit of a limb to point out that the Blagojevich case was rather dubious - mainly since the all-encompassing nationwide atmosphere of corruption makes his crude pay-for-play look rather small and isolated in comparison. Too isolated.

These guys think too small: if you want to get away with it, Bush style, connect it to everything. Play an Abramoff - get a piece of every bit of conspiracy, foreign and domestic, you can possibly touch. [Nice chart!] Blagojevich should have gone way bigger to really 'win.'

As it turns out, Democratic governors appear to basically live in the crosshairs of ongoing wiretaps and private intelligence/prostitution schemes. To Spitzer, Blagojevich and the utterly blacked-out-of-the-media Alabama ex-gov Don Siegelman, we can now add Bill Richardson to the honor roll of targets.

Richardson gets double bonus National Security Agency panopticon bonus points: some time ago, the NSA used a "training exercise" to snoop on him, and passed the materials out to other agencies and in particular Supreme Neocon Tool John Bolton, who was playing a dirty Info Ops game to spy upon his far more diplomatically skilled (and much hated) rival.

In my book, when John Bolton is abusing the NSA's spy apparatus to fuck with you, that means you're doing SOMETHING right. Hence, I casually supported Richardson for president.

Back in 2005: NSA Intercepts: Bill Richardson's Name Emerges - The Washington Note

What I do have from a confidential and highly placed source is at least one name who appears in the NSA documents, and it is someone I had not previously considered.

Quite astoundingly, reports are that Governor Bill Richardson -- who previously served as a Member of the U.S. Congress, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and as Secretary of Energy -- was named in the transcripts dealing with diplomatic efforts he was making with North Korea.

I suspect that Ambassador Charles "Jack" Pritchard, our previous envoy for negotiations with North Korea, is also part of the NSA intercepts package -- but the Richardson revelation is new.

The mainstream press is going to have to do its own digging on this one, but there are sources out there who have some knowledge of the intercepts.

Evidently, now Democratic governors get to be wiretapped all the live-long day - mainly because they're not Wall Street's buddies, it appears. I have yet to see any of the more square corporate cats get smushed by these intelligence and wiretapping-powered stings. I wonder why.

More: Steve Clemons: John Bolton & NSA Intercepts: The Connection That Mattered Was International

Bill Richardson thinks he was monitored. I am not sure, but Bolton would have had an interest in what Richardson was doing with the North Koreans. It is not clear to me why it would be inappropriate to monitor North Korean interactions with anyone, including Richardson -- whose name would have been redacted from the intercepts. What does bother me was Bolton's interest in a policy area as well as the names of specific people in an arena he had been fenced off from. Bolton was working overtime to undermine Colin Powell and staff on its Korea Peninsula diplomacy...

This story is no longer online: The Albuquerque Tribune: Did NSA tap Dem Gov Richardson’s phone?

WASHINGTON - Gov. Bill Richardson is concerned that some of his phone calls were monitored by a U.S. spy agency and transcripts of them were given to the president’s nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton.

Richardson called Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, to express his concerns after Dodd revealed that Bolton had on 10 occasions asked the National Security Agency for the intercepts of phone conversations involving Americans.

[snip] Sparks said Richardson’s call to Dodd was triggered when he read an online story by Washington journalist Wayne Madsen. The story said intelligence community “insiders” claim the NSA circumvented a ban on domestic surveillance by asserting that the intercepted calls were part of “training missions.”

Ohhh nooes Wayne Madsen exp0sed Neocon espionage skeme! [It might not be a coincidence that Richardson is not seen as a great buddy of AIPAC, getting this kind of heat on him...]

And now Richardson gets the boot from Washington -- no longer able to play the check against Hillary and the Great Washington Dumb Hawk contingent likely to congeal into her orbit.

[Hilary Mann Leverett, an old intel hand, just agreed with exactly my point about Hillary's dumb buddies on MSNBC Countdown. Neenar neenar...]

Meanwhile the Senate's top intel Dems Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller were forced to bitch about Leon Panetta getting appointed to run the CIA. Didn't see that coming. Anyway it's probably good - Feinstein and Rockefeller have let everything go to hell and have a LOT of explaining to do.

Feinstein not told about CIA pick - First Read - msnbc.com

I have not heard much of Panetta referred to negatively out in the antiwar land and even the shadowland of mirrors, AKA Internet conspiracy country. So that's probably good. It will definitely not be the normal Porter Goss style empire of corruption.

I have a conflicted angle on the Caroline Kennedy thing. Maybe she ticks off Hillary, who would have preferred a subordinate pawn in that seat. That would not be so bad, as we'd hope Kennedy has indeed a Clinton-independent power base. On the other hand, DNA dynasties suck, and have infested the body politic in this country.

There are a lot more layers going on - however we will see an interesting intersection or perhaps Limited Hang-Out as these staff levels roll over, and likely federal wiretaps continue to roam around, unable to persuade Grand Juries of their awesomeness.

It's like a really awesome episode of The Wire... Dammit McNulty!

James Bamford in NSA book The Shadow Factory: Israeli contractors break into U.S. wiretapping systems (told ya so)

Submitted by HongPong on Sat, 2008-11-29 18:39

After my recent weird electronic intelligence/espionage rant, along comes further news of the Israeli contractors that have broken into the U.S. domestic wiretapping systems and compromised their security. James Bamford's new book about the National Security Agency, The Shadow Factory, gets into why this is all such a mess, and the Israelis are kind of annoyed about it. Way to go, Comverse Infosys!!

More about Press Release: The Shadow Factory by James Bamford | Doubleday:

THE SHADOW FACTORY is organized into two parts: first, a gripping narrative of how NSA missed a chance to thwart two of the 9/11 hijackers once they reached our shores, and second, a detailed portrait of how NSA has tried to make sure that will never happen again. With an exacting level of detail and previously unreported sources, Bamford reveals exactly how every American’s data is being mined–every phone call and email—and by whom, and what is being done with it. Any reader who thinks America’s liberties are being protected by Congress will be shocked and appalled at what is revealed in THE SHADOW FACTORY......

  • Bamford details how NSA picked up the very first clue to the 9/11 attacks by eavesdropping on a house in Yemen that served as Osama bin Laden’s operations center—and then dropped the ball. Despite intercepting communications between the Yemen ops center and the terrorists in San Diego for nearly a year, the agency never realized that they were actually in the U.S.

  • Bamford explains how the terrorists were able to set up their final base of operations almost next door to NSA Headquarters and communicate with the Middle East without NSA even having a clue. Thus, as the agency was searching the world for the terrorists, they were almost within eyesight of the director’s eighth-floor office in Laurel, Maryland, NSA’s “company town.” For nearly a month, the terrorists worked out in the same gyms, ate at the same fast-food restaurants, and shopped at the same supermarkets as the eavesdroppers at NSA. At the same time senior officials at NSA were meeting to discuss how to locate them, Mohammed Atta and many of the others were just across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway meeting to finalize their plans and sending money and messages back to the Middle East at the local Kinkos and Safeway.

  • Bamford shows how, following the attacks and the White House order to begin warrantless eavesdropping, NSA began a massive expansion and for the first time since the early 1970s, began turning its giant parabolic antennas inward in the American people. Bamford reveals a very secret listening post in Georgia, near the South Carolina border, that began eavesdropping on the communications of Americans—including journalists engaged in intimate conversations with their spouses – without a warrant and without any indication of terrorism. This was all done remotely—with hidden antennas in the Middle East controlled by the NSA “voice interceptors” at the Georgia listening post. Bamford shows how the eavesdroppers sit at their stations, often with two earphones on each ear listening to four frequencies at the same time, while hitting recorders, scanning for signals and typing out transcripts. Bamford also chillingly describes how the NSA picked up the satellite phone call of a terrorist driving with others in a remote part of Yemen. Within seconds of recognizing his voice, they notified the CIA, which had a Predator drone in the area and fired a missile killing the caller and five other occupants of the car—including an American citizen. It was the NSA’s first assassination.

  • Bamford tells how NSA, because of changing technology, must now work out secret and potentially illegal agreements with the telecom industry in order to get access to both domestic U.S. communications and much of the world’s phone calls and e-mail. The NSA and the industry—principally Verizon and AT&T—secretly work together to tap into the company’s key trunk lines. And in what will likely come as a shock to many, the companies have outsourced the actual tapping to several little known foreign companies. These companies have the capability to remotely tap into what amounts to virtually the entire U.S. telecom system from anywhere in the world. The founder and former CEO of one of these companies is now a fugitive from the U.S. hiding out in Africa, and the general counsel and other executives have been charged with theft, money laundering and other crimes. Yet despite this track record and their foreign connections, the telecom companies continue to have secret access to much of America’s most private communications.

  • Bamford illustrates the many ways in which NSA gains access to much of the world’s communications. A key way is by gaining access to the major Internet “switches,” both in the U.S. and around the world. For example, there is a fortress-like building on a downtown street in Miami that has no name and no windows, yet 90 percent of all Caribbean, Central American and South American communications pass through it. Even a call made across the same South American town will likely be routed through the Miami building. Thus, with access to the building—run by a private company—NSA would have instant access to the communications, both phone and Internet, for an entire continent. The same is true for much of Africa’s communications—it passes through a single switch overseas. Bamford also reveals how the NSA makes secret agreements with these companies for access. And for those cables where it can’t gain company cooperation, it has a specially built submarine designed to sit on the bottom of the ocean floor and tap into foreign cables.

  • Bamford discusses how, once NSA has collected it all, the agency engages in sophisticated data mining techniques as it looks for links between callers and e-mail recipients. NSA is setting up a secret new data center in Texas with over 1,200 personnel to store and mine billions of communications. Interestingly, it is just a few miles from where Microsoft is also building a very large data center of exactly the same size. Under current law, NSA could gain access to Microsoft’s stored data without even a warrant—just a short fiber optic cable. To some, data mining produces about as much intelligence as reading tea leaves but others argue it could have provided the clue that might have led investigators to 9/11. Finally, Bamford explores how useful the entire enterprise—both eavesdropping and data mining—really is. For all the money and loss of privacy, is anything worthwhile coming from it? How many terrorist incidents has the program actually stopped, if any? And where does it end—with everyone’s phone calls, e-mail and Internet searches stored forever in some windowless Texas building?

Here's the item from the awesome Israeli paper Haaretz:

Is Israel's booming high-tech industry a branch of the Mossad? By Yossi Melman (October 16th 2008)

In 2006 the Check Point Software Technologies company, which specializes in protecting computer systems from hackers and data theft, wanted to acquire an American company called Sourcefire, which works in the same field. The great advantage of Sourcefire was that its clients include the American Defense Department and the National Security Agency. The U.S. administration, however, by means of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, did not approve the acquisition.

The committee made its decision based on an opinion by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and NSA security officers. The two organizations were afraid that Check Point, which was founded by Gil Shwed and fellow graduates of Unit 8200, the Israel Defense Forces' high-tech intelligence unit, would have access to top-secret information, which it could pass on to Israel's intelligence community.

The fear and suspicion currently is directed not only toward Check Point, but also other Israeli high-tech companies like Verint, Comverse, NICE Systems and PerSay Voice Biometrics, some of which work in data mining and engage in software development for tapping telephones, fax machines, e-mail and computer communications.

The above accusations come from journalist and writer James Bamford, whose new book, "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America" (Doubleday), came out this week in the United States.

Bamford, a former producer for the ABC television network, has spent the last 30 years writing about the NSA - one of the most important and least-known intelligence agencies in the United States, but usually in the shadow of the Central Intelligence Agency. The NSA is responsible for eavesdropping on telephones, fax machines and computers; intercepting communications and electromagnetic signals from radar equipment, aircraft, missiles, ships and submarines; and decoding transmissions and cracking codes. It has contributed immeasurably to U.S. intelligence and national security.

In this respect, the United States resembles Israel: Successes attributed to the Mossad should often be credited to other intelligence units - first and foremost Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA.

This is Bamford's third book, and it affords a look into the mazes of the NSA. In 1982 the Justice department threatened to prosecute him for revealing agency secrets in his first book, "The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization." In his second book, "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency," he described the NSA with a great deal of enthusiasm, which made him the organization's hero of the day. The NSA even organized a party in his honor at headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. His new book, which is critical of the NSA, has sent him back to his starting point.

Bamford's main thesis is that before September 11, 2001, the agency failed along with other intelligence agencies in understanding the Al-Qaida threat, even though it had intercepted members' phone calls and e-mails. This stemmed in part from excessive caution for upholding laws and respecting citizens' privacy. In April 2000, then-NSA director general Michael Hayden (currently the director of the CIA), vividly described to a Congressional committee how, if at that very moment Osama bin Laden were to step onto the Peace Bridge at Niagara Falls and cross into the United States, "my people must respect his rights."

After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the organization swung over to the other extreme. According to Bamford, since September 11 the NSA has had no compunctions about violating the Constitution and has been eavesdropping on American citizens.

One of the outstanding examples in the book, which has been well-covered in the American media, is the fact that the NSA has listened in on bedroom conversations of journalists, military officers and officials serving in Iraq. The NSA may eavesdrop on and intercept transmissions outside the United States, but cannot do so to American citizens without a court order.

Another of Bamford's important assertions, which also concerns Israel, is that the largest telephony and communications companies in the United States - in fact all of them except QWEST - have cooperated with the NSA, allowing it to tap their lines and optic fibers.

The above-mentioned Israeli companies and others are important software and technology suppliers for not only the American telephony companies, but for the NSA itself. Bamford claims that 80 percent of all American telephone transmissions are conducted by means of the Israeli companies' technology, know-how and accessibility. Thus, Bamford believes, the American intelligence community is exposing itself to the risk that the Israeli companies will access its most secret and sensitive digital information.

Bamford does not provide any backing for this thesis; he only points to a circumstantial relationship. The Israeli companies were largely established by graduates of 8200, and therefore he says they are connected by their umbilical cords to Israeli intelligence, and their CEOs and boards of directors include senior Shin Bet officials like Arik Nir or former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy (Nir is the CEO of Athlone Global Security, a hedge fund that has invested inter alia in PerSay Voice Biometrics, and Ephraim Halevy is a member of the Athlone Advisory Board).

To put it mildly, Bamford has no love lost for Israel. In his articles, he publishes claims by American Navy officials who believe Israel maliciously attacked the American spy ship Liberty during the 1967 Six-Day War. He holds that the September 11 attack did not stem from radical Islam's basic hatred of America, but rather from its anger at the United States' support for Israel. He calls the nineteen September 11 terrorists "soldiers" and describes them with a great deal of sympathy - Davids who "only" demolished four airplanes of the American Goliath.

In this context, and apparently because of his deep hostility, Bamford asserts that in light of the problematic record of Israel, which did not hesitate to spy against America on American soil, Israeli companies should not have been given the keys to the kingdom of America's secrets. His attitude toward Israel apparently pushes him over the psychological brink, as his book hardly mentions the close cooperation between the two countries' intelligence communities, mainly in the war against international jihad terror or in monitoring Iran.

And thus, the battle to fish out the foreign intelligence backdoors continues, likely with the backing of NSA staffers who have had enough of this bullshit.

I HAVE to read Bamford's book when i get some time. w000!

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