Information operations

There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior. To those of us who have lived under a totalitarian regime, there is an eerie feeling of déjà vu. This case, if any, deserves the comprehensive, mature and diverse consideration that an en banc panel can provide. We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania.
--Kozinski Chief LOLcat of the 9th Circuit

Via Chief Judge of 9th Circuit: “1984 here at last,” especially for poor. | Dailycensored.com -

So frequently these authoritarians schemes get one greenlight after another. This dissent nails down a wide variety of problems, from GPS spying to the distinct pattern of only appointing rich people with rich friends to the judiciary. This is a really nice dissent from Chief Judge Kozinski, who is regarded apparently as a bomb-throwing libertarian.

I'll post it in full, because we gotta pay some respect when one of these cats actually earns his paycheck.

******

VIA Laws, Life, and Legal Matters - Court Cases and Legal Information at Leagle.com - All Federal and State Appeals Court Cases in One Search

See also: Judges Divided Over Growing GPS Surveillance - NYTimes.com

U.S. v. PINEDA-MORENO

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Plaintiff-Appellee,
v.
JUAN PINEDA-MORENO, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 08-30385.

United States Court of Appeals, Ninth Circuit.

Filed August 12, 2010.

Before: Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain and N. Randy Smith, Circuit Judges, and Charles R. Wolle, Senior District Judge.[1 ]

Order; Dissent by Chief Judge Kozinski, Dissent by Judge Reinhardt.

The petition for rehearing en banc is DENIED.

ORDER

Judges O'Scannlain and N.R. Smith have voted to deny the petition for rehearing en banc, and Judge Wolle has so recommended.

The full court was advised of the petition for rehearing en banc. A judge requested a vote on whether to rehear the matter en banc, and the matter failed to receive a majority of the votes of the nonrecused active judges in favor of en banc consideration. Fed. R. App. P. 35.

Chief Judge KOZINSKI, with whom Judges REINHARDT, WARDLAW, PAEZ and BERZON join, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:

Having previously decimated the protections the Fourth Amendment accords to the home itself, United States v.Lemus, 596 F.3d 512 (9th Cir. 2010) (Kozinski, C.J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc); United Statesv. Black, 482 F.3d 1044 (9th Cir. 2007) (Kozinski, J., dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc), our court now proceeds to dismantle the zone of privacy we enjoy in the home's curtilage and in public. The needs of law enforcement, to which my colleagues seem inclined to refuse nothing, are quickly making personal privacy a distant memory. 1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it's here at last.

The facts are disturbingly simple: Police snuck onto Pineda-Moreno's property in the dead of night and attached a GPS tracking device to the underside of his car. The device continuously recorded the car's location, allowing police to monitor all of Pineda-Moreno's movements without the need for visual surveillance. The panel holds that none of this implicates the Fourth Amendment, even though the government concedes that the car was in the curtilage of Pineda-Moreno's home at the time the police attached the tracking device. The panel twice errs in very significant and dangerous ways.

1. The opinion assumes that Pineda-Moreno's driveway was part of his home's curtilage, yet concludes that Pineda-Moreno had no reasonable expectation of privacy there. Curtilage is a quaint word most people are not familiar with; even among judges and lawyers, the word is seldom well understood. Yet, it stands for a very important concept because it rounds out the constitutional protections accorded an individual when he is at home.

Curtilage comes to us by way of Middle English and traces its roots to the Old French courtillage, roughly meaning court or little yard. In modern times it has come to mean those portions of a homeowner's property so closely associated with the home as to be considered part of it. The walkway leading from the street to the house is probably part of the curtilage, and the stairs from the walkway to the porch almost certainly are, as is the porch where grandma sits and rocks most afternoons and watches strangers pass by. The attached garage on the side of the house is part of the curtilage, and so is the detached shed where dad keeps his shop equipment and mom her gardening tools—so long as it's not too far from the house itself. The front lawn is part of the curtilage, and the driveway and the backyard—if it's not too big, and is properly separated from the open fields beyond the house.

Whether some portion of property—the porch, the stairs, the shed, the yard, the chicken coop—is part of the curtilage is sometimes a disputed question. But once it is determined that something is part of the curtilage, it's entitled to precisely the same Fourth Amendment protections as the home itself. How do we know? Because the Supreme Court has said so repeatedly.

In Oliver v. United States, the Court said as follows:

[O]nly the curtilage . . . warrants the Fourth Amendment protections that attach to the home. At common law, the curtilage is the area to which extends the intimate activity associated with the "sanctity of a man's home and the privacies of life," and therefore has been considered part of home itself for Fourth Amendment purposes. Thus, courts have extended Fourth Amendment protection to the curtilage.

466 U.S. 170, 180 (1984) (quoting Boyd v. United States, 116 U.S. 616, 630 (1886)) (emphasis added). Three years later, the Court reiterated the same view in United States v. Dunn, 480 U.S. 294, 300 (1987):

[In Oliver] we recognized that the Fourth Amendment protects the curtilage of a house and that the extent of the curtilage is determined by factors that bear upon whether an individual reasonably may expect that the area in question should be treated as the home itself.

(Emphasis added). See also Dow Chemical Co. v. United States, 476 U.S. 227, 231 (1986) (citing Oliver, 466 U.S. at 170). There's no disputing that the Court considers the curtilage to stand on the same footing as the home itself for purposes of the Fourth Amendment.

While it can be unclear whether a particular portion of the homeowner's property is part of the curtilage, there's no doubt here because the government concedes that Pineda-Moreno's driveway is a part of his curtilage, and the panel expressly assumes that it is. United States v. Pineda-Moreno, 591 F.3d 1212, 1214-15 (9th Cir. 2010). Having made that assumption, Oliver and Dunn require the panel to "treat[ ] [it] as the home itself." Dunn, 480 U.S. at 300. Instead, the panel holds that Pineda-Moreno was required to separately establish a reasonable expectation of privacy in the curtilage. That— according to Oliver and Dunn—is like requiring the homeowner to establish a reasonable expectation of privacy in his bedroom. We are often reminded that we must follow Supreme Court precedent, see, e.g., Winn v. Ariz. Christian Sch. Tuition Org., 586 F.3d 649, 658-59 (9th Cir. 2009) (O'Scannlain, J., dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc), but the panel here forgets this advice.

The panel does cite California v. Ciraolo, 476 U.S. 207 (1986), but that case undermines its position. Ciraolo held that a homeowner has no reasonable expectation of visual privacy in his property as to activities that might be seen from a low-flying airplane. The activity there in question— cultivation of marijuana—took place in the homeowner's yard, so the Court could have limited its discussion to the curtilage. Instead, Ciraolo quoted a passage from Katz v.United States, 389 US. 347, 361 (1967), to the effect that "a man's home is, for most purposes, a place where he expects privacy, but objects, activities, or statements that he exposes to the `plain view' of outsiders are not `protected' because no intention to keep them to himself has been exhibited." Ciraolo, 476 U.S. at 215 (quoting Katz,389 U.S. at 361). This passage applies equally to a person's yard as his porch and his bedroom window: If what you do in your home is visible to the public, you have no reasonable expectation that it will remain private. Ciraolo citesOliver and follows its analysis by treating the curtilage and the home as exactly the same for Fourth Amendment purposes.

The panel's rationale for concluding that Pineda-Moreno had no reasonable expectation of privacy is even more worrisome than its disregard of Supreme Court precedent: According to the panel, Pineda-Moreno's driveway was open to the public in that strangers wishing to reach the door of his trailer "to deliver the newspaper or to visit someone would have to go through the driveway to get to the house." Pineda-Moreno, 591 F.3d at 1215. But there are many parts of a person's property that are accessible to strangers for limited purposes: the mailman is entitled to open the gate and deposit mail in the front door slot; the gas man may come into the yard, go into the basement or look under the house to read the meter; the gardener goes all over the property, climbs trees, opens sheds, turns on the sprinkler and taps into the electrical outlets; the pool man, the cable guy, the telephone repair man, the garbage collector, the newspaper delivery boy (we should be so lucky) come onto the property to deliver their wares, perform maintenance or make repairs. This doesn't mean that we invite neighbors to use the pool, strangers to camp out on the lawn or police to snoop in the garage. See United States v. Hedrick, 922 F.2d 396, 400, 402 (7th Cir. 1991) (Cudahy, J., dissenting).

The panel authorizes police to do not only what invited strangers could, but also uninvited children—in this case crawl under the car to retrieve a ball and tinker with the undercarriage. But there's no limit to what neighborhood kids will do, given half a chance: They'll jump the fence, crawl under the porch, pick fruit from the trees, set fire to the cat and micturate on the azaleas. To say that the police may do on your property what urchins might do spells the end of Fourth Amendment protections for most people's curtilage.

The very rich will still be able to protect their privacy with the aid of electric gates, tall fences, security booths, remote cameras, motion sensors and roving patrols, but the vast majority of the 60 million people living in the Ninth Circuit will see their privacy materially diminished by the panel's ruling. Open driveways, unenclosed porches, basement doors left unlocked, back doors left ajar, yard gates left unlatched, garage doors that don't quite close, ladders propped up under an open window will all be considered invitations for police to sneak in on the theory that a neighborhood child might, in which case, the homeowner "would have no grounds to complain." Id.

There's been much talk about diversity on the bench, but there's one kind of diversity that doesn't exist: No truly poor people are appointed as federal judges, or as state judges for that matter. Judges, regardless of race, ethnicity or sex, are selected from the class of people who don't live in trailers or urban ghettos. The everyday problems of people who live in poverty are not close to our hearts and minds because that's not how we and our friends live. Yet poor people are entitled to privacy, even if they can't afford all the gadgets of the wealthy for ensuring it. Whatever else one may say about Pineda-Moreno, it's perfectly clear that he did not expect— and certainly did not consent—to have strangers prowl his property in the middle of the night and attach electronic tracking devices to the underside of his car. No one does.

When you glide your BMW into your underground garage or behind an electric gate, you don't need to worry that somebody might attach a tracking device to it while you sleep. But the Constitution doesn't prefer the rich over the poor; the man who parks his car next to his trailer is entitled to the same privacy and peace of mind as the man whose urban fortress is guarded by the Bel Air Patrol. The panel's breezy opinion is troubling on a number of grounds, not least among them its unselfconscious cultural elitism.

2. After concluding that entering onto Pineda-Moreno's property and attaching a tracking device to his car required no warrant, probable cause, founded suspicion or by-your-leave from the homeowner, the panel holds that downloading the data from the GPS device, which gave police the precise locus of all of Pineda-Moreno's movements, also was not a search, and so police can do it to anybody, anytime they feel like it. Contra United Statesv. Maynard, No. 08-3030, slip op. at 19 (D.C. Cir. Aug. 6, 2010). Our panel relies on United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276 (1983), a case from the early 1980s, which involved very different technology.

The Knotts Court refers to the device used there as a "beeper" and describes it as "a radio transmitter, usually battery operated, which emits periodic signals that can be picked up by a radio receiver." Id. at 277. The beeper helped police follow a vehicle by emitting a signal that got stronger the closer the police were to it. The Court considered the beeper to be an aid to following a vehicle through traffic: "The governmental surveillance conducted by means of the beeper in this case amounted principally to the following of an automobile on public streets and highways." Id. at 281. Individuals traveling on streets and highways can be seen by the public, so they have no reasonable expectation that they won't be followed. The beeper helped the police follow the suspect more effectively—the way binoculars enhance the ability to see what is otherwise visible. But the beeper could perform no tracking on its own, nor could it record its location. If no one was close enough to pick up the signal, it was lost forever.

The electronic tracking devices used by the police in this case have little in common with the primitive devices inKnotts. One of the devices here used GPS satellites to pinpoint the car's location on a continuing basis—much like the electronic maps that are now popular in cars. The other type of device was, essentially, a cell phone that tracked the car's movements by its proximity to particular cell towers.

Beepers could help police keep vehicles in view when following them, or find them when they lost sight of them, but they still required at least one officer—and usually many more—to follow the suspect. The modern devices used in Pineda-Moreno's case can record the car's movements without human intervention—quietly, invisibly, with uncanny precision. A small law enforcement team can deploy a dozen, a hundred, a thousand such devices and keep track of their various movements by computer, with far less effort than was previously needed to follow a single vehicle. The devices create a permanent electronic record that can be compared, contrasted and coordinated to deduce all manner of private information about individuals. By holding that this kind of surveillance doesn't impair an individual's reasonable expectation of privacy, the panel hands the government the power to track the movements of every one of us, every day of our lives.

The Supreme Court has recognized that advances in "police technology [can] erode the privacy guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment." Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27, 34 (2001). To guard against this, courts "must take the long view, from the original meaning of the Fourth Amendment forward." Id. at 40. Kyllo followed a line of cases going back to United States v. Karo, 468 U.S. 705 (1984), Katz, 389 U.S. at 353, and Silverman v. United States,365 U.S. 505, 512 (1961), which stemmed the erosion of personal privacy wrought by technological advances.

In Kyllo, the Court held that use of a thermal imager to detect the heat emanating from defendant's home was a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment because the then-new technology enabled police to detect what was going on inside the home—activities the homeowner was entitled to consider private. Any other conclusion, the Court noted, "would leave the homeowner at the mercy of advancing technology—including imaging technology that could discern all human activity in the home." Kyllo, 533 U.S. at 35-36 (citing Karo, 468 U.S. at 705). "While the technology used in the present case was relatively crude," the Court continued, "the rule we adopt must take account of more sophisticated systems that are already in use or in development." Id. at 36. In determining whether the tracking devices used in PinedaMoreno's case violate the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy, we may not shut our eyes to the fact that they are just advance ripples to a tidal wave of technological assaults on our privacy.

If you have a cell phone in your pocket, then the government can watch you. Michael Isikoff, The Snitch in Your Pocket, Newsweek, Mar. 1, 2010, available at http:// www.newsweek.com/id/233916. At the government's request, the phone company will send out a signal to any cell phone connected to its network, and give the police its location. Last year, law enforcement agents pinged users of just one service provider—Sprint—over eight million times. SeeChristopher Soghoian, 8 Million Reasons for Real Surveillance Oversight, Slight Paranoia (Dec. 1, 2009) http://paranoia/dubfire. net/2009/12/8-million-reasons-for-real-surveillance.html. The volume of requests grew so large that the 110-member electronic surveillance team couldn't keep up, so Sprint automated the process by developing a web interface that gives agents direct access to users' location data. Id. Other cell phone service providers are not as forthcoming about this practice, so we can only guess how many millions of their customers get pinged by the police every year. See Justin Scheck, Stalkers Exploit Cellphone GPS, Wall St. J., Aug. 5, 2010, at A1, A14 (identifying AT&T and Verizon as providing "law-enforcement[ ] easy access to such data").

Use LoJack or OnStar? Someone's watching you too. E.g., OnStar Stolen Vehicle Assistance, http://www.onstar.com/ us_english/jsp/plans/sva.jsp (last visited July 17, 2010). And it's not just live tracking anymore. Private companies are starting to save location information to build databases that allow for hyper-targeted advertising. E.g., Andrew Heining, What's So Bad About the Google Street View Data Flap?, Christian Sci. Monitor, May 15, 2010, available at http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0515/What-s-sobad-about-the-Google-Street-View-data-flap. Companies are amassing huge, ready-made databases of where we've all been. If, as the panel holds, we have no privacy interest in where we go, then the government can mine these databases without a warrant, indeed without any suspicion whatsoever.

By tracking and recording the movements of millions of individuals the government can use computers to detect patterns and develop suspicions. It can also learn a great deal about us because where we go says much about who we are. Are Winston and Julia's cell phones together near a hotel a bit too often? Was Syme's OnStar near an STD clinic? Were Jones, Aaronson and Rutherford at that protest outside the White House? The FBI need no longer deploy agents to infiltrate groups it considers subversive; it can figure out where the groups hold meetings and ask the phone company for a list of cell phones near those locations.

The panel holds that the government can obtain this information without implicating the Fourth Amendment because an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements through public spaces where he might be observed by an actual or hypothetical observer. But that's quite a leap from what the Supreme Court actually held inKnotts, which is that you have no expectation of privacy as against police who are conducting visual surveillance, albeit "augmenting the sensory faculties bestowed upon them at birth with such enhancements as science and technology afford[s] them." 460 U.S. at 282.

You can preserve your anonymity from prying eyes, even in public, by traveling at night, through heavy traffic, in crowds, by using a circuitous route, disguising your appearance, passing in and out of buildings and being careful not to be followed. But there's no hiding from the all-seeing network of GPS satellites that hover overhead, which never sleep, never blink, never get confused and never lose attention. Nor is there respite from the dense network of cell towers that honeycomb the inhabited United States. Acting together these two technologies alone can provide law enforcement with a swift, efficient, silent, invisible and cheap way of tracking the movements of virtually anyone and everyone they choose. See, e.g., GPS Mini Tracker with Cell Phone Assist Tracker, http://www.spyville.com/passive-gps.html (last visited July 17, 2010). Most targets won't know they need to disguise their movements or turn off their cell phones because they'll have no reason to suspect that Big Brother is watching them.

The Supreme Court in Knotts expressly left open whether "twenty-four hour surveillance of any citizen of this country" by means of "dragnet-type law enforcement practices" violates the Fourth Amendment's guarantee of personal privacy. 460 U.S. at 283-84. When requests for cell phone location information have become so numerous that the telephone company must develop a self-service website so that law enforcement agents can retrieve user data from the comfort of their desks, we can safely say that "such dragnet-type law enforcement practices" are already in use. This is precisely the wrong time for a court covering one-fifth of the country's population to say that the Fourth Amendment has no role to play in mediating the voracious appetites of law enforcement. But see Maynard, slip op. at 19.

* * *

I don't think that most people in the United States would agree with the panel that someone who leaves his car parked in his driveway outside the door of his home invites people to crawl under it and attach a device that will track the vehicle's every movement and transmit that information to total strangers. There is something creepy and un-American about such clandestine and underhanded behavior. To those of us who have lived under a totalitarian regime, there is an eerie feeling of déjà vu. This case, if any, deserves the comprehensive, mature and diverse consideration that an en banc panel can provide. We are taking a giant leap into the unknown, and the consequences for ourselves and our children may be dire and irreversible. Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we're living in Oceania.

REINHARDT, Circuit Judge, dissenting from the denial of rehearing en banc:

I concur in Chief Judge Kozinski's dissent.

I have served on this court for nearly three decades. I regret that over that time the courts have gradually but deliberately reduced the protections of the Fourth Amendment to the point at which it scarcely resembles the robust guarantor of our constitutional rights we knew when I joined the bench. See Fisher v. City of San Jose, 558 F.3d 1069, 1089 (9th Cir. 2009) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Ankeny, 502 F.3d 829, 841 (9th Cir. 2007) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Crapser, 472 F.3d 1141, 1149 (9th Cir. 2007) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Gourde, 440 F.3d 1065, 1074 (9th Cir. 2006) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting);United States v. Kincade, 379 F.3d 813, 842 (9th Cir. 2004) (en banc) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Hudson, 100 F.3d 1409, 1421 (9th Cir. 1996) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); Acton v. Vernonia Sch. Dist. 47J, 66 F.3d 217, 218 (9th Cir. 1995) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Barona, 56 F.3d 1087, 1098 (9th Cir. 1995) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Kelley, 953 F.2d 562, 566 (9th Cir. 1992) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting);United States v. Alvarez, 899 F.2d 833, 840 (9th Cir. 1990) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting); United States v. Flores, 679 F.2d 173, 178 (9th Cir. 1982) (Reinhardt, J., dissenting).

These decisions have curtailed the "right of the people to be secure . . . against unreasonable searches and seizures" not only in our homes and surrounding curtilage, but also in our vehicles, computers, telephones, and bodies — all the way down to our bodily fluids and DNA.

Today's decision is but one more step down the gloomy path the current Judiciary has chosen to follow with regard to the liberties protected by the Fourth Amendment. Sadly, I predict that there will be many more such decisions to come.

I dissent.

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."

beta testing

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.

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:

• 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
• 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
• 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
• 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
• 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
• 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
• 7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
• 8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
• 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
• 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
• 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
• 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
• 13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
• 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
• 15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
• 16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
• 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
• 18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
• 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
• 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
• 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
• 22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
• 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
• 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
• 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon

I'm sure it was all an accident.

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.

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)

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....

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! ;-)

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:

Turner: “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

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

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?]

Surely 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!