The SNOWDEN Saga continues...

[gaiusmarius]

well lookee here what i found...

well lookee here what i found...

Glenn Greenwald working on new NSA revelations

By JENNY BARCHFIELD
Associated Press

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2013-09-28-20-46-34

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) -- Two American journalists known for their investigations of the United States' government said Saturday they've teamed up to report on the National Security Agency's role in what one called a "U.S. assassination program."

The journalists provided no evidence of the purported U.S. program at the news conference, nor details of who it targeted.

Jeremy Scahill, a contributor to The Nation magazine and the New York Times best-selling author of "Dirty Wars," said he will be working with Glenn Greenwald, the Rio-based journalist who has written stories about U.S. surveillance programs based on documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

"The connections between war and surveillance are clear. I don't want to give too much away but Glenn and I are working on a project right now that has at its center how the National Security Agency plays a significant, central role in the U.S. assassination program," said Scahill, speaking to moviegoers in Rio de Janeiro, where the documentary based on his book made its Latin American debut at the Rio Film Festival.

read the whole article by following the link above.

 

[mrcreosote]

Well thank God for that.
Glad to see someone taking over the assassination squads from those incompetent CIA fuckwits.

Having Castro walking around for 60 years is just a flat out embarrassment to the Agency.

You could get better results from hiring a random drunk to just drive around his neighborhood.

 

[Hydrosun]

actually, even if you don't pay much income tax, you still pay a lot of tax. every penny you spend is taxed. not 1 penny goes through your hands without the gov taking it's cut. working peoples salaries are robbed before they even see a penny. so yeah, it's misleading to say only 5% are paying taxes to do all the crap they are doing to us. it is indeed all the people paying for their enslavement. people just forget about all the other hidden taxes, but even worse is the stealth tax of inflation through massive injections of dollars into the system, which makes the buying power of the dollars get reduced.

the system has just become very good at hiding the taxes. some would even argue that all the fines being given out for everything under the sun, from too long grass to using rain water or selling your spare tomatoes, are all also a form of taxation. in the end what Hash Zeppelin said was perfectly correct. the people pay to be spied on, as well as all the rest of the gov actions.

The rich obtain their income through capitol gains which is taxed at a much lower rate. If you include payroll and sales taxes into the equation then the middle class is paying a much higher effective tax rate. But yes, since the rich have the billions the total sum adds up.

You are both correct. The payroll tax is a tax on the working man, used to pay for the NSA, Military, CIA, FBI, DEA, and IRS.

The other taxes you mention (sales tax, property tax, registration fees) are paid to state and local government. The state and local governments hire pigs, prosecutors, and prison guards, but they don't pay for drone strikes or MASSIVE spying operations on locals.

We can't starve the FEDERAL beast because almost all of their money comes from the top 1% and extorting the rest of the world to buy federal reserve created bonds. We need the rest of the world to boycott US Treasuries, but they won't because they who control the foreign investments are also the elites.

 

[gaiusmarius]

You are both correct. The payroll tax is a tax on the working man, used to pay for the NSA, Military, CIA, FBI, DEA, and IRS.

The other taxes you mention (sales tax, property tax, registration fees) are paid to state and local government. The state and local governments hire pigs, prosecutors, and prison guards, but they don't pay for drone strikes or MASSIVE spying operations on locals.

We can't starve the FEDERAL beast because almost all of their money comes from the top 1% and extorting the rest of the world to buy federal reserve created bonds. We need the rest of the world to boycott US Treasuries, but they won't because they who control the foreign investments are also the elites.

i see, thanks for clearing that up in regards to what money goes where. i get you point about the funding the federal gov. but as you said they still get the so called payroll tax.

then you have all the federal land bringing in cash from park visiting fees, fishing permits, hunting, licenses and all the fines they issue on federal land. but yeah i get your point.

 

[donb5]

the Brazilian president can say what he pleases, he does not have the money to make it happen..

That "he" is a "she" btw.

 

[floralheart]

front page of infowars.com today nsa using super computers to crack coding

It's probably their code in the first place.

 

[floralheart]

Speaking of taxes, the Federal tax started at 1% and nearly every American had a 1% rate. Then, in as little as a decade, it was up to nearly 70% or more. Not applied to everyone, but that was the pinnacle.

Then later, the highest US Federal taxes has ever been was about 90% of your income. With state taxes, that leaves you with pretty much nothing. More if not many people did pay that tax.

The IRS site can be some interesting reading.

I like to ask people what the highest Federal tax in the US was, because it shocked me when I learned it, and most have no idea. I didn't, until I did.

The rate was about 90% not that long ago.

 

[Crusader Rabbit]

Originally Posted by wantaknow
front page of infowars.com today nsa using super computers to crack coding

It's probably their code in the first place.

This has been in the news lately. It's starting now to look like any commercial encryption software developed and sold in the U.S. comes with a backdoor for easy NSA access. Hackers have clued into this so the user is doubly screwed.

I read that a few years back some mathematical genius working for the NSA had a big breakthrough in deciphering coded messages. Add in their supercomputing abilities and pretty much nothing is undecipherable nowadays. A good encryption is just looked at as a fun challenge for them now. The very fact that an intercepted (they all are!) transmission is encrypted is a red flag and guarantees that it will be pulled and examined.

 

[BOMBAYCAT]

So Snowden was just named as a finalist for the European Parliament's top human rights award, the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought. Some think he is a hero and some think he is a traitor. Go figure?

Denver Post Wednesday, October 2, 2013 - denverpost.com

 

[mrcreosote]

Hopefully it has more veracity than the 'Thug of the Year' Nobel Peace Prize.

 

[SpasticGramps]

 

[gaiusmarius]

ahh yes the special democratic bombs of freedom.....

 

[MrDanky]

damn... i thought the lady in the infinity was an american actually trying to stir some shit up.....

 

[gaiusmarius]

better start the spying as early as possible...

better start the spying as early as possible...

this goes to show that they are really starting to use the police state tools for petty crimes and misdemeanors. they claimed in the beginning it would only be used for terror and pedo filth, now they use it to punish swearing in school!

Careful what you tweet: Police, schools tap social media to track behavior

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/c...ice-schools-tap-social-media-track-4B11215908

A teenager who claimed "sarcasm" after talking on Facebook about shooting up a kindergarten spent months in jail this year for making a "terroristic threat." Over the summer, Instagram photos of guns and money led to New York City’s largest gun bust ever. A mom's Facebook photo of her baby with a bong led to her 2010 arrest.

While criminals — or those guilty of ill-placed sarcasm — aren’t wising up about social media oversharing, tools for monitoring Americans online are increasingly accessible and affordable to authorities, no NSA-level clearance required. Those in charge are monitoring more and more and social networks are happy to comply, especially where extra revenue is involved.

If you share something publicly on social media, "you should expect the world to read it," said Andy Sellars, a staff attorney at the Digital Media Law Project. "And you should expect that world to include law enforcement."

Expect, in fact, anybody — now more than ever. Beyond the feds, marketers and cops, there is a growing customer base for Internet-monitoring contractors who sift through personal details readily available on the Internet. Recently, some schools began enlisting these services to follow students on social media and monitor for cyberbullying, and eventually others will catch on.

We may very well face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing illegal "Game of Thrones" downloads, or run sweeps for insurance companies seeking non-smokers confessing to lapsing back into the habit. Instead of that one guy getting busted for a lame joke misinterpreted as a real threat, the new software has the potential to roll, Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful confession or questionable sense of humor.

The tools are getting better because there are more ways to get at the flood of data. As Twitter heads towards its IPO, the micro-messaging service is making its exclusive "firehose" of data available (for an undisclosed fee) to a growing number of third parties. While basic (and free) Twitter searches provide a limited amount of results, the Twitter firehose — previously open to only the likes of search engines such as Google and Bing — blasts everything publicly available on Twitter ... in real time.

While this firehose is valuable to marketers, data consulting firm BrightPlanet found a way to make it valuable (and affordable) to police departments. For only $150 a month, BrightPlanet's "BlueJay Law Enforcement Twitter Crime Scanner" allows cops to conduct very specific searches within the Twitter firehose.

"Monitor large public events, social unrest, gang communications and criminally predicated individuals," suggests the online pamphlet for the BlueJay browser tool, which reads like a mission statement for George Orwell's Ministry of Truth. "Identify potential witnesses and indicators for evidence."

The CSI of social media evidence gathering is mostly manual, but automating it could bring new benefits: A sudden flurry of tweets coming from a specific area can indicate anything from a riot to a natural disaster. As with most technologies, though, this is a double-edged sword.

"Used well, such tools should make police departments more aware of both local problems and complaints about their own work," Nate Anderson, author of The Internet Police: How Crime Went Online, and the Cops Followed, wrote on Ars Technica. "Used less than well, it can be a bit creepy, sort of on par with having a kid's uncle listen outside her bedroom during a slumber party. And used badly, it can make a nice tool for keeping an eye on critics/dissenters."

What's more, software isn't the best interpreter of very human data. Anderson points out that some of the real examples used in BlueJay's promotional material include #gunfire, #protest and #meth, which may not only not provide any "actionable intelligence," but could in fact be people talking about "Breaking Bad."

Anyone familiar with Facebook knows what happens when we rely on bots more than humans to interpret social media interactions. Using real humans to interpret sensitive social media interaction could be a valuable service to someone with the right business plan.

Geo Listening grabbed a lot of attention recently when it was reported that a suburban Los Angeles school district paid the social media monitoring company $40,500 to monitor the public posts of about 13,000 middle and high school students, eight schools in all.

Unlike BlueJay, Geo Listening is a full-service monitoring system which uses a staff of 10 humans, as well as contractors, to examine the public posts pinged by its monitoring technology, and send daily reports back to the schools. Public posts that use terms that signify drug use, bullying, suicidal thoughts, vandalism, truancy and violations of the school's code of conduct, are examined for context, and only reported if they warrant concert, Geo Listening CEO Chris Frydrych told NBC News.

During the initial pilot program for the Glendale school district in L.A., Frydrych said his team found a student who was posting about taking his life. "We were able to get him help," Frydrych said, adding that a goal of his company is not to get students in trouble, but to identify where intervention is needed. "These are kids who need help, and we can get it to them," he say.

It's hard to knock something that might actually do something about cyberbullying, but the intersection of students, free speech and social media was contentious long before Geo Listening ever got into business. Students are suspended or expelled for criticizing teachers or posting photos of themselves engaging in inappropriate behavior. Last year, an F-bomb-filled tweet sent at 2:30 a.m. got one student expelled three months before graduation, because he allegedly accessed Twitter through a school-issued computer.

Such social media monitoring services are sold on the platform that they can stop bad things from happening, but is that enough of a justification?

"We could stop bad things from happening if we install cameras in everyone’s bedroom in America," Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, told NBC News. "Which trade-off are we willing to accept? Every word, every fleeting thought we type into a search engine and every product we think about buying gets recorded by a large database, not to help us but to exert power over us."

"Spying is the nature of our society," Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt said recently an an event in New York City. Despite his infamously cavalier attitude toward the privacy of Google users, he has a point.

As social networks continues to look for ways to make money, the potential for providing direct access to the information we share publicly online is unsettling. Consider Facebook, and its infinite database of publicly shared photos on the Internet. In August, the social network announced that it might add profile photos to its facial recognition database, to aid in photo tagging.

"Can I say that we will never use facial recognition technology for any other purposes? Absolutely not," Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan said in a statement.

Of course, like all social media, you can opt out. At least for now.

Helen A.S. Popkin is Deputy Editor, Tech & Science at NBCNews.com. You can also find her on Twitter and/or Facebook.

 

[Hydrosun]

I just post photos of my schedule I drug activity and tell the government to go fuck themselves. I of course use ICmag and not facebook. No need to be the tallest mole in the game of whack-a-mole; but FUCK the government. Off to consume cannabis, breakfast of schedule I, life doesn't get much better.

 

[MrDanky]

I just post photos of my schedule I drug activity and tell the government to go fuck themselves. I of course use ICmag and not facebook. No need to be the tallest mole in the game of whack-a-mole; but FUCK the government. Off to consume cannabis, breakfast of schedule I, life doesn't get much better.

someone needs to drop one of these on the /\/SA building .... soon

 

[gaiusmarius]

don't even say that as a joke dude.

shit needs changing sure, but from the inside, through non violent methods. as can be seen so well in Libya, Egypt or Syria, revolution is not the way to go, the cost is too high, the results always end up worse then what people hopped for. peoples lives turn to shit and it can take generations to get the society back to it's pre revolutionary quality of life.

 

[MrDanky]

are there any other solutions though? if my joke was played out, i think it could help america regain credibility not only within america but on an international scale.... nsa AND gchq headquarters... let the other commy spying countries do their thing... america did just fine without the NSA...

i just watched white house down and although the movie was laughable at many times, it really makes me wonder.... it also fuels the thoughts in the serious joke that was last posted

i am surprised the gov even allows movies like that. give it a few more years and i bet they wont allow anything from movies like that to websites like this....

 

[gaiusmarius]

there is no fighting such a thing head on, it's the height of folly to think this way. the only way to change things for the better is to increase awareness and work at it till the tide is turned and people on a massive scale realize they do not want to live in such a world. once you have the masses behind you, the lawmakers/politicians will run to make it happen. any other method is doomed either to failure or worse it works but creates so much chaos and destruction to achieve that it takes life times to get things back on track.

we have laws on the books already to stop the mass spying, give it time, billions of people all wanting to have privacy will be most powerful, at that stage the sheer will power alone will make it happen. if we all come together on this, there is no army in the world that could stop the people from having their privacy back. let them go ahead and abuse the system for their petty crap, in the end it will come back to haunt them.

but for real no more talk like above please, this is an information thread, not a call to any crazy antics that will only earn you time and achieve the opposite of what you want, in fact anyone suggesting such a thing is ripe for a gov sting, lol better watch yourself MrDanky.

 

[vta]

The Obama administration is of the view that the NSA can spy on anyone anywhere.

From the Freedom Files


Government Looking for Witches Will Find Them

The Judge


While the nation’s political class has been fixated on a potential government shutdown in Washington this week, the NSA has continued to spy on all Americans and by its ambiguity and shrewd silence seems to be acknowledging slowly that the scope of its spying is truly breathtaking.

The Obama administration is of the view that the NSA can spy on anyone anywhere. The president believes that federal statutes enable the secret FISA court to authorize the NSA to capture any information it desires about any persons without identifying the persons and without a showing of probable cause of criminal behavior on the part of the persons to be spied upon. This is the same mindset that the British government had with respect to the colonists. It, too, believed that British law permitted a judge in secret in Britain to issue general warrants to be executed in the colonies at the whim of British agents.

General warrants do not state the name of the place to be searched or the person or thing to be seized, and they do not have the necessity of individualized probable cause as their linchpin. They simply authorize the bearer to search wherever he wishes for whatever he wants. General warrants were universally condemned by colonial leaders across the ideological spectrum -- from those as radical as Sam Adams to those as establishment as George Washington, and from those as individualistic as Thomas Jefferson to those as big-government as Alexander Hamilton. We know from the literature of the times that the whole purpose of the Fourth Amendment -- with its requirements of individualized probable cause and specifically identifying the target -- is to prohibit general warrants.

And yet, the FISA court has been issuing general warrants and the NSA executing them since at least 2004.

Last week we learned in a curious colloquy between members of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee and Gen. Keith Alexander and Deputy Attorney General James Cole that it is more likely than not that the FISA court has permitted the NSA to seize not only telephone, Internet and texting records, but also utility bills, credit card bills, banking records, social media records and digital images of mail, and that there is no upper limit on the number of Americans’ records seized or the nature of those records.

The judges of the FISA court are sworn to secrecy. They can’t even possess the records of what they have done. There is no case or controversy before them. There is no one before them to oppose what the NSA seeks. They don’t listen to challenged testimony.

All of this violates the Constitution because it requires a real case or controversy before the jurisdiction of federal courts may be invoked. So when a FISA court judge issues an opinion declaring that NSA agents may spy to their hearts’ content, such an opinion is meaningless because it did not emanate out of a case or controversy. It is merely self-serving rhetoric, unchallenged and untested by the adversarial process. Think about it: Without an adversary, who will challenge the NSA when it exceeds the “permission” given by the

FISA court or when it spies in defiance of “permission” denied? Who will know?

For this reason, the FISA court is unconstitutional at best and not even a court at worst. It consists of federal judges administratively approving in secret the wishes of the government. By not adjudicating a dispute, which is all that federal judges can do under the Constitution, these judges are not performing a judicial function. Rather, they are performing a clerical or an executive one, neither of which is contemplated by the Constitution.

And yet, the president and his secret agents and the politicians who support them would have you believe that the NSA’s spying has been approved by bona fide federal courts. It has not. Does the Constitution permit the federal government to put us all under a microscope? It does not. The government is supposed to work for us and derive its powers from the consent of the governed. Do you know anyone who consented to all this? I do not.

The traditional bar that the government must meet in order to begin gathering data on any of us is individualized articulable suspicion about criminal behavior. The purpose of that requirement is to prevent witch hunts and inquisitions and knocks on doors in the night. Without that bar, there are no limits as to whom the feds can pursue.

What will become of us if the feds can watch our every move and hear our every conversation and learn our every expenditure and read our every email and find out what we eat and whom we love and how we live? There are well over 4,500 federal crimes. The feds can find something wrong that anyone has done. Stalin’s chief of secret police, the monster Lavrenti Beria, once famously proclaimed: “Show me the man and I will find you the crime.” History teaches that a government on a witch hunt, unconstrained by law or Constitution, will not stop until it can brand someone as a witch. And an unbridled inquisition will not stop until it finds a heretic. The Constitution simply never entrusted the people who run the government with this awesome power. Rather, in the Fourth Amendment, it prohibited it.

If the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- which are the stated reasons for forming the United States of America in the first place -- mean anything, they mean that we all possess the inalienable right to be different and the inalienable right to be left alone. Neither of these rights can be honored when the government knows all. And when the government knows all, and doesn’t like what it knows, we will have an authoritarian state far more odious than any history has ever known.

On the face of an all-knowing secret government are large and awful eyes -- and no smile.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. His latest is “Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom.”