NSA collects millions of text messages daily in 'untargeted' global sweep

[ TheGuardian.com - http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/16/nsa-collects-millions-text-messages-daily-untargeted-global-sweep ]

• NSA extracts location, contacts and financial transactions
• 'Dishfire' program sweeps up 'pretty much everything it can'
• GCHQ using database to search metadata from UK numbers
• Dishfire presentation on text message collection – key extracts

The National Security Agency has collected almost 200 million text messages a day from across the globe, using them to extract data including location, contact networks and credit card details, according to top-secret documents.

The untargeted collection and storage of SMS messages – including their contacts – is revealed in a joint investigation between the Guardian and the UK’s Channel 4 News based on material provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The documents also reveal the UK spy agency GCHQ has made use of the NSA database to search the metadata of “untargeted and unwarranted” communications belonging to people in the UK.
-[Full Detail]

Exposed: Obama & NSA Breaks Laws to Spy on Americans

[ Occupy Corporatism - http://www.occupycorporatism.com/exposed-obama-nsa-breaks-laws-to-spy-on-americans/ ]

An audit of once secret documents concerning the Obama administration’s abuse of surveillance agencies and invasion of American’s right to privacy is revealing that President Obama has lied to the American public.

The National Security Agency (NSA) has broken the law in order to obtain data on “suspects” since 2008.

In 2012, nearly 3,000 requests for information were illegally made and approved which led to more spying. And these victims were individuals with green cards.

Shockingly, the amount of grammatical errors in the documents is telling of the mind-set of those involved in the data-mining.

Obama swore that: “If you look at the reports … all the stories that have been written, what you’re not reading about is the government actually abusing these programs and listening in on people’s phone calls or inappropriately reading people’s emails,” Obama said. “What you’re hearing about is the prospect that these could be abused. Now, part of the reason they’re not abused is because these checks are in place, and those abuses would be against the law and would be against the orders of the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court).”
-[Full Article]

[ Washington's Blog - http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/08/you-wont-believe-whats-going-on-with-government-spying-on-americans.html ]

You Won’t BELIEVE What’s Going On with Government Spying on Americans

Posted on August 17, 2013 by WashingtonsBlog

New Revelations Are Breaking Every Day

Revelations about the breathtaking scope of government spying are coming so fast that it’s time for an updated roundup:

• Just weeks after NSA boss Alexander said that a review of NSA spying found not even one violation, the Washington Post published an internal NSA audit showing that the agency has broken its own rules thousands of times each year

• 2 Senators on the intelligence committee said the violations revealed in the Post article were just the “tip of the iceberg”

• Glenn Greenwald notes:  “One key to the WashPost story: the reports are internal, NSA audits, which means high likelihood of both under-counting & white-washing”.(Even so, the White House tried to do damage control by retroactively changing on-the-record quotes)

• The government is spying on essentially everything we do. It is not just “metadata” … although that is enough to destroy your privacy

• The government has adopted a secret interpretation of the Patriot Act which allows it to pretend that “everything” is relevant … so it spies on everyone

• NSA whistleblowers say that the NSA collects all of our conversations word-for-word

• It’s not just the NSA … Many other agencies, like the FBI and IRS – concerned only with domestic issues – spy on Americans as well

• The information gained through spying is shared with federal, state and local agencies, and they are using that information to prosecute petty crimes such as drugs and taxes.  The agencies are instructed to intentionally “launder” the information gained through spying, i.e. to pretend that they got the information in a more legitimate way … and to hide that from defense attorneys and judges

• Top counter-terror experts say that the government’s mass spying doesn’t keep us safe 

• Indeed, they say that mass spying actually hurts U.S. counter-terror efforts.

• They say we can, instead, keep everyone safe without violating the Constitution … more cheaply and efficiently than the current system

• There is no real oversight by Congress, the courts, or the executive branch of government. And see this and this.

• Indeed, most Congress members have no idea what the NSA is doing.  Even staunch defenders of the NSA now say they’ve been kept in the dark

• A Federal judge who was on the secret spying court for 3 years says that it’s a kangaroo court

• Even the current judges on the secret spying court now admit that they’re out of the loop and powerless to exercise real oversight

• A former U.S. president says that the spying program shows that we no longer have a functioning democracy

• The chairs of the 9/11 Commission say that NSA spying has gone way too far

• Top constitutional experts say that Obama and Bush are worse than Nixon … and the Stasi East Germans

• While the government initially claimed that mass surveillance on Americans prevented more than 50 terror attacks, the NSA’s deputy director John Inglis walked that position back all the way to saying that – at the most – one (1) plot might have been disrupted by the bulk phone records collection alone.  In other words, the NSA can’t prove that stopped any terror attacks. The government greatly exaggerated an alleged recent terror plot for political purposes (and promoted the fearmongering of serial liars).  The argument that recent terror warnings show that NSA spying is necessary is so weak that American counter-terrorism experts have slammed it as “crazy pants”

• Even President Obama admits that you’re much less likely to be killed by terrorists than a car accident.  So the government has resorted to lamer and lamer excuses to try to justify mass surveillance

• Experts say that the spying program is illegal, and is exactly the kind of thing which King George imposed on the American colonists … which led to the Revolutionary War

• The top counter-terrorism Czar under Clinton and Bush says that revealing NSA spying programs does not harm national security

• The feds are considering prosecuting the owner of a private email company – who shut down his business rather than turning over records to the NSA – for refusing to fork over the information and keep quiet.  This is a little like trying to throw someone in jail because he’s died and is no longer paying taxes

• Whistleblowers on illegal spying have no “legal” way to get the information out

• There are indications that the government isn’t just passively gathering the information … but is actively using it for mischievous purposes

• Spying started before 9/11 … and various excuses have been used to spy on Americans over the years

• Governments and big corporations are doing everything they can to destroy anonymity

• Mass spying creates an easy mark for hackers. Indeed, the Pentagon now sees the collection of “big data” as a “national security threat” … but the NSA is the biggest data collector on the planet, and thus provides a tempting mother lode of information for foreign hackers

• Mass surveillance by the NSA directly harms internet companies, Silicon Valley, California … and the entire U.S. economy. And see these reports from Boingboing and the Guardian

• IT and security professionals are quite concerned about government spying

• Some people make a lot of money off of mass spying.  But the government isn’t using the spying program to stop the worst types of lawlessness

• Polls show that the public doesn’t believe the NSA … and thinks that the government has gone way too far in the name of terrorism

• While leaker Edward Snowden is treated as a traitor by the fatcats and elites, he is considered a hero by the American public

• Congress members are getting an earful from their constituents about mass surveillance

• The heads of the intelligence services have repeatedly been caught lying  about spying.  And even liberal publications are starting to say that Obama has been intentionally lying about spying

• Only 11% of Americans trust Obama to actually do anything to rein in spying

• A huge majority of Americans wants the director of intelligence – Clapper – prosecuted for perjury

• While the Obama administration is spying on everyone in the country – it is at the same time the most secretive administration ever (background). That’s despite Obama saying he’s running the most transparent administration ever

• A Congressman noted that – even if a mass surveillance program is started for good purposes – it will inevitably turn into a witch hunt

• Surveillance can be used to frame you if someone in government happens to take a dislike to you

• Government spying has always focused on crushing dissent … not on keeping us safe

• An NSA whistleblower says that the NSA is spying on – and blackmailing – top government officials and military officers (and see this)

• High-level US government officials have warned for 40 years that mass surveillance would lead to tyranny in America

• A top NSA whistleblower says that the only way to fix things is to fire all of the corrupt government officials who let it happen.  As the polls above show, the American public is starting to wake up to that fact

Video: Army’s Giant Spy Blimp Soars Over Jersey Shore in First Flight

Wired

On Tuesday, not far from the beaches of New Jersey, was a sight hundreds of millions of dollars and years of development in the making: the Army’s football-field-size robot spy blimp took to the air for the first time at a military base in Lakehurst. The 90-minute flight of the Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), manufactured by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman and allegedly captured in the video above, is only the beginning of a months-long test program; the lighter-than-air ship won’t head to a warzone until next year at the earliest. But it’s still important news. For years, the Pentagon has tried and failed to get next-generation airships off the ground. No longer.

“The first flight primary objective was to perform a safe launch and recovery with a secondary objective to verify the flight control system operation,” Army spokesman John Cummings said in a statement. “Additional first flight objectives included airworthiness testing and demonstration, and system level performance verification.”

“All objectives were met during the first flight,” Cummings added.

Provided further testing goes smoothly, the LEMV could deploy to Afghanistan for combat trials in early 2013, floating thousands of feet over the battlefield for, Northrop hopes, entire weeks on end, scanning for insurgents. K.C. Brown, Jr., Northrop’s director of Army programs, told Danger Room the LEMV could also pull double duty, hauling military cargo out of landlocked Afghanistan as part of the Pentagon’s war drawdown. It might make for quite the lighter-than-air mule: Northrop claims the LEMV has enough buoyancy to haul seven tons of cargo 2,400 miles at 30 miles per hour.

Long-Endurance Multi-Intelligence airship concept. Illustration: Northrop Grumman

[Full Article]

US sees Israel, tight Mideast ally, as spy threat

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The CIA station chief opened the locked box containing the sensitive equipment he used from his home in Tel Aviv, Israel, to communicate with CIA headquarters in Virginia, only to find that someone had tampered with it. He sent word to his superiors about the break-in.

The incident, described by three former senior U.S. intelligence officials, might have been dismissed as just another cloak-and-dagger incident in the world of international espionage, except that the same thing had happened to the previous station chief in Israel.

It was a not-so-subtle reminder that, even in a country friendly to the United States, the CIA was itself being watched.

In a separate episode, according to another two former U.S. officials, a CIA officer in Israel came home to find the food in the refrigerator had been rearranged. In all the cases, the U.S. government believes Israel's security services were responsible.

Such meddling underscores what is widely known but rarely discussed outside intelligence circles: Despite inarguable ties between the U.S. and its closest ally in the Middle East and despite statements from U.S. politicians trumpeting the friendship, U.S. national security officials consider Israel to be, at times, a frustrating ally and a genuine counterintelligence threat.-[Full Article]

US drones spy on Americans - ‘incidentally’

Russia Today

A leaked US Air Force document stipulates a drone that happens to capture surveillance images of Americans may store them for a period of 90 days. The paper appears to justify spying on citizens, as long as it is “incidental.”

­The document accepts that the Air Force may not record information non-consensually; however it does state “collected imagery may incidentally include US persons or private property without consent.”
The report, dated April 23 was discovered by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists and has been put online.

Data that is accidentally recorded may be stored for a period of 90 days by the Pentagon while it is analyzed to see if the subjects are legitimate targets for state surveillance. The Pentagon may also disseminate this data among other government organizations if it sees fit.- [Full Article]

Spying on Europe’s farms with satellites and drones

BBC

Farmers who claim more EU subsidies than they should, or who break Common Agricultural Policy rules, are now more likely to be caught out by a camera in the sky than an inspector calling with a clipboard. How do they feel about being watched from above?

Imagine a perfect walk in the country, a few years from now - tranquillity, clean air, birdsong in the trees and hedgerows, growing crops swaying in the breeze.

Suddenly a model plane swoops overhead.

But there is no-one around manipulating radio controls. This is not a toy, but a drone on a photographic mission.

Meanwhile, hundreds of kilometres up in space, the same patch of land is being photographed by a satellite, which clearly pinpoints individual trees and animals.

What is there to spy on here? No secret military installations, just farmland...[Full Article]

The Push Toward a Snitch Culture: New App Enables "fast, discrete, and intelligent" Anonymous Crime Reporting

CrimePush (click to enlarge)

Brandon Turbeville

Activist Post

In yet another Smartphone-related push to increase the intensity of the global police state, a “new” company, CrimePush, has released a smartphone app that will allow individuals greater ability to report “crimes” in real time.

The CrimePush app, which is now available on iTunes, is being touted as “the latest in mobile technology to provide urban populations with fast, discrete, and intelligent safety assistance.” This follows on the heels of similar Big Brother apps such as PatriotApp, which merged phones with American security and law enforcement agencies via the Internet, allowing for one-touch reporting of suspicious activities that could be perceived as threats to the Homeland.

Essentially, after the free app is downloaded, one need only access the app in order to record and report a crime to police. As Anushay Hossein of Forbes describes, “A package of information including the location of the crime, photo, video, audio, and text description of the crime are sent to authorities immediately. The application also allows for users to report crime anonymously so that they may continue with their busy lives knowing that with a push of a button, police will know and have everything to pursue the criminal.”

Read more »

Schools ‘spy’ on fat kids
Monitors raise privacy fear

New York Post

Big Brother is joining the battle of the bulge.

A group of Long Island students will soon be wearing controversial electronic monitors that allow school officials to track their physical activity around the clock.

The athletics chair for the Bay Shore schools ordered 10 Polar Active monitors, at $90 a pop, for use starting this spring. The wristwatchlike devices count heartbeats, detect motion and even track students’ sleeping habits in a bid to combat obesity.

The information is displayed on a color-coded screen and gets transmitted to a password-protected Web site that students and educators can access.

Angel Chevrestt

TOO FAR, TOO FAST? School aide records a student’s heart rate.

The devices are already in use in school districts in St. Louis and South Orange, NJ — and have raised privacy concerns among some parents and observers.

But Ted Nagengast, the Bay Shore athletics chair, said, “It’s a great reinforcement in fighting the obesity epidemic. It tells kids, in real time, ‘Am I active? Am I not active?’ We want to give kids the opportunity to become active.”

The monitors are distributed by Polar Electro, of Lake Success, LI, the US division of a Finland firm...[Full Article]

FBI Spies on Customers of Military Surplus Stores

Feds Send Terrorist Hand-out to Military Surplus Stores

Kurt Nimmo

Infowars.com

August 11, 2011

The feds are at it again. Now they want military surplus store owners and employees to rat out their customers. The hand-out below was distributed in Colorado.

Government hand-outs like this are nothing new. However, this time around the government is targeting “survivalists.” People who purchase MREs (Meals Ready to Eat) might be terrorists, especially if they make “suspicious comments regarding anti-US, radical theology (sic) vague or cryptic warnings that suggest or appear to endorse the use of violence in support of a cause.”

According to the hand-out, you might be with white al-Qaeda if you purchase high capacity magazines or rifle tripods, weatherized ammunition, flashlights, gas masks, night vision devices, especially if you buy them “bulk,” that is if you buy more than one of each.

The hand-out suggests stores “require valid ID from all new customers” and ask questions, presumably to find out if they are with al-Qaeda (or defend the Constitution too adamantly).

Of course, this rat-on-your-customers policy is doomed to failure. Business owners understand customers value their privacy and don’t like to be carded to do business and asked all kinds of inappropriate questions. If they want to stay in business, they will leave their customers alone – and ignore this silly government hand-out.

For now – until the next false flag terror attack – the feds are not requiring business owners to inform on their customers.

The hand-out was originally posted on the Oath Keeper’s website.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------





FBI Handout Lists Purchase of Preparedness Items as “Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities”



Oath Keepers

FBI_Terrorist_Indicators

Oath Keepers Exclusive: An FBI Denver Joint Terrorism Task Force handout being distributed to Colorado military surplus store owners lists the purchase of popular preparedness items and firearms accessories as “suspicious” and “potential indicators of terrorist activities,” instructing store owners to keep records on and report people who:

“Make bulk purchase of items to include:

Weatherproofed ammunition or match containers

Meals Ready to Eat

Night Vision Devices; night flashlights; gas masks

High capacity magazines

Bi-pods or tri-pods for rifles”

The FBI handout, entitled “Communities Against Terrorism: Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities Related to Military Surplus Stores” also instructs surplus store owners to:

“Require valid ID from all new customers.

Keep records of purchases.

Talk to customers, ask questions, and

listen to and observe their responses.

Watch for people and actions that are out of place.

Make note of suspicious statements, people, and /or vehicles.

If something seems wrong, notify law enforcement authorities.”

The handout also instructs surplus store owners to consider as “suspicious” anyone who “demands identity ‘privacy’” or anyone who expresses “extreme religious statements” and those who “make suspicious comments regarding anti-US, [or] radical theology.”

The “Communities Against Terrorism” flyer closes by stating:

Preventing terrorism is a community effort. By learning what to look for, you can make a positive contribution in the fight against terrorism. The partnership between the community and law enforcement is essential to the success of anti -terrorism efforts.

Some of the activities, taken individually, could be innocent and must be examined by law enforcement professionals in a larger context to determine whether there is a basis to investigate. The activities outlined on this handout are by no means all-inclusive but have been compiled from a review of terrorist events over several years.

The handout encourages surplus store owners and employees to provide information on “suspicious” customers by calling the Denver Joint Terrorism Task Force or the Colorado Information Analysis Center. This handout is very nearly identical to one issued by the FBI to gun stores from Connecticut to Utah: PDF

This new handout expands the absurdity by now also targeting customers of military surplus stores, and by specifically targeting the purchasing of very common, and very popular, preparedness items such as Meals Ready to Eat (MRE’s) as “potential indicators of terrorist activities.”

While this particular handout is being given to military surplus store owners in Colorado, it is nearly certain that similar versions are being handed out by Joint Terrorism Task Forces in other states. Anyone who has seen such a handout, or who has a copy of one, please contact us at tips@oathkeepers.org. You know, “if you see something, say something!” It may be a potential indicator of government terrorist (tyranny and chilling of speech) activities. Remember, combating tyranny is a community effort and you can make a difference! – Oath Keepers

FULL PDF OF HANDOUT

Word Version

[Full Article]

Doctors asked to identify potential terrorists under government plans

Redrawn counter-terrorism programme will call on doctors' help, but BMA fears threat to patient confidentiality

UK Guardian

Doctors and other health professionals will be asked to identify people who are "vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism" as part of the government's redrawn counter-terrorism programme to be detailed on Tuesday.

The home secretary, Theresa May, will also try to deflect criticism that the £60m-a-year Prevent programme has been used to spy on the Muslim community by extending its coverage to the far right and animal rights extremists, as well as Islamist groups.

May has indicated that 20 of the organisations funded by the government over the past three years are to have their cash withdrawn after the decision to stop working with non-violent extremists.

David Cameron has pushed through the change despite opposition from Nick Clegg and Charles Farr, the head of the office of security and counter-terrorism, arguing that such engagement is like "turning to a rightwing fascist party to fight a violent white supremacist movement".

The argument within Whitehall has delayed the publication of the revised Prevent strategy for five months and it is believed that Cameron only finalised the document on Monday afternoon.

The Prevent programme was developed to combat home-grown terrorism after the 7 July bombings in 2005...[Full Article]

[Webmaster - The 7/7/2005 London bombings were a false flag operation carried out by the British government. See the movie "7/7 Ripple Effect" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb_MmqgdCWI]

No Big Deal, But Google May Have Promoted a Contest to Get Kids’ Social Security Numbers [Updated]

NYMag.com

"Doodle-4-Google" is so much more than an art contest. Sure, the game, which received 33,000 entries last year, celebrates "the creativity of young people" by having them send in a drawing under the theme "What I’d like to do someday …" But, there's another component, as well. It also helps Google collect some very personal data on students K through 12. Along with the submission, the contest's initial Parent Consent Form asked for the child's city of birth (not current city, mind you), date of birth, the last four digits of the child's social security number, as well as complete contact info for the parents. Bob Bowdon, who directed The Cartel, a documentary about corruption in the public-school system explained the significance:

You see what Google knows and many parents don't know is that a person's city of birth and year of birth can be used to make a statistical guess about the first five digits of his/her social security number. Then, if you can somehow obtain those last four SSN digits explicitly — voila, you've unlocked countless troves of personal information from someone who didn't even understand that such a disclosure was happening.

If the information Google culled from the contest was linked with other databases to target ads, it could prove lucrative for the company, which enlists promotional help from schools by offering prize money. But Bowdon says he has no evidence that Google has used what it learned for marketing purposes. Not to mention the fact that statistical guessing seems more manpower intensive than the type of passive data collection Google usually prefers (oh, hey there, Street View camera). However, within 26 hours of alerting the FTC, Google updated its consent form eliminating the request for the last four digits of the kid's social security number but leaving in the question about birth city. Okay, class. Who wants to send in a doodle under the theme "Be sort of evil until someone figures it out"?

Why Has Google Been Collecting Kids' Social Security Numbers? [HuffPo]

Update: A Google spokesperson reached out to Intel for comment, noting that this the fourth year of the contest and the first time that the company requested Social Security information.

This year we started accepting doodles from kids even if their school hadn't registered for the contest. To help us keep entries distinct and remove duplicate entries from any particular student, we asked parents for limited information, including the last 4 digits of a student's social security number. We later updated our forms when we recognized that we could sufficiently separate legitimate contest entries while requesting less information. To be clear, these last 4 digits were not entered into our records and will be safely discarded.

The city of birth helps us identify whether contestants are eligible for the contest, as winners must be either U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents of the U.S. The information isn't used for any other purpose.

An infestation of Israeli spies

Last week, the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he was set to publicly appeal to President Barack Obama to release Jonathon Pollard, a former US naval intelligence analyst, who is currently serving a life sentence in a US prison for spying for Israel. That call is backed by Lawrence Korb, a former US assistant secretary of defense, who says Pollard’s continued incarceration is “a miscarriage of justice.”

Korb characterizes Pollard’s wrongdoing as “minor” when, according to the US Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) Pollard not only passed classified information to Israel, but also to South Africa and possibly to Pakistan. Moreover, at the time of his arrest, classified documents related to China were found in his home that had allegedly been used by his wife Anne to further her business interests.

If Obama decides to give in to pressure from America’s ally Israel and Pollard’s American friends in high places, what does this say about his administration’s bloodlust for WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, a journalist who merely disseminated stolen material?

As usual, when it comes to Israel, there are gross double standards at play. It amazes me that the American people aren’t up in arms over Israel spies when their tax dollars go to support the Jewish state in terms of aid, loan guarantees and weapons.

For instance, post-Sept. 11, 2001, Carl Cameron of Fox News revealed that a large Israeli spy ring whose members purported to be art students were tracking the movements of Al-Qaeda operatives and knew that attacks were on the cards, but failed to share this information with US authorities. The US Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA all said Cameron was mistaken, and the “art students” were allowed to return to Israel.

Similarly, the five Israeli “removal men” who were videoing, cheering and high-fiving as the first plane hit the World Trade Center were taken into custody for a short time before being packed off back to Israel after their boss had already done a runner.

Then, in 2004, another espionage scandal broke concerning Lawrence Franklin, a mid-level Pentagon official working in the office of the US Secretary of Defense. Franklin was caught passing a presidential directive and other top secret documents on America’s Iran policy to two employees of the pro-Israel lobbying organization AIPAC. Franklin pleaded guilty to espionage, was sentenced to 13 years in jail, when lo and behold that sentenced was reduced to 10 months house arrest, while the two AIPAC officials were allowed to walk away scot-free.

I never cease to be incredulous at the international community’s passivity vis-à-vis Israeli spies and assassins who seem to have been given carte blanche to infiltrate anywhere they like and do their worst, including murder...

[Full Article]


GO TO THE FOLLOWING RELATED LINKS...

The Israeli Spy Ring

The Five Dancing Israelis Arrested On 9-11

“Israeli Spying Network” Uncovered in Egypt Days Before Church Blast

VeteransToday.com

People in Egypt don`t have to waste their time suspecting and accusing al Qaeda, ..Egyptians know better, .. they know that al Qaeda is a joke, …they only point the finger at Israel, the one implacable enemy who happened to be the conspirator behind destabilizing Iraq and the whole region.

By Dr. Ashraf Ezzat / Staff Writer

What kind of images come to your mind whenever Egypt is mentioned? To a lot of people Egypt is automatically associated with the pyramids, the river Nile and the historical monuments of the great pharaohs. But modern Egypt is a lot more than just a world tourist attraction. Egypt besides the long history and culture is one of the leading nations in regard to liberation from European colonialism; the Egyptian revolution in 1952 was an inspiration to a lot of liberation movements in Africa and the Middle East.

During the era of the cold war, Egypt- with India and former Yugoslavia- initiated the non alignment movement (NAM) an intergovernmental organization of states considering themselves not aligned formally with or against any major power bloc. But the enthusiastic call for pan- Arabism was and still is- one of the most important political projects Egypt had adopted and advocated during the 1960^th. The idea of Arabic union with economic, political and military collaboration is a dream all Arab peoples long for but on the other hand this project of Arabic unity is deemed a potential and clear danger to a small country in the Middle East namely, Israel.

The Egyptian policy kept changing according to the local and international variables throughout the years. Egypt transformed from a constitutional monarchy at the first half of the twentieth century, to a socialist republic during the 1950-60^th and now to a state with a free market economy. Egyptians changed in so many ways, socially and economically that is, throughout the last 60 years. Egyptians vary in their political perspectives; they might as well disagree on a wide range of public issues but all Egyptians agree on one indisputable fact concerning their national security, they all view Israel as the permanent and implacable enemy.

Sometimes people get so wrapped up in nowadays news and conflicts they nearly forgot what happened during the last 60 years...

[Full Article]

Plan to Turn Post Office Trucks Into Stasi Data Collection Nodes

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Forget the StreetView data vacuum scandal. If an idea proposed for the money hole known as the U.S. Post Office is adopted, your friendly neighborhood postal person may be soon driving a high-tech data collection vehicle that would rival anything Google put to use for the government.

	Post Office trucks may be used to determine if you have problems with the government. Photo: Kevin Spencer.

“The service’s thousands of delivery vehicles have only one purpose now: to transport mail,” Michael Ravnitzky, chief counsel to the chairman of the Postal Regulatory Commission, wrote for the New York Times last week. “But what if they were fitted with sensors to collect and transmit information about weather or air pollutants? The trucks would go from being bulky tools of industrial-age communication to being on the cutting edge of 21st-century information-gathering and forecasting.”

“Data collection wouldn’t require much additional staff or resources; all it would take would be a small, cheap and unobtrusive sensor package mounted on each truck,” writes Ravnitzky.

He said outfitting the trucks would make “it significantly easier to spot a problem or anomaly” and the system “could assess road quality, catalog potholes and provide early warning of unsafe road conditions like black ice.”

Forget the prospect of weather forecasting or black ice. The federal government is far more interested in collecting data on citizens than it is on reporting road conditions. The NSA and the CIA don’t give a hoot about potholes.

On Monday, the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post, told us what we already know – the government has created a massive Stasi-like snoop apparatus in America. “The government is creating a vast domestic spying network to collect information about Americans in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks and subsequent terror plots,” Reuters reported. “The government is using for this purpose the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators,” and may soon use the Post Office if Mr. Ravnitzky’s proposal is adopted.

“The government’s goal is to have every state and local law enforcement agency in the country feed information to Washington to buttress the work of the FBI, which is in charge of terrorism investigations in the United States,” explains CBS News.

The FBI is also in the business of setting up patsies in order to promote the manufactured war on terrorism.

“Everything contained within the Post’s article has already been reported and covered in depth by this website and others in the alternative media that have consistently warned of the threat of the exponential rise of the big brother spy system over the past decade,” writes Steve Watson.

“The Washington Post report notes that such suspicious activity reports are just one piece of information being collected at the local and state levels and fed into a vast ‘Guardian’ database via fusion centers, which ultimately connect to the FBI, the DHS and even the Department of Defense,” Watson continues.

Guardian replaced the TALON database. It was created on orders issued by the deputy defense secretary during the Bush regime, the neocon Paul Wolfowitz, and was criticized for gathering information on antiwar activists and other political activists who posed no credible threat to the empire. TALON reports were collected by Defense Department agencies including law enforcement, intelligence, counterintelligence and security, and were analyzed by a secretive Pentagon agency, the Counterintelligence Field Activity.

CIFA was supposedly “disestablished” and the TALON database shut down. Of course, that was merely public relations spin – intelligence databases are never shut down. Instead, they are repurposed. TALON is now Guardian and it continues its legacy of collating data on threats to the establishment and its profitable occupations and covert wars in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Guardian has nothing to do with al-Qaeda, the fake terror group that takes its name from another database.

The Post Office data collection scheme will undoubtedly be used in the same way Google’s StreetView was used – to vacuum up wireless data and ferret out intelligence.

In July, Consumer Watchdog issued a newswire calling for the Energy and Commerce Committee to conduct hearings into privacy violations by Google. John M. Simpson of the non-profit group said “it appears that Google holds classified U.S. government contracts to supply search and geospatial information to the U.S. government.”

In addition, White House records show that Google executives have been holding meetings with U.S. national security officials for undisclosed reasons. Finally, it also appears that Google’s widely criticized efforts to collect wireless network data on American citizens were not inadvertent, contrary to the company’s claims.

As history has repeatedly shown, alliances between the U.S. intelligence community and giant corporations that collect data on American citizens can be a toxic combination where the U.S. Constitution is concerned.

Now the Post Office is about to be thrown into the effort to create a massive and all-encompassing electronic panopticon. “Such a system could aid in homeland security by rapidly detecting chemical agents, radiological materials and, eventually, biological attacks,” Ravnitzky avers.

It will also be used to determine user behavior over public Wi-Fi hotspots, a charge made against Google by the German Data Protection Authority in May.

The government is not worried about al-CIA-duh or the remote possibility of a biological attack. It is concerned – as the DHS report on “rightwing extremism” and the similar report issued by MIAC revealed – about the political activity of ordinary Americans.

“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” is said to be the motto of the Post Office. If the government has its way, the motto will need to be updated to include “and data-mine your personal information” to make sure you are not a threat to the establishment.

Consequences of 9/11: Houston Police Use Secret Drones to Spy on You

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GCmfR7sXu0

FBI Agents Train Garbage Collectors To Report Suspicious Activity

Nationwide “Waste Watch” spy program another alarming reminder of a society in terminal decay

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Friday, December 17, 2010

Former FBI agents are helping local authorities train thousands of garbage collectors across the country as a nationwide internal spy force to report “suspicious activity” to police in yet another example of how America is turning into an East German-style informant society as the country decays from within.

Local news reports out of Albany concerning the new “Waste Watch” program, wherein garbage collectors are trained by former FBI agents to look for suspicious activity, were replete with nodding drones expressing how delighted they were that they were being spied on by their fellow Americans.

Your local trash man will “help prevent crime” by “reporting anything suspicious they observe along the route,” reports Fox News 23.

Although the program is camouflaged in civic-minded virtues of reporting crashes, fires or emergencies, it also includes “anything out of ordinary,” as well as “suspicious situations,” which, given the fact that the Department of Defense now considers any form of protest to be a suspicious sign of “low-level terrorism,” could amount to almost anything.

Waste Watch is already active in 100 communities across the country. Given the fact that the Albany program alone has trained a hundred employees to watch for suspicious activity, the total figure of informants could already number at least 10,000 nationwide.

The program bears similarities to the Highway Watch initiative, which before it lost government funding, used ex-CIA and FBI agents to train bus drivers, truckers and van operators to become “terrorist hunters” . The Highway Watch website now states that the program has been superseded by “another trucking security program” run by Homeland Security, and encourages truckers to call the TSA National Operations Center if they want to “report a suspicious security event”.

It also harks back to Operation TIPS, a program which encouraged people who had access to Americans’ homes, such as cable installers and telephone repair workers, to report back to the authorities if they saw anything deemed “suspicious”.

TIPS was ironically disbanded when it was expressly prohibited with the passage of the 2003 Homeland Security Act at the behest of then majority leader Dick Armey, “Who was angered by the Justice Department’s plan to enlist millions of Americans to report any suspicious signs that might link some of the rest of us to terrorism. Armey, a conservative Republican libertarian, said he would not allow a law enabling “Americans to spy on one another.”

However, under a myriad of new programs being set up by both federal and state authorities, that is precisely what’s unfolding, not least with Big Sis Janet Napolitano’s infamous Wal-Mart initiative to remind Americans to report suspicious activity as they are buying goods at the checkout, a program that has also been expanded to 9,000 federal buildings as well as sports stadiums and other facilities.

As we have repeatedly warned, history shows that governments training citizens to spy on each other is a sign of a society in terminal decay. Such programs never lead to a more secure society, but instead breed suspicion, distrust, fear and resentment amongst the population. The only “benefit” that such programs have ever achieved is allowing the state to more easily identify and persecute political dissidents while discouraging the wider population from engaging in any criticism against the government.

Telling low paid government workers who, like garbage collectors, aren’t noted for their intelligence, that they are secret terrorist hunters for the state isn’t going to make anything more secure, it’s only going to affirm the fact that the United States is a banana republic decaying from within. If America is going to have an internal spy force watching the behavior of citizens, can’t it at least be professionally organized? I’m thinking KGB.

In all seriousness, Given the fact that local and federal authorities have identified support for the Constitution, political activism of any nature, carrying an Americans flag, and virtually any mild form of dissent whatsoever as domestic extremism under the MIAC report and innumerable others, one wonders what garbage collectors have been told to look out for by FBI agents, although you can pretty much guarantee that drunk illegal aliens joyriding in vehicles without insurance will be less of a concern than ordinary Americans trying to mind their own business, forgetting that they now live in a police state where everyone is guilty until proven innocent.

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

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show. Watson has been interviewed by many publications and radio shows, including Vanity Fair and Coast to Coast AM, America’s most listened to late night talk show.

Barbie cam spurs call for boycott

Watch out, Ken – Barbie’s got a spy cam. The new “Video Girl” Barbie from Mattel ($49.99) is embedded with a working video camera capable of taking 30-minute videos, cleverly hidden in the doll’s necklace (Barbie always did know how to accessorize).

One Australian psychologist is calling for a boycott, warning the Barbie cam will make it too easy for adults to exploit children and for children to upload inappropriate videos to the Internet.

“Boycott this product and to refuse to shop in any store that justifies selling this potentially pornographic tool," clinical psychologist Sally-Anne McCormack urged readers of the Herald Sun newspaper of Melbourne, Australia. She said she has counselled patients in the past who have been filmed without their knowledge. “Must I now also deal with clients who have been traumatized by a misused Barbie?"...

[Full Article]

Big Brother: Spying on Americans, The Threat of Satellite Surveillance

Unknown to most of the world, satellites can perform astonishing and often menacing feats. This should come as no surprise when one reflects on the massive effort poured into satellite technology since the Soviet satellite Sputnik, launched in 1957, caused panic in the U.S. A spy satellite can monitor a person’s every movement, even when the “target” is indoors or deep in the interior of a building or traveling rapidly down the highway in a car, in any kind of weather (cloudy, rainy, stormy). There is no place to hide on the face of the earth. It takes just three satellites to blanket the world with detection capacity. Besides tracking a person’s every action and relaying the data to a computer screen on earth, amazing powers of satellites include reading a person’s mind, monitoring conversations, manipulating electronic instruments and physically assaulting someone with a laser beam. Remote reading of someone’s mind through satellite technology is quite bizarre, yet it is being done; it is a reality at present, not a chimera from a futuristic dystopia! To those who might disbelieve my description of satellite surveillance, I’d simply cite a tried-and-true Roman proverb: Time reveals all things (tempus omnia revelat)...

[Full Article]

Federal Agents Urged to 'Friend' People on Social Networks, Memo Reveals

A privacy watchdog has uncovered a government memo that encourages federal agents to befriend people on a variety of social networks, to take advantage of their readiness to share -- and to spy on them. In response to a Freedom of Information request, the government released a handful of documents, including a May 2008 memo detailing how social-networking sites are exploited by the Office of Fraud Detection and National Security (FDNS).

As of Thursday morning, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Digg had not commented on the report, which details the official government program to spy via social networking. Other websites the government is spying on include Twitter, MySpace, Craigslist and Wikipedia, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which filed the FOIA request.

"Narcissistic tendencies in many people fuel a need to have a large group of 'friends' link to their pages, and many of these people accept cyber-friends that they don't even know," stated one of the documents obtained by the EFF. "This provides an excellent vantage point for FDNS to observe the daily life of beneficiaries and petitioners who are suspected of fraudulent activities," it said.

According to the EFF, this memo -- which specifically details how the government evaluates potential citizen requests -- suggests there's nothing to prevent an exaggerated, harmless or even out-of-date offhand comment in a status update from quickly becoming the subject of a full investigation...

[Full Article]