Commentary on the economic , geopolitical and simply fascinating things going on. Served occasionally with a side of snark.
Friday, March 1, 2013
Police State updates - Internet kill switch FOIA lawsuit , Second Amendment and gun rights de facto nullification government tactics , prolifigate spending during a time of so called shared sacrifice and austerity - which does not benefit american taxpayers , and who said anything about the President being a Dictator - Oh , it was the President ..... ,
( Note the Drones coming to the US have been adapted from the overseas battlefield version - why does DHS believe it needs to know if civilians are armed and why does it want to track cell phone calls ? )
DHS built domestic surveillance tech into Predator drones
Homeland Security's specifications say drones must be able to detect whether a civilian is armed. Also specified: "signals interception" and "direction finding" for electronic surveillance.
Homeland Security required that this Predator drone, built by General Atomics, be capable of detecting whether a standing human at night is "armed or not."
(Credit: U.S. Department of Homeland Security)
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has customized its Predator drones, originally built for overseas military operations, to carry out at-home surveillance tasks that have civil libertarians worried: identifying civilians carrying guns and tracking their cell phones, government documents show.
The documents provide more details about the surveillance capabilities of the department's unmanned Predator B drones, which are primarily used to patrol the United States' northern and southern borders but have been pressed into service on behalf of a growing number of law enforcement agencies including the FBI, the Secret Service, the Texas Rangers, and local police.
Homeland Security's specifications for its drones, built by San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, say they "shall be capable of identifying a standing human being at night as likely armed or not," meaning carrying a shotgun or rifle. They also specify "signals interception" technology that can capture communications in the frequency ranges used by mobile phones, and "direction finding" technology that can identify the locations of mobile devices or two-way radios.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center obtained a partially redacted copy of Homeland Security's requirements for its drone fleet through the Freedom of Information Act and published it this week. CNET unearthed an unredacted copy of the requirements that provides additional information about the aircraft's surveillance capabilities.
Homeland Security's Predator B drone can stay aloft conducting surveillance for 20 hours.
(Credit: U.S. Department of Homeland Security)
Concern about domestic use of drones is growing, with federal legislation introduced last month that would establish legal safeguards, in addition toparallel efforts underway from state and local lawmakers. The Federal Aviation Administrationrecently said that it will "address privacy-related data collection" by drones.
The prospect of identifying armed Americans concerns Second Amendment advocates, who say that technology billed as securing the United States' land and maritime borders should not be used domestically. Michael Kostelnik, the Homeland Security official who created the program, told Congress that the drone fleet would be available to "respond to emergency missions across the country," and a Predator drone was dispatched to the tiny town of Lakota, N.D., to aid local police in a dispute that began with reimbursement for feeding six cows. The defendant, arrested with the help of Predator surveillance, lost a preliminary bid to dismiss the charges.
"I am very concerned that this technology will be used against law-abiding American firearms owners," says Alan Gottlieb, founder and executive vice president of the Second Amendment Foundation. "This could violate Fourth Amendment rights as well as Second Amendment rights."
Homeland Security's Customs and Border Protection agency declined to answer questions about whether direction-finding technology is currently in use on its drone fleet. A representative provided CNET with a statement about the agency's unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) that said signals interception capability is not currently used:
U.S. Customs and Border Protection is not deploying signals interception capabilities on its UAS fleet. Any potential deployment of such technology in the future would be implemented in full consideration of civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy interests and in a manner consistent with the law and long-standing law enforcement practices.
CBP's UAS program is a vital border security asset. Equipped with state-of-the-art sensors and day-and-night cameras, the UAS provides real-time images to frontline agents to more effectively and efficiently secure the nation's borders. As a force multiplier, the UAS operates for extended periods of time and allows CBP to safely conduct missions over tough-to-reach terrain. The UAS also provides agents on the ground with added situational awareness to more safely resolve dangerous situations.
During his appearance before the House Homeland Security committee, Kostelnik, a retired Air Force major general who recently left the agency, testified that the drones' direction-finding ability is part of a set of "DOD capabilities that are being tested or adopted by CBP to enhance UAS performance for homeland security." CBP currently has 10 Predator drones and is considering buying up to 14 more.
If the Predator drones were used only to identify smugglers or illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican and Canadian borders, or for disaster relief, they might not be especially controversial. But their use domestically by other government agencies has become routine enough -- and expensive enough -- that Homeland Security's inspector general said (PDF) last year that CBP needs to sign agreements "for reimbursement of expenses incurred fulfilling mission requests."
"The documents clearly evidence that the Department of Homeland Security is developing drones with signals interception technology and the capability to identify people on the ground," says Ginger McCall, director of the Open Government Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. "This allows for invasive surveillance, including potential communications surveillance, that could run afoul of federal privacy laws."
A Homeland Security official, who did not want to be identified by name, said the drones are able to identify whether movement on the ground comes from a human or an animal, but that they do not perform facial recognition. The official also said that because the unarmed drones have a long anticipated life span, the department tries to plan ahead for future uses to support its border security mission, and that aerial surveillance would comply with the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and other applicable federal laws.
The documents show that CBP specified that the "tracking accuracy should be sufficient to allow target designation," and the agency notes on its Web site that its Predator B series is capable of "targeting and weapons delivery" (the military version carries multiple 100-poundHellfire missiles). CBP says, however, that its Predator aircraft are unarmed.
Gene Hoffman, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who's the chairman of the Calguns Foundation, said CBP "needs to be very careful with attempts to identify armed individuals in the border area" when aerial surveillance touches on a constitutional right.
"In the border area of California and Arizona, it may be actively dangerous for the law-abiding to not carry firearms precisely due to the illegal flow of drugs and immigrants across the border in those areas," Hoffman says.
CBP's specifications say that signals interception and direction-finding technology must work from 30MHz to 3GHz in the radio spectrum. That sweeps in the GSM and CDMA frequencies used by mobile phones, which are in the 300MHz to 2.7GHz range, as well as many two-way radios.
The specifications say: "The system shall provide automatic and manual DF of multiple signals simultaneously. Automatic DF should be able to separate out individual communication links." Automated direction-finding for cell phones has become an off-the-shelf technology: one company sells a unit that its literature says is "capable of taking the bearing of every mobile phone active in a channel."
Although CBP's unmanned Predator aircraft are commonly called drones, they're remotely piloted by FAA-licensed operators on the ground. They can fly for up to 20 hours and carry a payload of about 500 lbs.
Silencing communication except through controlled media is a way to control dissent .....
DHS could execute communications shutdown for entire cities
Steve Watson
Infowars.com
March 1, 2013
A privacy rights group has brought a lawsuit to gain more detailed information on the federal government’s ability to shut off the internet in the event of a national crisis.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has filed Freedom of Information Actlawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, in response to a failure by the agency to release any documents pertaining to the “Emergency Wireless Protocols,” (Standard Operating Procedure 303 or “SOP 303″).
SOP 303 outlines exactly how the DHS would carry out a complete communications shutdown in the event of what it deemed an emergency situation.
EPIC explains in its complaint that the DHS has publicly stated that under SOP 303 an agency component “will function as the focal point for coordinating any actions leading up to and following the termination of private wireless network connections, both within a localized area, such as a tunnel or bridge, and within an entire metropolitan area.”
The DHS, led by ‘Big Sis’ Janet Napolitano, said recently that it was “unable to locate or identify any responsive records” on the matter.
The issue is directly related to the much feared Obama Internet ‘kill switch’, a tangible government policy that was eventually purportedly dropped from cybersecurity legislation making its way through the Congress.
“Public apprehension about the possibility of handing the White House a ‘kill switch’ for the Internet has dogged the cybersecurity debate, fueled by a proposal that would have codified emergency powers for the president in the event of a catastrophic attack,” reported the Hill last year.
Indeed, cybersecurity advocate Joe Lieberman ominously pushed for the ‘kill switch’ provision to be included in the bill by citing the Chinese system of Internet policing as a model to which the United States should aspire. As we have documented, China routinely censors the Internet and cuts off access in order to hide evidence of government corruption and to cover up atrocities committed by the state.
Lieberman then pushed Obama to sign a cybersecurity executive order that would act as an Internet kill switch, granting the president vast power over private networks during a “national cyberemergency.”
Earlier this month, Obama secretly signed an executive order on Cyber Security, then issued an embargo to all news organisations NOT to cover the developments.
In recent days Janet Napolitano has described cybersecurity as a “core mission area” for the DHS. The federal agency was intimately involved in drawing up the Obama cybersecurity executive order.
Although language allowing the President to flip a figurative kill switch to shut down parts of the Internet is seemingly gone, the White House still claims that it already retains such powers under the law that created the Federal Communications Commission in 1934. This law states that if a “state of public peril or disaster or other national emergency” exists, the president may “authorize the use or control of any…station or device.”
and while moving toward gun control , a backdoor method is just buy up all the guns and ammo......
Amidst continuing controversy over the Department of Homeland Security’s purchase of large quantities of guns and ammunition, the federal agency is getting more secretive about its activity by censoring information about a no-bid contract with Remington for firearms parts.
Despite the fact that documents pertaining to government activity are only supposed to be redacted for national security reasons or if authorized by Congress, a new entry posted on the FedBizOpps website pertaining to the DHS’ plans for a $1.5 million contract with firearms manufacturer Remington contains numerous blacked-out sections.
The document is an explanation of why the DHS has entered into a contract on a basis “other than full and open competition,” in other words a no bid contract. The contract with Remington Arms Company for firearms replacement parts is set to run for five years at a cost not to exceed $1.5 million dollars.
The first censored portion of the document blacks out the precise year by year amount in dollars that the DHS plans to purchase from Remington.
The second censored section blacks out the number of Remington firearms that have been serviced and maintained by the ICE National Firearms and Tactical Training Unit (NFTTU).
The third censored section relates to how the Remington firearms are distributed at state and local levels.
The fourth censored section pertains to the government’s reluctance to purchase a “complete firearms replacement system,” instead of using Remington firearms.
This isn’t the first time the DHS has redacted information related to firearms or bullet purchases.
In August last year, the federal agency classified portions of a document to conceal references to the amount of 223 62 and 223 64 grain ammunition being purchased in another no-bid contract.
The no-bid contract was justified due to an “unusual and compelling urgency” to acquire the bullets, noting that there is a shortage of bullets which is threatening a situation which could cause “substantial safety issues for the government” should law enforcement officials not be adequately armed.
Concerns have been raised about why the DHS is buying ammunition in such large quantities – with the agency committing to purchase roughly 2 billion bullets over the course of the last year, enough to wage a near 30 year war. In September last year, the DHS also bought 7,000 fully automatic assault rifles, labeling them “personal defense weapons”.
Earlier this week, former Governor Sarah Palin raised the subject, warning that the federal government is “stockpiling bullets” in preparation for “civil unrest.”
She was attacked by a raft of leftist websites which claimed the issue had been “debunked,” although the debunking consisted of nothing more than regurgitating DHS statements which claimed the bullets were merely for target practice or that they were bought in bulk to save money.
The so-called “debunking” also failed to answer why most of the ammunition consisted of hollow point bullets, which are expensive and highly unusual to use for target practice.
Apparently, the mainstream media has failed to grasp that concerns about government activity cannot be “debunked” by merely repeating glib statements issued by government officials.
I was looking at the following website this morning: http://www.ar500armor.com
On the top of the page the site has a notice with the following information:
As a result from increased demand over the past few months we're experiencing delays in shipping on our Body Armor - which may go beyond stated ship times. Rest assured we want to get your armor to you as soon as possible, and are working hard to do so while maintaining our quality standards. Your business is very much appreciated! - AR500 Armor Team
Increased weapons and ammo demand I could understand, but I was curious as to why an armor company would see a jump in sales. So I decided to give them a call this morning and ask them what was causing such increased demand. Was it due to private citizens buying more than usual? Had the DHS, law enforcement and military recently placed large orders? Or was it simply a matter of all of the above happening at once?The fellow who answered the phone was very friendly. I told him I had been to his site and was curious as to why they had such an increase in sales. "It spiked right after the November election," he told me. I then asked him who the majority of the buyers were. "Are private citizens fueling the increase in sales, or is it government types like the DHS, law enforcement and military?" He quickly told me "all of them really, just an across the board increase from just about every type of buyer." I then asked him "So DHS, military and law enforcement have increased their purchases since November?" "Oh yes," he said, "we have a 6-8 week backlog."
I then told the man from AR500 about a phone call I had received from a friend yesterday. The person I spoke with had just received a phone call from one of his closest, life-long friends. The friend who called him spent some time in the Marines. While he was in the Corps he became very close friends with a man who now works in Washington, D.C. as an "International Advisor to the Pentagon."
Our friend told me that his friend hadn't talked to this "Int'l Advisor" in quite some time. So he didn't initiate the phone call, the Advisor called him out of the blue.
The advisor wanted him to know that "this guns and ammo grab is the real deal." He said "they are coming after guns, and they are going to squeeze ammo so bad that no one will be able to get any, and if you don't have an assault weapon by now, good luck. They will be impossible to get." While he didn't say a full-fledged gun ban was coming, he did say that the DHS "has another order in the works for ammo and AR-15's that will dwarf anything they have already purchased. They are going to absolutely strangle the market."
So … when I told this info to the man from AR500, he kind of chuckled and told me "that's funny, because I talked to a guy this morning that we do business with, he buys used brass, tumbles it, refurbishes it and re-sells it. He also makes new casings and sell those. He said he received a phone call yesterday from the gov't asking if he would fill a 50 billion round order for .223 casings."
"Did you say 50 billion? With a "B"?" I asked him.He laughed and said "that's exactly what I said. And the guy told me he laughed at the caller from the gov't and asked the same thing ….. Did you say billion, with a B?"
Yes, the gov't official said. 50 billion.
I asked the man from AR500 if his business associate was going to fill the order. "He said he was going to try, but he had to buy a ton of brass and didn't know if he could find enough to fill it." I then told him what we needed was for ammo companies to tell the gov't to go pound sand.
My phone was dying as I was talking to the man from AR500, and my call quality wasn't as great as I would have liked. My mistake, I should have known better, but it's been a while since I interviewed anyone, and I certainly didn't expect to hear what I heard. I plan on calling him back tomorrow and getting a little more indepth info and see if I can't get the name of the man with the brass order and track him down and interview him.
With Senate Judiciary Committee meeting this week, it’s likely that new gun control bills will be drafted very quickly. There are in essence two parts to the bills: the part that deals with the “assault weapon ban” and the part that deals with “universal background checks.” The first one faces long odds of passage, but the second might well pass.
Democrats will undoubtedly push for an assault weapons ban. The ban has become a central tenant of the Democratic party, with Obama’s calls “to get weapons of war and massive ammunition magazines off our streets” and even Michelle Obama claiming crimes are being committed with “automatic weapons.” Senator Dianne Feinstein is pushing hard to reinstitute the earlier assault weapon ban, which she had originally enacted in 1994.
Proponents of an “Assault Weapons Ban” often argue their point by posing the question: “Why do people need a semiautomatic Bushmaster to go out and kill deer?” Read more
Employees of Obama donor Leo Hindery Jr.’s media conglomerate Intermedia Partners, which now owns most of the top gun-culture media outlets in the country, believe that Hindery plans to gut and destroy all of them as part of a business plan that has already led to numerous layoffs and the virtual shuttering of prominent television production facilities in Minnesota and Montana.
Hindery, who was in consideration to be President Barack Obama’s secretary of commerce, is managing partner of Intermedia Partners. The New York-based media private equity fund owns Intermedia Outdoor Holdings, which publishes 17 hunting, fishing, and shooting magazines, including Guns & Ammo, Handguns, Gun Dog, Rifle Shooter and Shooting Times.
InterMedia Outdoor Holdings purchased the pro-gun hunting and fishing network the Sportsman Channel in 2007, and is now in the process of acquiring the Outdoor Channel, pending the federal government’s approval of last month’s merger between InterMedia Outdoors and Outdoor Channel Holdings.
InterMedia employees believe that Hindery, a Huffington Post blogger who has contributed to numerous Democratic politicians including Andrew Cuomo and Elizabeth Warren, is in the process of consolidating all of America’s leading gun-culture media outlets and stripping them down to virtual destruction.
Prior to its acquisition by InterMedia, the media brand Petersen’s Hunting, the television arm of which is broadcast by the Sportsman Channel, was housed in a “beautiful” facility in Baxter, Minnesota, overlooking the Mississippi River. The facility had approximately 60 employees, a massive studio, at least nine editing bays and fully-wired machine rooms and was conducting about four studio shoots per year with a full production crew.
That facility now mostly consists of about 12 employees — “basic administrative types,” who “think every day they go into work is going to be their layoff day,” according to an InterMedia employee who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“They have people working out of rental strip malls doing all of their TV production,” the source said.
Employees of the Baxter facility were offered the chance to move to Peoria, Ill., which offers a tax credit to companies who “create” jobs in town, in order to keep their employment.
“That studio in Brainerd was a real staple in that community for years. We used to joke that it was the Microsoft of Brainerd County. Everyone was impressed if you worked there. You made money, you did well, you had this dream life. Then Leo Hindery Jr. bought it and just completely gutted it,” said the employee. “It’s sad. I know a lot of good people in Brainerd who lost their jobs and had their houses foreclosed on.”
Petersen’s Hunting now “has its entire TV production staff working out of call centers” in Peoria, according to the employee.
InterMedia also purchased a company called Barrett Productions in Missoula, Mont., which was previously a thriving and well-respected television production company. The Barrett facility is now “gutted.”
“There’s nothing there but one intern slash production assistant and one administrative type. All the production people are gone. It’s a shell,” according to the employee.
“Now that Hindery has the Outdoor Channel, he’s in a position to consolidate all of the major pro-Second Amendment media titles in this country, strip them down, and destroy them, like venture capitalists do sometimes,” the employee said.
Many Outdoor Channel producers are “scared shitless,” realizing that the careers they built are now in the hands of an Obama donor who is in the process of breaking apart pro-gun media companies.
New York-based InterMedia Outdoors CEO Jeff Paro sent a memo to staff Feb. 4 describing the merger.
“It’s hard to believe it has been several months since the announcement of the IMO/SC and Outdoor Channel merger. It probably seems like it is taking forever, but unfortunately, despite great progress, that is the nature the beast. Since some time has passed, I just wanted to take a moment and provide you with a brief update of where we are to date and next steps for IMO over the next 4-6 weeks,” Paro wrote.
“Our registration for the new combined company was submitted to the SEC several weeks ago and we are hopeful that we will see final approvals soon. There will then be a short period of review by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which is required for the cable nets and then the merger ultimately will be subject to a formal vote by the current Outdoor Channel Shareholders. When all is said and done the new company, InterMedia Outdoor Holdings Inc. will be official. While you never know, our expectations are that this process will get us to go by, or around March 1st,” Paro wrote.
“So with this time frame as a target the management teams from SC/IMO and OC have begun the process of evaluating and prioritizing our integration strategy at launch. This process will accelerate over the coming weeks as many of our senior managers have already been recruited to participate on different integration teams. Most of the areas under immediate consideration are on the TV side between SC and OC, but with that said we have several groups forming to evaluate plans for some exciting development opportunities in TV, Digital and Multimedia Sales and Marketing,” Paro wrote.
When austerity is coming down the line on citizens here in the US and we hearing the whailing and gnashing of teeth about the puny 85 billion sequester , taxpayers should not be paying for stuff like this !
On February 21, 2013, in Video, by The Big Bad Bank
Obama Budgets $307 Billion For the African Internet, etc. The “Alliance For An Affordable Internet” is a public-private partnership which intends to build a huge, expensive African Internet. Its headquarters are in Nairobi, Kenya, now dubbed “Africa’s Silicon Valley”.
Hillary Clinton alluded to this monstrous State Department project when she stepped down from her Secretary job on February 1, 2013. She said, “One billion more persons will have access to the Internet”. She did not expand her sentence to include… “and Americans will pay for most of it”.
Here is the scheme: Bloomberg News reported on Feb 14, 2011 that President Obama’s budget for FYE2012 will include $307 billion in grants to Silicon Valley. Specifically, the individual grant amounts in Obama’s budget are: $148 billion for research and development, $80 billion for federal information systems and $77.4 billion for computer education. Much (most?) of the grant money will be spent for Africa’s Internet.
The partners of “Alliance For An Affordable Internet” include the U.S Department of State, the World Wide Web Foundation and five Silicon Valley computer giants (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Intel and Cisco Systems).
Americans will get little benefit from these huge grants, nor can we endure the $307 billion in the cash
outflow from the U.S. treasury. While we struggle to pay for health and indigent assistance, our constant wars and our corroding infrastructure, these grants will indeed bury us further into debt.
The World Bank, the UN and many foundations are available to fund an African Internet. If the international funds refuse to assist, the E.U. and the U.K. should fund this project because of their large African associations.
and why say I'm not a Dictator - how does that even come up as a discussion point really ? http://www.zerohedge.com/contributed/2013-03-01/potus-stop-painting-horns-my-head
In Case you missed our dictator and chief. He is a master of deception. If there are a huge amounts of pork that could be cut, why is Obama cutting things Americans really need?
Here is the scheme: Bloomberg News reported on Feb 14, 2011 that President Obama’s budget for FYE2012 will include $307 billion in grants to Silicon Valley. Specifically, the individual grant amounts in Obama’s budget are: $148 billion for research and development, $80 billion for federal information systems and $77.4 billion for computer education. Much (most?) of the grant money will be spent for Africa’s Internet.
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