http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=224043
Oh, It's Not Just The NSA (Boycott AT&T)
The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.1987?!
The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.
There is no reason for any company to keep records going back that far. And incidentally, those records include location, not just call duration and the numbers on both ends.
So why would AT&T keep that data? They wouldn't. So the Government pays them to do so.
Which means the government has effectively seized the records.
All of them.
Without a warrant.
And then they go ask via administrative subpoena for those that they want to "look at", rather than get a warrant.
But the real kicker?
“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.I see.
So the government knows damn well that paying for this program (that is, paying AT&T) is equivalent to seizing the records and the only real way to prevent court review of the constitutionality of this (it's blatantly NOT, incidentally) is to hide the very existence of the program.
The cute part is that doing that requires active perjury in each and every case where said "evidence" is later used, because one must lay the foundation forhow the law enforcement agency came to acquire the knowledge necessary to bring the charges and convict.
In short such a program and the secrecy surrounding it means that government agents and agencies have committed black-letter perjury in thousands if not tens of thousands of cases -- in fact, in each and every case where this sort of "evidence" has been used.
Perjury, in most cases, is a felony.
When the government stoops not only to violating your Constitutional Rights but then goes further and intentionally covers up what they're doing because they know their program won't pass muster and then commits felonies in support of it there is literally nothing left of the Rule of Law in your nation.
Goodnight America; it was nice to believe we had a Constitutional Republic, but until and unless each and every one of the people involved in this crap go to prison and every single case "made" with such evidence is thrown out and the record expunged as perjury was at the heart of the action there is no longer any such thing as a Constitutional Republic in this land.
Further, if you do business with AT&T after learning that it has been fully involved in this program and not only acquiesced to it silently (despite having no legal duty to do so) and stabbed you in the back as a customer you are an abject idiot.
AT&T's logo has in fact been likened to The Death Star for damned good reason.
http://www.blacklistednews.com/AT%26T_saves_decades_of_call_records_for_the_DEA/28594/0/38/38/Y/M.html
DEA agents – or AT&T employees?
For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counternarcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.
The Hemisphere Project, a partnership between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.
The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987.
The project comes to light at a time of vigorous public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance and on the relationship between government agencies and communications companies. It offers the most significant look to date at the use of such large-scale data for law enforcement, rather than for national security.
Read More...
http://www.blacklistednews.com/The_Most_Dangerous_Domestic_Spying_Program_is_Common_Core/28590/0/38/38/Y/M.html
Earlier this year, revelations about the Department of Justice spying on the Associated Press were quickly followed by revelations that the NSA was collecting phone data on all Verizon, and then all American cell phone, users. Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing drew yet more attention to the issue, and domestic surveillance programs have remained a top issue in people’s minds ever since.
While Americans focus on institutions like the CIA and NSA, though, programs are being implemented which would lead to a much more institutional way of tracking citizens. Obamacare is one of these, but Common Core Standards – the federal educational program – is the most eyebrow-raising.
Bill Gates was one of the leaders of Common Core, putting his personal money into its development, implementation and promotion, so it’s unsurprising that much of this data mining will occur via Microsoft’s Cloud system.
Even the Department of Education, though, admits that privacy is a concern, and that that some of the data gathered may be “of a sensitive nature.” The information collected will be more than sensitive; much of it will also be completely unrelated to education. Data collectedwill not only include grades, test scores, name, date of birth and social security number, it will also include parents’ political affiliations, individual or familial mental or psychological problems, beliefs, religious practices and income.
In addition, all activities, as well as those deemed demeaning, self-incriminating or anti-social, will be stored in students’ school records. In other words, not only will permanently stored data reflect criminal activities, it will also reflect bullying or anything perceived as abnormal. The mere fact that the White House notes the program can be used to “automatically demonstrate proof of competency in a work setting” means such data is intended to affect students’ futures.
Perhaps even more alarming is the fact that data collection will also include critical appraisals of individuals with whom students have close family relationships. The Common Core program has been heavily scrutinized recently for the fact that its curriculum teaches young children to use emotionally charged language to manipulate others and teaches students how to become community organizers and experts of the U.N.’s agenda 21.
Combined with this form of data collection, it’s easy to envision truly disturbing untruths and distortions making their way into the permanent record.
Like Common Core, states were bribed with grant money from the federal government to implement data mining, and 47 states have now implemented some form of data mining from the educational system. Only 9 have implemented the full Common Core data mining program. Though there are restrictions which make storing data difficult on the federal level, states can easily store the data and allow the federal government to access it at its own discretion.
The government won’t be the only organization with access to the information. School administrators have full control over student files, and they can choose who to share information with. Theoretically, the information could be sold, perhaps withholding identifying information. In addition, schools can share records with any “school official” without parental consent. The term “school official,” however, includes private companies which have contracts with the school.
NSA data mining is troubling because it could lead to intensely negative outcomes, because it opens up new avenues for control, and because it is fundamentally wrong. Common Core data mining, tracking students with GPS devices however, is far, far scarier.
It gives the government the ability to completely control the futures of every student of public education, and that will soon extend to private and home schools. It provides a way to intimidate students – who already have a difficult time socially – into conforming to norms which are not only social, but also political and cultural.
'Black Budget' Revealed: A Detailed Look at US 'Espionage Empire'
September 2, 2013
Source: Common Dreams
Latest revelations made possible by Edward Snowden give unprecedented view of how taxpayer funds are use to "collect it all"
In the latest revelation made possible by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Washington Post on Thursday published an investigative analysis and interactive map of America's so-called "Black Budget" which details the $52.6 billion allotment of taxpayer money that funds the government's "intelligence-gathering colossus" that has previously remained insulated from the eyes of the American public.
Though a series of revelations have flowed from the Snowden leaks over recent months, this is the first detailed financial picture of how public monies are used to fund programs that Americans still know very little about. Critiqued as a "collect it all" strategy by those concerned about Constitutional and privacy violations, the vast surveillance network has been slammed at home and abroad.
According to the Post, the "Black Budget,"
According to the reporting, the $52.6 billion far-exceeded estimates about the amount of money being spent on clandestine spying and surveillance operations and that figure does not even include an additional $23 billion specifically geared to CIA and NSA operations done in direct support of the U.S. military.
In addition to providing what is repeatedly referred to as an "unprecedented" look inside the financial operations of the both the CIA and the NSA, the summary report leaked by Snowden also shows the enormous rate of operational growth at the CIA in the last decade, including a "surge in resources for the agency funded secret prisons, a controversial interrogation program, the deployment of lethal drones and a huge expansion of its counterterrorism center."
In an additional and ironic twist, the documents trace the development of internal counterterrorism efforts at the NSA and how to prevent sensitive leaks from occurring "from within" the US intelligence system. As the Post reports:
In the latest revelation made possible by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Washington Post on Thursday published an investigative analysis and interactive map of America's so-called "Black Budget" which details the $52.6 billion allotment of taxpayer money that funds the government's "intelligence-gathering colossus" that has previously remained insulated from the eyes of the American public.Though a series of revelations have flowed from the Snowden leaks over recent months, this is the first detailed financial picture of how public monies are used to fund programs that Americans still know very little about. Critiqued as a "collect it all" strategy by those concerned about Constitutional and privacy violations, the vast surveillance network has been slammed at home and abroad.
According to the Post, the "Black Budget,"
maps a bureaucratic and operational landscape that has never been subject to public scrutiny. Although the government has annually released its overall level of intelligence spending since 2007, it has not divulged how it uses those funds or how it performs against the goals set by the president and Congress.A view into what the newspaper terms the US "espionage empire," the blueprint and summary documents obtained by the Post "provides a detailed look at how the U.S. intelligence community has been reconfigured by the massive infusion of resources that followed the Sept. 11 attacks" in 2001.
The 178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program details the successes, failures and objectives of the 16 spy agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, which has 107,035 employees.
The summary describes cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations. The Washington Post is withholding some information after consultation with U.S. officials who expressed concerns about the risk to intelligence sources and methods. Sensitive details are so pervasive in the documents that The Post is publishing only summary tables and charts online.
According to the reporting, the $52.6 billion far-exceeded estimates about the amount of money being spent on clandestine spying and surveillance operations and that figure does not even include an additional $23 billion specifically geared to CIA and NSA operations done in direct support of the U.S. military.
In addition to providing what is repeatedly referred to as an "unprecedented" look inside the financial operations of the both the CIA and the NSA, the summary report leaked by Snowden also shows the enormous rate of operational growth at the CIA in the last decade, including a "surge in resources for the agency funded secret prisons, a controversial interrogation program, the deployment of lethal drones and a huge expansion of its counterterrorism center."
In an additional and ironic twist, the documents trace the development of internal counterterrorism efforts at the NSA and how to prevent sensitive leaks from occurring "from within" the US intelligence system. As the Post reports:
The document describes programs to “mitigate insider threats by trusted insiders who seek to exploit their authorized access to sensitive information to harm U.S. interests.”
The agencies had budgeted for a major counterintelligence initiative in fiscal 2012, but most of those resources were diverted to an all-hands, emergency response to successive floods of classified data released by the anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks.
For this year, the budget promised a renewed “focus . . . on safeguarding classified networks” and a strict “review of high-risk, high-gain applicants and contractors” — the young, nontraditional computer coders with the skills the NSA needed.
Among them was Snowden, then a 29-year-old contract computer specialist who had been trained by the NSA to circumvent computer network security. He was copying thousands of highly classified documents at an NSA facility in Hawaii, and preparing to leak them, as the agency embarked on a security sweep.
No comments:
Post a Comment