The Surveillance State - A New Era

Napolitano Announces DHS, NFL Partnership

Reason not to have gone to the game in person.

TRANCOSO wrote:Renewing the Patriot Act While America Sleeps

Complete List of scumbags (with pics) who voted to EXTEND the PATRIOT ACT

http://www.tennesseesonsofliberty.com/2011/02/traitors-who-voted-to-extend-patriot.html

Greens vs the FBI - An Interview with Hugh Farrell and Mary Sackley
By LINDA GREENE
16-02-2011

The "green scare" is in full swing, with COINTELPRO-style targeting of environmental and animal rights activists. The green scare, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, is "the repression of environmental activists by designating them as terrorists."

The challenge for activists is to peacefully protest and avoid criminalization of their dissent. Nowhere is that situation more evident than in the case of two I-69 protestors, Hugh Farrell and Gina "Tiga" Wertz. After a nonviolent protest Wertz was charged with intimidation, a class A misdemeanor, two counts; conversion (unauthorized use of someone else's property), a class A misdemeanor, two counts; and corrupt business influence (racketeering), a class C felony. Her bond was set at $10,000.

Farrell was charged with two counts of intimidation, two counts of conversion and corrupt business influence plus felony racketeering; his bond was set at $20,000.

"Now that we're done with the case, we're trying to figure out the repression that was used against us."

All four misdemeanors are related to an alleged nonviolent action on July 9, 2007, in which activists removed the furniture from offices of two private, for-profit companies that had contracts with the Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) to work on I-69. They posted eviction notices on the doors to protest the eviction of property owners and confiscation of land and homes in the highway's path.

In early March 2010 the judge dismissed the felony racketeering charge. That left the four misdemeanors, which carried a maximum prison sentence of four years. In the end, the defendants' attorneys worked out a plea bargain consisting of unsupervised probation for two years.

Mary Sackley is another local activist; she is one of 16 citizens who protested an asphalt company's participation in construction of the new-terrain highway with two lockdowns in 2008 at the asphalt company's headquarters.

Here Farrell and Sackley talk about what their lives are like today, two years after the protests.

LG: Hugh, how has your life changed since your case ended?

HF: I'm still under judicial control, which means that for another year and a half I'll have probation restrictions, which means I can't be arrested and am subject to additional surveillance.

LG: What happens if you're arrested?

HF: I have a two-year sentence, so if I get arrested, that immediately becomes unsuspended, and I'd do two years [of prison time] automatically. Now that we're done with the case, we're trying to figure out the repression that was used against us. It was hardly against just Tiga [Wertz] and me; it was also against a number of other people in the movement against [the] I-69 [highway], and that's part of the national momentum targeting ecoactivists. A lot of people in Bloomington are trying now to get organized to support other people who have been in prison and facing repression and try to fight back. One specific situation is the civil suit, in which 16 people are facing legal harassment and what's called a SLAPP suit [Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation] by Gohmann Asphalt for impinging on I-69 profits.

MS: I can give a brief update on the civil suit. Basically it's kind of a long waiting game where Gohmann Asphalt can wait us out until our energy wears out. They have endless money. Gohmann recently won a $7 million contract for the construction of I-69 through Pike County and through the Patoka National Wildlife Refuge, so they continue to be raking in the dollars. And still suing us for what could end up being over $100,000. The most recent update is that in December I filed an anti-SLAPP motion, which is a motion within the lawsuit to basically prove that this lawsuit is a SLAPP suit under Indiana statutes. And we're very fortunate that Indiana has those statutes because a lot of states don't have these statutes, so it would be a lot harder to defend ourselves.

LG: Mary, what was your role in all this?

MS: I was present at both lockdowns at Gohmann Asphalt. I was arrested at the second lockdown. I was the police liaison at both protests. I was specifically targeted because I was providing communication in between the protestors and the police. I was actually talking to the police and the prosecutor of Gibson County, and I was seeking to say, "Okay, what do you want us to do? Here's what people are willing to do," and letting the police know about various medical conditions. They used pressure points and compliance holds.

LG: What's happening right now, besides what you said?

HF: On a related note, a long-term organizer and well-known community environmental activist here, Marie Mason, was arrested in 2008. We have to understand that her arrest was not only a response to her long history of resistance to environmental destruction across the Midwest, but an attack on the movement against I-69, which she participated in for 10 years, at a time when the state was gearing up to begin construction on the highway. She was arrested at the school where she worked in 2008. Many people in Bloomington are getting better organized to try to support her through her 22-year prison sentence.

LG: She's in solitary confinement, isn't she?

HF: She's in a "secure housing unit," which is an extremely repressive prison regime specifically meant to isolate and target political prisoners and prisoners who have been active in resistance of all kinds. It's also racist, frequently used to lock Muslim prisoners regardless of their charges. We're trying to get together support for her and make sure people know about her role in 20 years of environmental organizing and labor struggles and other projects.

LG: What does support consist of?

HF: Making sure that on her birthday (Jan. 26) and every other day she gets letters of support because she has very little contact with the outside world otherwise and making sure she's supported and that she's able to stay in touch with people and not only with people who are her good friends. What she wants is wider contact with other people who care about the world, not just her good friends. Making sure she's not isolated and trying to refuse the State's effort to isolate prisoners and better control them that way and scare the rest of us.

I think public displays and shows of support for her are really important. Showing support for Marie is also a way of taking a public position on environmental destruction and against the kind of interests that railroaded her and made sure that she'd receive five times the normal sentence that an arsonist would get. Linking together support for her as well as opposition to ongoing environmental degradation and also against repression by the prison system against political prisoners and all communities that are targeted by the prison system.

LG: What have you done that's public to support her?

MS: There was recently a speaking event at Boxcar Books. That was pretty well attended. Some folks from Cincinnati and her support crew there came to speak.

HF: I feel really good about that. I felt that what we need to start doing is having a dialogue, an open conversation, and a place like Bloomington, even though it's a small town, can often feel very isolating to people; there's been a lot of fear because of what happened to her.

LG: Have you had any problems with FBI informants?

HF: The assumption now is that the government should have the prerogative to insert infiltrators and every sort of watching eye in any group of people involved in social struggles, and it's incredible what kind of extensive network they've built for surveillance (not just human infiltrators, either; Facebook has been cited extensively in several recent cases), but at the same time it's important not to be intimidated by that. What they want is to spread paranoia and fear and prevent communication between people. They have such an extensive operation of surveillance of infiltration of repression, so the challenge is to avoid responding the way they us to, which would be shutting down.

LG: Do you assume that nobody is an informant, or are you just really careful?

HF: I think the opposite. My goal always is to try to relate to people and try to develop relationships of affinity and friendship and mutual understanding. The exciting thing about encountering people you don't know is that they are different from you, that they're coming from a different place and thus it's impossible to "be really careful" with them. If we work to develop the most intense connections possible, connections where we can begin to strategize and talk about the worlds we want to live in, and how to concretely reach them -- It's very difficult to fake that. Those are the kinds of connections that are important for resisting both infiltration but also paranoia and isolation.

LG: What are you doing now? Are you doing any activism besides Marie's support network?

HF: Reading a lot, working on a community garden project, which, hopefully, will be part of a wider network of community gardens.

LG: Mary, do you have anything to add at this point?

MS: I look forward to people in Bloomington continuing to keep their eyes open to the repression in this state, both that which is faced by people resisting I-69 and others. To continue to think about the repression in the state of Indiana and to continue to think about how that what we face as political activists isn't unique, and it's very much as the system operates.

Linda Greene can be reached at lgreene@bloomington.in.us.

Marie Mason can be reached at: Marie Mason #04672-061,, FMC Carswell, Federal Medical Center, P.O. Box 27137, Fort Worth, TX 76127.

SOURCE: http://www.counterpunch.org/greene02162011.html

At Clinton Speech: Veteran Bloodied, Bruised
and Arrested for Standing Silently


SNIP
"As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her speech at George Washington University yesterday condemning governments that arrest protestors and do not allow free expression, 71-year-old Ray McGovern was grabbed from the audience in plain view of her by police and an unidentified official in plain clothes, brutalized and left bleeding in jail. She never paused speaking. When Secretary Clinton began her speech, Mr. McGovern remained standing silently in the audience and turned his back. Mr. McGovern, a veteran Army officer who also worked as a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years, was wearing a Veterans for Peace t-shirt "

END SNIP

http://www.justiceonline.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5553


What an hypocrite Hillary is !

The Disturbing Reality of Trauma-Based Mind Control
February 18, 2011
by Zen Gardner

In anyone's sincere quest for truth, they will undoubtedly come up against the area of deliberate trauma-based mind control. At first it may seem like "conspiracy theory on steriods", but as you investigate this subject further it becomes a dark, stark reality that cannot be shaken.

Fritz Springmeyer, brave whistleblower now serving jail time for false charges, says the following: There are many dangers to the human race, some real and some imagined. I believe that the trauma-based mind control is the greatest danger to the human race. It gives evil men the power to carry out any evil deeds totally undetected.

Over the years, I have spent thousands of hours studying the Illuminati, the Intelligence agencies of the world, and the occult world in general. The centerpiece of these organizations is the trauma-based mind control that they carry out. Without the ability to carry out this sophisticated type of mind-control using MPD (multiple personality disorder), drugs, hypnosis and electronics and other control methodologies, these organizations would fail to keep their dark evil deeds secret.

You many only be able to take this subject in small doses at first as the scope and implications are truly staggering. That anyone would perform such acts on innocent children and adults for control and dominion for covert purposes is almost beyond belief. Most think psychological experimentation went out with Mengele and the Nazis, or was a strange abberation of a few disturbed psychologists in the 50's.

No. It's alive and thriving as a social engineering tool and you're seeing it in use every day.

The usage is vast, the implications horrific.

It’s on public record that MK ULTRA, the mind control research which CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner admitted to in 1977 spent millions of dollars studying Voodoo, witchcraft, and psychics. On August 3, 1977, at a Senate hearing the then CIA director Admiral Stansfield Turner disclosed that the CIA had been conducting mind control on countless numbers of unsuspecting victims for years, without their knowledge or consent.

These CIA mind-control operations were carried out with the participation of a least 185 scientists and at least 80 American institutions, including prisons, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and 44 medical colleges & universities. Many of America’s most prestigious institutes of medical research, had cooperated with the CIA. as well as numerous big name corporations.

Casey admitted that day that the CIA did mind-control consisting of drugs, hypnosis & electro-shock. A few of the victims of the Monarch Project were even awarded financial compensation for their misery.

But what was admitted was admitted in the spirit of covering up the extent of the full truth. The compensation was actually hush money, because victims were given "gag orders" by judges not to talk about what had happened to them.

The subject is pervasive and deserves your attention. It can be depressing so take it in small doses, but don't discount it. It's an ugly Satanic Illuminati control technique woven into individuals and concepts in today's realms of the media, education, politics, the military, entertainment and science. And we all need to be aware of its extent and help expose it.

Enter Kim Noble (pseudonym)
I came across perhaps the most revealing and confirming visual evidence of mind control and related abuses I've seen yet. It's posted on the thoroughly exposing PseudoOccultMedia.org site and involves a startling MPD (multiple personality disorder) subject who has as many as 20 alters, or alter personalities, several of whom have learned to paint after working with an art therapist.

"To all intents and purposes, each of Kim's personalities is an artist in their own right: Patricia paints the solitary desert landscapes, Bonny's pictures often feature robotic dancing figures or "frieze people", Suzy repeatedly paints a kneeling mother, Judy's canvasses are large, conceptual pieces while Ria's work reveals deeply traumatic events involving children.

These disturbing images are at the root of Kim's extraordinary condition; DID is a creative mental survival strategy whereby the personality splits at a young age due to severe and chronic trauma. The number of personalities that exist often depends on how long the trauma lasts. But Kim herself has no memory of being abused as a child; she has been protected over the years by her alters." (From interview in article below)

The images in this the article linked to below are vivid and sometimes very troubling. Besides the depictions of horrible abuse that only someone who would have experienced these would know, the abstract images speak a language I find extremely compelling as to the psychological fracturing these MKUltra Monarch mind control programs cause.

The material below is not for the fainthearted. If you're a student of the subject this will only confirm what you have learned. But the fact is, these are mental snapshots of very real experiences the various alters inside Kim have experienced. There is no other explanation according to psychologists, and your own intuition as you'll find out.

The author explains: "The paintings featured in this post are by an artist with MPD/DID going by the name of Kim Noble, who began painting after time with an art therapist, each of her alters developed their own distinctive style...Although she does not remember the abuse she suffered (her front/dominant alters anyway), it is evident from her artwork that she was pretty severely abused and seems to have been programmed (some of them are particularly graphic depictions I should warn, may be triggering)"

"She appears to have undergone occult Kabbalistic programming as evidenced by her 'Key' (of Solomon/key access to compartments of the mind, parts of her system) alter which draws Kabbalah inspired work complete with the Tree of Life and scenes of child sexual abuse charted by various occult symbols; I suspect that this is an alter that remembers some of the abuse."

Read With Caution

The following is a link to the author's article. I preface it in this fashion to emphasize it is not for everyone.

But knowledge of the reality of trauma-based mind control techniques is imperative; they are very real and being used extensively to this day. Research for yourself.

The Art of Dissociation... the Story and Pictures of Kim at: http://beforeitsnews.com/story/427/382/The_Disturbing_Reality_of_Trauma-Based_Mind_Control.htm

Concerned and hoping to educate and enlighten,
Zen
www.zengardner.com

SOURCE: http://beforeitsnews.com/story/427/382/The_Disturbing_Reality_of_Trauma-Based_Mind_Control.html

UPDATED: The HB Gary Email That Should Concern Us All
FEB 16, 2011

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All

Note : HB Gary Federal is a cyber-security company run by Aaron Barr who has been researching individuals he believes are associated with Anonymous. Specifically he has been trying to link the handles of IRC participants to real people.

As I wrote yesterday , there is a leaked email that has gotten surprisingly little attention around here. It's the one where Aaron Barr discusses his intention to post at Daily Kos - presumably something negative about Anonymous, the hacking group. But that's not the email I'm talking about here.

As I also mentioned yesterday, in some of the emails, HB Gary people are talking about creating "personas", what we would call sockpuppets. This is not new. PR firms have been using fake "people" to promote products and other things for a while now, both online and even in bars and coffee houses.

But for a defense contractor with ties to the federal government, Hunton & Williams, DOD, NSA, and the CIA - whose enemies are labor unions, progressive organizations, journalists, and progressive bloggers, a persona apparently goes far beyond creating a mere sockpuppet.

According to an embedded MS Word document found in one of the HB Gary emails, it involves creating an army of sockpuppets, with sophisticated "persona management" software that allows a small team of only a few people to appear to be many, while keeping the personas from accidentally cross-contaminating each other. Then, to top it off, the team can actually automate some functions so one persona can appear to be an entire Brooks Brothers riot online.

Persona management entails not just the deconfliction of persona artifacts such as names, email addresses, landing pages, and associated content. It also requires providing the human actors technology that takes the decision process out of the loop when using a specific persona. For this purpose we custom developed either virtual machines or thumb drives for each persona. This allowed the human actor to open a virtual machine or thumb drive with an associated persona and have all the appropriate email accounts, associations, web pages, social media accounts, etc. pre-established and configured with visual cues to remind the actor which persona he/she is using so as not to accidentally cross-contaminate personas during use.
And all of this is for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and (here's the one that really worries me) ganging up on bloggers, commenters and otherwise "real" people to smear enemies and distort the truth.

This is an excerpt from one of the Word Documents, which was sent as an attachment by Aaron Barr, CEO of HB Gary's Federal subsidiary, to several of his colleagues to present to clients:

To build this capability we will create a set of personas on twitter, blogs, forums, buzz, and myspace under created names that fit the profile ( satellitejockey, hack3rman, etc ) . These accounts are maintained and updated automatically through RSS feeds, retweets, and linking together social media commenting between platforms. With a pool of these accounts to choose from, once you have a real name persona you create a Facebook and LinkedIn account using the given name, lock those accounts down and link these accounts to a selected # of previously created social media accounts, automatically pre-aging the real accounts.
Yes!!! That's how democracy and the first amendment are supposed to work.

In another Word document, one of the team spells out how automation can work so one person can be many personas:

Using the assigned social media accounts we can automate the posting of content that is relevant to the persona. In this case there are specific social media strategy website RSS feeds we can subscribe to and then repost content on twitter with the appropriate hashtags. In fact using hashtags and gaming some location based check-in services we can make it appear as if a persona was actually at a conference and introduce himself/herself to key individuals as part of the exercise, as one example. There are a variety of social media tricks we can use to add a level of realness to all fictitious personas
I don't know about you, but this concerns me greatly. It goes far beyond the mere ability for a government stooge, corporation or PR firm to hire people to post on sites like this one. They are talking about creating the illusion of consensus. And consensus is a powerful persuader. What has more effect, one guy saying BP is not at fault? Or 20 people saying it? For the weak minded, the number can make all the difference.

And another thing, this is just one little company of assholes. I can't believe there aren't others doing this already. From oil companies, political campaigns, PR firms, you name it. Public opinion means big bucks. And let's face it, what these guys are talking about is easy.

Just today I was listening to Stand Up with Pete Dominic on XM's POTUS channel. He was talking about the Wisconsin labor attack and how he had seen a lot of people email and contact the show in support of the Teachers there. Then he added a "but": "I've also seen a lot of anti-labor people on Twitter..."

Really? I thought. How do we know if those are real people? Twitter has to be the easiest thing to fake and to automate with retweets and 180 characrer max sentences. To the extent that the propaganda technique known as "Bandwagon" is an effective form of persuasion, which it definitely is, the ability for a few people to infiltrate a blog or social media site and appear to be many people, all taking one position in a debate, all agreeing, for example, that so and so is not credible, or a crook, is an incredibly powerful weapon.

How many times have you seen a diary get posted that reports some revelatory yet unfavorable tidbit about someone only to see a swarm of commenters arrive who hijack the thread, distract with a bunch of irrelevant nonsense, start throwing unsubstantiated accusations and ad hominem attacks to where before you know it, everyone's pretty much forgotten what the diary said in the first place.

Some times diaries deserve to be swarmed. But what if a diary is swarmed and it's really just one Xxxxxxx working for a law firm that represents the oil company your diary was attacking?

I don't know about you, but it matters to me what fellow progressives think. I consider all views. And if there appears to be a consensus that some reporter isn't credible, for example, or some candidate for congress in another state can't be trusted, I won't base my entire judgment on it, but it carries some weight.

That's me. I believe there are many people though who will base their judgment on rumors and mob attacks. And for those people, a fake mob can be really effective.

I have no idea what to do about this problem, except just make sure everyone knows its possible, and so watches out for it.

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

Lastly, some here are falling for the meme that HB Gary personel, and especially Aaron Barr himself, are incompetent buffoons. This is a mistake. While Mr Barr may be a fool, he was not the one who fell for a spear fishing attack that allow an, apparently, 16 year old girl to gain access to their servers.

I have rummaged through the leaked email, some of which contain resumes for employees there. These guys are recruiting people with incredibly advanced skills from many different agencies and top universities like MIT.

HB Gary and its subsidiary, HB Gary Federal, as well as Berinco and Palantir, employed a lot of extremely qualified people with backgrounds in the NSA and ATT and other major organizations/corporations. These guys are pros.

Aaron Barr may be a mockery to Anonymous for running his mouth off. As he should be. But he's not an idiot and he wasn't the one who gave out the company's keys to a 16 yo girl.

I wanted to make this clear because it is in the interests of government and propagandists, and anyone else who wants this story to go away to try and blow all this off as one little company who wrote a proposal no one even read and who isn't even competent enough to protect its own servers so no one should pay any attention at all to what they were up to.

That is the narrative being spun, even here on this site, and it is entirely fictitious.

We are under attack. And the attackers are damn good at what they do. Pretending they're not, or that this isn't happening isn't going to make it better.

I do believe there are limitation to the effectiveness of such an attack on this site and others like it. This isn't twitter, and bullshit only goes so far, no matter how many personas are spreading it.

But everyone needs to be aware that not only are sites like this a target of attack, but that Daily Kos has been mentioned specifically as a target of attack.

Maybe this whole thing will be liberating. Maybe people will develop stronger spines and not be so easily swayed by raving mobs.

UPDATE: From another email, I found a government solicitation for this "Persona Management Software".

This confirms that in fact, the US Gov. is attempting to use this kind of technology. But it appears from the solicitation it is contracted for use in foreign theaters like Afghanistan and Iraq. I can't imagine why this is posted on an open site. And whenthis was discovered by a couple of HB Gary staffers, they weren't too happy about it either:

The first email just had the title, "WTF Dude?"
The response email said, "This is posted on open source. Are you Xxxxxxxx serious?"

Here's the link to the solicitation at website "FedBizOps.gov". Yes, that name doesn't sound like cronyism at all...

Link

Love Always
mudra

TRANCOSO wrote:The Disturbing Reality of Trauma-Based Mind Control
February 18, 2011
by Zen Gardner

I think the very bottom in terms of human degradation lays exactly there in the deep pit
of these Mind Control horrible rituals used on little children .
All done in such covert ways that the victims can't even remember .
A very disturbing subject and article specially when you follow it through it's links.
Would you mind TRAN to post it on the mind control thread so that people who
bump into this one without further notice may be helped by having the background
to all this ?

http://www.themistsofavalon.net/t1755-mind-control-from-slavery-to-self-mastery

Thanks

Love from me
mudra

AeroVironment's Nano Hummingbird - Outdoor Indoor Flight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96WePgcg37I&feature=player_embedded


Love Always
mudra

Is the Navy Trying to Start the Robot Apocalypse?
By Adam Rawnsley March 3, 2011

....

The U.S. Navy recently issued a proposal for aspiring mad scientists to build it “a coordinated and distributed swarm of micro-robots” (http://www.dodsbir.net/solicitation/sttr11A/navy11A.htm)capable of manufacturing “novel materials and structures.”

Gallery: Inside the Navy’s Armed-Robot Labs

This isn’t heavy industry, though. They want the robot swarm to use desktop manufacturing — a technology that allows you to “print” 3-D objects using equipment that can fit on your desk and be programmed with nothing more sophisticated than your own laptop.

In its more benign uses, desktop manufacturing takes the form of products like Makerbot, which lets users fabricate cool 3-D objects out of plastic. In the hands of intelligent robots, though, think of this more as the Easy-Bake Oven of the robot apocalypse.


The proposal says the mini manufacturers will be able to “pick and place, dispense liquids, print inks, remove material, join components” and “move cooperatively” to not just make things, but assemble them, as well.

And what exactly will they make? The Navy lists a number of examples like “multifunctional materials” and “metamorphic materials” but its mention of “programmable materials” really caught our ear.

Darpa, the Defense Department’s far-out advanced research wing, has previously experimented with “programmable materials” to create shape-shifting machines like the self-folding origami robot that can change into a small plane and boat.

Intel, one of Darpa’s partners on the research has suggested the technology could one day go further, making it able to “mimic the shape and appearance of a person or object being imaged in real time.”

So these mechanical swarms might eventually be capable of building other, shape-shifting robots? What could possibly go wrong?

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/navy-robot-apocalypse/

Love Always
mudra

3D realm versus mystical? I choose mystical. Mystical feelings are sublime. No bots for me.

Yeah They're called MAVs or CMAVs...

MAVs = Micro Air Vehicles...

CMAVs = Combat Micro Air Vehicles...

And They can be as small as the size of a Fly. I mean They've even talked about NAVs and CNAVs...

NAVs = Nano Air Vehicles...

CNAVs = Combat Nano Air Vehicles...

They have truly gone Insane. No need for debate - Purely Insane.

That said - I have a 2025 USAF DoD .pdf around here somewhere that details the above as well as Particle and Scalar Weapons...

Now where is that .pdf ?

Crowd Identity MAP - Unbelievable Technology - How Big Brother Watches Crowds
3-6-11

You used to be able to get lost in the crowd, but not anymore. Double click on any area in the picture to bring the person closer. Or, just click the mouse and use the mouse wheel to bring them closer.

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?auth=033ef14483ee899496648c2b4b06233c

This is a photograph of 2009 Obama Inauguration. You can see IN FOCUS the face of EACH individual in the crowd !!!

You can scan and zoom to any section of the crowd... wait a few seconds.

Double click anywhere and double click again and perhaps again. The focus adjusts to give you a very identifiable close up.

The picture was taken with a robotic 1474 megapixel camera (295 times the standard 5 megapixel camera).

Every one attending could be scanned after the event, should something have gone wrong during it.

SOURCE: http://www.rense.com/general93/crowdg.htm

Heres the PDF I was mentioning above.

Big Brother's Eye in the Sky Arrives in Florida
Kurt Nimmo
Mar 10 2011

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=34611


Police in Miami will soon be using a noisy bit of technology called a MAV, or Micro Air Vehicle, to snoop on citizens.

Miami-Dade Sgt. Andrew Cohen told CBS Miami the drone will be used to gather real time information in situations that may be too dangerous for officers.

"If an SRT (Special Response Team) has to go into an area they don't know what's there, we don't know what is in the backyard," said Cohen, "They want to know if there are dogs in the backyard, if there is a shed, things that could be a threat to us."



The ACLU is not so sure. "What happens when they fly over backyards and they see something without a warrant that they want to take [action] against," pondered ACLU Executive Director Howard Simon.

Cops respond that the device -- developed and used by the military -- will only be used in situations where there is an established police presence. "They are going to know we are there because we will have tactical teams, SRT teams, we're going to have a perimeter, it's going to be secure," said Cohen.

The police also admit the MAV -- purchased with grant money (more than likely from the Department of Homeland Security, although this is not mentioned in the CBS article) -- has the ability to peek in windows.

Since a large percentage of crime in the United States is of the non-violent and consensual sort -- i.e., adults consuming substances prohibited by the state -- it is probably advisable that the residents of Miami keep their window shades drawn from here on out.

In the not too distant future, however, the state will be able to look through your walls to see if you are doing something it considers illegal. Scientists and engineers are working to improve the capability of the Xaver800, a device that can see through walls.

The military and law enforcement agencies have orders in for the new technology, according to Science Daily.

Love Always
mudra

CCTV: When Criminals Control the Cameras
by grtv

Today CCTV cameras are ubiquitous, with Londoners estimated to be caught on camera 300 times a day. CCTV cameras in England are now being equipped with loud speakers so that “anti-social behaviour” can be rebuked in a child’s voice.

CCTV cameras are now routinely equipped with microphones and are admittedly used by law enforcement to listen in on conversations.

IBM, another company whose German branch actively collaborated with the Nazis in World War II, is developing behaviour-monitoring cameras tied to A.I. Computers that scan crowds for signs of “terrorist” behaviour.

Wal-Marts and other retailers across the US are showing televised messages from the head of Homeland Security urging Americans to spy on their fellow shoppers.

And now the federal government is announcing it is ready to test technology that has been quietly installed in the back door of every broadcaster in the U.S. allowing the President to interrupt all radio and TV broadcasts at any time.

In the 1940s, this was a nightmare vision of a totalitarian future. In 2011, it’s our mundane reality.

Full transcript: http://www.corbettreport.com/when-the-criminals-control-the-cameras/

White House: Streaming Should Be a Felony, Wiretap Infringers
16-03-2011

President Obama’s so-called “IP Czar” Victoria Espinel yesterday delivered a 20-page white paper containing her recommendations for future legislation, calling on Congress to make changes in order to make it easier to clamp down on copyright infringement. Among the recommendations are calls to turn streaming into a felony alongside authority to wiretap in copyright cases.

The Obama administration’s IP Enforcement Coordinator, Victoria Espinel, has finally released her list of proposals for changes in intellectual property law. While there is a strong presence in her white paper for action against counterfeit pharmaceuticals, it is likely that readers’ focus will be drawn to suggested measures for cracking down on the streaming of unauthorized media.

While in some cases the former will undoubtedly endanger lives and therefore carries a considerable gravity when considering legislation, the fact that the latter is even mentioned in the same breath is an immediate cause for concern.

In respect of sites offering streaming content, Espinel voices concern that their delivery mechanism of choice could be considered, under current law, to be more akin to a public performance. For copyright holders viewing from a deterrent perspective, this lower scale offense is problematic.

It is therefore proposed that streaming – or other new technological methods serving the same purpose – should be reclassified as the “distribution of copyrighted works” and, therefore, a felony.

With this upgrading to felony comes some other perks, notably in surveillance. While the FBI and other agencies are able to tap phones, Internet connections and other methods of communication as they investigate the most serious of crimes, copyright infringement is not currently one of them. If Espinel has her way, that will change.

“Wiretap authority for these intellectual property crimes, subject to the existing legal protections that apply to wiretaps for other types of crimes, would assist U.S. law enforcement agencies to effectively investigate those offenses, including targeting organized crime and the leaders and organizers of criminal enterprises,” the paper reads.

As always, there are some concerns. While at first view the recommendations appear to be aimed at site owners (or the apparent preferred term “criminal gangs”), by classifying “streaming” as a felony there is the potential to suck in innocent victims. As streaming becomes more popular and sites utilize the upload bandwidth of viewers in order to distribute content to others (such as PPLive), do those viewers then become “streamers” too?

Then of course, one is naturally drawn to the recent case of 32-year-old Texan Bryan McCarthy, who was arrested for criminal copyright infringement for his alleged operations at ChannelSurfing.net.

McCarthy was charged with criminal copyright infringement for “reproduction and distribution” of copyrighted material, yet Southern District of New York Attorney Preet Bhara said that McCarthy “sought to profit by intercepting and then streaming live sporting events.”

So, if McCarthy “streamed” and that’s a criminal offense already, why is a change in the law required? Furthermore, it’s believed that he did not stream content, but merely embedded other people’s streams in web pages on ChannelSurfing. So streaming or not streaming, distributing or not distributing (embedding) are all criminal offenses? As usual, there are more questions than answers.

SOURCE: http://torrentfreak.com/white-house-streaming-should-be-a-felony-wiretap-infringers-110316/

Orwell 2011: Towards a Pervasive "Surveillance State" in America
Biometrics, Facial Mapping, 'Computer-Aided ID'.
by Tom Burghardt
Global Research
March 28, 2011

Not since AT&T whistleblower Marc Klein's 2006 revelations that U.S. telecommunications giants were secretly collaborating with the government to spy on Americans, has a story driven home the point that we are confronted by a daunting set of invisible enemies: the security and intelligence firms constellating the dark skies of the National Security State.

As echoes from last month's disclosures by the cyber-guerrilla collective Anonymous continue to reverberate, leaked HBGary emails and documents are providing tantalizing insight into just how little daylight there is between private companies and the government.

The latest front in the ongoing war against civil liberties and privacy rights is the Pentagon's interest in "persona management software."

A euphemism for a suite of high-tech tools that equip an operative - military or corporate, take your pick - with multiple avatars or sock puppets, our latter day shadow warriors hope to achieve a leg up on their opponents in the "war of ideas" through stealthy propaganda campaigns rebranded as "information operations."

A Pervasive Surveillance State
The signs of a pervasive surveillance state are all around us. From the "persistent cookies" that track our every move across the internet to indexing dissidents already preemptively detained in public and private data bases: threats to our freedom to speak out without harassment, or worse, have never been greater.

As constitutional scholar Jack Balkin warned, the transformation of what was once a democratic republic based on the rule of law into a "National Surveillance State," feature "huge investments in electronic surveillance and various end runs around traditional Bill of Rights protections and expectations about procedure."

"These end runs," Balkin wrote, "included public private cooperation in surveillance and exchange of information, expansion of the state secrets doctrine, expansion of administrative warrants and national security letters, a system of preventive detention, expanded use of military prisons, extraordinary rendition to other countries, and aggressive interrogation techniques outside of those countenanced by the traditional laws of war."

Continuing the civil liberties' onslaught, The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Barack Obama's "change" regime has issued new rules that "allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades."

The Journal points out that the administrative "revision" of long-standing rules and case law "marks another step back from [Obama's] pre-election criticism of unorthodox counterterror methods."

Also last week, The Raw Story revealed that the FBI has plans to "embark on a $1 billion biometrics project and construct an advanced biometrics facility to be shared with the Pentagon."

The Bureau's new biometrics center, part of which is already operating in Clarksburg, West Virginia, "will be based on a system constructed by defense contractor Lockheed Martin."

"Starting with fingerprints," The Raw Story disclosed, the center will function as "a global law enforcement database for the sharing of those biometric images." Once ramped-up "the system is slated to expand outward, eventually encompassing facial mapping and other advanced forms of computer-aided identification."

The transformation of the FBI into a political Department of Precrime is underscored by moves to gift state and local police agencies with electronic fingerprint scanners. Local cops would be "empowered to capture prints from any suspect, even if they haven't been arrested or convicted of a crime."

"In such a context," Stephen Graham cautions in Cities Under Siege, "Western security and military doctrine is being rapidly imagined in ways that dramatically blur the juridical and operational separation between policing, intelligence and the military; distinctions between war and peace; and those between local, national and global operations."

This precarious state of affairs, Graham avers, under conditions of global economic crisis in the so-called democratic West as well as along the periphery in what was once called the Third World, has meant that "wars and associated mobilizations ... become both boundless and more or less permanent."

Under such conditions, Dick Cheney's infamous statement that the "War on Terror" might last "decades" means, according to Graham, that "emerging security policies are founded on the profiling of individuals, places, behaviours, associations, and groups."

But to profile more effectively, whether in Cairo, Kabul, or New York, state security apparatchiks and their private partners find it necessary to squeeze ever more data from a surveillance system already glutted by an overabundance of "situational awareness."

"Last October," Secrecy News reported, "the DNI revealed that the FY2010 budget for the National Intelligence Program (NIP) was $53.1 billion. And the Secretary of Defense revealed that the FY2010 budget for the Military Intelligence Program (MIP) was $27.0 billion, the first time the MIP budget had been disclosed, for an aggregate total intelligence budget of $80.1 billion for FY 2010."

This excludes of course, the CIA and Pentagon's black budget that hides a welter of top secret and above Special Access Programs under a dizzying array of code names and acronyms. In February, Wired disclosed that the black budget "appears to be about $56 billion, the same as last year," but this "may only be the tip of an iceberg of secret funds."

While the scandalous nature of such outlays during a period of intense economic and social attacks on the working class are obvious, less obvious are the means employed by the so-called "intelligence community" to defend an indefensible system of exploitation and corruption.

Which brings us back to the HBGary hack.

'Operation MetalGear'
While media have focused, rightly so, on the sleazy campaign proposed to Bank of America and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by the high-powered law firm and lobby shop Hunton & Williams (H&W) to bring down WikiLeaks and tar Chamber critics, the treasure trove of emails leaked by Anonymous also revealed a host of Pentagon programs pointed directly at the heart of our freedom to communicate.

In fact, The Tech Herald revealed that while Palantir and Berico sought to distance themselves from HBGary and Hunton & William's private spy op, "in 2005, Palantir was one of countless startups funded by the CIA, thanks to their venture funding arm, In-Q-Tel."

"Most of In-Q-Tel's investments," journalist Steve Ragan wrote, "center on companies that specialize in automatic collection and processing of information."

In other words Palantir, and dozens of other security start-ups to the tune of $200 million since 1999, was a recipient of taxpayer-funded largess from the CIA's venture capitalist arm for products inherently "dual-use" in nature.

"Palantir Technologies," The Tech Herald revealed, was "the main workhorse when it comes to Team Themis' activities."

In proposals sent to H&W, a firm recommended to Bank of America by a Justice Department insider, "Team Themis said they would 'leverage their extensive knowledge of Palantir's development and data integration environments' allowing all of the data collected to be 'seamlessly integrated into the Palantir analysis framework to enhance link and artifact analysis'."

Following the sting of HBGary Federal and parent company HBGary, Anonymous disclosed on-going interest and contract bids between those firms, Booz Allen Hamilton and the U.S. Air Force to develop software that will allow cyber-warriors to create fake personas that help "manage" Pentagon interventions into social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and blogs.

As Ragan points out, while the "idea for such technology isn't new," and that "reputation and persona management techniques have been used by the government and the private sector for years," what makes these disclosures uniquely disturbing are apparent plans by the secret state to use the software for propaganda campaigns that can just as easily target an American audience as one in a foreign country.

While neither HBGary nor Booz Allen secured those contracts, interest by HBGary Federal's disgraced former CEO Aaron Barr and others catering to the needs of the militarist state continue to drive development forward.

Dubbed "Operation MetalGear", Anonymous believes that the program "involves an army of fake cyber personalities immersed in social networking websites for the purposes of manipulating the mass population via influence, crawling information from major online communities (such as Facebook), and identifying anonymous personalities via correlating stored information from multiple sources to establish connections between separate online accounts, using this information to arrest dissidents and activists who work anonymously."

As readers recall, such tools were precisely what Aaron Barr boasted would help law enforcement officials take down Anonymous and identify WikiLeaks supporters.

According to a solicitation (RTB220610) found on the FedBizOpps.Gov web site, under the Orwellian tag "Freedom of Information Act Support," the Air Force is seeking software that "will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background, history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly [sic] consistent."

We're informed that "individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries."

Creepily, "personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user's situational awareness by displaying real-time local information."

Aiming for maximum opacity, the RFI demands that the licence "protects the identity of government agencies and enterprise organizations." An "enterprise organization" is a euphemism for a private contractor hired by the government to do its dirty work.

The proposal specifies that the licensed software will enable "organizations to manage their persistent online personas by assigning static IP addresses to each persona. Individuals can perform static impersonations, which allow them to look like the same person over time. Also allows organizations that frequent same site/service often to easily switch IP addresses to look like ordinary users as opposed to one organization."

While Barr's premature boasting may have brought Team Themis to ground, one wonders how many other similar operations continue today under cover of the Defense Department's black budget.

Corporate Cut-Outs
Following up on last month's revelations, The Guardian disclosed that a "Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with United States Central Command (Centcom), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle East and Central Asia, to develop what is described as an 'online persona management service' that will allow one US serviceman or woman to control up to 10 separate identities based all over the world."

That firm, a shadowy Los Angeles-based outfit called Ntrepid is devoid of information on its corporate web site although a company profile avers that the firm "provides national security and law enforcement customers with software, hardware, and managed services for cyber operations, analytics, linguistics, and tagging & tracking."

According to Guardian reporters Nick Fielding and Ian Cobain, Ntrepid was awarded a $2.76M contract by CENTCOM, which refused to disclose "whether the multiple persona project is already in operation or discuss any related contracts."

Blurring corporate lines of accountability even further, The Tech Herald revealed that Ntrepid may be nothing more than a "ghost corporation," a cut-out wholly owned and operated by Cubic Corporation.

A San Diego-based firm describing itself as "a global leader in defense and transportation systems and services" that "is emerging as an international supplier of smart cards and RFID solutions," Cubic clocks in at No. 75 on Washington Technology's list of 2010 Top Government Contractors.

Founded by Walter J. Zable, the firm's Chairman of the Board and CEO, Cubic has been described as one of the oldest and largest defense electronics firms on the West Coast.

Chock-a-block with high-level connections to right-wing Republicans including Darrell Issa, Duncan Hunter and Dan Coates, during the 2010 election cycle Cubic officers donated some $90,000 to Republican candidates, including $25,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee and some $30,000 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, according to the Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org.

With some $1 billion in 2009 revenue largely derived from the Defense Department, the company's "Cyber Solutions" division "provides specialized cyber security products and solutions for defense, intelligence and homeland security customers."

The RFI for the Air Force disclosed by Anonymous Ragan reports, "was written for Anonymizer, a company acquired in 2008 by intelligence contractor Abraxas Corporation. The reasoning is that they had existing persona management software and abilities."

In turn, Abraxas was purchased by Cubic in 2010 for $124 million, an acquisition which Washington Technology described as one of the "best intelligence-related" deals of the year.

As The Tech Herald revealed, "some of the top talent at Anonymizer, who later went to Abraxas, left the Cubic umbrella to start another intelligence firm. They are now listed as organizational leaders for Ntrepid, the ultimate winner of the $2.7 million dollar government contract."

Speculation is now rife that since "Ntrepid's corporate registry lists Abraxas' previous CEO and founder, Richard Helms, as the director and officer, along with Wesley Husted, the former CFO, who is an Ntrepid officer as well," the new firm may be little more than an under-the-radar front for Cubic.

Amongst the Security Services offered by the firm we learn that "Cubic subsidiaries are working individually and in concert to develop a wide range of security solutions" that include: "C4ISR data links for homeland security intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions;" a Cubic Virtual Analysis Center which promises to deliver "superior situational awareness to decision makers in government, industry and nonprofit organizations," human behavior pattern analysis, and other areas lusted after by securocrats.

The Guardian informs us that the "multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of al-Qaida supporters and others ranged against coalition forces."

"Since then," Fielding and Cobain wrote, "OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m programme and is thought to have been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East."

While CENTCOM's then-commander, General David Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee last year that the program was designed to "counter extremist ideology and propaganda," in light of HBGary revelations, one must ask whether firms involved in the dirty tricks campaign against WikiLeaks have deployed versions of "persona management software" against domestic opponents.

While we cannot say with certainty this is the case, mission creep from other "War on Terror" fronts, notably ongoing NSA warrantless wiretapping programs and Defense Department spy ops against antiwar activists, also involving "public-private partnerships" amongst security firms and the secret state, should give pause.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

SOURCE: http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23992

Cell Phone Surveillance: Some Cell Phones Record Your Location Hundreds Of Times A Day
Friday April 01, 03:18

SNIP
Do you own a cell phone? Do you think that it is private and secure? You might want to think again. The truth is that there is virtually no privacy when it comes to cell phones. In fact, the amount of cell phone surveillance that goes on is absolutely staggering. For example, one German politician named Malte Spitz recently went to court to force Deutsche Telekom to reveal how often his cell phone was being tracked. What he found out was absolutely amazing. It turns out that in just one 6 month period, Deutsche Telekom recorded the longitude and latitude coordinates of his cell phone 35,000 times. Not only that, in the United States cell phone companies are actually required by law to be able to pinpoint the locations of their customers to within 100 meters. Most cell phone carriers are able to track their customers far more accurately than that. The truth is that your location will never again be truly "private" as long as you are carrying a cell phone.

END SNIP

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/527/319/Cell_Phone_Surveillance:_Some_Cell_Phones_Record_Your_Location_Hundreds_Of_Times_A_Day.html

Ridiculous DHS list: You might be a domestic terrorist if...

We've all heard the "You might be a Redneck If" jokes, but in this series "You might be a Domestic Terrorist If" you believe in civil liberties, or if you actually believe in your Constitutional rights. Sadly, this is not a joke. You might also be a terrorist if you have ever expressed concerns of Big Brother. Are you a Christian who has ever discussed the anti-Christ, the apocalypse, or even mentioned the book of Revelation? Guess what, according to DHS then you too qualify as a potential domestic terrorist.

An 18-year veteran in law enforcement warned to beware of Homeland Security training that is being pushed to local law enforcement. James Wesley Rawles recently posted on AxXiom for Liberty some very disturbing trends in law enforcement training. He reports a shift in focus in the last 18 years from local community to a "federally dominated model of complete social control" coming out of, not surprisingly, Homeland Security. More specifically, the long-reaching DHS arms of TSA and FEMA have been pushed heavily in the last two years to local law enforcement.

Rawles notes that regardless to training session topics, the courses shift to domestic terrorist warnings in the community. That is not abnormal, but the wide scope of what our government describes as having the most potential to be domestic terrorists is highly alarming.

Rawles writes that the following are characteristics that qualifies a person as a potential domestic terrorist:

* Expressions of libertarian philosophies (statements, bumper stickers)

* Second Amendment-oriented views (NRA or gun club membership, holding a CCW permit)

* Survivalist literature (fictional books such as "Patriots" and "One Second After" are mentioned by name)

* Self-sufficiency (stockpiling food, ammo, hand tools, medical supplies)

* Fear of economic collapse (buying gold and barter items)

* Religious views concerning the book of Revelation (apocalypse, anti-Christ)

* Expressed fears of Big Brother or big government

* Homeschooling

* Declarations of Constitutional rights and civil liberties

* Belief in a New World Order conspiracy

People engaged in the above activities or mind-set may be considered "extremists" or "militia groups" that exist in our communities and are "hiding in plain sight, ready to attack."

We've looked before at suspicious activity reports (SAR database) and fusion centers that keep info on supposedly "suspicious" people, keeping watchlists that can be accessed by local law enforcement and other government agencies. Domestic surveillance seems out of control and ACLU's Policy Counsel on National Security, Immigration and Privacy, Mike German, has said as much: "The most disturbing thing we've uncovered is the scope of domestic intelligence activities taking place today. Domestic spying is now being done by a host of federal agencies (FBI, DOD, DHS, DNI) as well as state and local law enforcement and even private companies. Too often this spying targets political activity and religious practices. We've documented intelligence activities targeting or obstructing First Amendment-protected activity in 33 states and DC."

I'm sure none of us want terrorists in our country. Although there may be domestic terrorists inside the USA, why don't we actually hear about these groups? Could it be that all the warnings of how there are such a high risks for terrorism inside the U.S. might be because there are these utterly ridiculous lists of what qualifies as potential terrorists?

I strongly disagree that We the People of the USA, the land of free, are a wildly dangerous group. In fact, I don't think terrorists are lurking everywhere in America, waiting to attack. I believe, it is because we love America that we talk about and write about the worrisome facts of our great country becoming the land of surveillance and distrust, the place where neighbors are encouraged to report neighbors, and where local law enforcement is being told to be on the lookout for terrorists lurking all over their communities.

SOURCE: http://m.networkworld.com/community/blog/ridiculous-dhs-list-you-might-be-domestic-ter

Violating the Digital Privacy Rights of Americans - Pentagon Stonewalls Corporate Spy Probe
by Tom Burghardt
Global Research,
April 10, 2011

When Politico reported late last month that President Obama quietly received a "transparency" award "in a closed, undisclosed meeting at the White House," I first thought it was an April Fool's gag.

But as with all things Obama, the joke is on us.

Reporter Abby Phillip revealed that during a "secret presentation" which had been "inexplicably postponed" two weeks earlier, His Changeness received high marks from "Gary Bass of OMB Watch, Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive, Danielle Brian of the Project on Government Oversight, Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Patrice McDermott of OpenTheGovernment.org."

Let it be said, these organizations do yeoman's work uncovering official waste, fraud and abuse and have done much to expose state crimes (past and present) committed by the U.S. government.

Nevertheless, in callous disregard for his supporters (which should be an object lesson for those who believe the secret state can be "reformed" from the inside), the White House failed to post the meeting on the president's public schedule and barred photographers and print journalists from recording the august event.

OMB Watch's Gary Bass found it "baffling" that the president wouldn't want to trumpet his award; after all, hadn't Obama promised his would be the most "open" administration in history?

For her part, OpenTheGovernment.org's Patrice McDermott expressed "disappointment" that the meeting was held in camera and "surprise" when they learned the event was "not on the President's daily calendar."

Caught off-guard by the White House McDermott averred, "Why they decided to close the meeting to the press is not something we understand."

Scarcely a week later, we learned that the administration will soon seek legislation from Congress that would "punish leaks of classified information" and authorize "intelligence agencies to seize the pension benefits of current or former employees who are believed to have committed an unauthorized disclosure of classified information," Secrecy News revealed.

Given the embarrassing fact that the award was bestowed "in honor of President Obama's commitment to transparency," even as his administration hounds and prosecutes whistleblowers with a ferocity not seen since the darkest days of Watergate, the question is: why is there still such a profound disconnect between the harsh realities of White House policy and its perception management amongst those who should know better?

Digital Privacy? Forgetaboutit!
What other ironies are hiding in plain sight in well-appointed Washington hearing rooms and dark corridors?

CNET News reported that the Justice Department "offered what amounts to a frontal attack on proposals to amend federal law to better protect Americans' privacy."

During hearings last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is rewriting portions of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), Associate Attorney General James A. Baker warned the panel that granting "cloud computing users more privacy protections and to require court approval before tracking Americans' cell phones would hinder police investigations."

Baker told the committee "that requiring a search warrant to obtain stored e-mail could have an 'adverse impact' on criminal investigations," CNET reported. And making location information only available with a search warrant, he said, would hinder "the government's ability to obtain important information in investigations of serious crimes."

"As we engage in that discussion," Baker averred, "what we must not do - either intentionally or unintentionally - is unnecessarily hinder the government's ability to effectively and efficiently enforce the criminal law and protect national security."

How obtaining a search warrant to legally investigate crime while protecting the rights of suspects would hinder "the government's ability to access, review, analyze, and act promptly upon the communications of criminals that we acquire lawfully," was side-stepped by the Justice Department.

Coming on the heels of new administration rules that "allow investigators to hold domestic-terror suspects longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning," as The Wall Street Journal reported, while "significantly expanding exceptions to the instructions that have governed the handling of criminal suspects for more than four decades," weakening already anemic digital privacy rights would grant even more power to those building a National Surveillance State.

Indeed, short of obtaining a search warrant as stipulated in the Fourth Amendment, any and all electronic communications trolled by the secret state, whether or not they are part of an ongoing criminal or national security investigation have not been acquired "lawfully."

On this point, the law is clear: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

But as Antifascist Calling reported in February, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released an explosive report that documented the lawless, constitution-free zone that already exists in "new normal" America.

According to EFF, their review of nearly 2,500 pages of previously classified documents pried from the FBI through Freedom of Information Act litigation, revealed that Bureau "intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was previously assumed."

In fact, "almost one-fifth involved an FBI violation of the Constitution, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or other laws governing criminal investigations or intelligence gathering activities."

"From 2001 to 2008," the civil liberties' watchdogs uncovered evidence that "the FBI engaged in a number of flagrant legal violations." Amongst the more egregious abuses of democratic norms, EFF revealed that FBI investigators could be criminally charged with "submitting false or inaccurate declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury subpoenas" and "accessing password protected documents without a warrant."

Keep in mind these transgressions occurred in but one of 16 agencies which comprise the so-called "Intelligence Community." It's anyone's guess what dirty work is being hatched in darkness by opaque Pentagon satrapies such as the National Security Agency or U.S. Cyber Command, let alone that institutional black hole of crime and corruption, the CIA.

Never one to miss a beat, or offer ever more insidious snooping privileges to the Executive Branch, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) said "it's crucial to ensure we don't limit (law enforcement's) ability to obtain information necessary to catch criminals and terrorists who use electronic communication."

Grassley also suggested that requiring warrants, a thoroughly novel and radical approach to policing in a society that presumably champions the rule of law and the rights of the accused, would lead to "increased burdens on the court system."

We wouldn't want that would we? Heavens no! Considering how tiresome it must already be for our "overburdened" federal court system and Justice Department busily and conscientiously investigating and prosecuting Bush, now Obama, administration officials for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Launch a preemptive war against a nation that hasn't attacked us, say Libya, without consulting Congress whom the Constitution alone has granted the power to declare war? Well, there's an app for that too!, the White House Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which recently declared "that the President had the constitutional authority to direct the use of force in Libya because he could reasonably determine that such use of force was in the national interest."

Memo to Congress: sit down, shut up and continue doing what you do best--taking blood money from the corporate merchants of death who profit from the enterprise.

Pentagon Stonewalls Corporate Spy Probe
Violating the digital privacy and political rights of Americans isn't the exclusive purview of the secret state.

As fallout from the HBGary/Palantir/Berico/Team Themis hack by Anonymous continues to spread like a radioactive cloud, The Tech Herald, which first broke the story of Bank of America's sleazy project to bring down WikiLeaks by targeting journalists and supporters, reported that the Defense Department is stonewalling Rep. Hank Johnson's (D-GA) request "to review contracts signed with Team Themis."

"Last week," investigative journalist Steve Ragan disclosed, "Rep. Johnson sent a letter to the DOD, as well as the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), asking that any information regarding contracts signed with Team Themis be returned to his office within 10 business days."

Ragan writes that "Johnson is seeking 'in their entirety,' all past and present contracts held by Team Themis, in addition to a written explanation of what safeguards are in place to restrain federal contractors from using technologies for official use against American citizens. Moreover, he asked for a written explanation of who owns and controls the tools developed by contractors for the government."

"This last request," The Tech Herald avers, "is important when you consider that the persona management software developed for the U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM), also known as MetalGear, isn't owned by the government, it's owned by developer Ntrepid."

Such contracts are worth millions and niche security outfits like Team Themis are viewed by the Pentagon as key players in the development of surveillance tools in Washington's endless "War on Terror."

Last week, the secrecy-shredding web site Public Intelligence published two additional HBGary documents that provided new details on the close, and profitable, conjunction amongst opaque corporate entities and the Pentagon.

The first is the HBGary SRA International 'Memory Grabber' Forensics Tool White Paper, which describes a system for obtaining "memory access to a running and password protected laptop through the use of a small PC Card inserted into the PCMCIA slot of the laptop."

We're told that "law enforcement agents and Special Operations personnel need a tool that provides memory access to a running laptop in the field enabling the timely capture of volatile information."

Such a device would be of particular interest to Border Patrol agents who might seize the laptop of a dissident returning from an overseas peace conference, or a journalist who may have had the temerity to probe too deeply into state-sanctioned crimes.

Last week, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 2-1 decision that "authorities may seize laptops, cameras and other digital devices at the U.S. border without a warrant, and scour through them for days hundreds of miles away," Wired reported.

Unsurprisingly, "under the Obama administration, law enforcement agents have aggressively used this power to search travelers' laptops, sometimes copying the hard drive before returning the computer to its owner."

The second document, HBGary DARPA Cyber Insider Threat (CINDER) Proposal, details a bid by the dodgy firm to secure a piece of the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's "Insider Threat" pie.

"Like a lie detector detects physical changes in the body based on sensitivities to specific questions," HBGary avers, "we believe there are physical changes in the body that are represented in observable behavioral changes when committing actions someone knows is wrong."

"Our solution," disgraced former HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr wrote, "is to develop a paranoia-meter to measure these observables."

Before being run to ground by Anonymous, Barr and HBGary CEO Greg Hoglund claimed they had developed a system, a "full functional rootkit on every host or on targeted hosts that can have complete control over the operating environment."

We're told that "the rootkit loads as a stealth kernel-mode base implant," and "will collect select file access, process execution with parameters, email communications, keyboard activity with a time/date stamp, network/TDI activity (and the actual network data if appropriate), and IM traffic. If detailed surveillance is required, it can be enabled to capture screenshots and construct a video stream. All traces of the rootkit installation will be removed after the initial deployment (event log, etc)."

But as we have seen, projects such as this can just as easily migrate into the private sector and be deployed by corporations to spy on employees who might have an unfavorable view of shady practices, such as robo-signing tens of thousands of fraudulent foreclosure notices to cash-strapped homeowners, and then do something about it.

Johnson, in his letter to ODNI Director James Clapper is determined to discover whether Team Themis "violated the law and/or their federal contracts by conspiring to use technologies developed for U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism purposes against American citizens and organizations on behalf of private actors."

In the best traditions of DOD stonewalling and cover-up, the Department's CIO Teri Takai and deputy CMO Elizabeth McGrath both said they were not familiar with "that company" [HBGary] but, as Ragan reported, Takai said "she would have her office look into things and make sure that 'we get back to you...'"

When hell freezes over!

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, an independent research and media group of writers, scholars, journalists and activists based in Montreal, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

SOURCE: http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24254

Privacy Protection and the Secret State's Surveillance Powers
by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, April 17, 2011
Antifascist Calling

Call it another virtual "defense" of privacy rights by U.S. lawmakers.

In the week of April 11, senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ) introduced legislation in the U.S. Senate, the "Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights Act of 2011," they claimed would "establish a framework to protect the personal information of all Americans."

During a D.C. press conference, McCain told reporters that the proposed law would protect a "fundamental right of American citizens, that is the right to privacy."

While Kerry and McCain correctly state that "The ease of gathering and compiling personal information on the Internet and off, both overtly and surreptitiously, is becoming increasingly efficient and effortless due to advances in technology which have provided information gatherers the ability to compile seamlessly highly detailed personal histories of individuals" (p. 4), there's one small catch.

CNET's Declan McCullagh reported that the bill "doesn't apply to data mining, surveillance, or any other forms of activities that governments use to collect and collate Americans' personal information."

While the measure would apply to "companies and some nonprofit groups," CNET disclosed that "federal, state, and local police agencies that have adopted high-tech surveillance technologies including cell phone tracking, GPS bugs, and requests to Internet companies for users' personal information - in many cases without obtaining a search warrant from a judge" would be exempt.

As we know, a gaggle of privacy-killing agencies inside the secret state, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as well as offices and subunits sprinkled throughout the Pentagon's sprawling bureaucracy, including U.S. Cyber Command, all claim authority to extract personal information on individuals from still-secret Office of Legal Counsel memoranda and National Security Presidential Directives.

As the American Civil Liberties Union reported in March, what little has been extracted from the Executive Branch through Freedom of Information Act litigation is heavily-redacted, rendering such disclosures meaningless exercises.

For example, the bulk of the November 2, 2001 21-page Memorandum for the Attorney General, penned by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Yoo, which provided the Bush administration with a legal fig-leaf for their warrantless wiretapping programs, is blank. That is, if one ignores exemptions to FOIA now claimed by the Obama administration. (B1, b3, b5, exemptions relate to "national security," "inter-departmental communications" and/or programs labelled "TS/SCI" - Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, the highest classification).

And, as of this writing, the American people still do not have have access to nor even knowledge of the snooping privileges granted securocrats by the Bush and Obama administrations under cover of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI).

As Antifascist Calling previously reported, CNCI derives authority from classified annexes of National Security Presidential Directive 54, Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 (NSPD 54/HSPD 23) first issued by our former "decider."

Those 2008 presidential orders are so contentious that both the Bush and Obama administrations have even refused to release details to Congress, prompting a 2010 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) demanding that the full text, and underlying legal authority governing federal cybersecurity programs be made public.

McCullagh points out that the bill "also doesn't apply to government agencies including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Social Security Administration, the Census Bureau, and the IRS, which collect vast amounts of data on American citizens."

Nor are there provisions in the bill that would force federal or state agencies to notify American citizens in the event of a data breach. No small matter considering the flawed data security practices within such agencies.

Just last week, InformationWeek revealed that the "Texas comptroller's office began notifying millions of people Monday that their personal data had been involved in a data breach. The private data was posted to a public server, where it was available - in some cases - for over a year."

"The posted records," we're told, "included people's names, mailing addresses, social security numbers, and in some cases also dates of birth and driver's license numbers."

None of the data was encrypted and was there for the taking by identity thieves or other shady actors. InformationWeek pointed out although "most organizations that experience a serious data breach" offer free credit monitoring services to victims, "to date, Texas has not said it will offer such services to people affected by the comptroller's breach."

CNET reminds us that the "Department of Veterans Affairs suffered a massive security breach in 2006 when an unencrypted laptop with data on millions of veterans was stolen."

McCullagh avers that "a government report last year listed IRS security and privacy vulnerabilities" and that "even the Census Bureau has, in the past, shared information with law enforcement from its supposedly confidential files."

The limited scope of the Kerry and McCain proposal is underscored by moves by the Obama Justice Department to actually increase the secret state's already formidable surveillance powers and short-circuit anemic privacy reforms that have been proposed.

In fact, as Antifascist Calling reported last week, during hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Associate Attorney General James A. Baker warned the panel that granting "cloud computing users more privacy protections and to require court approval before tracking Americans' cell phones would hinder police investigations."

But even when it comes to reining-in out-of-control online tracking by internet advertising firms, the Kerry-McCain bill comes up short.

As the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, the Kerry-McCain bill won't stop online tracking by advert pimps who hustle consumers' private details to the highest bidder.

The civil liberties' watchdogs aver, "the privacy risk is not in consumers seeing targeted advertisements, but in the unchecked accumulation and storage of data about consumers' online activities."

"Collecting and retaining data on consumers can create a rich repository of information," EFF's legislative analyst Rainey Reitman writes, one that "leaves consumer data vulnerable to a data breach as well as creating an unnecessary enticement for government investigators, civil litigants and even malicious hackers."

Additionally, the proposal is silent on Do Not Track, "meaning there is no specific proposal for a meaningful, universal browser-based opt-out mechanism that could be respected by all large third-party tracking companies," and consumers "would still need to opt-out of each third party individually," a daunting process.

Worst of all, consumers "won't have a private right of action in the new Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights. That means consumers won't be granted the right to sue companies for damages if the provisions of the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights are violated." In other words, even when advertising firms and ISPs violate their users' privacy rights, the bill would specifically prohibit individuals from seeking relief in the courts.

Moving in for the Cybersecurity Kill
While the Kerry-McCain bill would exempt government agencies from privacy protections, the Defense Department is aggressively seeking more power to monitor civilian computer networks.

NextGov reported that General Keith Alexander, the dual-hatted commander of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency said that his agency "cannot monitor civilian networks" and that congressional authorization will be required so that CYBERCOM can "look at what's going on in other government sectors" and other "critical infrastructures," i.e., civilian networks.

Mendacity aside, considering that NSA already vacuums-up terabytes of America's electronic communications data on a daily basis, reporter Aliya Sternstein notes that Alexander "offered hints about what the Pentagon might be pushing the Obama administration to consider."

"Civil liberties and privacy are not [upheld] at the expense of cybersecurity," he said. "They will benefit from cybersecurity," available only, or so we've been led to believe, from the military, well-known for their commitment to civil liberties and the rule of law as the case of Pfc. Bradley Manning amply demonstrates.

Cyberspace, according to Alexander, is a domain that must be protected like the air, sea and land, "but it's also unique in that it's inside and outside military, civilian and government" domains.

Military forces "have to have the ability to move seamlessly when our nation is under attack to defend it ... the mechanisms for doing that have to be laid out and agreed to. The laws don't exist in this area."

While Cyber Command currently shares network security duties with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as I reported last year, a Memorandum of Agreement between DHS and NSA, claims that increased "interdepartmental collaboration in strategic planning for the Nation's cybersecurity, mutual support for cybersecurity capabilities development, and synchronization of current operational cybersecurity mission activities," will be beneficial.

We were informed that the Agreement "will focus national cybersecurity efforts, increasing the overall capacity and capability of both DHS's homeland security and DoD's national security missions, while providing integral protection for privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties."

But as Rod Beckström, the former director of Homeland Security's National Cybersecurity Center (NCSC), pointed out in 2009 when he resigned his post, he viewed increased control by NSA over national cybersecurity programs a "power grab."

In a highly-critical letter to DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, Beckström said that NSA "effectively controls DHS cyber efforts through detailees [and] technology insertions."

Citing the agency's role as the secret state's eyes and ears that peer into America's electronic and telecommunications' networks, Beckström warned that handing more power to NSA could significantly threaten "our democratic processes, if all top level government network security and monitoring are handled by any one organization."

Those warnings have gone unheeded.

National Defense Magazine reported that retired Marine Corps General Peter Pace, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, "would hand over the Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity responsibilities to the head of the newly created U.S. Cyber Command."

Seconding Pace's call for cybersecurity consolidation, under Pentagon control, Roger Cressey, a senior vice president with the ultra-spooky Booz Allen Hamilton firm, a company that does billions of dollars of work for the Defense Department, "agreed that putting all the responsibility for the federal government's Internet security needs would help the talent shortage by consolidating the responsibilities under one roof."

"The real expertise in the government," Cressey told National Defense, "capable of protecting networks currently lies in the NSA."

Cressey's is hardly an objective opinion. The former member of the National Security Council and the elitist Council on Foreign Relations, joined Booz Allen after an extensive career inside the secret state.

A military-industrial complex powerhouse, Booz Allen clocks-in at No. 9 on Washington Technology's list of 2010 Top 100 Contractors with some $3.3 billion in revenue.

As Spies For Hire author Tim Shorrock pointed out for CorpWatch, "Among the many services Booz Allen provides to intelligence agencies are data-mining and data analysis, signals intelligence systems engineering (an NSA specialty), intelligence analysis and operations support, the design and analysis of cryptographic or code-breaking systems (another NSA specialty), and 'outsourcing/privatization strategy and planning'."

With "data mining, surveillance, or any other forms of activities that governments use to collect and collate Americans' personal information" off the Kerry-McCain "privacy" bill table, as CNET reported, enterprising security firms are undoubtedly salivating over potential income - and lack of accountability - which a cybersecurity consolidation, Pentagon-style, would all but guarantee.

Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, The Intelligence Daily, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.

Tom Burghardt is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

SOURCE: http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24371

Michigan: Police Search Cell Phones During Traffic Stops

ACLU seeks information on Michigan program that allows cops to download information from smart phones belonging to stopped motorists.

CelleBriteThe Michigan State Police have a high-tech mobile forensics device that can be used to extract information from cell phones belonging to motorists stopped for minor traffic violations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Michigan last Wednesday demanded that state officials stop stonewalling freedom of information requests for information on the program.

ACLU learned that the police had acquired the cell phone scanning devices and in August 2008 filed an official request for records on the program, including logs of how the devices were used. The state police responded by saying they would provide the information only in return for a payment of $544,680. The ACLU found the charge outrageous.

"Law enforcement officers are known, on occasion, to encourage citizens to cooperate if they have nothing to hide," ACLU staff attorney Mark P. Fancher wrote. "No less should be expected of law enforcement, and the Michigan State Police should be willing to assuage concerns that these powerful extraction devices are being used illegally by honoring our requests for cooperation and disclosure."

A US Department of Justice test of the CelleBrite UFED used by Michigan police found the device could grab all of the photos and video off of an iPhone within one-and-a-half minutes. The device works with 3000 different phone models and can even defeat password protections.

"Complete extraction of existing, hidden, and deleted phone data, including call history, text messages, contacts, images, and geotags," a CelleBrite brochure explains regarding the device's capabilities. "The Physical Analyzer allows visualization of both existing and deleted locations on Google Earth. In addition, location information from GPS devices and image geotags can be mapped on Google Maps."

The ACLU is concerned that these powerful capabilities are being quietly used to bypass Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

"With certain exceptions that do not apply here, a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer determines that there is probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of criminal activity," Fancher wrote. "A device that allows immediate, surreptitious intrusion into private data creates enormous risks that troopers will ignore these requirements to the detriment of the constitutional rights of persons whose cell phones are searched."

The national ACLU is currently suing the Department of Homeland Security for its policy of warrantless electronic searches of laptops and cell phones belonging to people entering the country who are not suspected of committing any crime.

SOURCE: http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/34/3458.asp