Football in Brazil, NSA in Bahamas, Rush, Nader

Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; Ryan Devereaux (firstlook.org/The Intercept)

(Thoughty2) The most secretive places on Earth (except the NSA may be there, too)

If there's no safe harbor, no privacy, on a faraway tropical island, how about the city?

 

The Bahamas Wants to Know Why NSA is Recording Its Phone Calls

Greenwald says there's no place to hide (PIN)

Government officials in the Bahamas want their U.S. counterparts to explain why the National Security Agency has been intercepting and recording every cell phone call taking place on the island nation.

 

Responding to a report published by The Intercept on Monday, which revealed that the NSA has been targeting the Bahamas’ entire mobile network and storing the audio of every phone call traversing the network for up to 30 days, Bahamian officials told the Nassau Guardian that they had contacted the U.S. and vowed to release a statement regarding the revelations.

Chaplain anti-gay is a virtue

In a front-page story published Tuesday, Bahamian Minister of Foreign Affairs Fred Mitchell told The Guardian that his government had reached out to the U.S. for an explanation. Mitchell said the cabinet was set to meet to discuss the matter and planned to issue a statement on the surveillance. The Bahamian minister of national security told the paper he intended to launch an inquiry into the NSA’s surveillance but did not provide a comment.

Nader: Climate, Iraq...

A source familiar with the situation told The Intercept that the cabinet meeting had indeed taken place, but an official in Mitchell’s office said there would be no comment Tuesday. “You’ll have to call back,” said the official, who did not identify herself. More

Repressing World Cup Football protests in Brazil is big biz; What we don't see on TV

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How secret partners expand NSA’s dragnet

Ryan Gallagher (The Intercept/June 18, 2014)

Huge volumes of private emails, phone calls, and Internet chats are being intercepted by the National Security Agency (NSA) with the secret cooperation of more foreign governments than previously known, according to newly disclosed documents from heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden. The classified files, revealed today by the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information in a reporting collaboration with The... More

Ron Paul’s Secret Shame

(DavidFeldmanShow.com, August 13, 2013) Who killed Ron Paul’s campaign manager? Why won’t CNN ask that question? Dr. Nancy, Mark Thompson, Will Ryan and the Cactus County Cowboys. Plus Michael Snyder talks movies.
 

• WikiLeaks reveals secret global deal for corporations
• Learn about Social Media in less than 30 minutes!
• Cost of London real estate shows widening wealth gap
• The Ownership Revolution: Future emerging after...
• The global campaign to dismantle corporate power! 
• 15M Movement Spain's emerging Podemos Party
• The Top 5 Weirdest Websites on the Net 

Rush on women in workplace

Greenwald on the NSA live in L.A.

Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, Dhr. Seven, CC Liu, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; HaymarketBooks.org; Pacifica Radio Los Angeles (KPFK.org, Uprising)

The best alternative to being tracked and spied on by Google-search is Startpage.com

Secret partners expand NSA spying dragnet; NSA uses Germany to spy on Europe; felon/NSA head James Clapper goes unindicted after lying to Congress (firstlook.org/theintercept)

Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald spoke tonight at the Japanese Cultural Center, Little Tokyo, downtown Los Angeles. It was amazing. He began by joking that it was the beginning of the American leg of his speaking tour so he was fresh and lucid. That he was. Using notes only when directly quoting the consistently misleading mainstream media -- which paints every story in ways that supports structures of power even when they are feigning that real "objectivity" is possible -- he was vivid, funny, and shocking.

He had only one overarching point to make: Privacy matters, and anyone who says it does not can immediately by shown to not be thinking or to be lying. How? Let's say someone says, "If you're not doing anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide." Or better yet, "I'm not doing anything wrong, so I've got nothing to hide." Greenwald has a foolproof comeback for that kind of thoughtless and pernicious statement:

Sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Center for Economic Research and Social Change, Metropolitan Books, and KPFK FM (Pacifica Free Speech Radio, Los Angeles).

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Read a chapter free (truthdig.org)

"Oh really? Great. Here's my personal email address, when you get home, I want you to email me all your email, social media, and other passwords. Then I'm going to troll through them for whatever interests me, pick out what I like, and post it in your name for everyone to see." I mean, if you've done nothing wrong then you've got nothing to worry about, right? He's never gotten a reply to his offer, and he's waited by his email many the night. Privacy matters.

Google goes "evil" (anorak.co.uk).

Even Google Corporation's Eric Schmidt, whose salary recently doubled, found that out when he said he had "nothing to hide." He then banned everyone working at Google, Inc. from talking to CNET about him or disclosing his publicly available information as gathered and compiled by Google. Nice going on that "Do no evil" pledge, Google, Chairman Schmidt. It's easy to feel safe when you're helping take away everyone else's safety.

• See him live: Glenn Greenwald Speaks: Edward Snowden, NSA, and US Surveillance State

Edward Snowden, NSA, US Surveillance State

"Collect it all." How the NSA spies on me

Greenwald was signing his newest book, No Place to Hide, as well as answering personal questions one on one. Catch him on tour in a town near you. This is history in the making. And with the release of whistleblower and former spy (not merely low level contractor) Ed Snowden's revelations, Greenwald (editor at The Intercept) is making a fearless, incisive, and essential contribution to the world's understanding of the US surveillance state. Tickets were only $6.

NSA: Greenwald to speak in L.A. (June 19)

Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; HaymarketBooks.org; KPFK.org

Sponsored by Haymarket Books, The Center for Economic Research and Social Change, Metropolitan Books, and KPFK FM (Pacifica Free Speech Radio, Los Angeles).

Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State

• Thursday, June 19, 2014 - 7:00 pm
• Japanese American Cultural and Community Center (JACCC)
• 244 S. San Pedro Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012 See map
• TICKETS only $6

Glenn Greenwald

In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out for Hong Kong to meet a source who claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels.
 

Read a chapter free (truthdig.org)

That source turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA spy, teacher, and Booz Allen Hamilton (mole) contractor Edward Snowden, and his revelations about the agency’s widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a fierce debate over national security and information privacy.

As the arguments rage on and the government considers various proposals for reform, it is clear that we have yet to see the full impact of Snowden’s disclosures.
 

Best pres we never had: Emperor 0

In April 2014, Greenwald and his colleagues at The Guardian received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. See Greenwald live and in-person as he puts all the pieces together, recounting his high-intensity 11-day trip to Hong Kong but more importantly examining the broader implications of state surveillance detailed in his reporting for The Guardian, and revealing fresh information on the NSA’s unprecedented abuse of power with never-before-seen documents entrusted to him by Snowden himself.

Greenwald will be signing his new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Coming at a landmark moment in American history, No Place to Hide is a fearless, incisive, and essential contribution to our understanding of the U.S. surveillance state.

• Part of the Glenn Greenwald Speaks: Edward Snowden, NSA, and US Surveillance State

(Iraq and Obama)(Ukraine)(Free your mind, the rest will follow?)(Soccer)

Reset the Net protests back encryption, privacy

Pat Macpherson, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; Fightforthefuture.org, Resetthenet

(FFTF) June 5: "Reset the Net" campaign from the group Fight for the Future calls for increased Website encryption and privacy tools for users. Today marks the one-year anniversary of the publication of the first Guardian story based on the leaks of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Activist Evangeline Lilly

(FFTF) Narrated and executive-produced by Evangeline Lilly. Produced by Mata Wata. Don't just watch, DO something: The U.S. government has turned the Internet into a systematic way of spying on us in our most private moments. Out of control government surveillance is a dangerous form of censorship. We are emboldened as we Fight for the Future and Demand Progress. Share this video. More

Net Neutrality? Gone. NDAA indefinite detention? Passed. NSA spying? (demanprogress.org)

VIDEO: "There were no good options": Bergdahl should get honorable discharge, says lawyer for deserter
 
Is Bowe Bergdahl a "deserter"? If freed POW left his post, he joins ranks of soldiers moved by conscience to object to US imperial wars of greed, hatred, and delusion

Light will soon create matter: science

Pat Macpherson, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; TheGuardian.com

NSA reform: lawmakers aim to bar U.S. spying agency from weakening encryption

 

Prism. Prism? Prism! Light refracts, just as all the colors of white light contain a rainbow array of information. The NSA wants it all, which means no privacy for anyone in the world. Science will be like that within a year, some scientists claim. Light will soon be converted into matter. Who will stop them? Moreover, who will stop or slow down the National "Security" Agency, the NSA, one U.S. branch of America's spying apparatus. Even if Oversight Committee Chair Feinstein keeps her love spat with the CIA going, nothing much is being done here. Other countries will have to stand up.

Matter will be created from light within a year, scientists claim

• Global warming: it's to a point of no return in West Antarctica. What happens next?
• VIDEO: Climate chaos? So what! Cat attacks dog, saves boy
• As I Lay Dying singer Tim Lambesis jailed for murder plot
• Malcolm McLaren, revolutionary punk impressario, dies. He was a chaotic, brilliant, messed-up father
• Prince review – return to stadiums provokes hormonal spontaneous combustion
• Coldplay: Ghost Stories review – a very palatable wallow 
• How should older women dress to get a job – and what if we break the rules? 
• Morrissey to take guest role in BBC Radio 4's The Archers
• Yarl's Wood sex abuse allegations: "They are treating us like animals" New documents show how Serco, the firm looking after some of Britain's most vulnerable women, failed to properly investigate a claim of repeated sexual assault.

Everyone should know just how much the government lied to defend the NSA

NSA book ("No Place to Hide" excerpts)

Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; truthdig.com; Glenn Greenwald via TomDispatch.com

First appeared at TomDispatch; see Tom (Engelhardt)’s introduction. [This is a shortened, adapted version of Chp. 1 of Greenwald’s new book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Security State, with permission of Metropolitan Books.]

  

Greenwald, author, investigative journalist

On December 1, 2012, I received my first communication from Edward Snowden, although I had no idea at the time that it was from him.

 

The contact came in the form of an email from someone calling himself Cincinnatus, a reference to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, the Roman farmer who, in the fifth century BC, was appointed dictator of Rome to defend the city against attack. He is most remembered for what he did after vanquishing Rome’s enemies: he immediately and voluntarily gave up political power and returned to farming life. Hailed as a “model of civic virtue,” Cincinnatus has become a symbol of the use of political power in the public interest and the worth of limiting or even relinquishing individual power for the greater good.

 

The email began: “The security of people’s communications is very important to me,” and its stated purpose was to urge me to begin using PGP encryption so that “Cincinnatus” could communicate things in which,  he said, he was certain I would be interested. Invented in 1991, PGP stands for “pretty good privacy.” It has been developed into a sophisticated tool to shield email and other forms of online communications from surveillance and hacking.

 

In this email, “Cincinnatus” said he had searched everywhere for my PGP “public key,” a unique code set that allows people to receive encrypted email, but could not find it. From this, he concluded that I was not using the program and told me, “That puts anyone who communicates with you at risk. I’m not arguing that every communication you are involved in be encrypted, but you should at least provide communicants with that option.”

 

The United States of Fear

“Cincinnatus” then referenced the sex scandal of General David Petraeus, whose career-ending extramarital affair with journalist Paula Broadwell was discovered when investigators found Google emails between the two. Had Petraeus encrypted his messages before handing them over to Gmail or storing them in his drafts folder, he wrote, investigators would not have been able to read them.

• When the US National Intelligence Council issued its latest report meant for the newly elected Obama administration, it predicted that the planet's "sole superpower" would suffer a modest decline and a soft landing 15 years hence. The United States of Fear makes clear that Americans should don their crash helmets and buckle their seat belts, because the U.S. is on the path to a major decline at a startling speed.

“Encryption matters, and it is not just for spies and philanderers.”

  

“There are people out there you would like to hear from,” he added, “but they will never be able to contact you without knowing their messages cannot be read in transit.” Then he offered to help me install the program.  He signed off: “Thank you. C.”

 

Using encryption software was something I had long intended to do. I had been writing for years about WikiLeaks, whistleblowers, the hacktivist collective known as Anonymous, and had also communicated with people inside the U.S. national security establishment. More

• Af/Pak Daily Brief - Anand Gopal, Global Dispatches - Atlantic Wire - Rethink Afghanistan

Alternet - Antiwar.com - Arts & Letters Daily - Black Agenda Report -The Browser - Buzzflash - Commondreams - Counterpunch - The Daily Beast-Dollars and Sense - Environment 360 - Fabius Maximus - Foreign Policy in Focus - History News Network - Huffington Post - Israeli Occupation Archive-Lew Rockwell - Mondoweiss - Naked Capitalism - Open Democracy - Opposing Views - Pacific Free Press - Politico - Real Clear Politics - The Smirking Chimp - Talking Points Memo - ThinkProgress - TomPaine - TPM Muckraker - Truthdig - Truthout - Stephan M. Walt - War in Context - War Is a Crime - Wikileaks - ZNET 

Greenwald: "Collect it ALL" (U.S. spying)

Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman (democracynow.org)

"Collect it All": Glenn Greenwald on NSA bugging electronic hardware, economic espionage, and spying on U.N.

Today and tomorrow, Democracy Now! airs a two-part special with The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists who brought the Edward Snowden information to light.

• Edward Snowden: "The [criminal, unconstitutional] stuff I saw [being done by the NSA] really began to disturb me": How the U.S. Drone War pushed [me] to leak NSA docs

The National Spying Agency wants it all

He, Laura Poitras, and others went through The Guardian, a mainstream media British publication at one time brave enough to expose U.S. spying activity through the government's National [Spying] Agency the NSA. This revealed a web of corporate complicity in the "social media" arena. The CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, and others have been up to their elbows in Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, Google (especially Google), Yahoo, and other data collection businesses. Everyone used to wonder how they made money while reporting quarterly losses period after period. Now the world knows; it was more than Wall Street speculators propping it up.

• Glenn Greenwald: The explosive day we revealed Edward Snowden's name to the world (The Guardian)

I think we sold out for the right pice. - Me, too

And Greenwald has more to say after winning a Pulitzer for his reporting and being threatened by the military-industrial-spying complex. An American, he now lives abroad in Brazil but was brave enough to return to the U.S. talking about his new book. Snowden is fighting the good fight to rein in our out of control secret-government. But it doesn't want to be reined in and hopes to do more harm to our privacy before anyone stops it or enacts laws to curb it. Some localities already have. But the cover up is the size of tsunami raising all boats in the harbor and threatening to smash us to smithereens against the rocks. More (MP4 video only)

"Terms and Conditions May Apply" (trailer)

Pfc. Sandoval, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Cullen Hoback (vimeo.com)

The "may" is a courtesy. They do apply. Snowden reveals the secret documentation.

(Trailer) Terms and Conditions May Apply, directed by Cullen Hoback, 2013 documentary about contractual terms of user-service agreements used on spy-friendly sites like Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Twitter, Snapchat, and so on. Mark Zuckerberg appears in the film.
 

Admit it: no one really reads the endless terms and conditions connected to every website we visit, phone call we make, or app we download. No one can. But every day, billion-dollar corporations are spying and learning more about our interests, our friends and family, our finances, and our secrets... 

I f'd the country, it's true, maybe even the world. But I made a billion doing it, mo-fo's! Selling out to the CIA, NSA, FBI, and MIC pays big. Ask Jobs, ask Gates, ask... Oh, I've said too much. See you online...even if you don't see me seeing you, lol! Don't watch The Social Network.

  

Not only are they selling our information to the highest bidder, they are freely sharing it with the government (NSA, CIA, DHS, Pentagon, FBI, member corporations, or any of the many arms of the military-industrial complex). And you "agreed" to it when you clicked SUBMIT.

 

With fascinating examples and so-unbelievable-that-they're-almost-funny facts, filmmaker Cullen Hoback exposes what governments and corporations (together referred to as the military-industrial complex) are legally taking from us every day -- making the future of both privacy and civil liberties uncertain.

 

I agree. Spy on me: NSA malware via my Facebook (Ryan Gallagher/The Intercept)

 

From whistleblowers and investigative journalists to zombie fan clubs and Egyptian dissidents, this disquieting exposé demonstrates how everyone has incrementally "opted-in" to a real-time surveillance state, click by click. However, it also explains what, if anything, can be done about it. 

• In North America WATCH on: vimeo.com/ondemand/tacma

CULLEN HOBACK grew up in L.A. At 17 he started his own public access late night TV show but was kicked off the air for making offensive statements that angered some viewers. Hoback enjoyed sharing his perspective on strange and unfamiliar topics. In college he produced short films and a feature when digital cameras first came out. At 21, he made “Freedom State,” a comedy that captures the daily life of individualists who live “on the edge of the world.” Another narrative feature he made was “Friction,” a film about summer camp members who enact a scripted tale as the line between utopia and entity blur. In 2007, he was granted a budget to direct the LARPing documentary “Monster Camp,” which featured social outcasts coming together to create a community where magic is real and identity is limited only by imagination. In 2011, Hoback came back to the screens to create his documentary “Terms and Conditions May Apply.”

Resisting Putin and other dictators (video)

CC Liu, Irma Quintero, Wisdom Quarterly; DemocracyNow.org; Letters & Politics (KPFA)

Listen to this dumb B ('olshevik). We don't render, naked girl; the CIA renders!

 

Don't render me, bro, don't render me, bro! (F)

It is a day full of breaking stories in Crimea (Ukraine or Russia). Pres. Vlad the Invader Putin is pleasing the crowds in the capital of the former-and-future empire. And does anyone remember Iran's gambit to take three American hostages (later to be used as part of a pretext to invade and occupy Tehran, an inevitability according to John Lear)?

The three were imprisoned and tortured (by extended solitary confinement as defined by the international community as literal "torture" despite the U.S. doing the same and worse to its prisoners on a regular basis) then sold back to the U.S. for a $1.5 million ransom.

• LISTEN (KPFA, Berkeley): Prof. Paul Magocsi, Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto, is interviewed by L&P host Mitch Jeserich.

"CIA Spies and Tortured Lies"

Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan

This week’s public "spat" between CIA-loyalist and Spy Oversight Committee Chair Senator Dianne Feinstein (Democrat, California) and that agency (The Company, i.e., the CIA) might briefly upset the status quo. But they will soon make up. Sadly, it obscures a graver problem: the untold story of the United States’ secret policy of torture and "rendition" [White House code for “kidnapping” and sending captives to secret prisons and friendly states to do the dirty business outside of the purview of US oversight]. LISTEN

Snowden docs expose how the NSA "infects" millions of computers and impersonates Facebook server

They're trying to hack everyone on Facebook

(March 17, 2014) New disclosures from Edward Snowden show that the NSA is massively expanding its computer hacking worldwide. Software that automatically hacks into computers -- known as malware "implants" -- had previously been kept to just a few hundred targets. But the news website "The Intercept" (run by Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, and others) reports that the NSA is spreading...
 
READ:  A Sliver of Light (excerpt)

Today Democracy Now! speaks with Sarah Shourd, Shane Bauer, and Joshua Fattal about their new book, A Sliver of Light: Three Americans Imprisoned in Iran. Read an excerpt from Bauer about the day they were arrested on trumped of charges of trespassing into Iran and spying for the U.S.

• Ukraine will never accept Crimea's annexation by Russia 
• A Sliver of Light: Freed U.S. hikers on captivity in Iran and activism against solitary confinement (torture) in U.S.
• NFL: M.I.A., pay $16.6 mil for Super Bowl middle finger!
• LA to consider sales tax to fix failing streets, sidewalks
• Rise in unlawful reentry prosecutions drives convictions
• LAX shooting: Biggest failure was... says L.A. mayor

• Putin: Crimea is an "integral part" of Russia; U.S. imposes new sanctions
• Obama hosts Abbas in push for framework deal
• 15 killed in [alleged] Afghan suicide bombing
• Lawmakers seek answers on lack of mortgage fraud prosecutions
• Immigrant detainees launch hunger strike at 2nd GEO-owned private for-profit prison
• GM recalls another 1.6M cars as CEO admits "terrible" consequences
• Admin delays vote on Surgeon General nominee after gun control stance draws opposition
• Don't Tase me, bro! (KnowYourMeme.com)