lindseyandhaley: surveillance video

Showing posts with label surveillance video. Show all posts

Monday, 23 June 2014

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

How secret partners expand NSA’s dragnet

Ryan Gallagher (The Intercept/June 18, 2014)

How Secret Partners Expand NSA’s Surveillance Dragnet

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.

Rush on women in workplace

Thursday, 15 May 2014

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

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Wednesday, 14 May 2014

Meeting NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden (video)

Ashley Wells, Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman

Intercepting the National Spying Agency

In part two of Democracy Now's extended interview, Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald tells the inside story of meeting National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras were the journalists who first met Snowden in Hong Kong last June, going on to publish a series of disclosures in The Guardian, a venerable 190-year-old British newspaper, that exposed massive NSA surveillance to the world.

Host Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!

Greenwald has just come out with a new book on the Snowden leaks and their fallout, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Recalling his first encounter with Snowden, Greenwald says: "The big question was: 'How are we going to know that it’s you? We know nothing about you. We don’t know how old you are, what you look like, or what your race is, or even your gender.' And [Snowden] said, 'You’ll know me because I’ll be holding in my left hand a Rubik’s cube.' And so he walked in, was holding a Rubik’s cube, came over to us, introduced himself, and that was how we met him." More

Monday, 14 April 2014

Journalists and Snowden expose NSA (video)

Ashley Wells, Irma Quintero, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Nermeen Shaikh (DemocracyNow.com, April 14, 2014); Firstlook.org/TheIntercept

Journalists exposing NSA (zimbio)

Months ago, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept) flew from New York to Hong Kong to meet NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Poitras and Greenwald did not return to the US until Friday when they flew from Berlin to NY to accept the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting. They arrived not knowing if they would be detained or subpoenaed after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described journalists working on NSA stories as Snowden’s "accomplices." At a news conference following the ceremony, Poitras and Greenwald took questions from reporters about their reporting and the U.S. government intimidation it has sparked. More

Obama: Yes to NSA's unconstitutional spying

In their first return to the US since exposing the NSA’s mass surveillance operations, the Intercept journalists were honored in NYC on Friday. They play key roles in reporting the massive trove of documents leaked by Snowden.

They were joined by colleagues Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, with whom they shared the award. In their acceptance speeches, they paid tribute to their source: "Each one of these awards just provides further vindication that what [Snowden] did in coming forward was absolutely the right thing to do and merits gratitude, and not indictments and decades in prison," Greenwald said. "None of us would be here...without the fact that someone decided to sacrifice [his] life to make this information available," Poitras said. "And so this award is really for Edward Snowden."

Thursday, 3 April 2014

Sexy "Obama Girls" turn on Barack (video)

Amber Larson, CC Liu, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; ; Amber Lee Ettinger (RT America); Leah Kauffman; Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan (democracynow.org)

(Carey Wedler

B----, please! she said.

Tom Tomorrow (thismodernworld.com)

Before Obama became president, his message of "change" had many falling in love with the well-groomed CIA operative and Illinois senator. One busty individual, model Amber Lee Ettinger, became an instant Internet hit when she declared her "love" for the then-candidate. Ettinger's "Obama Girl" video went viral. But years of the commander-in-chief in office has her looking for a new crush. She joins RT America with more on why she has had a change of heart.

ht obama girl video thg 120905 wblog Obama Girl Returns, Kind Of

The voice behind Obama Girl, Leah Kauffman

A new Obama Girl video -- “Still Got a Crush on Obama” -- was released in 2012: If “Obama Girl” looked different but sounded exactly the same, that’s because Leah Kauffman -- the original singer and songwriter behind the 2008 “Crush on Obama” song and video -- actually stars in this one. Last time Kauffman and partner Ben Relles, who is not involved with this new video, hired a [hot] model, Amber Lee Ettinger, to lip-synch the original song. But in 2012 Kauffman finally stepped up to take center-stage. VIDEO

Obama defends more NSA spying

China sees Obama girls, but not Xi's daughter

China sees Obama girls, but not Xi girl

THE HAGUE, Netherlands - Pres. Obama on Monday (March 24, 2014) defended U.S. surveillance programs as serving national security rather than [civil liberties or] commercial interests, in a wide-ranging meeting with his Chinese counterpart on the sidelines of a nuclear summit. More

Soft Dictator and new Pope
(Gwen Ifill/PBS NewsHour) Pres. Barry and Pope Francis met for the first time at Corporate Church HQ, the Vatican. The papal audience emphasized different points. Obama claims they focused on their shared interest in helping the poor, while Vatican officials emphasized areas where their views differ like birth control mandates.

Barack Obama: The Least Transparent President in History

Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan (DemocracyNow.org)

Six years into the Obama administration, the president’s promise of “a new era of open government” seems just another grand promise, cynically broken. LISTEN

As colleges across the country, from Harvard to U of Mississippi, deal with (often unconscious but sometimes blatant) racism, a new film tackles the issue with comedy and satire: "Dear White People" follows a group of black students on a fictional Ivy League campus. One of the students hosts a campus radio show of the same name. It confronts racist stereotypes and dilemmas faced by students of color. Tensions come to a head when a group of mostly white students throw an African-American-themed party, wearing blackface and using watermelons and fake guns as props. More

VIDEO: Bush was bad, but Obama fooled the world

Wednesday, 19 March 2014

"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.”

Thursday, 13 March 2014

Facebook's face cries to White House about NSA

Wisdom Quarterly; firstlook.org/TheIntercept; Associated Press (ap.org)

Not content that Facebook already helps FBI and CIA, NSA got into the act (infowars.com).

The face of mega spying social media site

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he's called Pres. Barack Obama to express his frustration over what he says is long-lasting damage caused by the U.S. government's surveillance programs.

Posting on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg wrote today that he's "been so confused and frustrated by the repeated reports of the behavior of the U.S. government."

He adds that when Facebook's "engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we're protecting [users] against criminals, not our own government."

Have you been paying any attention, Mark?

The post comes a day after the news site Intercept [the work of Glenn Greenwald, Jeremy Scahill, Laura Poitras, and others] reported that the National Security Agency has impersonated a Facebook server to infect surveillance targets' computers and get files from a hard drive. The NSA says the report is "inaccurate."

White House spokeswoman Caitlin Hayden confirmed that the president spoke with Zuckerberg.

White House has been covering up presidency’s role in torture From 2009 to 2012, the Obama administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep a single short phrase secret, one describing Pres. Bush’s authorization of the torture program.
Foreign Officials in the dark about their own spy agencies’ cooperation with NSA (Glenn Greenwald) Top political officials in other nations have repeatedly demonstrated, or even explicitly claimed, wholesale ignorance about their nations’ cooperation with the NSA, as well as their own spying activities. Were these top officials truly unaware, or were they pretending to be?
Calls for Brennan’s ouster emerge along with details of illegal CIA search of Senate computers CIA Director John Brennan’s decision to search Senate committee computers was such a blatant violation of the Constitutional separation of powers that some pro-accountability groups in Washington are starting to seek his ouster.
How the NSA plans to infect "millions" of computers with malware (Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald) Top-secret documents reveal that the National Security Agency is dramatically expanding its ability to covertly hack into computers on a mass scale by using automated systems that reduce the level of human oversight in the process.
CIA search of Congressional computer sparks Constitutional crisis (Dan Froomkin) Two top Senate leaders declared Tuesday that the CIA’s recent conduct has undermined the separation of powers as set out in the Constitution, setting the stage for a major battle to reassert the proper balance between the two branches.
The Intercept welcomes its new editor and two new writers (Glenn Greenwald) We at The Intercept are very excited to announce our new editor-in-chief, John Cook, who joins us after after serving as editor-in-chief of Gawker.
The NSA Has An Advice Columnist. Seriously. (Peter Maass) An NSA official, writing under the pen name “Zelda,” has served as a Dear Abby for spies. One of her most intriguing columns responds to an NSA staffer who complains that his (or her) boss is spying on employees.
The inverse of oversight: CIA spies on Congress [about Congress investigating the CIA] (Dan Froomkin) In the wake of an explosive new allegation that the CIA spied on Senate intelligence committee staffers, one senator felt this morning that he needed to make something clear: “The Senate Intelligence Committee oversees the CIA, not the other way around,” Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) said in a press release.
RT Host Abby Martin condemns Russian incursion into Crimea – on RT (Glenn Greenwald) The vast bulk of the commentary issuing from American commentators about the Russian military action in Ukraine involves condemning exactly that which they routinely advocate and which the U.S. itself routinely does.
The Washington Post uses biased experts to promote propaganda on Venezuela (Murtaza Hussain) The Washington Post's Feb. 19th article about the recent spate of unrest in Venezuela took a breathlessly laudatory stance towards the opposition against Pres. Nicolás Maduro. The opening paragraphs offer a good indication of its tenor.

Wednesday, 12 March 2014

Senate hypocrisy: NSA-lover blasts CIA (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Nermeen Shaikh, DemocracyNow.org, 3/12/14; Phillip Muldari (KPFA)

DARPA created Net for military, uses social media to spy. NSA helps steal our nude images.

The spat between the CIA and its congressional "overseers" (actually overlookers since they overlook so much misbehavior) has intensified after California Senator Dianne Feinstein took to the Senate floor to directly accuse the CIA of spying on her overisight committee.

Why was the CIA conducting homeland spying in violation of its charter? It was in an effort to undermine a probe of the CIA’s torture and rendition program by Chairperson Feinstein's Senate committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Is the CIA going to brainwash me again? - What, Feinstein?

Its report has yet to be released but reportedly documents extensive illegal abuses and a cover-up by CIA officials. Feinstein says the CIA broke the law by secretly removing more than 900 documents from computers used by panel investigators. She also accuses the CIA of intimidation in its request of an FBI inquiry of the panel’s conduct.

America tortures with CIA help and cover-ups

Current CIA Director John Brennan rejects Feinstein’s allegations. Meanwhile, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden has weighed in by accusing Feinstein of hypocrisy for criticizing alleged CIA spying on U.S. senators but condoning government surveillance of ordinary private citizens.

Julia Angwin

Democracy Now! hosted a roundtable discussion with three guests: former FBI Agent Mike German, former CIA Analyst Ray McGovern, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Angwin, author of the new book, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. More