Trying to escape the Surveillance State (video)

Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; author, researcher, and journalist Julia Angwin with Amy Goodman, Nermeen Shaikh, Juan González (democracynow.org)

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin visited Democracy Now! to discuss her new book, Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. Currently at ProPublica and previously with The Wall Street Journal, Angwin details her complex path toward increasing her own online privacy as a private citizen.

According to her research, the private data collected by East Germany’s Soviet-era Stasi secret police at its height of abuse pales in comparison to the information revealed today by an individual’s Facebook profile or Google search history, which is never erased by Google even when we clear our history. It is used by the government for unconstitutional unwarranted spying on Americans, by police to give everyone a police record, and by advertisers to target individuals. More

• Obama Administration confirms warrantless "backdoor" searches target U.S. citizens 
• Chile declares state of emergency after 8.2 earthquake triggers tsunami
• Koch Brothers-backed measure bans transit funding in Tennessee
• GM CEO apologizes to the dead, family victims, but fails to explain negligence [which was due to a profit motive for the car compy after a very conscious cost-benefit analysis]
• Obama celebrates [weak, insurance-friendly] health law enrollment numbers
• NATO suspends formal cooperation with Russia
• Palestinian Authority signs International Conventions after Israel goes back on promised prisoner release 
• Obama Administration: No decision on release of jailed spy 
• Group: Syrian civilian death toll could reach 220,000
• House votes to block climate research

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.

• Los Angeles is tops when it comes to gridlock
• VIDEO: Woman drives family into ocean
• LSD (psychedelic acid) may help cancer patients
• PHOTOS: Malaysia widens search for missing plane

• Holder backs reduced sentences for some drug traffickers
• Second strikers flooding California's prison system
• California’s prison system weighs changes to solitary
• Ruling could mean more murderers paroled in California
• School volleyball coach admits to molestation of two girls

Google = New frontiers in Gov't Spying (video)

Pat Macpherson, Pfc. Sandoval, Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Dr. Katherine Albrecht; Quentyn Kennemer; DemocracyNow.org; Mark Weinstein (sgrouples.com)

With praise from the mainstream media, Albrecht may not represent a real alternative to Google search with Startpage.com and Ixquick.com, but maybe. She says she does.

Obama administration inherits spying apparatus...then keeps it going and growing

Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez spell out the CIA-Google connection (ETL)

(ITN) Hey, Patriot, want to keep America free from weirdos and subversives like your friends and parents? Of course, you do. Uncle NSA and Sexual Harassment Panda want you to wear this tiny spy camera so we can end the horror of privacy once and for all. It'll be our secret.

 

Creepy new Google Glass SuperSpy app

Quentyn Kennemer (Phandroid.com, Feb. 5, 2014) 

Google Glass doesn't lead to brain cancer (SL)

Google Glass app can instantly identify anyone they look at, give information to wearer. Google has reached out to remind us that it’s ["evil" after all] against their developer policies (section C.1.e) to approve Glassware that has any sort of facial recognition technology.

As such, they will not be distributing the app through official channels. It could still be possible for the developer to distribute the app themselves and have users sideload it, but there is little chance such an app would get wide distribution.

 

The world has seen its fair share of creepy apps, but this one takes the cake. It’s called NameTag. And in Robocop-like fashion, the app can scan a person’s face and [deliver a dossier on anybody, anywhere]. More

  

An alternative?

What is STARTPAGE? It is the world’s most private search engine, safe from NSA spying, and Albrecht helped create it. What about "private" email. Coming soon is STARTMAIL. A short video explains. Anyone can reserve an (upcoming) fully private paid email account. Get off of "free" CIA, FBI, NSA, DHS, NSC-laden services like Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail and escape from government spying, claims Albrecht.

 

Think Prism is bad, look at Quantum

What can we say about radio host Dr. Albrecht except that she has provided a great deal of information about homeland spying, "smart" meters, frequency pollution, RFID tracking chips, and other government intrusions in the name of "security." If Snowden turns out to be a plant and a tricky but intentional means of NSA disclosure, anything is possible with Albrecht. Until then, very few people are providing insider-information on these matters the way she is.

Surprise! SnapChat pictures DON'T really disappear! Here's how to retrieve them. OMG.

• SPYING ALERT: SnapChat pictures DON'T disappear! $20 "SnapHack" app lets anyone retrieve them
• Is Instagram PRIVATE social networking? No, says Mark Weinstein, founder of Sgrouples.com
• Princeton Univ. study: Facebook is about to lose 80% of users. Why? Facebook is NOT cool (TIME.com) Facebook’s growth will eventually come to a quick end, much like an infectious disease that spreads rapidly and suddenly dies, say Princeton researchers who are using diseases to model the life cycles of social media.
• Facebook, FBI (CNN), NSA, CIA (the rest of TV), and Gov't operatives in extreme damage control mode
• Twitter stock loses 1/5th of its value today, 18% down
• Seattle dive bar first to BAN government's Google Glass
• Quantum: NSA tracks computers offline, without wifi
• The Government is Google (G-men who Ogle) not Zucker'
• OH, Bama! Government's healthcare.gov spies on users
• "Google" (like lots of Silicon Valley) bankrolled by CIA
• U.S. Government also infiltrated MicroSoft until it got a better deal from Apple
• Net corporations spy on citizens and give it to Gov't
• Stop me before I give your emails and data away again
• Does CHINA have all these problems? Weibo, Renren, etc.
  
• Hi, NSA, what's going on, guys?

Remember to twink us on MyFace, friend us on InstaText, like our BoBo profile, date us on OhNoCupid, and report us to the NSA through Twits you repost on SpaceBook!

Do we live in a police state? (Part 2)

Chase Madar (Pasadena Weekly); Pat Macpherson, CC Liu, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly

2013 in review (Tom Tomorrow/thismodernworld.com)

 
Throwing police power at social problems

Civil liberties? (stopandfrisk.org)

If all one has is a hammer then everything starts looking like a nail. If police and prosecutors are our only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone in America will be treated like a criminal. 

This is increasingly the way of life we are being forced to endure, a path that involves “solving” social problems (even non-problems) by throwing more and more cops at them, with disastrous results. 

Shut up the F up, old man! (latimes.com)

Wall-to-wall criminal law encroaches on everyday life as police power is applied in ways that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago.

By now, the militarization of the police has advanced to the point where the “War on Crime” and “War on Drugs” are no longer metaphors but understatements. There is a proliferation of:

• heavily armed SWAT teams even in small towns
• school lock downs treating children like prison inmates
• the use of shock-and-awe tactics to bust small-time bookies
• no-knock raids to recover trace amounts of drugs often resulting in the killing of family dogs or family members
• waging a counterinsurgency drug war in communities where drug treatment programs were once  key...

But American over-policing involves far more than the widely reported up-armoring of our local precinct. It’s also the way police power has entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every sphere of American life into a police matter. More

The NSA's new TAO of Spying (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Der Spiegel, Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman (DemocracyNow.org)

Glenn Greenwald and story on the NSA's TAO of Spying starts at Minute 25:30

 

The TAO, in NSA terms, refers to a unit of hackers it hires, trains, and continues to develop, the office of Tailored Access Operations.

NSA can "watch every keystroke [we] make"

The German publication Der Spiegel ("The Mirror") has revealed new details about a secretive hacking unit inside the National Security Agency called the Office of Tailored Access Operations, or TAO. The unit was created in 1997 to hack into global communications traffic. 

Hackers inside the TAO have developed a way to break into (hack) computers running Microsoft Windows by gaining passive access to machines when users report program crashes to Microsoft [both installing malware and getting the cooperation of Microsoft], according to Glenn Greenwald.

Panel backs major curbs on NSA

In addition, with help from the CIA and FBI, the NSA has the ability to intercept computers and other electronic accessories purchased online in order to secretly insert spyware and components that can provide backdoor access for the intelligence agencies. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer and journalist Glenn Greenwald join Democracy Now! to discuss the latest revelations, along with the future of Edward Snowden.

• Orwellian or blunt tool? - Conflicting rulings on illegal NSA spying sets up likely Supreme Court showdown
• Inside the "Electronic Omnivore": new leaks show NSA spying on U.N., Climate Summit, text messaging
• Pres. Obama wrongs the Bill of Rights

Greenwald is the journalist who first broke the NSA spying document revealed by Edward Snowden. Snowden now lives in Russia for safety. He was previously a columnist at Britain's The Guardian newspaper and is creating a new media venture with Laura Poitras (who is forced to live in abroad because England is redefining journalism that reveals a country's secrets as "terrorism"), Jeremy Scahill (author of Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, which is also a movie), and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

The Illuminati, Conspiracies, Obama... (video)

Pat Macpherson, Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Mark Dice (video)

Johnathan Davis, singer for the band Korn, does not think highly of our "puppet" President Obama or the war path he continually leads us on.

Ke$ha for $atan (french.fansshare.com)

The world of "conspiracies" is fun. It's true, too. But just uttering the word makes it all all right. We stop paying attention. It's our Pavlovian conditioned response, the way we have been trained. Dalai Lama was once a CIA "operative"? Conspiracy. Oh, okay. JFK shot by agents of the military industrial complex? Conspiracy. Oh, okay. The "Illuminati" are a self-serving club of elitists in Hollywood, the military, industry (multinational corporations), and government? 

Another pawn in the Big Pentagram's game

Conspiracy. Oh, okay. Kate Middleton was never pregnant, or she may have been, but certainly did not have that baby (Prince Georgie) by ordinary means; one can see how abashed she is about lying or participating in this charade, but that is the price of fame and power in a corrupt world of politics and money, genocide and hegemony. Incest among nobility to maintain their monarchy is nothing new, and no one thinks Prince William has any power to stand up to the power he inherits. England did not get where it got by playing nice and we, as the USA, are its superpower offspring. What if off-planet entities rule not directly but through humans in positions of power, thus making it vital that bloodlines (with hybrid "divine" DNA) be maintained?

Paris Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson's daughter, wanted to warn us

of the Illuminati agenda, calling attention with a half-hearted suicide bid.

"Buddhist" Mass Murderer Alexis?

Aaron Alexis by remote control (wiki commons)

Melissa Melton (Activist Post) has another explanation for the military-style carnage from the US militant and presumably Buddhist Aaron Alexis, who went down in US history as the "Navy Yard shooter." What if his apparently intentional and irrational actions that day had a much more sinister explanation in covert activity, propaganda, and experimental influence on soldiers just as Alexis himself reported to police was happening BEFORE the shooting ever took place.

Alexis was being electronically harassed by a team of military-industrial operatives determined to cause mayhem, fear (state-sponsored terrorism), and carnage through an "experimental agent" (aka patsy) just as they have in so many previous cases.

 

Occupy the MIC (military-industrial complex)

We look for comforting causes solely in the susceptible individual and dismiss out of hand the social and conspiratorial forces at work. What has secretive science become capable of with all our DARPA and similar technology militarized to promote war, discredit opposition, and turn the world in directions that advantage the Pentagon (the US military) and the world's real "movers and shakers"(multinational corporations or "industry," the mainstream infotainment media, Big Pharma, privatized prison companies, etc.)? Oh, look, Justin Bieber! Kanye West! Boobs! Never mind the men in the business suits and camouflage.

Oh no, not Obama, too
Obama-Apologist Earl Ofari Hutchinson (pasadenaweekly.com)

President B.S. Obama, the military-industrial complex's most useful mouthpiece ever

   

The Republican Party is a bundle of politically cynical [nuts full of] contradictions. Even before Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s 13-hour Senate filibuster against President Obama’s drone war, various GOP politicos took shots at the president for overreaching on national security.

  

Obama’s been lambasted for failing to close Gitmo [like he swore he would] and his presumed willingness to continue having CIA and counterintelligence forces [illegally spy on Americans and] wage overt and covert war in Afghanistan after the final troop withdrawal.

 

Revoke Obama's Peace Prize (rootsaction.com)

 

This is the same GOP ["Grand Old Party"] that, from the moment Obama announced his presidential candidacy in 2007, did everything possible to tar him as a commander in chief who would be a marshmallow on national defense and, more damaging, stand down on Bush’s [endless] war on [a tactic known vaguely as] terrorism.

 

The attack was a typical tactic from the GOP’s playbook to sully Democrats on national security. [We'll show those rightwing Republicans who's tough on crime, downright reactionary on eliminating civil rights, and willing to go medieval on terrorism!]

 

GOP Presidents Reagan, Bush Sr., and especially George W. Bush in 2004 in his reelection fight with Democratic presidential foe [and fellow Yale Skull & Bones member] Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry [now proving himself a greater killer than Bush Jr. as Sec'y of State], used this ploy masterfully against their Democratic opponents. More