tagged w/ NSA
-
Why F@*K is it always celebrities who get special treatment and protection, and the NSA can do this to any of the rest of us and no one cares?
Anytime the phone company does this to any of us it should be a big deal, why isn't that the case?Why F@*K is it always celebrities who get special treatment and protection, and the... more
-
-
Along with frequent-flyer miles and a passport packed with colorful stamps, almost every experienced globetrotter has at least one great story about a one-night stand in a foreign land. Which isn't surprising. Traveling is so romantic in nature — moonlight over unfamiliar cityscapes, trains rumbling through thousand-year-old crumbling vistas — it would seem a shame not to share it with someone. And practically speaking, of course, hooking up with a winsome local means you've got an insider's guide to the best restaurants and someone to help you work off the calories with later.
Mike Edison, musician and author of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go ... (Faber and Faber), has traveled the world with various rock bands and become something of an expert on the short-lived liaison. I recently sat down with Edison and picked his brain on the ins and outs of intercontinental intercourse.Along with frequent-flyer miles and a passport packed with colorful stamps, almost... more
-
-
When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, Americans won't just get a new president; they might finally learn the full extent of George W. Bush's warrantless domestic wiretapping.
Since the New York Times first revealed in 2005 that the NSA was eavesdropping on citizen's overseas phone calls and e-mails, few additional details about the massive "Terrorist Surveillance Program" have emerged. That's because the Bush Administration has stonewalled, misled and denied documents to Congress, and subpoenaed the phone records of the investigative reporters.
Now privacy advocates are hopeful that a President Obama will be more forthcoming with information. But for the quickest and most honest account of Bush's illegal policies, they say don't look to the incoming president. Watch instead for the hidden army of would-be whistle-blowers who've been waiting for Inauguration Day to open the spigot on the truth.
"I'd bet there are a lot of career employees in the intelligence agencies who'll be glad to see Obama take the oath so they can finally speak out against all this illegal spying and get back to their real mission," says Caroline Fredrickson, the ACLU's Washington D.C. legislative director.
New Yorker investigative reporter Seymour Hersh already has a slew of sources waiting to spill the Bush administration's darkest secrets, he said in an interview last month. "You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on January 20. [They say,] 'You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.'"
So far, virtually everything we know about the NSA's warrantless surveillance has come from whistle-blowers. Telecom executives told USA Today that they had turned over billions of phone records to the government. Former AT&T employee Mark Klein provided wiring diagrams detailing an internet-spying room in a San Francisco switching facility. And one Justice Department attorney had his house raided and his children's computers seized as part of the FBI's probe into who leaked the warrantless spying to the New York Times. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales even suggested the reporters could be prosecuted under antiquated treason statutes.
If new whistle-blowers do emerge, Fredrickson hopes the additional information will spur Congress to form a new Church Committee -- the 1970s bipartisan committee that investigated and condemned the government's secret spying on peace activists, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other political figures.
But even if the anticipated flood of leaks doesn't materialize, advocates are hopeful that Obama and the Democratic Congress will eventually get around to airing out the White House closet anyway. "Obama has pledged a lot more openness," says Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which was the first to file a federal lawsuit over the illegal eavesdropping.
One encouraging sign for civil liberties groups is that the Center for American Progress's president John Podesta is one of the top three heading Obama's transition team, which will staff and set priorities for the new administration. The center was a tough and influential critic of the Bush administration's warrantless spying.When Barack Obama takes the oath of office on January 20, Americans won't just... more
-
-
A judge has ordered the Justice Department to produce White House memos that provide the legal basis for the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 warrantless wiretapping program.
U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. signed an order Friday requiring the department to produce the memos by the White House legal counsel's office by Nov. 17. He said he will review the memos in private to determine if any information can be released publicly without violating attorney-client privilege or jeopardizing national security.
Kennedy issued his order in response to lawsuits by civil liberties groups in 2005 after news reports disclosed the wiretapping.
The department had argued that the memos were protected attorney-client communications and contain classified information.
But Kennedy said that the attorney-client argument was "too vague" and that he would have to look at the documents himself to determine if that argument is valid and also to see if there is information that can be released without endangering national security.
Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd said Saturday the department is reviewing the opinion and will "respond appropriately in court."
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush authorized the National Security Agency to spy on calls between people in the U.S. and suspected terrorists abroad without obtaining court warrants. The administration said it needed to act more quickly than the court could and that the president had inherent authority under the Constitution to order warrantless domestic spying.A judge has ordered the Justice Department to produce White House memos that provide... more
-
-
by Tom Burghardt
Global Research, October 20, 2008
Antifascist Calling…
‘Tying the room together’: DARPA’s Project Gandalf
In the 1998 Coen brothers cult film The Big Lebowski, southern California slacker Jeffrey Lebowski aka “The Dude,” bemoans the desecration of his living room rug by criminals out to collect a debt in a hilariously absurd case of mistaken identity. After the thugs urinate on his prized possession, The Dude is crestfallen because that rug “really tied the room together.”
Fast forward to 2008, only there’s no mistaking either the identities or what’s being “tied together” here. DARPA’s Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) is seeking solicitations for “Project Gandalf,” according to an October 7 “Industry Day” announcement on the Federal Business Opportunities website.
In a bid to “tie the room together,” DARPA is developing a demonstration project that will provide “counterterrorist” special operators and spies, aka state terrorists, with
solutions to … radio frequency (RF) geolocation and emitter identification using specific emitter identification (SEI) for specific signals of interest. The ultimate goal of the Gandalf program is to enable a set of handheld devices to be utilized to perform RF geolocation and SEI on RF signals of interest to the Gandalf program. The specific goals and performance objectives associated with RF geolocation and SEI for the Gandalf system are classified. (”Gandalf Program, DARPA Industry Day Announcement,” Federal Business Opportunities, October 7, 2008)
That’s right, a hand-held cell phone tracking device that will enable security operatives to locate and take out opponents of the capitalist “new order” in global South or “hardened” heimat cities.
Sounds like a seamless way to “tie together” information culled by NSA trolls or the Justice Department’s Terrorist Identity Datamart Environment (TIDE), the “master list” from which all other federal agencies derive their own dubious watch lists.
The Gandalf Program is classified Secret/NOFORN, meaning only American firms whose personnel hold coveted U.S. Department of Defense “secret clearances or higher” need apply. The October 28, 2008 Industry Day will be held at the Rosslyn, Virginia headquarters of the Scitor Corporation. An appropriate venue if ever there were one.
Deriving its name from a Latin word meaning “to seek to know,” Scitor’s website has little in the way of useful information for the researcher, aside that is, from the usual banalities about “excellence” and “solving customer needs.”
continued at above linkby Tom Burghardt
Global Research, October 20, 2008
Antifascist Calling…... more
-
-
Two former NSA intercept operators have sparked a firestorm of discussion over the past week thanks to their whistleblowing accounts of the routine eavesdropping that targeted innocent military personnel and humanitarian aid workers overseas. But civil libertarians hoping that the story will prove a game-changing bombshell in the fight over warrantless surveillance may want to dial-down their expectations. As even the ACLU acknowledges, the eavesdropping described in these reports is only indirectly related to President Bush's now-infamous "Terrorist Surveillance Program," and is unlikely to have violated the existing FISA law. Two former NSA intercept operators have sparked a firestorm of discussion over the... more
-
-
Stephen Colbert explains why letting the government listen to Americans having phone sex is a national security priority.Stephen Colbert explains why letting the government listen to Americans having phone... more
-
-
James Bamsford's new book on the NSA.
The Bush administration’s wiretapping program has come under new scrutiny this week. Two influential congressional committees have opened probes into allegations US intelligence spied on the phone calls of American military personnel, journalists and aid workers in Iraq. We speak to James Bamford about the NSA’s spying on Americans, the agency’s failings pre-9/11 and the ties between NSA and the nation’s telecommunications companies.James Bamsford's new book on the NSA.
The Bush administration’s... more
-
-
get a real pick for pulling good people to fake animal rights
the dog, bear and arabs look like a 3rd graders work.get a real pick for pulling good people to fake animal rights
the dog, bear and... more
-
-
Reports all over the media yesterday and today confirm what we’ve known all along. Surveillance programs touted as critical to protect national security have in fact been used to monitor the private communications of innocent Americans.Reports all over the media yesterday and today confirm what we’ve known all... more
-
-
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), called the allegations "extremely disturbing" and said the committee has begun its own examination.
"We have requested all relevant information from the Bush Administration," Rockefeller said Thursday. "The Committee will take whatever action is necessary."
"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.
Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."
Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.
The accounts of the two former intercept operators, who have never met and did not know of the other's allegations, provide the first inside look at the day to day operations of the huge and controversial US terrorist surveillance program.
But the accounts of the two whistleblowers, which could not be independently corroborated, raise serious questions about how much respect is accorded those Americans whose conversations are intercepted in the name of fighting terrorism.
Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.
"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.
Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.
"I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me," he said.
In testimony before Congress, then-NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden, now director of the CIA, said private conversations of Americans are not intercepted.
Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the... more
-
-
Americans mistakenly believe that the CIA (and other intelligence agencies for whom it provides cover) only operates against other countries.
In fact, it operates against all who it perceives as potential threats to the government's comfort i.e. any movement that demonstrates independence of thought and action.
Here's how it operates in other countries, which is really not that much different from how it operates at home: Full?Americans mistakenly believe that the CIA (and other intelligence agencies for whom it... more
-
-
The Department of Homeland Security has been given the money it needs to begin turning international spy satellites within the country's borders, despite lingering fears about the program's lack of focus and the potential for it to infringe upon Americans' civil liberties.
After more than a year of delay, Congress quietly authorized DHS to begin sharing data gathered by military satellites with civilian and law enforcement agencies. A $634 billion spending bill signed into law earlier this week provides funds for DHS to establish the satellite surveillance program, known as the National Applications Office, without addressing the myriad concerns about NAO privacy and civil liberties protections that had been delaying its implementation.
Supporters of the program claim, according to the Wall Street Journal, that its scope will be limited to "emergency response and scientific needs," but civil liberties advocates and some members of Congress fear the door has been open for the highly classified satellite surveillance program to shift into high gear.
More from this article:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/DHS_satellite_spy_program_going_forward_1002.htmlThe Department of Homeland Security has been given the money it needs to begin turning... more
-
-
A few days ago, a senior officer at the Pentagon called his intelligence officer into his office. The boss had heard a news report about China while driving to his office and wanted some answers. It wasn't a tough assignment, given the news coverage, but there was a hitch. "There was plenty of information in the public domain about the topic," recalls the intelligence officer, a 10-year veteran. "And yet, if there wasn't some classified information cited in my report, the boss would never believe it was accurate."
This is a great story. Read on....A few days ago, a senior officer at the Pentagon called his intelligence officer into... more
-
-
The era of the American Internet is ending.
Invented by American computer scientists during the 1970s, the Internet has been embraced around the globe. During the network’s first three decades, most Internet traffic flowed through the United States. In many cases, data sent between two locations within a given country also passed through the United States.
Engineers who help run the Internet said that it would have been impossible for the United States to maintain its hegemony over the long run because of the very nature of the Internet; it has no central point of control.
And now, the balance of power is shifting. Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences.
American intelligence officials have warned about this shift. “Because of the nature of global telecommunications, we are playing with a tremendous home-field advantage, and we need to exploit that edge,” Michael V. Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2006. “We also need to protect that edge, and we need to protect those who provide it to us.”
Indeed, Internet industry executives and government officials have acknowledged that Internet traffic passing through the switching equipment of companies based in the United States has proved a distinct advantage for American intelligence agencies. In December 2005, The New York Times reported that the National Security Agency had established a program with the cooperation of American telecommunications firms that included the interception of foreign Internet communications.
Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say those actions and other government policies may be hastening the shift in Canadian and European traffic away from the United States.
“Since passage of the Patriot Act, many companies based outside of the United States have been reluctant to store client information in the U.S.,” said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. “There is an ongoing concern that U.S. intelligence agencies will gather this information without legal process. There is particular sensitivity about access to financial information as well as communications and Internet traffic that goes through U.S. switches.”The era of the American Internet is ending.
Invented by American computer... more
-
-
bshipp
-
added this
-
3 years ago
- |
-
When somebody within your own government calls you out, do you show up? How do you handle it?
Wayne Madsen, always spoiling for a fight with Bush and Cheney, or the chance to show off his undies to minimum wage airport TSA workers, has an executive level NSA staff person on record saying that significant sentiment exists within the NSA to kill troublesome bloggers and journalists.
The NSA executive staffer was, apparently, not the source of the sentiment, but this individual did pass along the context and the precise wording of the “junior G-man” working in the NSA. Prominent names listed in the NSA database of troublemakers?
1. Bill Gertz
2. James Bamford
3. Vernon Loeb
4. Jim Risen
5. Dr. John C. K. Daly
6. Wayne Madsen
7. Seymour Hersh
These were all the names Madsen published, but there are, of course, many others. Possibly you, gentle reader.
If not now, probably later.
As much as Madsen hates Daily Kos, I would think that if Kos was in the database, he would have published his name, too. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga — a name that should just roll off the Hebroid-Russian tongue of George Soros, and frequently does — is he NOT in the NSA’s database of journalists and bloggers to be put out of Cheney’s misery?
Wear nice underwear when you travel, bloggers. The TSA will soon be checking your anal orifice for that extra 3 ounces of shampoo you just can’t live without.When somebody within your own government calls you out, do you show up? How do you... more
-
-
A short clip from my feature film "The Proof" about the
covert actions of the CIA leading up to 9/11. A short clip from my feature film "The Proof" about the
covert actions of... more
-
-
In December of last year, The Washington Post revealed:
Four members of Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. For more than an hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA’s overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators had devised to try to make their prisoners talk.
Among the techniques described, said two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. But on that day, no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said.
Identically, numerous key Democrats in Congress were told that Bush had ordered the NSA to spy on American without warrants and outside of FISA. None of them did anything to stop it.
In light of this sordid history of active complicity, is it really any wonder that these leading Democrats are desperate to quash any investigations or judicial adjudications of Bush administration actions that they knew about and did nothing to stop, in some cases even actively supporting?
In December of last year, The Washington Post revealed:
Four members of Congress... more
-
-
Congress is now considering whether the President has unilateral power to ask companies to break American law.
Don't let these corporations get away with invading our privacy. If we do, a dangerous precedent will be set and you will see not just the phone companies, but electric, gas, and any company that has information on you to read your mail, tap your phones, find out what toilet paper you use, or whatever.... without a warrant. Without a court order and totally illegal since the corps will know the government will protect them from felonies involving any of this. MAKE THEM PAY for their crimes!!!
For more than five years, AT&T and other telephone companies broke the law and violated their customers' privacy rights by sending billions of private domestic internet and telephone communications and records to the National Security Agency. (See Diagram)
1. Reporting from every major American media outlet and undisputed whistleblower evidence show that AT&T and other phone companies were complicit in the NSA's warrantless surveillance. This included the records and full content of the private domestic communications of millions of ordinary Americans. The President and the phone companies hid this information from Congress and the American people for at least six years.
2. These actions violated at least four major privacy laws that have protected Americans' privacy for over 30 years. The laws deliberately and specifically require telephone companies to safeguard the privacy of their customers communications, especially when the government seeks to access them. The violation of these laws is at the core of almost forty pending lawsuits against AT&T, Verizon, MCI, Sprint and other telephone companies. These lawsuits have been consolidated before Judge Vaughn Walker in California.
3. Now, the phone companies and the Bush administration are trying to bar Americans from defending their privacy. Their arguments in favor of retroactive immunity are manipulative, illogical and simply unconvincing.
4. The American people deserve their day in court. Companies that break the law deserve to be held accountable. Oppose retroactive amnesty for telecommunications companies.
“AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal."
-Judge Vaughn Walker
"The Whistleblower Vs. The Spies"
AT&T Technician Mark Klein speaks out
http://www.eff.org/pages/news-coverage-mark-klein-washington
This guy worked there and helped the NSA set up all the equipment at AT&T which allowed the government to collect info on all Americans going thru AT&T. He figured it was not right and now spoke out about it.
And, when you've finished reading the above and the article and any document you want to examine, please go to this page http://www.stopthespying.org/ to determine who you representative in congress is and let em know you don't want the phone companies getting away with what they did. Again its at:
http://www.stopthespying.org/Congress is now considering whether the President has unilateral power to ask... more
-
-
By Blank DeCoverly
BLF Minister of Propaganda
The Billboard Liberation Front [has] a major new advertising improvement campaign executed on behalf of clients AT&T and the National Security Agency. Focusing on billboards in the San Francisco area, this improvement action is designed to promote and celebrate the innovative collaboration of these two global communications giants.
“This campaign is an extraordinary rendition of a public-private partnership,” observed BLF spokesperson Blank DeCoverly. “These two titans of telecom have a long and intimate relationship, dating back to the age of the telegraph. In these dark days of Terrorism, that should be a comfort to every law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide.”
...
-----
Full story at link.By Blank DeCoverly
BLF Minister of Propaganda
The Billboard Liberation Front... more
-
