We are just a group of retired spooks that discuss things that you’ll not find anywhere else. It makes us unique. Take a look around. Learn a thing or two.
I’ve been posting too many serious articles as of late. This has pretty much skewed the content. Just like it was skewed during the President Trump’s administration. This article and others, are my attempt at trying to reestablish balance in MM. Let’s put a big happy smile on our faces. And I hope this article helps facilitate that.
Now, that being said, let’s face the facts. Most people work in front of a computer, or use a cellphone. Or else how do you read MM, eh? And if you are one such person, then this article is for you…
Whether your desk is messy or tidy, your walls adorned with pop culture posters or neatly framed art pieces, you could see yourself in one of these delightfully stereotypical character illustrations.
The project was started by Serbian artist Dmitry Narozhny, who drew a new character each month for Devexperts’ company calendar, with designs ranging from the hipster to the hippy, goth to the geek.
So, can you spot someone resembling you among these geeky stereotypes?
The [1] artist / poet compared to the [2] wholly-organized creator.
6 4d9
Or, perhaps, you are the [3] Travel dreamer / adventurer, or the [4] fastidious organized worker…
5 5d0
Consider the [5] cellphone as the primary medium of communication, or the [6] busy and disorganized MM. (Yup! That’s me.)
4s 51
Not found yourself yet? How about the [7] hedonistic or the [8] comfortable gamer.
3 a53
Then there’s the [9] urban hipster, or perhaps the [10] hard-core designer type.
a2 54
What ever you may be, I am sure that you have found comfort in your life. What ever it might be.
I will tell you that I would like to hear what kind of person you all are, and what archetype that you fill. It’s my curiosity, only. I’m not going to collect the information and sell it to some data-collection agency. LOL.
Do you want more?
I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Fourth amendment? What's a "fourth amendment"?
-Joe Average American Citizen
This is a compilation of articles, thoughts, information and data that I threw together for my personal use. It dates from the time period of 2013 through to 2018, and has not really been updated to account to the enormous expansion of the surveillance capabilities of the various alphabet organizations under President Trump.
Essentially, it became too overwhelming. It was impossible to keep up with the massive effort under-weigh to convert the United States government into a totalitarian utopia for the oligarchy.
Looking at the sole enormity of this information shows an overwhelming preponderance of evidence that the United States is not only no longer “free”, but that it has become a prison-state. It somehow by-passed or slid past the military totalitarian state mode and went straight to wall-less prison.
“Im just setting up a barebones linux laptop to go to Panama with. All the essentials will be kept on an encrypted thumb drive just incase I need to access client machines. Installed Skype, remote software and password safe, but the data is on the thumbdrive that gets wiped after 10 tries at the password. Its a shame that americans have to be like this for doing nothing illegal.”
-Skype message to the Author on 13JAN18.
We are witnessing the integration of spying on two levels, the government level (federal, state and local) and the corporate level (via telecom providers, web services and credit card companies). It’s “Full Metal” Orwell.
The term "full metal Orwell" is a play on words.
Full Metal
Full Metal Jacket is a 1987 British-American war film directed and produced by Stanley Kubrick. The screenplay by Kubrick, Michael Herr, and Gustav Hasford was based on Hasford's novel The Short-Timers (1979). Its storyline follows a platoon of U.S. Marines through their training, primarily focusing on two privates, Joker and Pyle, who struggle to get through camp under their foul-mouthed drill instructor, Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, and the experiences of two of the platoon's Marines in the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. The film's title refers to the full metal jacket bullet used by soldiers. The film was released in the United States on June 26, 1987. In slang the term “full metal” means “to go into combat or to fight”.
Orwell
Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often published as 1984, is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English novelist George Orwell.It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive regimentation of persons
If you are a user of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Craigslist or another popular site, the U.S. security state is watching you. An increasing number of federal agencies are employing sophisticated means to monitor Americans’ use of social networking sites.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
.
Federal entities from the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Defense Department to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to even the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) are involved in developing programs to track the American public online.
Criminals are running the United States government; call them what you will, but they all serve their own interests.
“There’s nothing more destructive to a society than the institutionalization of immunity for elite criminals, yet that’s exactly what’s happened since the financial crisis. Top tier predators, whether they operate within government or mega corporations, recognize that the system they control will never hold them accountable for anything they do.”
Read more here; https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2018/01/22/we-can-do-a-lot-better-than-this/
This is not, not, NOT how a function government acts. Not how ANY functioning goverment acts. Let alone one that was set up as a “Republic” for the people, by the people.
“Today the path to total dictatorship in the U.S. can be laid by strictly legal means, unseen and unheard by Congress, the President, or the people.
Outwardly we have a Constitutional government.
We have operating within our government and political system … a well-organized political-action group in this country, determined to destroy our Constitution and establish a one-party state....
The important point to remember about this group is not its ideology but its organization…
It operates secretly, silently, continuously to transform our Government....
This group ... is answerable neither to the President, the Congress, nor the courts. It is practically irremovable.”— Senator William Jenner, 1954 speech
This corruption of what the United States is has many facets. But in this article we will look at a very specific, tiny portion of this corruption. It is, to put it in a nutshell, the abrogation of the powers of Congress to agencies; the “alphabet organizations”. And the powers that they have grabbed for themselves when Congress stopped policing their behaviors.
In short, Congress has created numerous “Frakenstein monsters”. (Named CIA, FBI, IRS, ATF, DHS, etc…)
A metaphorical Frankenstein monster is a situation —political, financial, ecclesiastical, or domestic—which has been created through folly, and which has become so potent and uncontrollable that it is now a menace to social stability.
Meaning of “A Frankenstein Monster” phrase of Idiom
To each one they granted it their own regulation-making and law-making powers. And to each one they allowed it to grow and get big with no limits on behaviors, no oversight in what they were doing, and no controls or rules over their ability to run “roughshod” over the Bill of Rights.
Particuliarly the 9th and the 4th amendments.
The Ninth Amendment was James Madison’s attempt to ensure that the Bill of Rights was not seen as granting to the people of the United States only the specific rights it addressed. In recent years, some have interpreted it as affirming the existence of such “unenumerated” rights outside those expressly protected by the Bill of Rights.
The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights. It prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. In addition, it sets requirements for issuing warrants: warrants must be issued by a judge or magistrate, justified by probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and must particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
Here is a brief summary of some of the programs that now exist un-constitutionally within the alphabet organizations that Congress has created.
WARNING: Specific examples come from both Conservative and Progressive websites. There, apparently, is more conservative examples of progressive abuses being illustrated than the other way around. Sorry about that. I use what is available to me.
Let it be well understood that the two political parties are both THE SAME PARTY. It is the party of the rich and powerful. They conduct theater to keep you and I occupied while they rob us blind. So do not get all caught up on “he did this”, or “she was innocent”, nonsense.
The examples used are illustrative only. So please do not be offended that I am using Hillary Clinton as an example, or Donald Trump as an example. Stop thinking of them as being the “flag bearers” of your own personal ideology.
They are both actors playing a role. Nothing more.
Justice Department
“To block exposure of their misdeeds, these officials falsely claimed that national security would be damaged.”
-Michael Goodwin
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released a report from the DOJ’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property section, “Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites,” that describes how evidence from social networking sites can reveal personal communications that might help “establish motives and personal relationships.”
It reports that monitored data from such sites can provide location information and “prove and disprove alibis.”
Perhaps most illuminating, it advises agents that “going undercover” on social media sites can enable law enforcement to communicate with suspects and targets, gain access to nonpublic information and map social relationships.
The DOJ document notes that Twitter retains the last login IP address, but does not preserve data unless legally required to do so. However, that means nothing. Twitter censors, deletes, and fabricates lies to meet whatever objective that it deems appropriate.
It was in 2016, when angry tweeters alleged that Jack Dorsey et al., were purposefully censoring and "suppressing" certain content on Twitter,
[1] namely anything to do with the leaked DNC and John Podesta emails, as well as
[2] hashtags critical of Hillary Clinton
[3] while "shadow-banning" pro-Donald Trump content. (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-31/twitter-shadow-banning-donald-trump)
We can now confirm that at least one part of the above was true, because during the late 2017 Senate hearing, Twitter admitted it "buried", which is another word for censored, significant portions of tweets related to hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta in the months heading into the 2016 presidential campaign.
Twitter’s systems hid 48 percent of tweets using the #DNCLeak hashtag and 25 percent of tweets using #PodestaEmails, Twitter general counsel Sean Edgett said in his written testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday.
Twitter.
Can you just imagine all the issues related to twitter with Donald trump? Oi Vey! I’ll tell youse guys. You are either convinced that there is no such thing as freedom of speech or not. It’s not my job to prove it to anyone.
“While the FISA court’s activities are secret, the court did admit in 2013 that it had, during its several decades in existence, approved over 99.9 percent of the US government’s surveillance requests.”
-Adam Dick via The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity
There is an American idiom for this. It is known as “rubber stamping” something. It means to approve something without any consideration, as a formality. Obviously any court that approves 99.97 percent of anything isn't doing jack shit as far as doing its job is concerned.
Hence, rubber stamps became one of the symbols of excessive bureaucracy, and a rubber stamp, in your sentence, would be someone whose role was merely to signify their approval of something, to endorse uncritically. The OED says of "rubber stamp" as a verb: "To endorse or approve uncritically; to pass routinely or automatically."
Rubber stamp - phrase meaning and origin
The IRS
“The gov is so rotten that it’s going to take an incredible, massive, long effort to expose, indict, charge, try, convict, and sentence the evil doers. It won’t always be pretty. But it HAS to be done.”
-2/8/2018, 5:24:35 AM by little jeremiah
The IRS uses a variety of social media sites like Facebook, Google, Twitter, MySpace, YouTube and Second Life to investigate taxpayers.
It seems to have started this practice in 2009 (shortly after Obama became President), providing agents with special training on social networking operations, and user habits. The EFF posted the IRS’ 38-page training that offers detailed tips to agents on how to conduct searches, locate relevant taxpayer information, narrow down and refine results.
The DOD Social Media Strategic Communications Program (SMISC).
The Defense Department has solicited proposals through DARPA for a $42 million “Social Media Strategic Communications” (SMISC) program, a tool that tracks social media and weeds out information.
It has set four goals for the project: [1] to detect, classify and measure the development of ideas, concepts in hidden social media messages; [2] specify the structure of the campaign and influence in social media sites and the community they create; [3] identify the participants and intention in conducting a social media campaign of persuasion and measure its effect; and [4] develop an effective counter-message to an identified campaign carried out against the enemy.
If not, we are no longer America. We are a banana republic where it’s acceptable for the government to use its police powers against political opponents.”
-Michael Goodwin
There should be no doubt in the mind of the reader as to just how corrupt the FBI has become. Permitting serial felonious treason, while at the same time operating “secret societies” within the government, are all crystal clear indicators of dangerous behaviors. Behaviors that can turn on the American people at any time for any reason.
The FBI has become a dangerous and out of control anti-American organization.
“Several other GOP Congressmembers have weighed in. "I have read the memo," tweeted Rep. Steve King (R-IA), adding "The sickening reality has set in. I no longer hold out hope there is an innocent explanation for the information the public has seen. I have long said it is worse than Watergate. It was #neverTrump & #alwaysHillary. #releasethememo."
Along with the four-page memo, Congressional investigators learned from a new batch of text messages between anti-Trump FBI investigators that several individuals within the Department of Justice and the FBI may have come together in the "immediate aftermath" of the 2016 election to undermine President Trump, according to Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) who has reviewed the texts.”
-From the article; “Comey, Rosenstein, McCabe All Named In FISA Memo, First Leak Reveals”
Unfortunately, for all the scandal, most people watching the mainstream media (run by the oligarchy) would be unaware of the turmoil inside of the FBI.
The FBI operates as a secret police. They are completely armed with military grade weapons, and they have their own secret court system. They do not follow the rule of law, and make it up as it suits them. It has gotten worse over time, and most alarming (after “upgrading” by President Obama) they have become dangerously political.
We can only imagine the terrible capabilities that they must now have after a Trump Presidency, and a Mike Pompeo Secretary of State.
This is pretty darn sad.
“So it was — and, look, this is scary stuff, right? I mean, these are secret courts. And I have long supported these because it’s mainly to go after terrorists and people abroad who are looking to do bad things. Never did I think that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act would be used to go after a political campaign. And, you know, there’s gonna have to be some major reforms done to these programs. And what shocks me is that the people at these institutions aren’t worried about this.
I mean, you know, we have a hard enough time, Rush, trying to track down terrorists and bad guys around the world. And just the fact that they would have wasted our intelligence agencies’ time to go after somebody like Carter Page to try to get into the Trump campaign is really scary stuff and really a waste of taxpayer money, and I think every American should be concerned about this no matter if you’re a Republican or Democrat or don’t even pay attention to politics, you ought to care about this.”
- Congressman Devin Nunes of California (chairman of the House Intelligence Committee) discussing the abuse by the FBI and how it was weaponized by Hillary Clinton for political purposes to attack American citizens.
The truth is, that today, the FBI was involved in activities more suited to Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, China under Mr. Mao, and Cuba under Fidel Castro than their constitutionally stated purpose.
They not only went far and above the law, they created their own internal “secret society”.
While the "secret society" reference may have been in jest, a “whistleblower” has (allegedly) confirmed the existence of clandestine meetings. Of which high ranking U.S. intelligence officials met "offsite" to conspire against a sitting President.
This is according to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).
“...we have an informant talking about a group holding secret meetings off-site,” Johnson said. “We have to continue to dig into it,” he added. “This is not a distraction. This is biased, potentially corruption at the highest levels of the FBI.”
-The Hill
On the night of 22JAN18, Reps. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) and Trey Gowdy (R-SC) told Fox News what they had learned from a batch of communications between two FBI investigators. These FBI communications were contained within a 384-page batch of text messages that were delivered to Congress from the DOJ on 19JAN18.
Of particular note is that Ratcliffe says that Strzok and Page were included in the clandestine anti-Trump cabal. This was at the highest levels of the American intelligence community. This is disturbing stuff no doubt.
These meetings are evidence of a secret society, or club. It’s a secret society where they gathered together and determined how to achieve their own internally-determined objectives. Often, if not always, that ran counter to the needs of the American people.
I wonder if they wore robes, had secret handshakes, and performed satanic rituals…
It is critical to the “powers that be” that this information be kept secret and hidden from the American people.
Therefore, of course, the oligarchy is fighting back hard.
Sen. Feinstein, Rep. Schiff urged Facebook and Twitter to investigate involvement of Russian bots in pushing "Release the Memo" campaign:"
If these reports are accurate, we are witnessing an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors." pic.twitter.com/SkAci5NefK” (https://t.co/SkAci5NefK)
— ABC News (@ABC) January 23, 2018 (https://twitter.com/ABC/status/955830690381254659?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw)
The letter's claims were immediately shot down by Facebook, which told the Daily Beast (https://www.thedailybeast.com/source-twitter-pins-releasethememo-on-republicans-not-russia/) that #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag has been pushed by actual Americans.
A knowledgeable source says that Twitter’s internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo.
There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.
In short, according to this source, who would not speak to The Daily Beast for attribution, the retweets are coming from inside the country.
The PTB, and their oligarchy, simply just doesn’t want to lose their grip on power. They need the FBI, CIA, DHS, IRS, and the DOJ on “their side”. Or else they risk swinging from nooses on scaffolding.
It appears Billionaire (Democrat mega-donor) and Rabid-Clintonite Tom Steyer (D) is surprised that the nationwide ad campaign he bankrolled to urge members of Congress to impeach President Trump hasn’t yielded any results.
Steyer went off on both Republicans and Democrats in January 2018 after a House vote on articles of impeachment garnered a paltry 66 votes.
"This vote is not a reflection of whether or not Trump has passed the threshold for impeachment, which he did months ago, it is a failure by members of Congress to do what’s right to keep the American people safe."
- Steyer stated on Friday 12JAN18 in a press statement after the Congressional vote.
Steyer, a billionaire (former) hedge fund manager from California, launched his ‘Need to Impeach’ movement in October of 2017. While more than four million people have signed his petition, Democrats aren’t particularly happy with the initiative. Democratic leaders believe pushing for impeachment could hurt their party’s chances in the midterms later this year.
Steyer underscored his campaign by sending copies of Michael Wolff’s book “Fire and Fury” to every lawmaker.
Check out this video; https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-10-21/democratic-megadonor-launches-campaign-impeach-mentally-unstable-trump
To anyone reading these references, they seem so out-of-date, and boring. It’s “old news” the argument goes. Or, “Hey! it’s the democrats”, or “Hey! It’s the Republicans!” That’s not the point.
That’s not the point.
It’s both “parties”.
It’s a club and you ain’t a part of it.
Look at what is beginning to go on after the 2020 election, it’s all the same “song and dance”. It’s not to amuse Americans. It’s to control them.
Any idea of transparency in government is a FARCE.
As these dated examples indicate.
So to recap: not only were high level intelligence officials allegedly involved in clandestine meetings in which they conspired to “impair” Donald Trump, this leak in conjunction of the four-page GOP memo confirms what many have suspected all along; a highly illegal operation was conducted against a sitting President (President Trump) which goes all the way to the top of the U.S. government.
It’s a club, and you are not part of it. If you are an “outsider”, you will have zero support, and every method will be used to remove you.
“Stop and think what really happened here. We have a political candidate who lost the election. (Then) commissions an opposition research document, the Steele dossier. Which is then packaged and presented as legitimate intelligence (gathered by respected intelligence agents the world over). And it features such shocking details as the golden showers story.
We find out that Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC paid for this, $10 million. We find out that Steele did not even talk to these people in Russia in person on the phone.
We then find out that the FBI uses this to get a warrant, as you say, to spy on Carter Page. They did NOT tell the court that this was a political document. This is the kind of thing that movie scripts contain and are made of.
It’s hard to get my arms around comprehending the number of people that had to be in on this and their motivation. Now, you may be nervous about going into motivation. To me, that is everything. Why? What’s the purpose here?”
-Rush Limbaugh talking to Congressman Devin Nunes of California (chairman of the House Intelligence Committee) discussing the abuse by the FBI and how it was weaponized by Hillary Clinton for political purposes to attack American citizens.
It’s a private club. It’s a “secret organization” that floats in the upper percentages of the United States population. The entire American government, all that juicy “freedom” and “mouth-watering “democracy” are just lies used to manipulate and control the American people from rising up from their roles as cash-cows under a feudal serfdom.
So, they must do everything in their power to keep their actions secret. For their actions are illegal and against the Constitution, and ultimately the citizens of the United States. They absolutely MUST keep things secret.
“In Comey's testimony where he said he did not determine not to recommend Hillary for indictment before her interrogation was held he asked that if any FBI person thought he was lying they should contact him privately before stating their opinion.
I thought that was a very odd thing to say.”
-LostinfortwaltonJan 25, 2018 8:00 AM PermalinkA former Federal Prosecutor sat down with The Daily Caller (http://dailycaller.com/2018/01/20/obama-administration-plot-exonerate-hillary/) to give perhaps the most comprehensive rundown of the Obama Administration's "brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton" and "frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy."
“The FBI used to spy on Russians. This time they spied on us.
(This is) what this story is about - a brazen plot (by the FBI) to exonerate (Democrat Presidential Candidate) Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law with regard to the way she handled classified information with her classified (secretive) server.
(This was) Absolutely a crime, absolutely a felony.
It's about finding out why (as the Inspector General is doing at the department of justice) why Comey (head of the FBI) and the senior DOJ officials conducted a fake criminal investigation of (to exonerate) Hillary Clinton.
(They) ...
[1] Followed none of the regular rules,
[2] gave her every break in the book,
[3] immunized all kinds of people,
[4] allowed the destruction of evidence,
[5] no grand jury,
[6] no subpoenas,
[7]no search warrant(s).
That's not an investigation, that's a Potemkin village. It's a farce.
And everybody knew it was a farce.
The problem was, she didn't win (the 2016 Presidential election).
And because she didn't win, the farce became a very serious opera. It wasn't a comic opera anymore, it was a tragic opera. And she was going to be the focus.
What this is about, this is about a lavabo, a cleansing of FBI and the upper echelons of the Department of Justice.
We're going to discover that the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch (under President Obama), her deputy Sally Yates, the head of the national security division John Carlin (under President Obama), Bruce Ohr and other senior DOJ officials, and regrettably, lying attorneys (were ALL involved in this effort).
People who were senior career civil servants violated the law, perhaps committed crimes, and covered up crimes by a presidential candidate (Hillary Clinton)
But (it was) more than that, they tried to frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy that never existed, and they knew it, and they plotted to ruin him as a candidate and then destroy him as a president.
That's why this is important. That's why connecting the dots is important.
DiGenova condemned the FBI for working so closely with the controversial Fusion GPS, a political hit squad paid by the DNC and Clinton campaign to create and spread the discredited Steele dossier about President Donald Trump.
Without a justifiable law enforcement or national security reason, he says, the FBI “created false facts so that they could get surveillance warrants.
Those are ALL crimes.”
-Daily Caller
The FBI has become a very powerful police force run for and by the oligarchy.
It is used to keep the American people under control and “in line” while America undergoes a transformation to a “new” government structure –one that favors the elite oligarchy, and closes everyone else out.
This is not my opinion.
There proof of this is out there and obvious to all who is willing to face the ugly truth;
“The leadership of the FBI and DOJ behaved in a way we would expect of the former Soviet Union, not the United States of America. I applaud Representative Nunes and other Republican members of the House Intel Committee for fighting and exposing corruption.
Americans are tired of corrupt bureaucrats and their career politician enablers.
If powerful leaders are not held accountable, the American people will never regain faith in the institutions meant to protect us. Former FBI Director James Comey was entrusted with one of the most powerful positions in the world. Sadly, he intentionally abused his power in an effort to destroy Donald Trump’s presidency.
He should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law and sent to prison for his crimes. No one is above the law. No one.”
– Georgia GOP Gubernatorial candidate Sen. Michael Williams demanding the prosecution of (former) FBI Director Comey for his efforts related to treason.
The FBI is seriously corrupted, and works to further the agendas of others.
“III. Conclusion
We should all recognize the harm done to our rule of law when crimes go unpunished because government officials look the other way for the wealthy, famous, or powerful.
Americans rightly expect a single and impartial system of justice for all, not one for the well connected and a separate one for everyone else.
The information available to the Committee at this time raises serious questions about how the FBI applied the rule of law in its investigation of classified information on Secretary Clinton’s private email server. We know that:
• The FBI did not use a grand jury to compel testimony and obtain the vast majority of evidence, choosing instead to offer immunity deals and allow fact witnesses to join key interviews.
• There were substantial edits to Director Comey’s public statement that served to downplay the severity of Secretary Clinton’s actions, and that the first draft of the memo was distributed for editing two months before key witnesses were interviewed.
• Director Comey stated that he had not consulted with the Justice Department or White House, when text messages suggest otherwise.106 We have text messages in which two key investigators discuss an “insurance policy” against the “risk” of a Trump presidency, and “OUR task.”
• Messages discuss “unfinished business,” “an investigation leading to impeachment,” and “my gut sense and concern there’s no big there there.”
• Senior FBI officials—likely including Deputy Director McCabe— knew about newly discovered emails on a laptop belonging to Anthony Weiner for almost a month before Director Comey notified Congress.
• Over the period of at least four months, the FBI did not recover five months’ worth of text messages requested by DOJ OIG and two Senate committees; however, when pressed, DOJ OIG was able to recover missing texts in less than one week.
Taken together, this information warrants further inquiry. While some may discount the investigation for political reasons, we all have a great interest in ensuring the public has confidence in the integrity and independence of the FBI, the preeminent law enforcement agency in the world. Unlike prosecutors or inspectors general, the primary goal of congressional oversight is full transparency in order to promote public awareness and confidence in federal agencies. For these reasons, our important work will continue.”
- THE CLINTON EMAIL SCANDAL AND THE FBI’S INVESTIGATION OF IT. An Interim Report. A Majority Staff Report of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs United States Senate. Senator Ron Johnson, Chairman
file:///C:/Users/Michael/Downloads/2018-02-07%20Interim%20Report_The%20Clinton%20Email%20Scandal%20and%20the%20FBI’s%20Investigation%20of%20It.pdf
To this end, the FBI has it’s hands in all kinds of ways to monitor (so they can control) Americans. Of course, we know that the 4th amendment to the United States Constitution prevents them for collecting “unauthorized” information. They need a court document from a judge to do that. So what they are doing in the meantime (without going through a judge) is simply collecting the information…you know, “just in case”.
Democrats do it. Republicans do it. It is a policy that is rampant.
As of 2016, the FBI has been soliciting a bid for a program that seems very similar to the DHS social-network monitoring program. Dubbed the “FBI Social Media Application,” the program would have
"[the ability] to rapidly assemble critical open source information and intelligence ... to quickly vet, identify and geo-locate breaking events, incidents and emerging threats."
In the FBI’s 12-page solicitation, it requests a program that can quickly identify, display and locate alerts on geo-spatial maps and enable users to summarize the “who, what, when, where and why” of specific threats and incidents.
Going further, it seeks to not simply detect “credible threats,” but to identify those organizing and taking part in gatherings and to predict upcoming events. According to the FBI,
"Social media will be a valued source of information to the SIOC [i.e., Strategic Information and Operations Center] intelligence analyst in a crisis because it will be both eyewitness and first response to the crisis."
An FBI spokesperson insisted,
"[We] will not focus on specific persons or protected groups, but on words that relate to 'events' and 'crisis' and activities constituting violations of federal criminal law or threats to national security. Examples of these words will include lockdown, bomb, suspicious package, white powder, active shoot, school lockdown, etc.”
Rest assured, much like the assurances voiced by the DHS, the FBI insists that its monitoring won’t be used to focus on specific individuals or groups.
The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is made up of fingerprints, iris scans, faceprints, and other facial recognition data. As of 2016 EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center) sued regarding the FBI’s plan to include tattoos and scars in the database.
According to EPIC:
“With NGI, the FBI will expand the number of uploaded photographs and provide investigators with ‘automated facial recognition search capability.’ The FBI intends to do this by eliminating restrictions on the number of submitted photographs (including photographs that are not accompanied by tenprint fingerprints) and allowing the submission of non-facial photographs (e.g. scars or tattoos).”
“The FBI also widely disseminates this NGI data. According to the FBI’s latest NGI fact sheet, 24,510 local, state, tribal, federal and international partners submitted queries to NGI in September 2016.”
EPIC asked a judge to force the FBI to release records about its plan to share the biometric data with the U.S. Department of Defense. EPIC filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2015, but the FBI has so far refused to release the 35 pages of responsive records.
EPIC and privacy advocates are concerned about the potential for cases of mistaken identity and abuse of the collected data. EPIC also argues
“the FBI stated that ‘increased collection and retention of personally identifiable information presents a correspondingly increased risk that the FBI will then be maintaining more information that might potentially be subject to loss or unauthorized use.”
Although very little is actually known about the database, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and EPIC have been able to uncover that the FBI would like to track every individual as they move from one location to another. In 2013, EPIC obtained a document that showed
“NGI shall return an incorrect candidate a maximum of 20% of the time.”
In 2011, EFF observed the growing biometrics trend:
"Once the collection of biometrics becomes standardized, it becomes much easier to locate and track someone across all aspects of their life.
EFF believes that perfect tracking is inimical to a free society.
A society in which everyone’s actions are tracked is not, in principle, free. It may be a livable society, but would not be our society.”
In 2014, EFF received documents from the FBI related to the NGI system.
Based on the records, EFF estimated the facial recognition component of NGI would include as many as 52 million face images by 2015. Indeed, the danger of abuse from facial recognition programs is on the rise.
Activist Post recently highlighted a new report from Georgetown Law University’s Center for Privacy and Technology that details how law enforcement is using facial recognition software without the knowledge or consent of the people. The report, “The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America,” examines several cases of misuse or abuse of facial recognition technology.
Facial recognition software is not the only type of surveillance tool the FBI has an interest in. The Bureau is reportedly set to sign a contract with Dataminr that will provide the feds with an upgrade to social media monitoring software.
According to the Federal Business Opportunities’ official government page, the contract will provide the FBI with around 200 licenses for Dataminr’s Advanced Alerting Tool. This upgrade “will permit the FBI to search the complete Twitter firehose, in near real-time, using customizable filters.”
The FBI claims to want the social media tool for detecting and catching terrorists, but it doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to see how this could be applied to U.S. citizens.
The pursuit of facial recognition software and social media monitoring tools is just the latest step in the expanding war on privacy, which is itself a part of the eternal war on freedom.
This system has been in operation for a number of years now, and is toted as a success.
This Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) covers the Next Generation Identification-Interstate Photo System (NGI-IPS), which serves as the FBI’s biometric identity and criminal history records system and maintains the fingerprints and associated identity information of individuals submitted to the FBI for authorized criminal justice, national security, and civil purposes.
-PIA: NGI-Interstate Photo Systen — FBI
Finally, let it be understood that the FBI’s Next Generation Identification system exempt from Privacy Act News roundup: The FBI Next Generation Identification biometrics database is exempt from the Privacy Act.
“From Rep. Adam Schiff’s increasingly desperate attempts to stonewall the truth to the FBI’s predictable appeals to secrecy from law enforcement to cover corruption, this memo is lifting the scales from the eyes of voters all over the country.
It’s telling them the cockroaches have run out of corners to hide in.
Time to put on our pointy shoes and start kickin’.
The reaction to this memo puts paid the classic libertarian critique that an organization’s highest priority is self-preservation. Doing what you formed the organization to do comes a distant second.
Government creates organizations that are not directly accountable to the people who fund them and therefore can dig moats around themselves to ensure their survival no matter what.
This is the essence of corruption. It is the essence of why the Swamp needs to be drained.
The FBI is a corrupt and venal organization of power-hungry, self-righteous arbiters of arbitrary justice. Even the good agents are tainted by the organizational rot. The same is true in every government department.
No one sees corruption like a government employee with half a conscience.
The pressure to not release this memo comes from formerly very powerful people – Obama and his staff, the Clintons, the DNC, etc. The fallout will be an overhaul from the ground up of multiple powerful agencies within the Federal Government.”
-Tom Luongo
It’s often the case that new technologies arrive on the scene faster than our society and its legal code can keep up. Sometimes this can be a good thing. For instance, 3D printing allows people to print out unregulated gun parts, thus allowing gun owners to circumvent the onerous laws of our government, which has struggled to come up with new laws to restrict the technology.
When technology advances at a breakneck pace however, it can also be quite dangerous for our liberties. This is especially true in regards to privacy. If a new technology makes it easy for the government to track us, you can bet that the government is going to take its sweet time updating the legal code in a way that will protect us from surveillance.
That certainly seems to be the case with facial recognition software. During a recent Congressional Oversight Committee hearing, members of both political parties sounded the alarm on the FBI’s use of the technology, and read the written testimony of Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Jennifer Lynch:
Lynch detailed the stunning scope of the FBI’s photo collection. In addition to collecting criminal and civil mug shots, the agency currently has “memorandums of understanding” with 16 states that mean every driver’s license photo from those states is accessible to the agency—without the drivers’ consent. The FBI also has access to photos from the U.S. State Department’s passport and visa records.
Lynch argued that “Americans should not be forced to submit to criminal face recognition searches merely because they want to drive a car. They shouldn’t have to worry their data will be misused by unethical government officials with unchecked access to face recognition databases. And they shouldn’t have to fear that their every move will be tracked if face recognition is linked to the networks of surveillance cameras that blanket many cities.”
“But without meaningful legal protections, this is where we may be headed,” Lynch stated. “Without laws in place, it could be relatively easy for the government and private companies to amass databases of images of all Americans and use those databases to identify and track people in real time as they move from place to place throughout their daily lives.”
All told, law enforcement agencies around the country have access to 400 million photos in facial recognition databases, which are connected to roughly 50% of American adults. Most of these people have never committed a crime, and obviously haven’t given any consent to this.
At first glance it may sound harmless to be in one of these databases. Movies and TV shows make it sound like this technology can help law enforcement swiftly and precisely nab suspects. So what do you have to fear if you haven’t committed a crime? It turns out that in real life, facial recognition is far from perfect.
Internal FBI documents obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the nonprofit Electronic Privacy Information Center indicate that the FBI’s own database, called the Next Generation Identification Interstate Photo System, or NGI-IPS, had an acceptable margin of error of 20 percent — that is, a 1-in-5 chance of “recognizing” the wrong person.
And research published in the October 2015 issue of the scientific journal PLOS ONE by researchers at the universities of Sydney and New South Wales in Australia found that the humans who interpret such data build in an extra error margin approaching 30 percent.
If we ever allow our government to roll out facial recognition cameras on a wider scale, lots of innocent people are going to be hurt. Whether by mistake or by malice, it will become shockingly easy for law enforcement to identify ordinary people as criminals. The surveillance control grid will not only be inescapable, it will be unwieldy and rife with abuse.
It’s often said that you should never trade freedom for safety. In this case, we wouldn’t receive any kind of safety.
The FBI is operates as a “Secret Police”
In order to boost the credibility of the FBI’s investigations of the Trump team, much of the media is whitewashing the bureau’s entire history. But the FBI has been out of control almost since its birth. Here is a concise summary of some interesting history regarding this issue. Intelligence provided here was collected by James Bovard and all credit due to James Bovard.
In the 1930s, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court feared that the FBI had bugged the conference room where justices privately wrangled over landmark cases, as Tim Weiner noted in his “Enemies: A History of the FBI.”
From 1956 through 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants, to sic the IRS on people, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, communist, white racist, antiwar, and black organizations (including Martin Luther King Jr.). These operations involved vast numbers of warrantless wiretaps and illicit break-ins and resulted in the murder of some black militants. A Senate Committee chaired by liberal Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) issued a damning report on FBI abuses of power that should be mandatory reading for anyone who believes the bureau deserves deference today.
Politifact quotes a professor who asserts that “any use of unnecessary violence (by the FBI) would be met with the full force of the criminal law.” Is that why an internal FBI report claimed that every one of the 150 shootings by FBI agents between 1993 and 2011 was faultless?
FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi gunned down Vicki Weaver in 1992 as she stood in her Idaho cabin doorway holding her baby. After being accusing the FBI of a coverup in a Wall Street Journal oped, FBI chief Louis Freeh denounced Jim Bovard for twisting the truth. But after a confidential Justice Department report leaked out revealing the FBI’s deceits and unconstitutional rules of engagement, the feds paid a $3 million wrongful death settlement to the Weaver family. When an Idaho County sought to prosecute the FBI sniper, the Justice Department invoked the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution to torpedo the case. (Ah, the 9th Circuit Court, rules in favor of the Progressive government.)
“Our very fear of speaking out (against the FBI) ... has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny ... which is ensnaring that Constitution and Bill of Rights which we are each sworn to uphold.”
The FBI is currently scorning almost every congressional attempt at oversight. Thus far, members of Congress have responded with nothing except press releases and talk show bluster.
Politifact repeatedly scoffs at the notion that the FBI is “a secret police agency such as the old KGB.” And since the FBI is not as bad as the KGB, let’s mosey along and pretend no good citizen has a right to complain. A similar standard could exonerate any American president who was not as bad as Stalin.
In the 1960s, some conservatives adorned their cars with “Support Your Local Sheriff” bumper stickers. How long until we see Priuses with “Support Your Secretive All-Powerful Federal Agents” bumper stickers? But those who forget or deny past oppression help forge new shackles for the American people.
The FBI can come after YOU!
This should be obvious, but it isn’t. Most Americans think that “it can never happen to me”. Ask anyone in prison. Life can change in a heartbeat. Especially when the corrupt and powerful is in control of your life.
“RUSH: And welcome back. We wrap up here with Congressman Nunes. I thought of one more thing I wanted to run by you during the break. And it was… I played the audio sound bite of this earlier. It’s a former CIA counterintelligence muckety-muck guy named Phillip Mudd, and there have been two other people like him over the weekend saying to President Trump, “You know what? If you’re gonna pick a fight with the FBI, you don’t want to make those guys mad.“They can really come after you.”
And I’ve heard that before. The same thing has been said by Chuck Schumer to President Trump about the CIA, the intelligence community. I’m sure you’re getting the same kind of insults. Now, with people saying, “You better not make the FBI mad! They could really come out and do you damage or come after you,” doesn’t that kind of validate what’s already going on, if we have people advocating that the FBI be used as a weapon against political opponents?
NUNES: Yeah. So those days are over, Rush. That is what they did in the Obama administration. These institutions became corrupt at the top, and it’s not just the FBI. It’s all of the departments who became just out of control. I mean, do we have to go back to Lois Lerner and the IRS and all of those games that were played?
RUSH: Right.
NUNES: And what’s happening here is that the first time in a long time Congress — which is a separate branch of government. We created the FBI.
RUSH: Right!
NUNES: We created the Department of Justice.
RUSH: You could abolish them if you want to!
NUNES: We could abolish them. We could cut their money off. But the bottom line is this. I said, “We’re done. You cross the rubicon. You abused the FISA court.” And, you know, I had to fight for these documents for months and months and months. We issued the original subpoenas back in August of last year, and it took until just a few weeks ago for us to finally put all the pieces together. So, you know, I’m not gonna take their crap. I’m not gonna be threatened. They tried to do an end run around me, and Speaker Paul Ryan said, “No. The Congress is gonna exert our authority.”
-Rush Limbaugh talking to Congressman Devin Nunes of California (chairman of the House Intelligence Committee) discussing the abuse by the FBI and how it was weaponized by Hillary Clinton for political purposes to attack American citizens.
It’s getting pretty serious. It is obvious that the FBI no longer serves the American people. It serves the oligarchy and itself only.
“I’ll tell you how serious it’s getting. Well, not how serious it’s getting. To illustrate for you just how even greater the divide is becoming, there’s a CIA analyst named Phil Mudd and we’ve got the audio sound bite coming up. This guy is on CNN, and he’s actually saying to Nunes and to Trump, “You know, you make these guys at the FBI mad at you, and they can come back and destroy you.”
What in the hell does that mean? You make these guys at the FBI mad, and they can really come get you. What is that supposed to mean? And he says that with approval and advocacy, like as though he’s in favor of the nation’s premier law enforcement agent targeting people for their politics. It’s like when Chuck Schumer warned Trump, “You better be careful of these guys in the intelligence community. They can wipe you out six ways from Sunday,” which we know to be the case, but to advocate for that.
And lest anybody have any doubt, I’m amazed at people who are just realizing this, but they are. I’ve read I don’t know how many pieces, media on our side — I’m talking about the conservative media, forget the left — who have come to a sudden shocking realization that the media is part of the establishment! I’m reading this, “Duh. You think that’s a revelation?” But, I mean, I’ll take it. I mean, the more people get it, the better.”
-Rush Limbaugh
The FBI Is Paying Geek Squad Members To Dig Around In Computers For Evidence
“Compared to the 18-minute “gap” in the White House tape during the Watergate scandal, this is the Grand Canyon[i]. So what does the Bureau have to say about it?
They blamed it on “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades.” Someone at the FBI actually wrote that.“
-Robert Knight - Sunday, January 28, 2018[i]"The Grand Canyon". The pattern of alarming behavior at the FBI and the Justice Department deserves a recap:
On June 27, 2016, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch held a private meeting with Bill Clinton in a jet at the Phoenix airport, even though the FBI, a branch of the Justice Department, was investigating Mr. Clinton’s wife’s conduct as Secretary of State. A more glaring conflict of interest is hard to imagine.
A week later, on July 5, then-FBI Director James Comey released a report exonerating Mrs. Clinton. He criticized her misuse of emails, but described her violation of national security protocols as “extremely careless” instead of the criminally indictable “grossly negligent” in the original draft. The ever nimble Mr. Strzok has been credited with that edit.
Mr. Strzok also revealed in a text that the FBI team had removed a reference to President Obama as having received a text from Mrs. Clinton when one of them was “on the territory of sophisticated adversaries.” Was it Russia? Alabama?
To downplay the severity of the breach, the FBI report editors cleverly demoted Mr. Obama from president into just “another senior government official,” according to The Journal. The very next day after Mr. Comey’s press conference and release of the report, Ms. Lynch announced that no charges would be filed against Mrs. Clinton, to no great surprise.
Mr. Comey also drafted a statement closing the Clinton email investigation before the FBI even interviewed Mrs. Clinton or her staff. And, Mr. Comey leaked his own memo to a reporter about a conversation with President Trump in order to trigger the Mueller investigation. This all adds up to a disturbingly convincing scenario in which partisan FBI officials bent the law to protect Hillary Clinton, sully Donald Trump before the election, and destabilize his presidency afterward.
If something here isn’t a federal crime, I really don’t know what is.
Law enforcement has a number of informants working for it and the companies that already pay their paychecks, like UPS, for example. It also has a number of government employees working for the TSA, keeping their eyes peeled for “suspicious” amounts of cash it can swoop in and seize.
According to court records, Geek Squad technician John "Trey" Westphal, an FBI informant, reported he accidentally located on Rettenmaier's computer an image of "a fully nude, white prepubescent female on her hands and knees on a bed, with a brown choker-type collar around her neck."
Westphal notified his boss, Justin Meade, also an FBI informant, who alerted colleague Randall Ratliff, another FBI informant at Best Buy, as well as the FBI. Claiming the image met the definition of child pornography and was tied to a series of illicit pictures known as the "Jenny" shots, agent Tracey Riley seized the hard drive.
Not necessarily a problem, considering companies performing computer/electronic device repair are legally required to report discovered child porn to law enforcement.
The difference here is the paycheck.
This Geek Squad member had been paid $500 for digging around in customers’ computers and reporting his findings to the FBI. That changes the motivation from legal obligation to a chance to earn extra cash by digging around in files not essential to the repair work at hand.
More of a problem is the FBI’s tactics. While it possibly could have simply pointed to the legal obligation Best Buy has to report discovered child porn, it proactively destroyed this argument by apparently trying to cover up the origin of its investigation, as well as a couple of warrantless searches.
Setting aside the issue of whether the search of Rettenmaier's computer constituted an illegal search by private individuals acting as government agents, the FBI undertook a series of dishonest measures in hopes of building a case, according to James D. Riddet, Rettenmaier's San Clemente-based defense attorney. Riddet says agents conducted two additional searches of the computer without obtaining necessary warrants, lied to trick a federal magistrate judge into authorizing a search warrant, then tried to cover up their misdeeds by initially hiding records.
The “private search” issue is mentioned briefly in OC Weekly’s report, but should be examined more closely. Private searches are acceptable, but the introduction of cash payments, as well as the FBI having an official liaison with Best Buy suggests the searches aren’t really “private.” Instead, the FBI appears to be using private searches to route around warrant requirements. That’s not permissible and even the FBI’s belief that going after the “worst of worst” isn’t going to be enough to salvage these warrantless searches.
A bill that will allow homes to be searched without a warrant was passed with overwhelming support by the United States Congress.
It was signed into law by President Trump.
It happened silently with no media coverage and very little fanfare.
On the surface, House Joint Resolution 76 looks harmless. The title of the bill claims that its purpose is “Granting the consent and approval of Congress for the Commonwealth of Virginia, the State of Maryland, and the District of Columbia to enter into a compact relating to the establishment of the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission.”
http://thefreethoughtproject.com/congress-passes-bill-allowing-homes-searched-without-warrant/
No 4th Amendment Protections!
As Andrew Fleischman points out at Fault Lines, the government’s spin on the paid “private search” issue — that it’s “wild speculation” the Best Buy employee was acting as a paid informant when he discovered the child porn — doesn’t hold up if the situation is reversed. AUSA Anthony Brown’s defensive statement is nothing more than the noise of a double standard being erected.
Flipping the script for a minute, would an AUSA say it was “wild speculation” that a man was a drug dealer when phone records showed he regularly contacted a distributor, he was listed as a drug dealer in a special book of drug dealers, and he had received $500.00 for drugs? Sorry to break it to you, Mr. Brown, but once you start getting paid for something, it’s tough to argue you’re just doing it for the love of the game.
In addition to these problems, the file discovered by the Best Buy tech was in unallocated space… something that points to almost nothing, legally-speaking.
In Rettenmaier's case, the alleged "Jenny" image was found on unallocated "trash" space, meaning it could only be retrieved by "carving" with costly, highly sophisticated forensics tools.
In other words, it's arguable a computer's owner wouldn't know of its existence. (For example, malware can secretly implant files.)
Worse for the FBI, a federal appellate court unequivocally declared in February 2011 (USA v. Andrew Flyer) that pictures found on unallocated space did not constitute knowing possession because it is impossible to determine when, why or who downloaded them.
This important detail was apparently glossed over in the FBI’s warrant application to search Rettenmaier’s home and personal devices.
In hopes of overcoming this obstacle, they performed a sleight-of-hand maneuver, according to Riddet.
The agents simply didn't alert Judge Marc Goldman that the image in question had been buried in unallocated space and, thus, secured deceitful authorization for a February 2012 raid on Rettenmaier's Laguna Niguel residence.
Courts have shown an often-excessive amount of empathy for the government’s “outrageous” behavior when pursuing criminals. The fact that there’s child porn involved budges the needle in the government’s direction, but the obstacles the FBI has placed in its own way through its deceptive behavior may prevent it from salvaging this case.
The case is already on very shaky ground, with the presiding judge questioning agents’ “odd memory losses,” noting several discrepancies between the FBI’s reports and its testimony, and its “perplexing” opposition to turning over documents the defense has requested.
In any event, it appears the FBI has a vast network of informants — paid or otherwise — working for both private companies and the federal government. Considering the FBI is already the beneficiary of legal reporting requirements, this move seems ill-advised. It jeopardizes the legitimacy of the evidence, even before the FBI engages in the sort of self-sabotaging acts it appears to have done here.
Underneath it all is the perplexing and disturbing aversion[i] to adhering to the Fourth Amendment we’ve seen time and time again from law enforcement agencies, both at local and federal levels. Anything that can be done to avoid seeking a warrant, and anything that creates an obfuscatory paper trail, is deployed to make sure the accused faces an even more uphill battle once they arrive in court[ii].
The DHS Media Monitoring capability Program (MMC).
Department of Homeland Security. A more aggressive monitoring program was revealed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
This occurred when it secured from the DHS a list of approximately 380 keywords that the agency tracks. The allegedly threatening terms were found in the DHS’ Analyst Desktop Binder, part of its 2011 Media Monitoring Capability (MMC) program.
Agencies – 26 terms, including “DHS,” “FBI”, “CIA,” “Air Marshal,” “United Nations” and “Red Cross”;
Domestic security – 52 terms, including “assassination,” “dirty bomb,” “crash,” “first responder,” “screening” and “death.”
Hazardous materials – 34 terms, including “hazmat,” “nuclear,” “leak,” “burn” and “cloud.”
Public health – 47 terms, including “ebola,” “contamination,” “wave,” “pork” and “agriculture.”
Infrastructure security – 35 terms, including “AMTRAK,” “airport,” “subway,” “port,” “electric” and “cancelled.”
Southwest border violence – 65 terms, including “drug cartel,” “decapitated,” “gunfight,” “marijuana,” “heroin,” “border” and “bust.”
Terrorism – 55 terms, including “Jihad,” “biological weapons,” “suicide attack,” “plot” and “pirates.”
Emergencies and weather – 41 terms, including “disaster,” “hurricane,” “power outage,” “ice,” “storm” and “help.”
Cyber security – 25 terms, including “cyber terror,” “malware,” “virus,” “hacker,” “worm,” “China” and “Trojan.”
The DHS has been engaged in monitoring social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and LinkedIn as well as blogs since at least 2010. Its effort is run through the Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS), National Operations Center (NOC), and is entitled “Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness (Initiative).” Its ostensible purpose is to provide situational awareness and strengthen its common operating picture.
The scope of DHS’ practice of social monitoring was unexpectedly revealed in a special congressional hearing, the House Subcommittee on Counterintelligence and Intelligence, headed by Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-PA), in February. Two DHS officials, Chief Privacy Officer Mary Ellen Callahan and Director of Operations Coordination and Planning Richard Chavez, raised the representatives’ ire by appearing to be deliberately stonewalling on the scope and practice of the agency’s social media surveillance.
Most disturbing, the DHS reps appeared unsure about the monitoring program’s goals, how the gathered information would be used and whether it would be shared with other agencies. In an unusual show of bipartisan unity, Reps. Billy Long (R-MO), Jackie Speier (D-CA) and Bennie Thompson (D-MS) joined Rep. Meehan in chastising the DHS officials.
Under intense congressional probing, DHS reps revealed that the keywords chosen for monitoring were drawn from commercially available, off-the-shelf database programs that were customized to meet its specifications. The agency was particularly interested in determining first witnesses to breaking events like the 2011 Tucson shooting of Gabrielle Giffords and others and the January 2012 bomb threat at an Austin school.
The DHS reps insisted that data gathered was only used to confirm other news reports and that information on private citizens was not being collected. In addition, they claimed that that all personally identifying information was regularly scrubbed from the agency’s servers.
Few should feel comforted by the DHS assurances. At the House hearing, it was also revealed that the agency was involved in what appears to be an ongoing campaign to monitor the actions and beliefs of individual Americans engaged in community-based political activism. It compiled a report, “Residents Voice Opposition Over Possible Plan to Bring Guantanamo Detainees to Local Prison-Standish MI,” that tracked community reactions to the proposed location of Guantánamo detainees in a local Michigan prison.
The DHS report is part of the EPIC documents acquired through a Freedom of Information request. It details that information was gathered from a variety of sources, including newspaper articles and responses, blogs by local activists, and Twitter and Facebook posts.
The House hearing also shed light on the DHS practice of outsourcing keyword tracking of social media through a sole-source contract to the giant defense contractor, General Dynamics. In 2011, General Dynamics had revenues of $5.5 billion of which 84 percent ($4.6 bil) came from government contracts. Earlier it’s Advanced Information Systems division was awarded a $14 million DHS contract to (in the words of a press release) “provide constant and continual watch operations for critical communications to the agency’s National Coordinating Center.” In addition, it will “identify the possible impacts of potentially disruptive events.
In keeping with the prevailing ethos of corporate unaccountability, it turns out if the General Dynamics employees are found to have misused the information garnered from a social network user, including a journalist or public figure, the employee must take a training course or, worst case, lose his/her job. No criminal penalties are specified.
A word to the wise, Big Brother is watching you.
The US Ministry of Propaganda
In the last your of President Obama’s term of office, “a bill to implement the U.S.’ very own de facto Ministry of Truth had been quietly introduced in Congress.
As with any legislation attempting to dodge the public spotlight the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act of 2016 marks a further curtailment of press freedom and another avenue to stultify avenues of accurate information.
Introduced by Congressmen Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Ted Lieu (D-CA), H.R. 5181 seeks a “whole-government approach without the bureaucratic restrictions” to counter “foreign disinformation and manipulation,” which they believe threaten the world’s “security and stability.”
Creation
Also called the Countering Information Warfare Act of 2016 (S. 2692), when introduced in March by Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), the legislation represents a dramatic return to Cold War-era government propaganda battles.
“These countries spend vast sums of money on advanced broadcast and digital media capabilities, targeted campaigns, funding of foreign political movements, and other efforts to influence key audiences and populations,”
Portman explained, adding that while the U.S. spends a relatively small amount on its Voice of America, the Kremlin provides enormous funding for its news organization, RT. Portman stated,
“Surprisingly, there is currently no single U.S. governmental agency or department charged with the national level development, integration and synchronization of whole-of-government strategies to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation.”
Yah. Sure. What ever you say bub.
You ever hear of the NID, or the NED, or the “color revolutions” or the “Pro-Democracy” movements?
Long before the “fake news” meme became a daily topic of extensive conversation on such discredited mainstream portals as CNN and WaPo, H.R. 5181 would task the Secretary of State with coordinating the Secretary of Defense, the Director of National Intelligence, and the Broadcasting Board of Governors to “establish a Center for Information Analysis and Response,” which will pinpoint sources of disinformation, analyze data, and — in true dystopic manner — ‘develop and disseminate’ “fact-based narratives” to counter effrontery propaganda.
In short, long before “fake news” became a major media topic, the US government was already planning its legally-backed crackdown on anything it would eventually label “fake news.”
Here is the full statement issued by the generously funded Senator Rob Portman (R- Ohio) on the singing into law of a bill that further chips away at press liberties in the US, and which sets the stage for future which hunts and website shutdowns, purely as a result of an accusation that any one media outlet or site is considered as a source of “disinformation and propaganda” and is shut down by the government. Go Here to read about this historical event.
Portman-Murphy Bill Promotes Coordinated Strategy to Defend America, Allies Against Propaganda and Disinformation from Russia, China & Others
U.S. Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Chris Murphy (D-CT) today announced that their Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act – legislation designed to help American allies counter foreign government propaganda from Russia, China, and other nations– has been signed into law as part of the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Conference Report. The bipartisan bill, which was introduced by Senators Portman and Murphy in March, will improve the ability of the United States to counter foreign propaganda and disinformation from our enemies by establishing an interagency center housed at the State Department to coordinate and synchronize counter-propaganda efforts throughout the U.S. government. To support these efforts, the bill also creates a grant program for NGOs, think tanks, civil society and other experts outside government who are engaged in counter-propaganda related work. This will better leverage existing expertise and empower our allies overseas to defend themselves from foreign manipulation. It will also help foster a free and vibrant press and civil society overseas, which is critical to ensuring our allies have access to truthful information and inoculating people against foreign propaganda campaigns.
“Our enemies are using foreign propaganda and disinformation against us and our allies, and so far the U.S. government has been asleep at the wheel,” Portman said. “But today, the United States has taken a critical step towards confronting the extensive, and destabilizing, foreign propaganda and disinformation operations being waged against us by our enemies overseas. With this bill now law, we are finally signaling that enough is enough; the United States will no longer sit on the sidelines. We are going to confront this threat head-on. I am confident that, with the help of this bipartisan bill, the disinformation and propaganda used against us, our allies, and our interests will fail.”
“The use of propaganda to undermine democracy has hit a new low.But now we are finally in a position to confront this threat head on and get out the truth. By building up independent, objective journalism in places like eastern Europe, we can start to fight back by exposing these fake narratives and empowering local communities to protect themselves,” said Murphy. “I’m proud that our bill was signed into law, and I look forward to working with Senator Portman to make sure these tools and new resources are effectively used to get out the truth.”
Priorities
The bipartisan Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act is organized around two main priorities to help achieve the goal of combating the constantly evolving threat of foreign disinformation from our enemies:
The first priority is developing a whole-of-government strategy for countering THE foreign propaganda and disinformation being wages against us and our allies by our enemies. The bill would increase the authority, resources, and mandate of the Global Engagement Center to include state actors like Russia and China as well as non-state actors. The Center will be led by the State Department, but with the active senior level participation of the Department of Defense, USAID, the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the Intelligence Community, and other relevant agencies. The Center will develop, integrate, and synchronize whole-of-government initiatives to expose and counter foreign disinformation operations by our enemies and proactively advance fact-based narratives that support U.S. allies and interests.
Second, the legislation seeks to leverage expertise from outside government to create more adaptive and responsive U.S. strategy options. The legislation establishes a fund to help train local journalists and provide grants and contracts to NGOs, civil society organizations, think tanks, private sector companies, media organizations, and other experts outside the U.S. government with experience in identifying and analyzing the latest trends in foreign government disinformation techniques. This fund will complement and support the Center’s role by integrating capabilities and expertise available outside the U.S. government into the strategy-making process. It will also empower a decentralized network of private sector experts and integrate their expertise into the strategy-making process.
And so, with the likes of WaPo having already primed the general public to equate “Russian Propaganda” with “fake news” (despite admitting after the fact their own report was essentially “fake”), while the US media has indoctrinated the public to assume that any information which is not in compliance with the official government narrative, or dares to criticize the establishment, is also “fake news” and thus falls under the “Russian propaganda” umbrella, the scene is now set for the US government to legally crack down on every media outlet that the government deems to be “foreign propaganda.”
Just like that, the US Ministry of Truth is officially born.
Impact
The Founding Fathers protected freedom of speech and freedom of the press as the most important liberties. They are protected in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And as discussed below, the Founders recognized that the ability to speak freely was the foundation for all other freedoms. If you remove it, the other freedoms would fall. Thousands of years of history shows how rare and valuable such freedoms really are. Please consider…
Socrates
Socrates was killed in 399 BC for “failing to acknowledge the gods that the [government] acknowledges”.
Using the Printing Press
Before the invention of the movable type printing press by Gutenberg, the church controlled the production of books. Gutenberg’s invention allowed cheap production of books. This challenged the monopoly on books by the church, and thus allowed different viewpoints to be heard.
For example, when Martin Luther posted his “95 Theses” on a church door in Germany criticizing the corrupt Catholic practice of selling “indulgences” – paying the church in return for a reduction of your time in purgatory – the printing press spread his writings throughout all of Germany in 2 weeks, and throughout “all of Christendom” within a month. This launched the Protestant Reformation, and challenged the power of the Catholic church.
So Pope Alexander VI issued an edict against unlicensed printing in 1501.
And in 1535, Francis I of France prohibited – under penalty of death – the printing of any books.
William Tyndale
William Tyndale was killed in 1536 for translating the Bible into English so that everyone could read it for themselves, and no longer had to rely on the clergy to tell them what it said.
Unlicensed Printing
In 1585, the Star Chamber assumed the right to confine printing to London, Oxford and Cambridge, to limit the number of printers and presses, to prohibit all publications issued without proper license, and to enter houses to search for unlicensed presses and publications. The search for unlicensed presses or publications was entrusted to an officer called the ” messenger of the press.”
In 1557, Henry II made the collecting of prohibited books punishable by death or imprisonment. An in 1559, he made it punishable by death to print without royal authority.
Galileo
In 1616 and 1633, Galileo was tried for saying that the Earth revolves around the Sun, instead of agreeing with the church’s “mainstream” view that the Sun revolves around the Earth.
Heretics and Critics
Many people have been killed over the centuries for saying anything that the church authorities of the day disliked. And the British monarchy punished anyone caught with materials criticizing the monarchy, which they labeled as “libelous” or “scandalous”, even if what was written was true.
(Indeed, the ransacking of houses by authorities searching for “heretical” and “libelous” material was so common that it was the main reason the Founding Fathers wrote the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting unreasonable “search and seizure”).
Benjamin Franklin
In 1773, Ben Franklin was fired as colonial Postmaster General for informing the American Colonists about what the British were really doing.
Strongmen
Strongmen of all stripes have cracked down anyone who insults the strongman or criticizes his policies.
Book Burnings
In 1933, the Nazis carried out numerous book burnings of authors such as Einstein, Freud, Kafka, Hellen Keller, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Proust, Upon Sinclair and H.G. Wells because their writing book …
“acts subversively on our future or strikes at the root of German thought, the German home and the driving forces of our people…”
There have been many other book burnings throughout history.
Mussolini
Mussolini had around 2,000 people killed because they challenged the dictator.
Stalin and the Soviet Union
Stalin murdered or through into insane asylums countless people who criticized the Soviet government or Communism.
Other Communist Regimes
China’s Mao and other Communist leaders killed people who failed to sign the Great Leaders’ praise.
CIA
In 1972, CIA director Richard Helms relabeled dissenters as “terrorists”.
Reporters
The extremely popular tv personality Phil Donahue’s show – the most popular on MSNBC – was canceled for questioning the wisdom of the Iraq war. Indeed, many reporters have been fired, harassed, spied upon and even accused of terrorism for reporting stories critical of government actions or policies.
Protect What Makes Us American
Those in power are always tempted to censor and punish critical speech and reporting. George W. Bush said “You’re either with us or your against us”, and cracked down on criticism and protest. Most powerful Democrats now want to suppress right-wing speech. But freedom of speech and of the press – no matter how much we may disagree with and even hate what someone else says – is the bedrock of America.
If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
– George Washington
“Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech.”
– Ben Franklin
“Freedom of expression is the matrix, the indispensable condition, of nearly every other form of freedom.”
– U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo
“The framers of the constitution knew human nature as well as we do. They too had lived in dangerous days; they too knew the suffocating influence of orthodoxy and standardized thought. They weighed the compulsions for restrained speech and thought against the abuses of liberty. They chose liberty.”
-U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Douglass
“If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.”
-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis
NGA
If you’re one of the countless Americans who was distraught to learn of the revelations made by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden, the mere idea that there might be yet another agency out there – perhaps just as powerful and much more intrusive – should give you goosebumps.
Foreign Policy reports that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, is an obscure spy agency former President Barack Obama had learned to love and appreciate. Like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), the NGA is an intelligence agency, but it also serves as a combat support institution that functions under the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD).
With headquarters bigger than the CIA’s, the building cost $1.4 billion to be completed in 2011. In 2016, the NGA bought an extra 99 acres in St. Louis, building additional structures that cost taxpayers an extra $1.75 billion. Enjoying the extra budget Obama threw at them, the NGA became one of the most obscure intelligence agencies precisely because it relies on the work of drones.
A partially redacted March 2016 report released by the Pentagon revealed that drones had already been used domestically on about 20 or fewer occasions between 2006 and 2015. Though some of these operations mostly involved natural disasters, National Guard training, and search and rescue missions, quotes from an Air Force law review article found their way into the report. In it, Dawn M. K. Zoldi wrote that technology designed to spy on targets abroad could soon be used against American citizens.
Use Foreign Intelligence to Collect Intel
.@Judgenap: Three intel sources have disclosed that Pres. Obama turned to British spies to get surveillance on Trump pic.twitter.com/IghCFm7qhO
— FOX & friends (@foxandfriends) March 14, 2017
During the waning months of the Obama Administration, then President Obama used the British spy agency GCHQ to collect information on incoming President-elect Trump. This was because of both the constitutional limitations placed on him by law, as well as avoiding any connection to spying (and wiretaps like Richard Nixon had the unfortunate experience to endure) by using a “cat’s paw” to collect the intel.
MUSCULAR (DS-200B)
MUSCULAR (DS-200B), located in the United Kingdom, is the name of a surveillance programme jointly operated by Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that was revealed by documents which were released by Edward Snowden and interviews with knowledgeable officials.
GCHQ
GCHQ is the primary operator of the program.GCHQ and the National Security Agency have secretly broken into the main communications links that connect the data centers of Yahoo! and Google.Substantive information about the program was made public at the end of October 2013.
The programme is jointly run by:
Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) (United Kingdom)
U.S. National Security Agency (NSA)
MUSCULAR is one of at least four other similar programs that rely on a trusted 2nd party, programs which together are known as WINDSTOP. In a 30-day period from December 2012 to January 2013, MUSCULAR was responsible for collecting 181 million records. It was however dwarfed by another WINDSTOP program known (insofar) only by its code DS-300 and codename INCENSER, which collected over 14 billion records in the same period.
According to the leaked document the NSA’s acquisitions directorate sends millions of records every day from internal Yahoo! and Google networks to data warehouses at the agency’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. The programme operates via an access point known as DS-200B, which is outside the United States, and it relies on an unnamed telecommunications operator to provide secret access for the NSA and the GCHQ.
According to the Washington Post, the MUSCULAR program collects more than twice as many data points (“selectors” in NSA jargon) compared to the better known PRISM Unlike PRISM, the MUSCULAR program requires no (FISA or other type of) warrants.
Because of the huge amount of data involved, MUSCULAR has presented a special challenge to NSA’s Special Source Operations. For example, when Yahoo! decided to migrate a large amount of mailboxes between its data centers, the NSA’s PINWALE database (their primary analytical database for the Internet) was quickly overwhelmed with the data coming from MUSCULAR.
Closely related programmes are called INCENSER and TURMOIL. TURMOIL, belonging to the NSA, is a system for processing the data collected from MUSCULAR.
Blaming Others for Nefarious Activities
The WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 release contains a batch of documents, named ‘Marble’, which detail CIA hacking tactics and how they can misdirect forensic investigators from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to their agency by inserted code fragments in foreign languages. Per the WikiLeaks release:
"The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages."RELEASE: CIA Vault 7 part 3 "Marble"
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 31, 2017
The latest release is said to potentially allow for ‘thousands’ of cyber attacks to be attributed to the CIA which were originally blamed on foreign governments.
WikiLeaks said Marble hides fragments of texts that would allow for the author of the malware to be identified. WikiLeaks stated the technique is the digital equivalent of a specialized CIA tool which disguises English language text on US produced weapons systems before they are provided to insurgents.
It’s “designed to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation" as "string obfuscation algorithms” often link malware to a specific developer, according to the whistleblowing site.
The source code released reveals Marble contains test examples in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi.
“This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion,” WikiLeaks explains, “But there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages.”
The code also contains a ‘deobfuscator’ which allows the CIA text obfuscation to be reversed. “Combined with the revealed obfuscation techniques, a pattern or signature emerges which can assist forensic investigators attribute previous hacking attacks and viruses to the CIA.”
Previous Vault7 releases have referred to the CIA’s ability to mask its hacking fingerprints.
WikiLeaks claims the latest release will allow for thousands of viruses and hacking attacks to be attributed to the CIA.
CIA's "Marble Framework" shows its hackers use potential decoy languages
Background: https://t.co/GsoN4BuyTz pic.twitter.com/ZT66doCnfY
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 31, 2017
Full release from WikiLeaks:
Today, March 31st 2017, WikiLeaks releases Vault 7 "Marble" -- 676 source code files for the CIA's secret anti-forensic Marble Framework. Marble is used to hamper forensic investigators and anti-virus companies from attributing viruses, trojans and hacking attacks to the CIA.
Marble does this by hiding ("obfuscating") text fragments used in CIA malware from visual inspection. This is the digital equivallent of a specalized CIA tool to place covers over the english language text on U.S. produced weapons systems before giving them to insurgents secretly backed by the CIA.
Marble forms part of the CIA's anti-forensics approach and the CIA's Core Library of malware code. It is "[D]esigned to allow for flexible and easy-to-use obfuscation" as "string obfuscation algorithms (especially those that are unique) are often used to link malware to a specific developer or development shop."
The Marble source code also includes a deobfuscator to reverse CIA text obfuscation. Combined with the revealed obfuscation techniques, a pattern or signature emerges which can assist forensic investigators attribute previous hacking attacks and viruses to the CIA. Marble was in use at the CIA during 2016. It reached 1.0 in 2015.
The source code shows that Marble has test examples not just in English but also in Chinese, Russian, Korean, Arabic and Farsi. This would permit a forensic attribution double game, for example by pretending that the spoken language of the malware creator was not American English, but Chinese, but then showing attempts to conceal the use of Chinese, drawing forensic investigators even more strongly to the wrong conclusion, --- but there are other possibilities, such as hiding fake error messages.
The Marble Framework is used for obfuscation only and does not contain any vulnerabilties or exploits by itself.
Intentional Fabrication of UFO lore.
And why not?
You see all the above examples, the many, many, many examples are mostly political, or used to add control “for natural security”. It’s all just excuses.
It’s not about “getting your political opponents”. Nor is it about “the children”, or “for national security”.
It’s all about control.
"I share your concern over the secrecy that continues to shroud our intelligence activities on this subject."
-Congressman Thomas L. Ashley in a letter to NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) on the subject of UFOs.
Numerous government employees have been actively engaged in the creation of UFO / extraterrestrial lore. This involves various people in the military; including the leadership, various government employees of various agencies that includes both contractors and direct payroll staff, and even elected officials who do so for political purposes. The reasons behind why they were involved in such activities ran the gambit from governmental projects with intentional goals, to mere mischievous pranks. These individuals are now well known in their complicity to deflect, redirect, and discredit all extraterrestrial related study and lore.
One must give pause as to why the government would want to employ someone to do this full time.
A former Air Force special investigations officer named Richard Doty has admitted to having infiltrated UFO circles. As a UFO researcher says:
"Doty had this wonderful way to sell it – 'I'm with the government. You cooperate with us and I'm going to tell you what the government really knows about UFOs, deep down in those vaults.'"
Doty and his colleagues fed credulous ufologists lies and half-truths, knowing their fertile imaginations would do the rest. In return, they were apprised of chatter from the community, thus alerting the military when anyone was getting to close to their top-secret technology. And if the Soviets thought the US really was communing with aliens, all the better.
The classic case, well-known to conspiracy aficionados, is Paul Bennewitz, a successful electronics entrepreneur in New Mexico. In 1979, Bennewitz started seeing strange lights in the sky, and picking up weird transmissions on his amateur equipment. The fact that he lived just across the road from Kirtland air force base should have set alarm bells ringing, but Bennewitz was convinced these phenomena were of extraterrestrial origin. Being a good patriot, he contacted the Air Force, who realized that, far from eavesdropping on ET, Bennewitz was inadvertently eavesdropping on them. Instead of making him stop, though, Doty and other officers told Bennewitz they were interested in his findings. That encouraged Bennewitz to dig deeper. Within a few years, he was [1] interpreting alien languages, [2] spotting crashed alien craft in the hills from his plane (he was an amateur pilot), and [3] sounding the alert for a full-scale invasion. All the time, the investigators were watching him observe them. They gave Bennewitz computer software that “interpreted” the signals, and even dumped fake props for him to discover. The mania took over Bennewitz’s life. In 1988, his family checked him into a psychiatric facility.
There’s plenty of stories like this.
Many central tenets of the UFO belief system turn out to have far earthlier origins. Mysterious cattle mutilations in 1970s New Mexico turn out to have been officials furtively investigating radiation in livestock after they’d conducted an ill-advised experiment in underground “nuclear fracking”.
Test pilots for the military’s experimental silent helicopters admit to attaching flashing lights to their craft to fool civilians. Actual photos were doctored to appear that things were being hidden, while other actual pictures were lost in the static of confusion.
It is now easy for anyone to simply say;
“There are no aliens or extraterrestrials at all. The government has been conducting a program to hid advanced research and development programs from the public. They use the smoke-screen of extraterrestrial activity to stigmatize observers of such actions into passive silence.”
As that is, indeed, partly the case.
But I am here, and I am telling you otherwise. Oh, the extraterrestrial presence is real. The technology is real. The government cover-up is real.
But most of what you read on the Internet, and in books are but lies and fabrications. What you see on the television, and observe on the Internet are but cleverly orchestrated efforts used to manipulate group conventional thought and placate the populace for the purposes of the government.
Conclusion
Long and drawn out.
Boring. Old “news”.
Old “subjects”.
Yeah! I get it.
These articles dated to before the Trump Administration. Now, you can well imagine that things are much tighter, the controls more restrictive, exacting, and lethal to your supposed “freedom”. You all are just animals in a big “free ranging” field. Nothing more.
And please don’t get all “hung up” on the “political song and dance”; the “progressives vs. the conservatives”. It’s all just “bread and circuses” for the mindless masses.
bread and circuses A phrase used by a Roman writer to deplore the declining heroism of Romans after the Roman Republic ceased to exist and the Roman Empire began: “Two things only the people anxiously desire — bread and circuses.” The government kept the Roman populace happy by distributing free food and staging huge spectacles.
-Bread and circuses | Definition of Bread and circuses
When Congress gave up it’s powers to the alphabet organizations, they did much more than create “Frankenstein Monsters”. They created an endless system that keep you within a stratified social construct. One that you must toil for the well-being of others, and by which you can be imprisoned and even killed if you fail to conform.
This means a complete subversion of the systems that are intended to help you and your family in “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.
The subversion is now complete. It is beyond redemption.
Key Point: The “fighting” for your Rights is all just a farce. The elections are all just theater. The systems are in place, and you are the cattle that toils for your new masters. Oh, the faces change on the “news” screens, but the takeover is complete. So any articles about “regaining” your “God given” Rights is just meaningless. You have NONE. It’s over. And nothing will be done when one party or the other takes power. It’s all just nonsense.
Anyone still sticking around in America is now trapped. It’s probably too late to escape. And if history has anything to say, it is that it’s only going to get worse.
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my Front Row Seat Index, though this could just as well fit under any other index as well.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
If you read the American media, one thing that runs through all the propaganda, and it’s an on-going theme. It’s pretty much this; [1] China is hard-core communist, and thus [2] everything they do is a lie. [3] America must disengage from that lie. And, [4] when the time is right, America destroy China completely.
This is a pretty big departure from the “most favored trading status nation” to “America’s number one enemy”.
I call it the “Trump effect”. Which is pretty much a nation being run upon delusions and fantasy. You all can thank Trump and his “God fearing” neocon advisers who (foolishly) believe that America is Heaven on earth, and it is their God-Given right to rule the world, and remake it into an American vassal state.
For decades, China labored and provided goods to America. Once America could no longer afford those goods, the American leadership wanted to crush China completely and seize everything inside China for their own personal use.
This is really, seriously, all messed up.
This isn’t 1840, don’t you know.
But China is not what the American leadership thinks it is. China is a serious, serious nation. It is run by leadership who where tops in their classes, experienced hardship by working their way from the very bottom of society to where they are now, and who have displayed merit over and over again. It’s a big change from the “clowns” and “misfits” that currently run America.
In this post we will look at what China has been doing over the last few decades while America has gotten, fat, lazy, slothful and rich. We will look at the efforts that they made to become a world-leader in manufacturing. And then, we will look at where this effort has got them, and what China has become as a result of it; indeed, what China is today.
To start off, however, we need to look at how China started out, and what they did to become where they are today.
Hint:
It took [1] real leadership, and [2] structural changes within the government.
We start with a post titled “Just Cheap Labor? How China Became a Manufacturing Powerhouse” by The World Affairs Blog. Posted on 13SEP20. Reprinted as found with only minor alternations to fit this venue. All credit to the writers and editors.
Just Cheap Labor? How China Became a Manufacturing Powerhouse
Many people have simple narratives about China’s rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. And this misunderstanding (ignorance?) is also the reason why the same people believe that multinational corporations are going to quickly move or re-shore factories out of China. The logic behind this narrative mostly boils down to, “China has cheap labor and thus became a manufacturing giant.”
It’s just not true.
For starters, if poverty is the sole requirement to become a manufacturing center, obviously every other developing country would have performed well. Consider this: while China and India have almost the same population, China’s manufacturing is almost 10x India’s. Thus, let’s analyze this phenomenon more closely.
China’s growth in manufacturing over the last forty years has been nothing but astonishing. Consider that, in 1980, US manufacturing output was almost five times as large as China’s. However, just thirty years later — in 2010 — China surpassed the US as the world’s #1 manufacturing country. This was also quite momentous, since the US had been the manufacturing leader for the previous 110 years!
Of course, cheap labor made a big difference in the 1980s, 1990s and even until 2006 or so. However, after that, China’s wages caught up with other middle-income developing countries. Now, Chinese wages are 2.5x higher than in Mexico or 5x higher than in Vietnam.
Thus, while the Chinese wages tripled over a decade (2008-2018), China’s share of global manufacturing value added almost doubled from 15% to 28%!
So, obviously, there’s lot more than cheap labor.
In fact there are dozens of holistic factors that make a country a successful manufacturer. (Not all of them are positive — for example, lax environmental laws — but that’s the dark side of manufacturing). Understanding these will help see what a daunting challenge foreign companies will face in finding new countries to replace China.
There’s no one magic bullet, and all the ten factors listed below are critical:
**1. Skilled, Productive and Disciplined Labor: Yes, more than being cheap, even the lowest paid workers must have all these three qualities. The people making shoes or assembling gadgets still need skills and consistency. Products and requirements change all the time, and the workers should be able to adapt. Moreover, these people must show up for work every day and consistently perform. In many countries, you can’t find such high-quality workers.
**2. Medium and Hi-tech Manufacturing Factories: A plastic toy or a bulb may seem very simple, but there’s a lot of chemistry, metallurgy, materials science and much more behind how to make them from raw materials. Now imagine TVs, car engines etc. Factories need very sophisticated engineers to make the products to specifications at the right cost. There’s a lot of innovation here behind the scene. Here’s a quick note from Tim Cook (Apple’s CEO) on this topic:
**3. Producing at Scale: Assembling 100,000 iPhones a day requires a totally different factory from the one that churns out 1,000 smartphones a day — every process will be different from end to end. Automation, smart factories, robots, and 5G will be increasingly crucial in the factories of the future.
**4. Elasticity and Flexibility: Can you handle a sudden extra request for 1 million new gadgets to meet demands for Christmas? Can you quickly switch from one version to another version of a product? For example, China was able to quickly build huge mask factories and COVID19 testing labs within 2-3 weeks.
Is that possible in Vietnam? In Britain? In Canada? In the United States?
**5. Design to Prototypes to Products: Customers just come up with vague or highly complex product designs and then expect the manufacturer to do all the work. Chinese firms have so much talent and experience that they can often create a prototype within a couple of days. And these firms must be creative enough to suggest alternative designs and features. These are invaluable skills that just can’t be developed in a few months.
**6. Logistics: How do you make sure that the parts and raw materials are always available for the factories? How do you manage all the workers? How about testing and shipping out all the products on time? How do you work with customers from all over the world and deal with different languages, legal issues etc.?
**7. Infrastructure: The Chinese government has to make sure that the factories have land, electricity, water, buildings, warehouses, roads, Internet etc. And they must be affordable. These may sound easy to someone in the US, but developing nations like India or Indonesia may struggle to provide high-quality infrastructure. For example, until recently, massive power outages used to be very common in India.
**8. Transportation: Although this falls under infrastructure, it must be spelled out. A bullet train that reduces travel time by 60% … deep sea ports that can handle massive ships and millions of containers … new strategically located airports all over the country … freight trains that can travel thousands of miles (like from Xian, China to Barcelona, Spain) … these are monumental projects in which no country can match China. This is why Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative is truly visionary.
**9. Ecosystem: This is a unique success factor for China. There is an ecosystem for every kind of factory. For example, a clothing factory would greatly benefit if there are dozens of nearby factories that specialize in different kinds of materials — cotton, wool, silk, denim, nylon, polyester etc. Similarly, a smartphone company would like to work closely with other firms that specialize in microphones, speakers, cameras, screens, printed circuit boards etc. Other services experts such as international lawyers, marketing consultants, and designers are also indispensable. Without such 360-degree ecosystems, no country can expect to be a manufacturing superpower. Shenzhen, the electronics capital of the world, is a stellar example of such ecosystems.
**10. Tax Breaks, Subsidies, Incentives, Trade Agreements: Finally, you need a very smart and visionary government that plans 5, 10, 20 years in advance, makes huge investments, knows how to attract and keep foreign and domestic investors, provide tax cuts and subsidies, negotiate smart trade agreements etc. to create a win-win environment.
Elon Musk at Shanghai Tesla factory that was built in just one year!
So, these are the secrets behind China’s success. Other countries can try to replicate this model, but they need to be prepared to invest a lot and plan for the long term.
While low-end manufacturing will move out of China because of high Chinese wages and China’s desire to improve its environment, Americans shouldn’t dream of quick decoupling or re-shoring factories. This is why 75% of US manufacturers in China say they won’t move any production out of China! Moving out of China in any meaningful way will take a decade … if other developing nations execute their manufacturing strategy flawlessly.
And now that you know about how China got to where it is, you can see how this all affects it’s global standing…
China’s GDP is now $14.4 trillion. Within ten years …
China slowed down a bit, thanks to trade war and tariffs, but didn’t suffer a lot.
The mainstream media gave it a spin as “China’s economy grows at the slowest pace in 29 years!” However, the slowdown in China’s growth is natural at this stage of its development. Nothing can grow at 15% forever.
What is not mentioned by the China-haters is that China grew much faster than the US economy and left other major economies like EU and Japan in the dust.
Here are the numbers for GDP growth in 2019 — China: 6.1%, USA: 2.2%, EU: 1.4% and Japan: 0.7%.
Note that, the official GDP growth are always inflation-adjusted. This is a strange norm that distorts reality. We don’t do this to other stats like stock market or wages. Thus, in real life, China’s GDP actually grew 10% … from Ұ90 trillion to Ұ99 trillion.
Thus, last year, China’s GDP grew by Ұ9 trillion… which translates to $1.4 trillion. For comparison, the US economy grew by $1 trillion. See the difference? This is how China catches up to the US.
Every year from now on, China will reduce the gap with the US by $400 billion or more.
World Beyond the US
How did China achieve this growth? How come the trade war and tariffs didn’t wreck the Chinese economy?
There are two answers:
One, the significance of American economy is shrinking.
In 2019, the US became the third trading partner for China! Not number one. Not number two. Third.
The top two were EU and ASEAN (a group of 10 countries in Asia). The Belt and Road countries also increased their trade with China.
Two, China’s economy is no longer dominated by manufacturing.
Services sector — “tertiary industry” — is now 54% of the economy; and manufacturing is only 40%. Since services depend mostly on domestic consumption, trade war doesn’t have much impact.
Thus the “Trade War” does not affect domestic consumption. Only international trade with China’s third largest trading partner; America.
Future
If you look at the relative size of China to the US over the last 30 years, you can see how China is catching up:
With 4x as many people — who also work very hard — and a government
that surprisingly plans and coordinates the economy very well, it should
be no surprise that China will surpass the US by 2030 in nominal GDP.
(Don’t forget that China has been #1 in terms of PPP GDP since 2014).
Of course, the trajectory is based on the assumption there won’t be any major financial crisis or hot wars in the coming decade, which are all quite possible…
Conclusion
It should not be any mystery to anyone not drinking the “electric kool-aide” from the American (and Western) media. China is successful precisely because of it’s leadership, planning and hard work.
It is not a “democracy” where public opinion can change the leadership on a whim. It is a Socialist Republic run by merit. It doesn’t need to lie. They just tell you what things are, and you can accept it or not.
All Chinese leadership worked to get where they are today. They lead China into what it has become.
The Chinese people, culture and the Chinese society, along with proper investment and long term planning has created a situation where China is the global leader that America considers so much a threat.
China will continue this path that it is on, and the only thing that can slow it down (but not stop it) would be a “hot war” with America.
To this end, China is working with other nations. Creating and building long-lasting friendships and relationships. While America is tearing down relationships, ignoring treaties, and generally being a global nuisance.
Do you want more?
I have more posts like this in my China Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.
All the people writing about the intrusive nature of the NSA, and the collection of data through the cell-phones by back-door access has got it all wrong. It’s not about the collection of data. It’s about using your phone to control your mind.
All these “back doors” and secret embedded code within your electronics, your chips, and your cell-phones is not simply about collecting your personal information. That is the obvious purpose, but that is not the ultimate purpose.
The ultimate purpose is to enable the embedding of special algorithms and embedded code that allow the government to manipulate what you see, read and hear. These enormous (and hidden) embedded programs overlay instructions to your mind. They alter the selection of programs that you might want to use, they change the access and ease of access to websites. They alter the type, range and frequency of information on your feeds, and change what you would watch, see and listen to.
Have you ever been on your cell phone, and musing about something... thinking about a memory or an event... and then suddenly you see a link or an article related to a similar type of event?
No. It's not coincidence.
It's intentional.
You are being subconsciously manipulated to act, think, and behave as part of a herd of humans, that the oligarchy wants to shepherd into certain defined behaviors.
And the revelations by Wiki-leaks in Vault 7 proves this.
Vault 7
Whenever you mention the “power” that the United States has over the serfs citizens living there, you really need to mention “Vault 7”. “Vault 7” proves, beyond all and any shadow of a doubt, that the United States government has complete distain for the Bill of Rights, and everything that it stands for. Americans have no protections. ZERO. Americans exist at the mercy of their government.
Democrat Senator Feinstein trying to put limits on the the first amendment to the Bill of Rights.
Americans are just monitored cattle. They are monitored by their owners; those handful of Billionaires that fully control the government.
WikiLeaks has published what it claims is the largest-ever release of confidential documents on the CIA. It includes more than 8,000 documents as part of “Vault 7”, a series of leaks on the agency, which have allegedly emerged from the CIA’s Center For Cyber Intelligence in Langley, and which can be seen on the org chart below, which Wikileaks also released:
A total of 8,761 documents have been published[v] as part of “Year Zero”. This “Year Zero” is the first in a series of leaks the whistle-blower organization has been dubbed “Vault 7.” WikiLeaks said that “Year Zero” revealed details of the CIA’s “global covert hacking program,” including “weaponized exploits” used against company products including “Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.”
WikiLeaks tweeted the leak, which it claims came from a network inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia.
Wikileaks released ORG Chart.
Among the more notable disclosures which, if confirmed, “would rock the technology world“, the CIA had managed to bypass encryption on popular phone and messaging services such as Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram. According to the statement from WikiLeaks, government hackers can penetrate Android phones and collect “audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.”
Another profound revelation is that the CIA can engage in “false flag” cyberattacks which portray Russia as the assailant. Discussing the CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group, Wikileaks’ source notes that it “collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation.
“With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from. UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.”
As Kim Dotcom summarizes this finding,
"CIA uses techniques to make cyber attacks look like they originated from enemy state. It turns DNC/Russia hack allegation by CIA into a JOKE"
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) March 7, 2017
But perhaps what is most notable is the purported emergence of another Snowden-type whistleblower: the source of the information told WikiLeaks in a statement that they wish to initiate a public debate about the “security, creation, use, proliferation and democratic control of cyberweapons.” Policy questions that should be debated in public include “whether the CIA’s hacking capabilities exceed its mandated powers and the problem of public oversight of the agency,” WikiLeaks claims the source said.
The FAQ section of the release, shown later, provides further details on the extent of the leak, which was “obtained recently and covers through 2016”. The time period covered in the latest leak is between the years 2013 and 2016, according to the CIA timestamps on the documents themselves. Secondly, WikiLeaks has asserted that it has not mined the entire leak and has only verified it, asking that journalists and activists do the leg work.
Weeping Angel
Among the various techniques profiled by WikiLeaks is “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.
Dotcom also added that “Obama accused Russia of cyberattacks while his CIA turned all internet enabled consumer electronics in Russia into listening devices. Wow!”
Obama accused Russia of cyberattacks while his CIA turned all internet enabled consumer electronics in Russia into listening devices. Wow!
— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) March 7, 2017
Julian Assange, WikiLeaks editor stated that
“There is an extreme proliferation risk in the development of cyber ‘weapons’. Comparisons can be drawn between the uncontrolled proliferation of such ‘weapons’, which results from the inability to contain them combined with their high market value, and the global arms trade. But the significance of “Year Zero” goes well beyond the choice between cyberwar and cyberpeace. The disclosure is also exceptional from a political, legal and forensic perspective.”
Key Highlights
“Year Zero” introduces the scope and direction of the CIA’s global covert hacking program, its malware arsenal and dozens of “zero day” weaponized exploits against a wide range of U.S. and European company products, include Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android and Microsoft’s Windows and even Samsung TVs, which are turned into covert microphones.
Wikileaks claims that the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation. This extraordinary collection, which amounts to more than several hundred million lines of code, gives its possessor the entire hacking capacity of the CIA. The archive appears to have been circulated among former U.S. government hackers and contractors in an unauthorized manner, one of whom has provided WikiLeaks with portions of the archive.
By the end of 2016, the CIA’s hacking division, which formally falls under the agency’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI), had over 5000 registered users and had produced more than a thousand hacking systems, trojans, viruses, and other “weaponized” malware. Such is the scale of the CIA’s undertaking that by 2016, its hackers had utilized more code than that used to run Facebook.
The CIA had created, in effect, its “own NSA” with even less accountability and without publicly answering the question as to whether such a massive budgetary spend on duplicating the capacities of a rival agency could be justified.
Once a single cyber ‘weapon’ is ‘loose’ it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by rival states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.
CIA targets iPhones, Androids, smart TVs:
CIA malware and hacking tools are built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), a department belonging to the CIA’s DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation). The DDI is one of the five major directorates of the CIA (see this organizational chart of the CIA for more details).
The EDG is responsible for the development, testing and operational support of all backdoors, exploits, malicious payloads, trojans, viruses and any other kind of malware used by the CIA in its covert operations world-wide.
The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell’s 1984, but “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.
The attack against Samsung smart TVs was developed in cooperation with the United Kingdom’s MI5/BTSS. After infestation, Weeping Angel places the target TV in a ‘Fake-Off’ mode, so that the owner falsely believes the TV is off when it is on. In ‘Fake-Off’ mode the TV operates as a bug, recording conversations in the room and sending them over the Internet to a covert CIA server.
As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.
The CIA’s Mobile Devices Branch (MDB) developed numerous attacks to remotely hack and control popular smart phones. Infected phones can be instructed to send the CIA the user’s geolocation, audio and text communications as well as covertly activate the phone’s camera and microphone.
Despite iPhone’s minority share (14.5%) of the global smart phone market in 2016, a specialized unit in the CIA’s Mobile Development Branch produces malware to infest, control and exfiltrate data from iPhones and other Apple products running iOS, such as iPads. CIA’s arsenal includes numerous local and remote “zero days” developed by CIA or obtained from GCHQ, NSA, FBI or purchased from cyber arms contractors such as Baitshop. The disproportionate focus on iOS may be explained by the popularity of the iPhone among social, political, diplomatic and business elites.
A similar unit targets Google’s Android which is used to run the majority of the world’s smart phones (~85%) including Samsung, HTC and Sony. 1.15 billion Android powered phones were sold last year. “Year Zero” shows that as of 2016 the CIA had 24 “weaponized” Android “zero days” which it has developed itself and obtained from GCHQ, NSA and cyber arms contractors.
These techniques permit the CIA to bypass the encryption of WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Wiebo, Confide and Cloackman by hacking the “smart” phones that they run on and collecting audio and message traffic before encryption is applied.
Take aways…
CIA malware and hacking tools are built by EDG (Engineering Development Group), a software development group within CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence), a department belonging to the CIA’s DDI (Directorate for Digital Innovation). The DDI is one of the five major directorates of the CIA (see this organizational chart of the CIA for more details).
The increasing sophistication of surveillance techniques has drawn comparisons with George Orwell’s 1984, but “Weeping Angel”, developed by the CIA’s Embedded Devices Branch (EDB), which infests smart TVs, transforming them into covert microphones, is surely its most emblematic realization.
Many of these infection efforts are pulled together by the CIA’s Automated Implant Branch (AIB), which has developed several attack systems for automated infestation and control of CIA malware, such as “Assassin” and “Medusa”.
The CIA has developed automated multi-platform malware attack and control systems covering Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, Linux and more, such as EDB’s “HIVE” and the related “Cutthroat” and “Swindle” tools.
Also cars,
As of October 2014 the CIA was also looking at infecting the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks.
The purpose of such control is not specified, but it would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations.
This is quite suggestive of the CIA having a role in the death of Michael Hastings.
The CIA also runs a very substantial effort to infect and control Microsoft Windows users with its malware.
This includes multiple local and remote weaponized “zero days”, air gap jumping viruses such as “Hammer Drill” which infects software distributed on CD/DVDs, infectors for removable media such as USBs, systems to hide data in images or in covert disk areas ( “Brutal Kangaroo”) and to keep its malware infestations going.
Hoarding of Zero Day exploits:
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks about the NSA, the U.S. technology industry secured a commitment from the Obama administration that the executive would disclose on an ongoing basis — rather than hoard — serious vulnerabilities, exploits, bugs or “zero days” to Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other US-based manufacturers.
Serious vulnerabilities not disclosed to the manufacturers places huge swathes of the population and critical infrastructure at risk to foreign intelligence or cyber criminals who independently discover or hear rumors of the vulnerability. If the CIA can discover such vulnerabilities so can others.
The U.S. government’s commitment to the Vulnerabilities Equities Process came after significant lobbying by US technology companies, who risk losing their share of the global market over real and perceived hidden vulnerabilities. The government stated that it would disclose all pervasive vulnerabilities discovered after 2010 on an ongoing basis.
“Year Zero” documents show that the CIA breached the Obama administration’s commitments. Many of the vulnerabilities used in the CIA’s cyber arsenal are pervasive and some may already have been found by rival intelligence agencies or cyber criminals.
As an example, specific CIA malware revealed in “Year Zero” is able to penetrate, infest and control both the Android phone and iPhone software that runs or has run presidential Twitter accounts. The CIA attacks this software by using undisclosed security vulnerabilities (“zero days”) possessed by the CIA but if the CIA can hack these phones then so can everyone else who has obtained or discovered the vulnerability. As long as the CIA keeps these vulnerabilities concealed from Apple and Google (who make the phones) they will not be fixed, and the phones will remain hackable.
The same vulnerabilities exist for the population at large, including the U.S. Cabinet, Congress, top CEOs, system administrators, security officers and engineers. By hiding these security flaws from manufacturers like Apple and Google the CIA ensures that it can hack everyone &mdsh; at the expense of leaving everyone hackable.
Take aways…
In the wake of Edward Snowden’s leaks about the NSA, the U.S. technology industry secured a commitment from the Obama administration that the executive would disclose on an ongoing basis — rather than hoard — serious vulnerabilities, exploits, bugs or “zero days” to Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other US-based manufacturers.
Serious vulnerabilities not disclosed to the manufacturers places huge swathes of the population and critical infrastructure at risk to foreign intelligence or cyber criminals who independently discover or hear rumors of the vulnerability. If the CIA can discover such vulnerabilities so can others.
Please see the table of contents for the full list of projects described by WikiLeaks’ “Year Zero”. (Over 500 and counting…)
Proliferation of leaked/hacked Cyberwar programs:
While nuclear proliferation has been restrained by the enormous costs and visible infrastructure involved in assembling enough fissile material to produce a critical nuclear mass, cyber ‘weapons’, once developed, are very hard to retain.
Cyber ‘weapons’ are in fact just computer programs which can be pirated like any other. Since they are entirely comprised of information they can be copied quickly with no marginal cost.
Over the last three years the United States intelligence sector, which consists of government agencies such as the CIA and NSA and their contractors, such as Booze Allan Hamilton, has been subject to unprecedented series of data exfiltrations by its own workers.
Once a single cyber ‘weapon’ is ‘loose’ it can spread around the world in seconds, to be used by peer states, cyber mafia and teenage hackers alike.
The U.S. Consulate in Frankfurt is a covert CIA hacker base
In addition to its operations in Langley, Virginia the CIA also uses the U.S. consulate in Frankfurt as a covert base for its hackers covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
CIA hackers operating out of the Frankfurt consulate ( “Center for Cyber Intelligence Europe” or CCIE) are given diplomatic (“black”) passports and State Department cover.
The instructions for incoming CIA hackers make Germany’s counter-intelligence efforts appear inconsequential: “Breeze through German Customs because you have your cover-for-action story down pat, and all they did was stamp your passport”
Examples of CIA projects
The CIA’s Engineering Development Group (EDG) management system contains around 500 different projects (only some of which are documented by “Year Zero”) each with their own sub-projects, malware and hacker tools. The majority of these projects relate to tools that are used for penetration, infestation (“implanting”), control, and exfiltration.
Umbrage: The CIA’s Remote Devices Branch’s UMBRAGE group collects and maintains a substantial library of attack techniques ‘stolen’ from malware produced in other states including the Russian Federation. With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.
Fine Dining: Fine Dining comes with a standardized questionnaire i.e menu that CIA case officers fill out. The questionnaire is used by the agency’s OSB (Operational Support Branch) to transform the requests of case officers into technical requirements for hacking attacks (typically “exfiltrating” information from computer systems) for specific operations. Among the list of possible targets of the collection are ‘Asset’, ‘Liason Asset’, ‘System Administrator’, ‘Foreign Information Operations’, ‘Foreign Intelligence Agencies’ and ‘Foreign Government Entities’. Notably absent is any reference to extremists or transnational criminals.
‘Improvise’; a toolset for configuration, post-processing, payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender), MacOS (JukeBox) and Linux (DanceFloor).
HIVE: HIVE is a multi-platform CIA malware suite and its associated control software. The project provides customizable implants for Windows, Solaris, MikroTik (used in internet routers) and Linux platforms and a Listening Post (LP)/Command and Control (C2) infrastructure to communicate with these implants. The implants are configured to communicate via HTTPS with the webserver of a cover domain; each operation utilizing these implants has a separate cover domain and the infrastructure can handle any number of cover domains.
Evading forensics and anti-virus
A series of standards lay out CIA malware infestation patterns which are likely to assist forensic crime scene investigators as well as Apple, Microsoft, Google, Samsung, Nokia, Blackberry, Siemens and anti-virus companies attribute and defend against attacks.
“Tradecraft DO’s and DON’Ts” contains CIA rules on how its malware should be written to avoid fingerprints implicating the “CIA, US government, or its witting partner companies” in “forensic review”. Similar secret standards cover the use of encryption to hide CIA hacker and malware communication (pdf), describing targets & exfiltrated data (pdf) as well as executing payloads (pdf) and persisting (pdf) in the target’s machines over time.
CIA hackers developed successful attacks against most well known anti-virus programs.
CIA hackers discussed what the NSA’s “Equation Group” hackers did wrong and how the CIA’s malware makers could avoid similar exposure.
UMBRAGE
The CIA’s hand crafted hacking techniques pose a problem for the agency. Each technique it has created forms a “fingerprint” that can be used by forensic investigators to attribute multiple different attacks to the same entity.
This is analogous to finding the same distinctive knife wound on multiple separate murder victims. The unique wounding style creates suspicion that a single murderer is responsible. As soon one murder in the set is solved then the other murders also find likely attribution.
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution by leaving behind the “fingerprints” of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.
It’s easy to have the NSA place “digital fingerprints” on their hacking efforts using these tools, and then blame another nation.
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation, stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.
Unless maintained, the Bill of Rights becomes useless and superannuated.
Fine Dining
Fine Dining comes with a standardized questionnaire i.e menu that CIA case officers fill out. The questionnaire is used by the agency’s OSB (Operational Support Branch) to transform the requests of case officers into technical requirements for hacking attacks (typically “exfiltrating” information from computer systems) for specific operations.
The questionnaire allows the OSB to identify how to adapt existing tools for the operation, and communicate this to CIA malware configuration staff. The OSB functions as the interface between CIA operational staff and the relevant technical support staff.
Among the list of possible targets of the collection are ‘Asset’, ‘Liason Asset’, ‘System Administrator’, ‘Foreign Information Operations’, ‘Foreign Intelligence Agencies’ and ‘Foreign Government Entities’. Notably absent is any reference to extremists or transnational criminals. The ‘Case Officer’ is also asked to specify the environment of the target like the type of computer, operating system used, Internet connectivity and installed anti-virus utilities (PSPs) as well as a list of file types to be exfiltrated like Office documents, audio, video, images or custom file types. The ‘menu’ also asks for information if recurring access to the target is possible and how long unobserved access to the computer can be maintained. This information is used by the CIA’s ‘JQJIMPROVISE’ software (see below) to configure a set of CIA malware suited to the specific needs of an operation.
Improvise (JQJIMPROVISE)
‘Improvise’ is a toolset for configuration, post-processing, payload setup and execution vector selection for survey/exfiltration tools supporting all major operating systems like Windows (Bartender), MacOS (JukeBox) and Linux (DanceFloor). Its configuration utilities like Margarita allows the NOC (Network Operation Center) to customize tools based on requirements from ‘Fine Dining’ questionairies.
HIVE
What is an "implant"?
It is the embedded code that instructs your brain what to do and how to behave when you are using electronics technology.
It is the software that has the back of your mind musing about certain things, issues of the day, or getting all emotionally upset about something.
HIVE is a multi-platform CIA malware suite and its associated control software. The project provides customizable implants for Windows, Solaris, MikroTik (used in internet routers) and Linux platforms and a Listening Post (LP)/Command and Control (C2) infrastructure to communicate with these implants.
The implants are configured to communicate via HTTPS with the webserver of a cover domain; each operation utilizing these implants has a separate cover domain and the infrastructure can handle any number of cover domains.
Each cover domain resolves to an IP address that is located at a commercial VPS (Virtual Private Server) provider. The public-facing server forwards all incoming traffic via a VPN to a ‘Blot’ server that handles actual connection requests from clients. It is setup for optional SSL client authentication: if a client sends a valid client certificate (only implants can do that), the connection is forwarded to the ‘Honeycomb’ toolserver that communicates with the implant; if a valid certificate is missing (which is the case if someone tries to open the cover domain website by accident), the traffic is forwarded to a cover server that delivers an unsuspicious looking website.
The Honeycomb toolserver receives exfiltrated information from the implant; an operator can also task the implant to execute jobs on the target computer, so the toolserver acts as a C2 (command and control) server for the implant.
Similar functionality (though limited to Windows) is provided by the RickBobby project.
“You could have all the crazy thoughts you wanted, as long as you smiled and kept them to yourself.”
― Mara Purnhagen, Past Midnight
99.9% of the articles (on the internet and in books) discuss how “unconstitutional” the collection of information, by the NSA, is. They argue (and rightfully so) that the United States government should not be doing this, that it is against the Constitution, the law, the purpose of government, and is a dangerous precedent. Ah. We all get this and understand it.
I argue something a little different.
The reason why the United States wants your reading, watching, listening, and Geo-location information (as well as your passwords, your friends, and your associations) is not so much to track your actions and behaviors. But instead, to be able to feed embedded algorithms into your phone.
These hidden and secretive signals direct your subconscious actions.
They control what you look at, what you listen to, and what you are exposed to.
Thus, they “box you in” to a particular “mind set”. And in so doing, they control you.
And the American PTB (Deep State) Oligarchy leadership are believing that this 2D manipulation of minds will guarantee their successful implementation of change; guarantee that they will remain in power forever, and guarantee that their goals and societal adjustments will occur without any opposition.
But the universe is far more complex than any 2D operation. It’s at a bare minimum, an 11D exercise. And pushing this controlling narratives into the minds of millions of Americans will have , or is having…
… unexpected, or unintended consequences.
It should be no surprise that the United States is now balkanized into violently radical warring factions. All of which are attuned to certain pre-defined narratives. Individual, independent thought no longer exists. You are either “A”, or “B” or “C”. And they have further classified you in to a direct subcategory all for the purposes of your control. “A-4”, or “B-7”.
Vault 7 exposes this.
Now a cursory look at the files might (indeed) give you the impression that it’s just advanced techniques for the collection and gathering of information. I urge the reader to think past that. Any nation that has an intimate knowledge of your “private papers” and “personal privacy” in real time has the ability to control you.
It’s all about control.
The control of what and how you think, by a very powerful government.
And this is why Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo are all up in arms about 5G, and Huawei. It's not that the technology is better, dangerous, or would have "back doors". It is that the stranglehold of the American government control over people would come to an end as less and less people use programs with these embedded algorithms.
If you want to protect yourself from being manipulated by hidden, invisible and secret manipulations, you need to start using phones, and software developed outside of the United States. Those products that are being “banned from American use” such as Huawei and Xiaomi are almost certainly devoid of NSA malware.
Though, perhaps the best thing might be to just move away from all electronic media and live a far simpler life.
A simpler life.
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I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…
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find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy
notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a
necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money
off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you
because I just don’t care to.
Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.
