Amid the sound and fury of yesterday’s IRS hearing were a few small tidbits which raise significant questions about who knew what and when within the Obama administration. While getting the answer (the real honest truth) is highly unlikely, as the Wall Street Journal notes, the IRS’s watchdog told top Treasury officials around June 2012(when Republican lawmakers were complaining publicly about alleged IRS targeting of tea-party groups) he was investigating allegations the tax agency had targeted conservative groups, for the first time indicating that Obama administration officials were aware of the explosive matter in the midst of the president’s re-election campaign. The revelation nonetheless raised a fresh set of questions about who was aware of the problem within the Obama administration. However, the hearing left numerous other fundamental questions unanswered, including who ordered the targeting and why it continued so long, pointing to a protracted investigation ahead as Rep. Paul Ryan exclaimed, “how can we not conclude that you misled this committee?” As Doug Ross’ full timeline below suggests, this is fascism on the part of the IRS and White House…Continue reading »
Remember my recent post titled: Former FBI Agent: All Phone Conversations are Recorded and Stored? Well now they now want to ensure doing the same on the internet is as easy as possible. The latest proposal by the FBI, which would require companies to provide a backdoor for the feds to spy on American citizens on the internet, has been covered extensively in the mainstream media over the past couple of weeks, first in the Washington Post and then later in the New York Times. It centers around this push to make communications on the internet “wiretap capable” and would impose fines of $25,000 per day for companies that do not comply with Big Brother. Julian Sanchez of Wired has written and excellent article explaining how this proposal would not only crush privacy rights of law abiding citizens, but would also help cyber criminals, enable totalitarian governments, make the internet less secure and stifle the remnants of innovation that remain in the economy. Oh, and unsurprisingly, Obama backs the proposal. My favorite excerpts:
The FBI has some strange ideas about how to “update” federal surveillance laws: They’re calling for legislation to penalize online services that provide users with too much security.
I’m not kidding. The proposal was revealed in The Washington Post last week — and a couple days ago, a front-page story in The New York Times reported the Obama administration is preparing to back it.
While it’s not yet clear how dire the going-dark scenario really is, the statutory “cure” proposed by the FBI — with fines starting at $25,000 a day for companies that aren’t wiretap capable — would surely be worse than the disease.
The FBI’s misguided proposal would impose costly burdens on thousands of companies (and threaten to entirely kill those whose business model centers on providing highly secure encrypted communications), while making cloud solutions less attractive to businesses and users. It would aid totalitarian governments eager to spy on their citizens while distorting business decisions about software design. Perhaps worst of all, it would treat millions of law-abiding users with legitimate security needs as presumed criminals — while doing little to hamper actual criminals.
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
- Aldous Huxley, 1961
“By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise.” – Adolf Hitler
And so the final curtain falls on the myth of what was supposed to be, in its own words, the “most transparent administration“ in history.
As it turns out, the big Friday story of Bloomberg journalists snooping on its clients was just amateur hour compared to what the AP was about to serve. In fact, the Watergate affair may soon appear like a walk in the park compared to the First Amendment shitstorm that is about to be unleashed following the just reported news that the US Department of Justice had “secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.”
First amendment? Freedom of speech and press? Surely not when it comes to the Nobel-peace prize winning President and those who dare to expose his secret ways.
And what’s worst, is that the AP breach has all the makings of a spiteful hack driven by personal vengeance against one of America’s premier news outlets.
We can’t wait to see the rest of the not so conservative media stands up in arms and defend one of their peers against an administration whose utter disdain for all checks and balances puts Stalinist Russia to shame. Or perhaps it will be merely a case of “first they came for AP’s reporters, and we said nothing…”
And while it has long been known that the NSA actively intercepts and records every single form of electronic communication, the unspoken truth is that the government can do anything it wants as long as it doesn’t get caught. It just did, and not only in Benghazi, or the IRS fiasco, but in making a complete mockery of the First Amendment.
As the NSA whistleblower told Wired Magazine over a year ago, “we are this far from a turnkey totalitarian state“, all we can add is “we are now in a full-blown totalitarian state.”
The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.
Oh just another eight hundred page “bipartisan” bill that nobody will read, mainstream media will refuse to cover, and that will merely further destroy any remnants of freedom left in these United States. Never forget the George Carlin quote on bipartisanship:
“Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.”
The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.
Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.
This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.
“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things,” said Chris Calabrese, a congressional lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “More fundamentally, it could be the start of keeping a record of all things.”
“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.”
– Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” - George Orwell
“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”
-Aldous Huxley, 1961
So it seems the surveillance state just had its coming out party on CNN. In this interview with Erin Burnett, former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente admits that the feds have access to pretty much everyone’s telephone conversations. Also pay attention to the smirk on his face as he admits this disturbing reality.
Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian wrote an excellent piece yesterday o this exact topic. Some of my favorite excerpts: Continue reading »
The European Commission wants to impose on farmers and gardeners in the future the use of standard seeds. Old and rare varieties have little chance of an approval, their cultivation will be punishable by law – even if it takes place in private gardens.
The European Commission is working on a revision of the European seed market in the form of a regulation. Thus, a decision of the European Court is legalized in July 2012: Farmers are allowed to sell only officially authorized seed. So far, old and rare seed varieties were excluded that were grown in long standing economic and exchange traded, usually in small quantities. If it goes to the Commission’s plans, small farmers or private persons may not even give away their homegrown seeds in the future.
The march to tyranny has picked up fierce momentum in the state of New York, where the criminal Cuomo administration is now issuing subpoenas that demand psychiatrists turn over ALL their records to the state, reports AmmoLand.com.
This is just the first step for the New York government’s “HIPAA” committee, whose sole purpose is to “illegally obtain and access the private medical records of potentially millions of NY State Residents.”
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has claimed that agents do not need warrants to read people’s emails, text messages and other private electronic communications, according to internal agency documents.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which obtained the documents through a Freedom of Information Act request, released the information on Wednesday.
In a 2009 handbook, the IRS said the Fourth Amendment does not protect emails because Internet users “do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such communications.” A 2010 presentation by the IRS Office of General Counsel reiterated the policy. Continue reading »
Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSac hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up.
And three: Paula Broadwell,who had an affair with CIA director David Petraeus, similarly took extensive precautions to hide her identity. She never logged in to her anonymous e-mail service from her home network. Instead, she used hotel and other public networks when she e-mailed him. The FBI correlated hotel registration data from several different hotels — and hers was the common name.
The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we’re being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period.
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