Infinite Unknown

- With CIA Help, NYPD Moves Covertly in Muslim Areas (ABC NEWS, August 24, 2011):

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Police Department has become one of the nation’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies, targeting ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government, an Associated Press investigation has found.

These operations have benefited from unprecedented help from the CIA, a partnership that has blurred the line between foreign and domestic spying.

The department has dispatched undercover officers, known as “rakers,” into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing.

Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which has given NYPD more than $1.6 billion since 9/11, is told exactly what’s going on.

Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit.

A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency’s payroll, was the architect of the NYPD’s intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency’s spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States.

And just last month, the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters.

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Tags: CIA, Civil liberties, Civil rights, Dictatorship, Fascism, FBI, Global News, Government, New World Order, NYPD, Police, Police State, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance, U.S.

All to protect civilians, right?

- Pentagon’s Secret War: U.S. Special Operations Forces To Be Deployed in 120 Countries By The End Of This Year (Counterpunch)

- Bahrain Seeks Mercenaries From Indonesia, Malaysia And Pakistan (ABC Radio Australia)

- Bahrain Doctors Tortured Into Confessing, Say Families (BBC News)

- UK Training Saudi Forces Used To Crush Arab Spring (Guardian)

- Blackwater Hired To Set Up A 800-Member Mercenary Battalion For The United Arab Emirates (Reuters)

- Exposed: The US-Saudi Libya Deal: You Invade Bahrain. We Take Out Muammar Gaddafi In Libya (Asia Times)

- Torture in Bahrain Aided by Nokia Siemens (Bloomberg, Aug 23, 2011):

The interrogation of Abdul Ghani Al Khanjar followed a pattern.

First, Bahraini jailers armed with stiff rubber hoses beat the 39-year-old school administrator and human rights activist in a windowless room two stories below ground in the Persian Gulf kingdom’s National Security Apparatus building. Then, they dragged him upstairs for questioning by a uniformed officer armed with another kind of weapon: transcripts of his text messages and details from personal mobile phone conversations, he says.

If he refused to sufficiently explain his communications, he was sent back for more beatings, says Al Khanjar, who was detained from August 2010 to February.

“It was amazing,” he says of the messages they obtained. “How did they know about these?”

The answer: Computers loaded with Western-made surveillance software generated the transcripts wielded in the interrogations described by Al Khanjar and scores of other detainees whose similar treatment was tracked by rights activists, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its October issue.

The spy gear in Bahrain was sold by Siemens AG (SIE), and maintained by Nokia Siemens Networks and NSN’s divested unit, Trovicor GmbH, according to two people whose positions at the companies gave them direct knowledge of the installations. Both requested anonymity because they have signed nondisclosure agreements. The sale and maintenance contracts were also confirmed by Ben Roome, a Nokia Siemens spokesman based in Farnborough, England. Continue reading »

Tags: Bahrain, Big Brother, Civil liberties, Dictatorship, Fascism, Global News, Government, Human Rights, Interrogation, New World Order, Nice Systems, Nokia, Police State, Politics, Privacy, Siemens, Society, Surveillance, Technology, Torture, Trovicor, Verint Systems

- Redacting all but your privacy – DHS Voyeurism, Backscatter Vans and Body-scanners (Activist Post, August 18, 2011):

Apparently public information can be redacted into an unaccountable oblivion, and the only boundary to black-marks are your private parts where they end for the sake of voyeurism. EPIC’s Freedom of Information Act request was answered with what looks more like a Hubble malfunction than a document regarding body-scanners and mobile X-ray (Backscatter) vans. See PDF.

“ZBV” – Z Backscatter Van

YouTube

The implication of such things are many, and it is not surprising that the very agency vigilantly attempting to criminalize normal civilians would want to keep these technologies as private as possible while applying them on the public. The good news – however hopeless – is that EPIC has filed suit to force disclosure of these documents. If it is the public who are to be the subjects of this technology, then it is the public who should be thoroughly informed of it. The DHS clearly opposes this, and seeks to covertly employ their spyware wherever they can. We really must ask where this will stop if left unchecked. The likeliest answer is that it will not.

The Eccentric Intelligence Agency: Helping the Ouroboros finish itself. Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Body Scanners, Dictatorship, Global News, Government, Health, New World Order, Obama administration, Politics, Privacy, Technology, U.S., X-ray

- DHS says Terror Watchlist is exempt from Privacy Act (The Informant, August 10, 2011):

Last Friday, the federal government’s new anti-terror database, the Terror Screening Watchlist Service, went live. The database is loaded with an unknown amount of personal information, including names, photographs and biometric data. In a new turn that has civil liberties advocates crying foul, the Department of Homeland Security is claiming all information contained in the watchlist is confidential.

Earlier today, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and several other groups filed a formal complaint with DHS about the blanket exemptions to the Privacy Act.

Under DHS’ rules guidelines for the Terror Watch Lists, individuals “do not have an opportunity to decline to provide information” for the database, and cannot obtain the relevant information through the Federal Privacy Act. The Privacy Act is one of the milestone reforms passed in the wake of the Watergate spying scandal. It permits individuals to obtain law enforcement files about them by the government, with the intent of correcting incorrect information.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, DHS, Dictatorship, Global News, Government, Homeland Security, Law, New World Order, Obama administration, Politics, Privacy, Society, Surveillance, Terrorism, U.S.

- House panel approves broadened ISP snooping bill (CNET News, July 28, 2011):

Internet providers would be forced to keep logs of their customers’ activities for one year–in case police want to review them in the future–under legislation that a U.S. House of Representatives committee approved today.

The 19 to 10 vote represents a victory for conservative Republicans, who made data retention their first major technology initiative after last fall’s elections, and the Justice Department officials who have quietly lobbied for the sweeping new requirements, a development first reported by CNET.

A last-minute rewrite of the bill expands the information that commercial Internet providers are required to store to include customers’ names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and temporarily-assigned IP addresses, some committee members suggested. By a 7-16 vote, the panel rejected an amendment that would have clarified that only IP addresses must be stored.

It represents “a data bank of every digital act by every American” that would “let us find out where every single American visited Web sites,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, who led Democratic opposition to the bill.

Continue reading »

Tags: Big Brother, Civil liberties, Dictatorship, Global News, Government, Internet, Law, New World Order, Obama administration, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance, Technology, U.S.

Don’t miss:

- Police Across The Nation Will Roll Out Face-Recognizing iPhone Tech This Year (POPSCI, July 14, 2011):

YouTube

Demonstrates the use of MORIS – the first of its kind mobile multi-modal biometric recognition device based on the iPhone. It is utilizing iris recognition in addition to face and fingerprint. For more information, please visit: http://www.bi2technologies.com/MORIS

Tags: 1984, Big Brother, Biometrics, Civil liberties, Constitution, Fingerprints, Global News, Government, iPhone, New World Order, Police, Police State, Politics, Privacy, Society, Surveillance, Technology, U.S.

- Amid Privacy Fears, Police Across the Nation Will Roll Out Face-Recognizing iPhone Tech This Year (POPSCI, July 14, 2011):

A controversial piece of facial recognition technology (and a PopSci “Best of What’s New 2010” alum) is rolling out in police stations across the country this fall, and naturally not everyone is happy about it. The Mobile Offender Recognition and Identification System (MORIS) uses an augmented iPhone to snap pictures of faces, scan fingerprints, and even to image irises, and then combs through police databases looking for matching identities. This, understandably, has privacy and civil liberties advocates crying foul.

The MORIS device attaches to the back of an iPhone, adding roughly 1.75 inches to the thickness of the smartphone. Police officers armed with the tool can take a photo of a person’s face from about five feet away, or scan his or her iris from about six inches, and wirelessly beam that data to law enforcement databases elsewhere to look for a match. It can also perform remote fingerprint matching.

Similar biometric technology has been deployed by the U.S. military in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to confirm the identities of civilians entering military safe zones and to search for known insurgents at checkpoints. But rolling it out in the streets of the U.S. has plenty of people concerned with privacy and Constitutional issues.

Continue reading »

Tags: 1984, Big Brother, Biometrics, Civil liberties, Constitution, Fingerprints, Global News, Government, iPhone, New World Order, Police, Police State, Politics, Privacy, Society, Surveillance, Technology, U.S.

- Microsoft admits Patriot Act can access EU-based cloud data (ZDNet, June 28, 2011):

LONDON — At the Office 365 launch, Gordon Frazer, managing director of Microsoft UK, gave the first admission that cloud data — regardless of where it is in the world — is not protected against the USA PATRIOT Act.

It was honestly music to my ears. After a year of researching the Patriot Act’s breadth and ability to access data held within protected EU boundaries, Microsoft finally and openly admitted it.

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Tags: EU, Europe, Global News, Government, Microsoft, New World Order, Patriot Act, Politics, Privacy, Surveillance

MEPs led the campaign to stop the use of the scanners in the Parliament yet they are in use in 70 airports across Europe, including London Heathrow Photo: PA

The body scanners, bought in 2005 at a cost of £100,000 each, are “rotting” in the basement of the building in Brussels and have never been used.

When the scanners, which create an image of a person’s nude body, were eventually delivered to the Parliament in the autumn of 2005 MEPs objected to them being used in the building on privacy grounds.

Nikki Sinclair, a British independent MEP, said the Parliament tried to sell the machines but failed to do so.

Continue reading »

Tags: Body Scanners, Civil liberties, Civil rights, EU, Europe, Global News, Government, Politics, Privacy, Society, X-ray

(NaturalNews) As if it’s not enough for the TSA to feel you up at the airport, now they’re experimenting with rapid results DNA scanners that can scan and analyze your DNA using just a drop of saliva. Spit at the TSA agent who is molesting you, in other words, and they can use that saliva to scan your DNA and then store it in a government database.

Why would they want to do that? We can only imagine. Remember, it was Alex Jones who broke the story about hospitals secretly taking blood samples of babies and handing them over to the federal government for use in a national genetic database (http://www.prisonplanet.com/newborn…).

The government routinely steals genetic material from people for its own nefarious purposes, as does the pharmaceutical industry. For example, the medical industry’s so-called “Hela cells” which have been exploited for decades by vaccine and drug companies, were harvested and stolen decades ago from Henrietta Lacks without her permission or consent (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa). Hela cells are the foundation of hundreds of billions of dollars in profit for Big Pharma, and they are all based on DNA theft perpetrated by the pharmaceutical industry.

Harvesting your DNA at the airport

Now that the TSA is experimenting with portable DNA scanners, their real agenda becomes apparent: They will use airport security checkpoints to harvest DNA from the public in order to build up their government “bio bank” database of stolen DNA.

Continue reading »

Tags: Barack Obama, Civil liberties, Civil rights, Constitution, DHS, DNA, Food, Freedom, Government, Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, New World Order, Obama administration, Politics, Privacy, Society, Technology, TSA, U.S.