Yhdysvallat

[aj77]

Minua on kiinnostanut jo yli 10 vuotta, miksi Afganistanin unikkotuotanto räjähti sananmukaisesti pilviin, kun Usa tuli rajoittamaan tuota paheksuttua elinkeinomuotoa?

Sotilaat ja huumeet...yhtä ikiaikainen ilmiö kuin sotilaatkin. Herättäähän se mietteitä, että ydinasearsenaalia komentaa ja valvoo joukko upseereita, jotka ovat töissä piristeissään....ja toisella puolen maapalloa lujasti votkissa. Hienoa, ihmiskunta, täältä tullaan.

Joo. Olivat muuntohuumeissaan ja käsittääkseni amfetamiinin tai extaasin kaltaisessa muuntohuumessa. Toivottavasti eivät painaneet tuplavuoroa vuorokausia tai olisivat kohta painaneet myös nappia.,

 

[ctg]

Olen suurella mielenkiinnolla seurannut tuota Saksan kultansa perään huutelua jenkeistä-. Silloin taannoinhan Usa sanoi että saatte kyllä kultanne ,mutta siinä menee 7-vuotta ainakin.Johtunee siittä että niillä ei ole sitä enään.
Näin videopätkän jonkun keskuspankin johtajan Kongressin kuulustelusta liittyen ihan toiseen asiaan, missä kaveri sivulauselle totesi että heillä ei ole yhtään kultaa varastossa . Onko siis Fort Knox maailman vartioiduin tyhjä tila?
Tuo ei tiedä hyvää pitkässä juoksussa.

 

[ctg]

Minua on kiinnostanut jo yli 10 vuotta, miksi Afganistanin unikkotuotanto räjähti sananmukaisesti pilviin, kun Usa tuli rajoittamaan tuota paheksuttua elinkeinomuotoa?

Sotilaat ja huumeet...yhtä ikiaikainen ilmiö kuin sotilaatkin. Herättäähän se mietteitä, että ydinasearsenaalia komentaa ja valvoo joukko upseereita, jotka ovat töissä piristeissään....ja toisella puolen maapalloa lujasti votkissa. Hienoa, ihmiskunta, täältä tullaan.

“For decades, it has been rumored the United States government was secretly sponsoring the smuggling of cocaine into the country. Federal officials have long denied such speculation, pointing out the billions of dollars spent intercepting drugs. Newly released documents, and testimony from Justice Department and DEA officials now show the stories of government running cocaine are true.

An investigation conducted in Mexico found the American government allowed that country’s largest drug cartel, Sinaloa, to operate without fear of persecution. That groups is estimated to be responsible for 80 percent of the cocaine coming into the country through Chicago. In exchange, the leaders of Sinaloa provided the DEA information on rival gangs. “

http://investmentwatchblog.com/nati...muggler-revealed-the-dea/#VtZh8UFXjQQQ7PBC.99
Joten mitä luulet, että miksi erinäisissä piireissä supistaan siitä kuinka setä samuli on maailman suurin asekauppias ja miten jenkit rahoittaa heidän mustan budjetin projektejaan huumerahalla. Ei ihme miksi maailmaa vaivaa huumesota ongelma, jos se on vain pelkkä maailmanpoliisin kulissi heidän todelliselle operaatiolleen.

 

[Tvälups]

yle 17.1.2014 klo 18:54
Obama julkisti lukuisia muutoksia NSA:n toimintaan
Yhdysvaltain presidentti Barack Obama kielsi Yhdysvaltojen liittolaismaiden johtajien vakoilun ja määräsi tiedusteluun entistä tiukemmat säännöt.

Kuva: EPA/SHAWN THEW
Yhdysvaltain presidentti Barack Obama ilmoitti perjantaina Washingtonissa pitämässään puheessa, että Yhdysvaltojen läheisten liittolaismaiden johtajien urkinta kielletään. Jatkossa ystävämaiden johdon urkinta on mahdollista vain tilanteessa, jossa se on aivan välttämätöntä kansallisen turvallisuuden vuoksi. Valkoinen talo ei kuitenkaan julkistanut listaa maista, jotka Yhdysvaltain liittolaismaihin lukeutuvat.

Pitkässä puheessaan Obama kertoi myös lukuisista muista uudistuksista Yhdysvaltojen tiedustelutoiminnassa ja ilmoitti lopettavansa NSA:n vakoiluohjelman nykymuodossaan.

NSA:n saatava lupa puhelutietojen tutkimiseeen
Osa Obaman määräämistä uudistuksista tulee voimaan välittömästi, mutta osa vaatii lisätutkimusta ja Yhdysvaltain kongressin hyväksynnän. Heti voimaan tulee esimerkiksi sääntö, jonka mukaan NSA:n pitää saada salaiselta oikeudelta lupa ennen kuin se voi tutkia satojen miljoonien amerikkalaisten puhelutietoja. NSA varastoi tällä hetkellä tietoja puhelujen pituudesta ja soitetuista numeroista, mutta ei puhelujen sisältöä.

Jatkossa NSA ei voi myöskään tutkia kohdetta enempää kuin "kahden henkilön päähän". Käytännössä se tarkoittaa, että NSA ei voi tulevaisuudessa enää tutkia puhelutietoja henkilöltä, joka on soittanut jollekin, joka soitti jollekin, joka soitti epäillylle.

Obama linjasi tiedustelutiedon käyttötarkoitusta
Obama antoi myös presidentillisen määräyksen siitä, mihin Yhdysvaltain hallinto voi tiedustelutietoja käyttää. Määräyksen mukaan dataa saa käyttää vastavakoilussa, terrorisminvastaisissa toimissa ja kyberturvallisuuden varmistamisessa. Tietoja voidaan Obaman mukaan hyödyntää myös Yhdysvaltain ja sen liittolaisten suojelemisessa sekä kansainvälisen rikollisuuden ehkäisemisessä.

Sen sijaan kiellettyä on tiedustelutiedon käyttö kritiikin tukahduttamiseen, kilpailuetujen hankkimisessa amerikkalaisyrityksille ja ihmisten syrjinnässä.

Lähteet:
AFP, AP

 

[ctg]

Some analysts and Congressional officials suggested Friday that emphasizing a terrorist threat now was a good way to divert attention from the uproar over the N.S.A.’s data-collection programs, and that if it showed the intercepts had uncovered a possible plot, even better.

http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2013/0...eat-used-to-divert-attention-from-nsa-uproar/

The Teleprompter-In-Chief Fails to Impress …
President Obama did exactly what the American people predicted: made a pretty speech, but failed to rein in NSA spying.

CNN correctly notes:

Critics of U.S. intelligence practices barely waited for the speech to end before pouncing.

Representative Rush Holt says:

The President’s speech offered far less than meets the eye.

“His proposals continue to allow surveillance of Americans without requiring a Fourth Amendment determination of probable cause. They continue to regard Americans as suspects first and citizens second. They continue to allow the government to build backdoors into computer software and hardware. They fail to strengthen protections for whistleblowers who uncover abusive spying.

“The President spoke about navigating ‘the balance between security and liberty.’ But this is a faulty and false choice. As Barack Obama himself urged in his first inaugural address, we must ‘reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.’

“The Fourth Amendment and other civil liberty protections do not exist to impede police or intelligence agencies. To the contrary, they exist to hold to hold government agents to a high standard – to ensure that they act on the basis of evidence, rather than wasting time and resources on wild goose chases.

“Even the modest improvements announced today are subject to reversal at a stroke of the President’s pen. A standard of ‘trust my good intentions’ isn’t good enough. Congress should reject these practices and repeal the laws that made the NSA’s abuses possible.”

Senator Rand Paul says:

President Obama’s announced solution to the NSA spying controversy is the same unconstitutional program with a new configuration ….​

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/01/obama-speech-nsa-spying-substance.html

 

[ctg]

The assumption by global depositors who have entrusted their national savings with the Federal Reserve and US Government has always been that when they request to repatriate their holdings the Fed would simply open the vault, access said assets and ship them back to where they belong.

That’s exactly what Germany expected would happen last year when the country requested that the Federal Reserve return about one-fifth of their gold reserves. But that’s when things got really dicey. The Fed announced that Germany’s gold would be returned… but it would take seven years to get back home.

The response to Germany’s request turned heads all over the world and raised concerns that the Federal Reserve had squandered its gold holdings. But this isn’t the only red flag that was raised. Public pressure reached such levels that the Fed was forced to take steps to maintain confidence in its operations, so it started shipping gold to Germany. Except it turns out that the gold being sent back to the Bundesbank wasn’t actually German gold. It contained none of the original serial numbers, had no hallmarks, and was reportedly just recently melted.

The implications are earth shattering and hit the very core of the problems facing America today. The whole system as it exists is just one big paper IOU.

In this must-watch interview with Future Money Trends, Jefferson Financial CEO Brien Lunden weighs in on Germany’s gold, what is happening at the Fed and what other central banks are doing right now. Brien also shares his thoughts on where the gold market is today, what to expect in coming years as gold supplies tighten up, how mining companies like Brazil Resources are taking advantage of the current environment, and how to profit from gold in coming years.

http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/feds-dirty-little-secret-the-gold-isnt-there-exists-as-paper-ious_01212014?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed: SHTFplan (SHTF Plan - When It Hits The Fan, Don't Say We Didn't Warn You)

Since the first disclosures based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, Obama has offered his own defenses of the programs. But not all of the president’s claims have stood up to scrutiny. Here are some of the misleading assertions he has made.

1. There have been no abuses.

And I think it's important to note that in all the reviews of this program [Section 215] that have been done, in fact, there have not been actual instances where it's been alleged that the NSA in some ways acted inappropriately in the use of this data … There had not been evidence and there continues not to be evidence that the particular program had been abused in how it was used. -- Dec. 20, 2013

At press conferences in June, August and December, Obama made assurances that two types of bulk surveillance had not been misused. In fact, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has reprimanded the NSA for abuses both in warrantless surveillance targeting people abroad, and in bulk domestic phone records collection.

In 2011, the FISA Court found that for three years, the NSA had been collecting tens of thousands of domestic emails and other communications in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The court ordered the NSA to do more to filter out those communications. In a footnote, Judge John D. Bates also chastised the NSA for repeatedly misleading the court about the extent of its surveillance. In 2009 – weeks after Obama took office – the court concluded the procedures designed to protect the privacy of American phone records had been “so frequently and systemically violated that it can fairly be said that this critical element of the overall … regime has never functioned effectively.”

The NSA told the court those violations were unintentional and a result of technological limitations. But the NSA’s own inspector general has also documented some “willful” abuses: About a dozen NSA employees have used government surveillance to spy on their lovers and exes, a practice reportedly called “LOVEINT.”

2. At least 50 terrorist threats have been averted.

We know of at least 50 threats that have been averted because of this information not just in the United States, but, in some cases, threats here in Germany. So lives have been saved. -- June 19, 2013

The record is far less clear. Obama’s own review group concluded that the sweeping phone records collection program has not prevented any terrorist attacks. At this point, the only suspect the NSA says it identified using the phone records collection program is a San Diego cab driver later convicted of sending $8,500 to a terrorist group in his homeland of Somalia.

The NSA’s targeting of people abroad appears to have been more effective around counter-terrorism, as even surveillance skeptics in Congress acknowledge. But it’s impossible to assess the role the NSA played in each case because the list of thwarted attacks is classified. And what we do know about the few cases that have become public raises even more questions:

• Contrary to what Obama suggested on the “Charlie Rose Show” in June, the AP has reported that the FBI did not need either program to identify Najibullah Zazi, later convicted of plotting to attack the New York subway system.
• ProPublica has reported that one case began with a tip from British intelligence, not NSA surveillance.
• In another case, no one has been charged related to the alleged plot.

3. The NSA does not do any domestic spying.

We put in some additional safeguards to make sure that there is federal court oversight as well as Congressional oversight that there is no spying on Americans. We don't have a domestic spying program. What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an e-mail address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat, and that information is useful. -- Aug. 7, 2013

In fact, plenty of Americans’ communications get swept up. The government, of course, has the phone records of most Americans. And, as the FISA Court learned in 2011, the NSA was gathering tens of thousands of domestic emails and other communications.

Additionally, the NSA's minimization procedures, which are supposed to protect American privacy, allow the agency to keep and use purely domestic communications in some circumstances. If the NSA “inadvertently” vacuums up American communications that are encrypted, contain evidence of a crime, or relate to cybersecurity, the NSA can retain those communications.

The privacy standards suggest there is a “backdoor loophole” that allows the NSA to search for American communications. NSA critic Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., has said, “Once Americans' communications are collected, a gap in the law that I call the 'back-door searches loophole' allows the government to potentially go through these communications and conduct warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans.”It’s not clear whether the NSA has actually used this “backdoor.”

And while the NSA acknowledges that it intercepts communications between Americans and surveillance targets abroad, the agency also intercepts some domestic communications that mention information about foreigners who have been targeted. As a result, the NSA has sometimes searched communications from Americans who have not been suspected of wrongdoing – though an NSA official says the agency uses “very precise” searches to avoid those intercepts as much as possible.

4. Snowden failed to take advantage of whistleblower protections.

I signed an executive order well before Mr. Snowden leaked this information that provided whistleblower protection to the intelligence community – for the first time. So there were other avenues available for somebody whose conscience was stirred and thought that they needed to question government actions. -- Aug. 9, 2013

Obama’s presidential policy directive forbids agencies from retaliating against intelligence personnel who report waste, fraud and abuse. But the measure mentions only “employees,” not contractors. Whistleblower advocates say that means the order does not cover intelligence contractors.

“I often have contractors coming to me with whistleblower-type concerns and they are the least protected of them all,” attorney Mark Zaid told the Washington Post.

What’s more, the directive was not yet in effect at the time Snowden came forward.Since the leaks, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has said “the Executive Branch is evaluating the scope” of the protections.

Former NSA employee Thomas Drake argues that even if Snowden were a government employee who went through the proper legal channels, he still wouldn’t have been safe from retaliation. Drake says while he reported his concerns about a 2001 surveillance program to his NSA superiors, Congress, and the Department of Defense, he was told the program was legal. Drake was later indicted for providing information to the Baltimore Sun. After years of legal wrangling, Drake pleaded guilty to a lesser charge and got no prison time.​

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21350-four-questionable-claims-obama-has-made-on-nsa-surveillance

 

[ctg]

Yhdellä kädellä, Non Such Agency hoitaa "hommiaan" ja

In a lengthy missive posted to the Neiman Marcus website, president and CEO Karen Katz reveals that as many as 1.1 million cards could have been hacked after “malicious software (malware) was clandestinely installed on our system.” Katz also confirms what The New York Times and Associated Press reported last week: The breach dates back to July.

http://bizbeatblog.dallasnews.com/2...malware-breach-which-dates-back-to-july.html/

ja toisella sensuuri painaa päälle villaisella, jotta kaikki näyttää a-ok

The company that conducted a background investigation on the contractor Edward J. Snowden fraudulently signed off on hundreds of thousands of incomplete security checks in recent years, the Justice Department said Wednesday.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/us/security-check-firm-said-to-have-defrauded-us.html

 

[ctg]

The National Security Agency is involved in industrial espionage and will take intelligence regardless of its value to national security, the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has told a German television network.

In a lengthy interview broadcast on the public broadcaster ARD TV on Sunday, Snowden said the NSA did not limit its espionage to issues of national security and cited the German engineering firm Siemens as one target.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/26/edward-snowden-nsa-industrial-sabotage

 

[SJ]

Niin, onhan siitä ollut aikaisemminkin tietoa, että neuvostoliiton hajoamisen jälkeen ainakin CIA olisi vaihtanut teolliseen vakoiluun. Mutta tulee mieleen, että toisaalta tuohan on Snowdenin ensimmäinen esiintyminen sen jälkeen, kun tämä läksi käpälämäkeen ja päätyi venäjälle. Eli mahtaakohan tuo tieto näkyä missään tyypin vuotamissa dokumenteissä? Vai olisiko kyseessä ollut "maksettu ilmoitus"? Ainakin Venäjän ja Kiinan kannalta olisi mukavaa, jos he voisivat torjua vakkoilusyytteet sanomalla, että "jenkit sen teki" tai "mutku jenkit tekee samaa".

 

[Tvälups]

yle 30.1.2014 klo 21:26
Yhdysvaltojen ydinaseskandaali laajanee – 92 pidätetty virantoimituksesta
Yhdysvaltojen ilmavoimien johtajan Deborah Lee Jamesin mukaan henkilöt ovat joko osallistuneet huijaukseen tai tienneet siitä jotakin, mutta eivät ole raportoineet asiasta.

Yhdysvaltojen ilmavoimien mukaan 92 henkilöä näyttää liittyvän tavalla tai toisella ydinasejoukkoja koskevaan skandaaliin. Heidät kaikki on pidätetty virantoimituksesta.

Tapaus liittyy paljastuksiin, jotka koskevat pätevyystesteissä huijaamista. Yhdysvaltojen ilmavoimien johtajan Deborah Lee Jamesin mukaan henkilöt ovat joko osallistuneet huijaukseen tai tienneet siitä jotakin, mutta eivät ole raportoineet asiasta.

Asia paljastui, kun laitonta huumeiden hallussapitoa selvittäneet rikostutkijat löysivät sattumalta epäselvyyksiä kuukausittaisessa pätevyystestissä.
Tutkijat saivat selville, että eräällä upseerilla oli matkapuhelimessaan vastaukset pätevyystestiin ja hän oli lähettänyt niitä muille joukkojen jäsenille.

Yhdysvaltojen puolustusministeri Chuck Hagel on määrännyt kohupaljastusten ryvettämiin ydinasejoukkoihin sisäisen tutkinnan.

Lähteet:
AFP

 

[Tvälups]

IW Julkaistu 5.02.2014

The U.S. Postal Service is currently seeking companies that can provide "assorted small arms ammunition" in the near future. Ironically the Postal Service isn't the first non-law enforcement agency seeking firearms and ammunition. Since 2001, the U.S. Dept. of Education has been building a massive arsenal through purchases orchestrated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The Education Dept. has spent over $80,000 so far on Glock pistols and over $17,000 on Remington shotguns. Back in July, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also purchased 72,000 rounds of .40 Smith & Wesson, following a 2012 purchase for 46,000 rounds of .40 S&W jacketed hollow point by the National Weather Service. The Feds have also spent millions on riot control measures in addition to the ammo acquisitions.
While the government gears up for civil unrest and stockpiles ammo without limit, private gun owners on the other hand are finding ammunition shelves empty at gun stores across America, including shortages of once-common cartridges such as .22 Long Rifle.

 

[ctg]

Last month, former Congressman Otis Pike died, and no one seemed to notice or care. That’s scary, because Pike led the House’s most intensive and threatening hearings into US intelligence community abuses, far more radical and revealing than the better-known Church Committee’s Senate hearings that took place at the same time. That Pike could die today in total obscurity, during the peak of the Snowden NSA scandal, is, as they say, a “teachable moment” —one probably not lost on today’s already spineless political class.

…

The Church Committee focused on excesses and abuses, implying that with the proper reforms and oversights, the intelligence structures could be set right. But as the Pike Committee started pulling up the floorboards, what they discovered quickly led Rep. Pike and others to declare that the entire intelligence apparatus was a dangerous boondoggle. Not only were taxpayers getting fleeced, but agencies like the NSA and CIA were a direct threat to America’s security and democracy, the proverbial monkey playing with a live grenade. The problem was that Pike asked the right questions—and that led him to some very wrong answers, as far as the powers that be were concerned.

It was Pike’s committee that got the first ever admission—from CIA director William Colby—that the NSA was routinely tapping Americans’ phone calls. Days after that stunning confession, Pike succeeded in getting the head of the NSA, Lew Allen Jr., to testify in public before his committee—the first time in history that an NSA chief publicly testified. It was the first time that the NSA publicly maintained that it was legally entitled to wiretap Americans’ communications overseas, in spite of the 1934 Communications Act and other legal restrictions placed on other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-fir...-the-nsa-is-dead-no-one-noticed-no-one-cares/

Spy Agency “Masqueraded As An Enemy In A ‘False Flag’ Operation”
We’ve warned since 2009 (and see this) that the government could be launching cyber “false flag attacks” in order to justify a crackdown on the Internet and discredit web activists.

A new report from NBC News – based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden – appear to confirm our fears, documenting that Britain’s GCHQ spy agency has carried out cyber false flag attacks:

In another document taken from the NSA by Snowden and obtained by NBC News, a JTRIG official said the unit’s mission included computer network attacks, disruption, “Active Covert Internet Operations,” and “Covert Technical Operations.” Among the methods listed in the document were jamming phones, computers and email accounts and masquerading as an enemy in a “false flag” operation. The same document said GCHQ was increasing its emphasis on using cyber tools to attack adversaries.

Postscript: We await further revelations of “false flag” attacks by spy agencies.

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/02/nsa-engaged-internet-false-flag-attacks.html

 

[ctg]

emme ole ainoita jotka painii tämän ongelman parissa, mutta onko tämä hyvä täällä vai pitäisikö tämä siirtää taikka kopioida tuonne huoltoketjun alle?

When at least one sniper attacked a substation in California last April, the power did not go out. But the incident did bring the issue of power grid security to a new level.

New reports about an attack on Pacific Gas & Electric’s (PG&E) substation in California last April raise questions about the vulnerabilities of the U.S. power grid. The Metcalf transmission substation was not a critical facility, but the Wall St. Journal speculated that the attack could have been a test ground for a larger attack.

The former Federal Regulatory Commissioner, Jon Wellinghoff, told the Wall St. Journal it was "the most significant incident of domestic terrorism involving the grid that has ever occurred" in the U.S.

The assault took place in the middle of the night when at least one person entered an underground vault at PG&E’s Metcalf substation and cut fiber cables. Soon after, one or more gunmen opened fire on the substation for nearly 20 minutes. They took out 17 transformers and then slipped away into the night before police showed up.

Despite the coordination, tossing around the word terrorism might be premature. The attack appeared planned, but for now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation doesn’t think a terrorist organization is involved.

No matter who carried out the attack, there are questions about how to balance investment against attacks both physical and cyber. Foreign Policy magazine reported that Wellinghoff has noted that the recent focus on cybersecurity has overshadowed the need to rethink physical security.

In many ways, utilities are much more capable of rethinking physical security, as they have been facing physical threats as long as the grid has been in existence.

“Long before the arrival of smart grid technologies, utilities have been protecting substation, generation facilities and control centers with physical controls,” grid security experts Andy Bochman and Steven Bucci wrote in a grid cybersecurity report [PDF] for The Heritage Foundation. For example, Consolidated Edison in New York quickly repositioned the angles of its security cameras after the PG&E attack, according to National Public Radio.

Cybersecurity, on the other hand, is a more novel threat to the utility industry, but one that utilities are increasingly focusing on. Utilities will spend more than $7 billion between 2013 and 2020 on security, according to research firm Zpryme. The spending could also help even if there is a physical attack.

Previously, utility operational technologies (OT) were largely siloed from information technology (IT) infrastructure, but utility investments in smart grid technologies are increasingly merging OT and IT. In the Metcalf attack, for example, grid operators were able to reroute power around the site to avoid outages. If more sensors and communications networks are distributed across the grid and substations are more automated, power can be rerouted automatically when there is a fault so that less people lose power.

The threat of attacks is just one driver for investing in the grid. Resiliency, a buzzword since Superstorm Sandy, has also led legislators to call for electrical grids that can withstand extreme weather events. Many of the technologies that would help isolate the effects of storms and heat waves could also be beneficial in the case of an attack on the grid.

On the transmission grid, for example, data coming from sychrophasors (phasor measurement units that take real-time measurements off of transmission lines about 30 times a second and timestamp them using GPS) could be used for advanced applications that could help stop a blackout from cascading.

Better coordination among utilities is one of the challenges to handling attacks, but that too is changing. Just last fall, the North American Electric Reliability Corporation ran a drill that addressed both cyber and physical attacks.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise...ifornia-substation-fuels-grid-security-debate

 

[ctg]

Metadata Alone Doesn’t Insure We’re Targeting Bad Guys
In Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald’s new report based on interviews with drone targeting program whistleblowers as well as Edward Snowden, they point out that targets for drone strikes are picked almost entirely using “metadata” … and that human intelligence isn’t used to confirm that actual bad guys are being targeted.

We reached out to a former top NSA official to get his take on this story: Bill Binney, the 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency, the senior technical director within the agency who managed thousands of NSA employees, and has been interviewed by virtually all of the mainstream media, including CBS, ABC, CNN, New York Times, USA Today, Fox News, PBS and many others.

Washington’s Blog asked Binney:

Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill have a new article on drone targeting abroad.

In it, they argue that Sigint [signals intelligence] can be unreliable in targeting drone strikes, without Humint [human intelligence] to corroborate.

Do you have any opinion on this?

Binney responded:

The problem I have with drone strikes using metadata only is that they are not making sure of their targets this way. You need to have content not just metadata to know that it is your target. Humint could point you to a bad guy; but, even then, you still need to have content to insure that is the same guy using the phone or originating the e-mail. This is why I call the strikes by metadata alone a “undisciplined slaughter.”

But also, cell phones can be lent to others and multiple people can use the same computer etc.
​

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014...s-metadata-alone-undisciplined-slaughter.html

 

[ctg]

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden obtained access to classified documents by stealing one of his co-worker's passwords, according to an unclassified NSA memo obtained by NBC News.

That co-worker resigned after being stripped of his security clearance, according to the report, which also indicated that a member of the US military and a contractor were barred from accessing National Security Agency facilities after being linked to actions that may have aided Snowden. Their status is currently under review, according to the memo (PDF).

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57618837-38/snowden-stole-co-workers-password-nsa-memo-alleges/

 

[ctg]

Top-secret documents from the National Security Agency and its British counterpart reveal for the first time how the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom targeted WikiLeaks and other activist groups with tactics ranging from covert surveillance to prosecution.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/...actics-aimed-at-wikileaks-and-its-supporters/

 

[ctg]

Spy Chief: We Should’ve Told You We Track Your Calls

The U.S. government long considered its collection of Americans' call records to be a state secret. Now the Director of National Intelligence admits it would have been better if Washington had acknowledged the surveillance in the first place.

Even the head of the U.S. intelligence community now believes that its collection and storage of millions of call records was kept too secret for too long.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...e-should-ve-told-you-we-track-your-calls.html

 

[ctg]

Revelations about NSA monitoring activities over the last year show the potential for a police state mechanism, according to the former U.S. cybersecurity czar, but there is still time to avoid the dire consequences.

***

“[T]hey have created, with the growth of technologies, the potential for a police state.”

***

“Once you give up your rights, you can never get them back. Once you turn on that police state, you can never turn it off.”

http://investmentwatchblog.com/whit...ay-enable-a-police-state/#5MDG7A0Ssto5BkZu.99

 

[ctg]

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden said he repeatedly tried to go through official channels to raise concerns about government snooping programs but that his warnings fell on the deaf ears. In testimony to the European Parliament released Friday morning,

Snowden wrote that he reported policy or legal issues related to spying programs to more than 10 officials, but as a contractor he had no legal avenue to pursue further whistleblowing.

Asked specifically if he felt like he had exhausted all other avenues before deciding to leak classified information to the public, Snowden responded: Yes. I had reported these clearly problematic programs to more than ten distinct officials...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...-internally-over-10-times-before-going-rogue/

 

[SJ]

Aika outoa, että tuollainen paljastus tehdään vasta tässä vaiheessa.