The Police State Isn't Close - IT IS HERE!
- Thread starter pspr
- Start date
And this from former CIA Director Petraeus a year ago.
---
More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches. CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you through them.
Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an âInternet of Thingsâ â that is, wired devices â at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIAâs venture capital firm. ââTransformationalâ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,â Petraeus enthused, âparticularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.â
All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if youâre a âperson of interestâ to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the âsmart home,â youâd be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy agency can intercept in real time when you use the lighting app on your phone to adjust your living roomâs ambiance.
âItems of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters â all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,â Petraeus said, âthe latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.â
Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices âchange our notions of secrecyâ and prompt a rethink of âour notions of identity and secrecy.â All of which is true â if convenient for a CIA director.
The CIA has a lot of legal restrictions against spying on American citizens. But collecting ambient geolocation data from devices is a grayer area, especially after the 2008 carve-outs to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Hardware manufacturers, it turns out, store a trove of geolocation data; and some legislators have grown alarmed at how easy it is for the government to track you through your phone or PlayStation.
Thatâs not the only data exploit intriguing Petraeus. Heâs interested in creating new online identities for his undercover spies â and sweeping away the âdigital footprintsâ of agents who suddenly need to vanish.
âProud parents document the arrival and growth of their future CIA officer in all forms of social media that the world can access for decades to come,â Petraeus observed. âMoreover, we have to figure out how to create the digital footprint for new identities for some officers.â
Itâs hard to argue with that. Online cache is not a spyâs friend. But Petraeus has an inadvertent pal in Facebook.
Why? With the arrival of Timeline, Facebook made it super-easy to backdate your online history. Barack Obama, for instance, hasnât been on Facebook since his birth in 1961. Creating new identities for CIA non-official cover operatives has arguably never been easier. Thank Zuck, spies. Thank Zuck.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/
---
More and more personal and household devices are connecting to the internet, from your television to your car navigation systems to your light switches. CIA Director David Petraeus cannot wait to spy on you through them.
Earlier this month, Petraeus mused about the emergence of an âInternet of Thingsâ â that is, wired devices â at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIAâs venture capital firm. ââTransformationalâ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies,â Petraeus enthused, âparticularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft.â
All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if youâre a âperson of interestâ to the spy community. Once upon a time, spies had to place a bug in your chandelier to hear your conversation. With the rise of the âsmart home,â youâd be sending tagged, geolocated data that a spy agency can intercept in real time when you use the lighting app on your phone to adjust your living roomâs ambiance.
âItems of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters â all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,â Petraeus said, âthe latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.â
Petraeus allowed that these household spy devices âchange our notions of secrecyâ and prompt a rethink of âour notions of identity and secrecy.â All of which is true â if convenient for a CIA director.
The CIA has a lot of legal restrictions against spying on American citizens. But collecting ambient geolocation data from devices is a grayer area, especially after the 2008 carve-outs to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Hardware manufacturers, it turns out, store a trove of geolocation data; and some legislators have grown alarmed at how easy it is for the government to track you through your phone or PlayStation.
Thatâs not the only data exploit intriguing Petraeus. Heâs interested in creating new online identities for his undercover spies â and sweeping away the âdigital footprintsâ of agents who suddenly need to vanish.
âProud parents document the arrival and growth of their future CIA officer in all forms of social media that the world can access for decades to come,â Petraeus observed. âMoreover, we have to figure out how to create the digital footprint for new identities for some officers.â
Itâs hard to argue with that. Online cache is not a spyâs friend. But Petraeus has an inadvertent pal in Facebook.
Why? With the arrival of Timeline, Facebook made it super-easy to backdate your online history. Barack Obama, for instance, hasnât been on Facebook since his birth in 1961. Creating new identities for CIA non-official cover operatives has arguably never been easier. Thank Zuck, spies. Thank Zuck.
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/03/petraeus-tv-remote/
And it gets worse.
The National Security Agency's warrant for metadata on every single Verizon call for three months is jaw-dropping in its scope. Except, well, the NSA's surveillance of our communications is most likely much, much bigger than that. Technology has made it possible for the American government to spy on citizens to an extent East Germany could only dream of. Basically everything we say that can be traced digitally is being collected by the NSA. We're supposed to trust that our government will be much better behaved, but they're not, and the White House almost admits it. That doesn't mean they're admitting everything.
"On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records," The Week's Marc Ambinder writes of Glenn Greenwald's scoop last night. "My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes." Previous reporting from many outlets suggests that's true. In 2006, USA Today's Leslie Cauley reported the NSA was secretly collecting call records with data from AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth. A source told Cauley, "It's the largest database ever assembled in the world" and that the NSA wanted "to create a database of every call ever made" within U.S. territory. Likewise, in 2011, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer spoke to former NSA crypto-mathematician Bill Binney, who "believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later." He thinks the NSA wants all emails to be searchable, the same way we search with Google. "The agency reportedly has the capacity to intercept and download, every six hours, electronic communications equivalent to the contents of the Library of Congress," Mayer said. As Mark Rumold, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Atlantic Wire last night, "This is confirmation of what we've long feared, that the NSA has been tracking the calling patterns of the entire country." Update: In defending the program, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein seems to indicate that the court order is a regular, quarterly thing. "There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is, that this was a routine three-month approval under seal that was leaked," Feinstein said on Thursday.
And the NSA isn't just collecting the things we say. It's also tracking what we buy and where we go. In 2008, The Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman reported that the NSA's domestic data collection "have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks." That means emails records, bank transfers, phone records, travel records.
As Ambinder explains, there's a difference between collecting the call data, analyzing the data, and eavesdropping on the calls. The government's talking points defend the program by noting the NSA might know the length and location of your phone calls, but at least they weren't listening in. "On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not allow the Government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls," the talking points say. The "senior government official" does not directly confirm the court order is real, but says that "Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States."
That sounds so noble. And the NSA would never abuse its awesome surveillance power, right? Wrong. In 2008, NSA workers told ABC News that they routinely eavesdropped on phone sex between troops serving overseas and their loved ones in America. They listened in on both satellite phone calls and calls from the phone banks in Iraq's Green Zone where soldiers call home. Former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk described how a coworker would say, "Hey, check this out⦠there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out." Faulk explained they would gossip about the best calls during breaks. "It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy.'"
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/06/nsa-spying-verizon-analysis/65963/
The National Security Agency's warrant for metadata on every single Verizon call for three months is jaw-dropping in its scope. Except, well, the NSA's surveillance of our communications is most likely much, much bigger than that. Technology has made it possible for the American government to spy on citizens to an extent East Germany could only dream of. Basically everything we say that can be traced digitally is being collected by the NSA. We're supposed to trust that our government will be much better behaved, but they're not, and the White House almost admits it. That doesn't mean they're admitting everything.
"On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records," The Week's Marc Ambinder writes of Glenn Greenwald's scoop last night. "My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes." Previous reporting from many outlets suggests that's true. In 2006, USA Today's Leslie Cauley reported the NSA was secretly collecting call records with data from AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth. A source told Cauley, "It's the largest database ever assembled in the world" and that the NSA wanted "to create a database of every call ever made" within U.S. territory. Likewise, in 2011, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer spoke to former NSA crypto-mathematician Bill Binney, who "believes that the agency now stores copies of all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to retrieve the details later." He thinks the NSA wants all emails to be searchable, the same way we search with Google. "The agency reportedly has the capacity to intercept and download, every six hours, electronic communications equivalent to the contents of the Library of Congress," Mayer said. As Mark Rumold, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Atlantic Wire last night, "This is confirmation of what we've long feared, that the NSA has been tracking the calling patterns of the entire country." Update: In defending the program, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein seems to indicate that the court order is a regular, quarterly thing. "There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is, that this was a routine three-month approval under seal that was leaked," Feinstein said on Thursday.
And the NSA isn't just collecting the things we say. It's also tracking what we buy and where we go. In 2008, The Wall Street Journal's Siobhan Gorman reported that the NSA's domestic data collection "have evolved to reach more broadly into data about people's communications, travel and finances in the U.S. than the domestic surveillance programs brought to light since the 2001 terrorist attacks." That means emails records, bank transfers, phone records, travel records.
As Ambinder explains, there's a difference between collecting the call data, analyzing the data, and eavesdropping on the calls. The government's talking points defend the program by noting the NSA might know the length and location of your phone calls, but at least they weren't listening in. "On its face, the order reprinted in the article does not allow the Government to listen in on anyone's telephone calls," the talking points say. The "senior government official" does not directly confirm the court order is real, but says that "Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States."
That sounds so noble. And the NSA would never abuse its awesome surveillance power, right? Wrong. In 2008, NSA workers told ABC News that they routinely eavesdropped on phone sex between troops serving overseas and their loved ones in America. They listened in on both satellite phone calls and calls from the phone banks in Iraq's Green Zone where soldiers call home. Former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk described how a coworker would say, "Hey, check this out⦠there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out." Faulk explained they would gossip about the best calls during breaks. "It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy.'"
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2013/06/nsa-spying-verizon-analysis/65963/
Ironically, the far-left Los Angeles Times saw this coming about a year and a half ago.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/31/opinion/la-ed-secrets-20111031
OBAMA'S SECRETS: The Obama administration should rethink its outrageous proposal that would allow the government to lie to citizens about whether documents exist.
One of the most disappointing attributes of the Obama administration has been its proclivity for secrecy. The president who committed himself to "an unprecedented level of openness in government" has followed the example of his predecessor by invoking the "state secrets" privilege to derail litigation about government misdeeds in the war on terror. He [Obama] has refused to release the administration's secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, which two senators have described as alarming. He has blocked the dissemination of photographs documenting the abuse of prisoners by U.S. service members. And now his Justice Department has proposed to allow government agencies to lie about the existence of documents being sought under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.
At present, if the government doesn't want to admit the existence of a document it believes to be exempt from FOIA, it may advise the person making the request that it can neither confirm nor deny the document's existence. Under the proposed regulation, an agency that withholds a document "will respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist."
This policy is outrageous. It provides a license for the government to lie to its own people and makes a mockery of FOIA. It also would mislead citizens who might file an appeal if they knew there was a possibility that the document they sought was in the possession of a government agency. Such an appeal would allow a court to determine whether the requested document was covered by an exemption in FOIA.
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/31/opinion/la-ed-secrets-20111031
OBAMA'S SECRETS: The Obama administration should rethink its outrageous proposal that would allow the government to lie to citizens about whether documents exist.
One of the most disappointing attributes of the Obama administration has been its proclivity for secrecy. The president who committed himself to "an unprecedented level of openness in government" has followed the example of his predecessor by invoking the "state secrets" privilege to derail litigation about government misdeeds in the war on terror. He [Obama] has refused to release the administration's secret interpretation of the Patriot Act, which two senators have described as alarming. He has blocked the dissemination of photographs documenting the abuse of prisoners by U.S. service members. And now his Justice Department has proposed to allow government agencies to lie about the existence of documents being sought under the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA.
At present, if the government doesn't want to admit the existence of a document it believes to be exempt from FOIA, it may advise the person making the request that it can neither confirm nor deny the document's existence. Under the proposed regulation, an agency that withholds a document "will respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist."
This policy is outrageous. It provides a license for the government to lie to its own people and makes a mockery of FOIA. It also would mislead citizens who might file an appeal if they knew there was a possibility that the document they sought was in the possession of a government agency. Such an appeal would allow a court to determine whether the requested document was covered by an exemption in FOIA.
Good call.
7 major US tech companies gave the NSA direct access to their servers (Google, FB, Apple, MS, yahoo etc). That's huge news in itself (the big tech guys are basically a cyber stasi for the Government and are treasonous scumbags).
Listen, the NSA is gigantic blackmailing and corporate espionage operation. That's it.
Senators, Congressmen, aids, wives, the president, any dept head or executive council, the military, they are all recorded FOR ANY DIRT the military-industrial complex can later use to blackmail key figures with in order to get votes/influence shifted in their favor.
That's why policy doesn't change from one admin to the next. Only the scum are allowed to get in power, because THEY ARE BLACKMAILABLE. That's how the entire "political system" in America, works!
Echelon is over 20 years old. PRISM is just a new iteration of it. The NSA are straight up fucking criminals that blackmail elected officials to swing policy in favor of whatever the criminal syndicate running this country want. Those are Fortune 100 bankers, wallstreet, defense contractors, oil, war machine. There is no democracy in this country. It doesn't fucking exist. There is The Will of the banking-military elite, and the puppets in congress better vote for it, or else all their gay trysts in airport washrooms, underage callboys, and weatherman terror plots hit mondays newstand, real quick. UNDERSTAND SENATOR?!?!
That's how real America works. All this terrorism mumbo-jumbo is nothing but a smokescreen. Why? Because the border is wide fucking open. They never closed it. The entire WOT is a political operation meant to DE-Liberate America and turn us into a police state, while Fortune 100 gov contractors feast off the taxpayer. Its a raping from above and below.
7 major US tech companies gave the NSA direct access to their servers (Google, FB, Apple, MS, yahoo etc). That's huge news in itself (the big tech guys are basically a cyber stasi for the Government and are treasonous scumbags).
Listen, the NSA is gigantic blackmailing and corporate espionage operation. That's it.
Senators, Congressmen, aids, wives, the president, any dept head or executive council, the military, they are all recorded FOR ANY DIRT the military-industrial complex can later use to blackmail key figures with in order to get votes/influence shifted in their favor.
That's why policy doesn't change from one admin to the next. Only the scum are allowed to get in power, because THEY ARE BLACKMAILABLE. That's how the entire "political system" in America, works!
Echelon is over 20 years old. PRISM is just a new iteration of it. The NSA are straight up fucking criminals that blackmail elected officials to swing policy in favor of whatever the criminal syndicate running this country want. Those are Fortune 100 bankers, wallstreet, defense contractors, oil, war machine. There is no democracy in this country. It doesn't fucking exist. There is The Will of the banking-military elite, and the puppets in congress better vote for it, or else all their gay trysts in airport washrooms, underage callboys, and weatherman terror plots hit mondays newstand, real quick. UNDERSTAND SENATOR?!?!
That's how real America works. All this terrorism mumbo-jumbo is nothing but a smokescreen. Why? Because the border is wide fucking open. They never closed it. The entire WOT is a political operation meant to DE-Liberate America and turn us into a police state, while Fortune 100 gov contractors feast off the taxpayer. Its a raping from above and below.
That's what that giant data center being built by the NSA in Utah is for. Every bit of information about our lives is going to be stored there.
They are also building an $860 million data center in Maryland.
All that ammo being purchased by the DHS is starting to make sense.
I wonder where they are going to build the detention centers to put us all in.
They are also building an $860 million data center in Maryland.
All that ammo being purchased by the DHS is starting to make sense.
I wonder where they are going to build the detention centers to put us all in.
They already have some, don't they? FEMA camps??
