The Truth Or The Fight

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, September 2, 2010

On September 1, North Carolina’s governor, Bev Perdue, declared a state of emergency by executive order as Hurricane Earl approaches.

“The declaration calls for all state and local governments to cooperate in the North Carolina Emergency Operations Plan,” reports WECT News 6in Wilmington. Perdue said the National Guard is standing by and ready to respond if the storm hits the state.

Earlier today, the National Hurricane Center estimated that Hurricane Earl is approximately 300 miles south of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. It is a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 140 mph.

Blogger John Jacob notes a possible sinister side to North Carolina’s declared state of emergency — citizens will not be allowed to carry weapons. In other words, the governor has in effect suspended the Second Amendment at a time when crime will almost certainly increase.

Section 3 of the executive order, notes the No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money blog, delegates Perdue power under Article 36A of Chapter 14 of the NC General Statues to the Secretary of Crime Control and Public Safety “to such further action as is necessary to promote and secure the safety of populace in North Carolina.”

NC Gen. Statues Section 14-288-7 bans transportation stipulates:

Transporting dangerous weapon or substance during emergency; possessing off premises; exceptions.

(a) Except as otherwise provided in this section, it is unlawful for any person to transport or possess off his own premises any dangerous weapon or substance in any area:

(1) In which a declared state of emergency exists; or

(2) Within the immediate vicinity of which a riot is occurring.

(b) This section does not apply to persons exempted from the provisions of G.S. 14-269 with respect to any activities lawfully engaged in while carrying out their duties.

(c) Any person who violates any provision of this section is guilty of a Class 1 misdemeanor. (1969, c. 869, s. 1; 1993, c. 539, s. 192; 1994, Ex. Sess., c. 24, s. 14(c).)

The No Lawyers blog explains:

G.S. 14-269 deals with the carrying of concealed weapons. The only exemptions it provides to those “carrying out their duties” involve law enforcement and military personnel. The holder of a NC Concealed Handgun Permit does not have “duties” and therefore could not be considered an “exempted person” under G.S. 14-288-7.

G.S. 14-288-7 makes no exemptions for recreational shooting, it makes no exemptions for hunting, and it makes no exemption for concealed carry permit holders. If you possess or transport a firearm off your premises during the state of emergency, you will have committed an offense that the state considers a Class 1 misdemeanor. It does not matter that you live in an area that has received no rain, no wind, and no damage from Hurricane Earl.

In February, North Carolina outlawed carrying weapons in public during a snow emergency. North Carolina, however, is not alone — Pennsylvania’s Uniform Firearms Act outlaws possession of firearms during a government declared emergency and Colorado also considered enacting similar legislation. Georgia followed suit.

“Personally, I think [North Carolina's] law is unconstitutional to start with and stupid public policy,” Alan Gottlieb, founder of Second Amendment Foundation, told WorldNetDaily on February 16, 2010. “It reminded me of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when New Orleans confiscated guns.”

On September 8, 2005, P. Edwin Compass III, the superintendent of police for New Orleans, declared no civilians would be allowed to carry firearms in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “Only law enforcement are allowed to have weapons,” he said.

New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin said the Second Amendment would not be tolerated in New Orleans and soon police, the National Guard, the Oklahoma National Guard, and U.S. Marshals began going house-to-house taking weapons away from citizens.

“A disaster can bring out predators ready to loot, rampage, and pillage the moment that they have the opportunity,” David B. Kopel wrote for Reason on September 10, 2005. “Now we are seeing another awful truth: There is no shortage of police officers and National Guardsmen who will obey illegal orders to threaten peaceful citizens at gunpoint and confiscate their firearms.”

For now, North Carolina has banned residents from carrying weapons outside their homes. But if Hurricane Earl seriously wallops the state and looting and chaos ensues, it is entirely possible police and National Guard will be dispatched, as they were in New Orleans, and will deny citizens their right to possess firearms, as guaranteed under the Second Amendment, and protect themselves from criminals and predators.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/gun-confiscation-in-response-to-hurricane-earl.html

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“The proud patriotic people of Greece may start a world wide revolution… (a good thing).”

-F.F.

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Cernobbio, Italy

“This tragedy does not have a solution,” said Hans-Werner Sinn, head of the prestigious IFO Institute in Munich.

“The policy of forced ‘internal devaluation’, deflation, and depression could risk driving Greece to the edge of a civil war. It is impossible to cut wages and prices by 30pc without major riots,” he said, speaking at the elite European House Ambrosetti forum at Lake Como.

“Greece would have been bankrupt without the rescue measures. All the alternatives are terrible but the least terrible is for the country to get out of the eurozone, even if this kills the Greek banks,” he said.

Dr Sinn said Greece is an entirely different case from Spain and Portugal, which still have manageable public debts and can bring their public finances back into line with higher taxes.

“Greece would have defaulted in the period between April 28 and May 7, had the money not been promised by the European Union,” he said, describing the failure of the EU’s bail-out strategy to include a haircut for the banks as an invitation to moral hazard.

“There should be a quasi-insolvency procedure for countries. Creditors have to accept a haircut before any money flows for rescue plans, otherwise we’ll never have debt discipline in the eurozone,” he said.

Greek society has so far held together well, despite a wave of strikes and street violence in the early months of the crisis. However, unemployment is rising fast and political fatigue with such austerity policies typically sets in the second year.

Under the rescue deal, the eurozone pledged €80bn of new loans at 5pc interest and the International Monetary Fund offered a further €30bn.

The joint bail-out was hoped to safeguard Greece against the pressure from global capital markets for two and half years, but the relief rally proved short. Spreads on longer-term Greek government debt have surged back to crisis levels of about 800 basis points, implying a high risk of default.

“We are in the second Greek crisis right now, today,” said Dr Sinn.

Greece is undergoing what amounts to an IMF austerity package but without the IMF cure of debt restructuring or devaluation that usual for a country with a spiralling public debt and a chronic loss of competitiveness.

The IMF says Greece’s debt will rise to 150pc by 2013-2014 even if Athens complies fully, a strategy viewed as self-defeating by several ex-IMF officials. There is a strong suspicion that the real objective is to bail-out North European banks with heavy exposure to Southern Europe, rather help Greece.

Dr Sinn said the Germany is now was super-competitive after clawing back 18pc in competitiveness during its long slump. “We’re in a new phase of history. The toggle switch has turned and we are going to see a mirror image of the last 15 years. This time it is Germany that will have an internal boom,” he said.

Germans will not recyle their savings in the Club Med region. They will invest at home.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/7980291/EU-austerity-policies-risk-civil-war-in-Greece-warns-top-German-economist-Dr-Sinn.html

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“Awesome stuff! Just fighting is victory .”

-F.F.

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“Sure why not. Train the little slaves of the future. Insane.” (I can’t even begin to illustrate what I would do if some flunky teacher who tried to hook-in my imaginary kid).

-Fred Face 8/31/10

by Lee Bains

One of the United States’ most affluent cities is debating whether or not, and how, to track its students with RFID tags. School officials in New Canaan, Connecticut have engaged in talks with SecureRF Corporation, which has applied for a $100,000 federal research grant and is hoping to find test partners. Among the potential applications for the radio-frequency identification devices (like those used in mobile payment systems) bandied about were tracking students for the purpose of emergency evacuations, streamlining the bus system and monitoring who’s cutting class. At least one board member, it seems, has some sense, though. “I can perceive parents would have an issue with tracking kids through the school and through town,” Jim Kucharczyk told the New Canaan Advertiser. “There’s a big difference between putting this on the school bus [and] putting it on backpacks or an ID card.”

Fortunately for the students of New Canaan High School, Superintendent Dr. David Abbey has made clear that participation in the experiment would not be mandatory, and that it would require both student and parental permission. Of course, this raises the question: what kind of kid would jump at the opportunity to be tracked? We have a sneaking suspicion that the RFID data would skew towards the library, computer lab and the student crossing guard.

http://www.switched.com/2010/08/24/new-canaan-connecticut-schools-consider-tracking-students-with/2

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“Sounds about right.”

-F.F.

TV should be banned for toddlers and severely rationed for other youngsters to protect their health and family life, a leading psychologist will tell MEPs today.

Dr Aric Sigman claims that millions of children spending hours slumped in front of TVs and computers is ‘the greatest unacknowledged health scandal of our time’.

He says it is linked to ills ranging from obesity and heart disease to poor grades and lack of empathy.

Some British children spend as much as seven-and-a-half hours a day in front of a screen  -  the equivalent of a full year of 24-hour days by the age of seven.

Dr Sigman, an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society, believes that the youngest children, whose brains are undergoing massive development, should not watch any TV at all.

From the ages of three to 12, boys and girls should be limited to an hour a day, rising to an hour and a half for teenagers.

The psychologist will tell an EU parliamentary working group on the ‘quality of childhood’ that TVs and computers should be kept out of bedrooms until a child is 15.

‘Governments throughout Europe regularly advise their citizens on the most intimate health matters: from daily grams of salt intake and units of alcohol to number of sexual partners,’ he will say.

‘Yet when it comes to children’s main waking activity, politicians are mysteriously lost for words.

‘Irrespective of what our children are watching or doing on the screen, a clear relationship is emerging between daily hours of screen time and negative medical, psychological, behavioural and educational consequences.

‘The more hours per day, the more likely the risk of these negative consequences and the greater their intensity.

‘Most of the damage linked to screen viewing seems to occur beyond exposure of one-and-a-half hours per day, irrespective of the quality of the content. Yet the average child is exposed to three to five times this amount.’

Dr Sigman’s work and studies by other researchers around the world link TV and computer time with problems including obesity, high cholesterol and blood pressure, inattentiveness, declines in maths and reading, sleep disorders and autism.

A recent US study found that many youngsters are so engrossed in surfing the internet, playing computer games and watching TV, that they don’t even notice when their father comes home from work.

France banned TV programmes aimed at under-threes two years ago.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1307550/Ban-TV-protect-childs-health-psychologist-urges-European-politicians.html

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http://gunowners.org/

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Sally O’Boyle
Activist Post

Re: SPLC list of “Active Patriot Groups” and DOJ’s “Criminal Extremist List”

I am wondering if you will start a Patriot Persons list to go along with your Patriot Groups list? If so, I’d like to apply. If your criteria* is the same for People as for Groups, I might be a pretty good fit!

I am definitely against any “New World Order” or “One World Government” scheme. The U.S. must remain a sovereign nation as outlined in our Constitution. (Besides, and I don’t mean to be catty here, but the idea doesn’t seem to be working out so bloody well for the EU.) Do you know if there is an active attempt by the U.S. government to join into a world government? If so, please let me know! I’d like to sign and circulate a petition against that.

I don’t engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing; all the conspiracies about which I theorize have grounds. Do you think you could make an exception? And which conspiracies are the groundless ones? A list somewhere on your site would be helpful.

Also, how do you define “extreme anti-government doctrines”, please? Can you give any examples? I am personally extremely pro-Constitutional governance, something which has been in short supply during the last few administrations, including the current one. I would only be anti-government about a government that was extremely anti-U.S. Constitution. Will this count for or against me?

I am glad to see Oath-Keepers made the list of Patriot Groups! I am a member of Oath-Keepers. They are educating military and law-enforcement personnel about the Constitution and Bill of Rights, encouraging them to keep their oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. Thank goodness! Since the Constitution is no longer adequately taught in our schools (having just educated two teenagers, I can attest to that fact), I am thrilled to see that someone has taken on this monumental task!

Could you let me know if I make the list? You can find me at Campaign for Liberty or at Liberty-Candidates.org.

I hope I’m not asking too much, but maybe you could give a plaque or something? Or how about a pin that we could wear all the time identifying us as Patriots who made your list? Then we could easily spot each other. That would be way cool. Thanks!

God bless,
Sally O’Boyle

P.S. Thanks for printing that list of Patriot Groups broken out by state. Now I can find friends no matter where I am. Kind of like an A.A. meeting list! Now, I’m thinking I should join a militia. Don’t mean to be greedy, but would I get extra points for that?

*Criteria: “Generally, Patriot groups define themselves as opposed to the “New World Order,” engage in groundless conspiracy theorizing, or advocate or adhere to extreme antigovernment doctrines.” (http://tinyurl.com/patriotgroups)

http://www.activistpost.com/2010/08/dear-southern-poverty-law-center-and.html

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Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Monday, August 30, 2010

Global revolt against deadly vaccines spreads as cases of debilitating illnesses, soft-kill side-effects and even instant deaths become widespread

Cases of debilitating illnesses, soft-kill side-effects and even instant deaths as a result of vaccinations across the world are skyrocketing as the cover-up of deadly inoculations implodes and more people than ever become suspicious about what they are being injected with by health authorities who have proven they cannot be trusted.

The implosion of the vaccine cover-up is sure to discourage more parents from vaccinating their children in the coming months, with the swine flu shot now being combined with the regular seasonal flu jab. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 52 per cent of Americans were concerned about the safety of vaccines as we approach the start of school and college terms, where many children and teenagers will be “required” to take shots before they can attend.

A global revolt against dangerous vaccines is brewing following a series of cases where children have been killed as a direct result of inoculations.

A measles vaccination program in India was halted after four children died almost immediately after receiving the shot. “Four children died within minutes of receiving a vaccine for measles followed by drops of Vitamin A solution on Saturday,” reports MedGuru.

Indian newspaper reports carried eyewitness accounts of what happened. “The four children were reported to have fainted soon after they were vaccinated and witnesses reported seeing the children’s eyes roll back as they began to have seizures,” reports Blitz.

Furious villagers reacted to the tragedy by going on a rampage, attacking health workers and holding government doctors hostage.

Health professionals and doctors with government ties were also blamed in Finland and Sweden after aH1N1 vaccination program was halted following a 300 per cent increase in cases of the neurological disorder narcolepsy amongst children and young people who had received the shot over the last six months.

According to Kari Lankinen, head physician of the Finnish Medicines Agency, doctors were complicit in hiding the link between the swine flu shot and narcolepsy and did so to advance their careers.

Meanwhile, concerned mothers whose daughters have been injured or killed by the Gardasil vaccine have put together a website that documents the truth about how the vaccine has killed and injured thousands of young girls since it was introduced in 2006. Thousands of teenagers have suffered adverse reactions and at least 71 have died from the vaccine since the HPV program was launched four years ago.

The global vaccine cover-up took a massive blow after it was confirmed that the 2009 swine flu outbreak was, as we predicted from the start, a contrived scam centered around making vast profits for pharmaceutical companies while endangering the health of the public.

As we reported earlier this year, Chair of the Council of Europe’s Sub-committee on Health Wolfgang Wodarg’s investigation into the 2009 swine flu outbreak found that the pandemic was a fake hoax manufactured by pharmaceutical companies in league with the WHO.

Wodarg said that governments were “threatened” by special interest groups within the pharmaceutical industry as well as the WHO to buy the vaccines and inject their populations without any reasonable scientific reason for doing so, and yet in countries like Germany and France only around 6 per cent took the vaccine despite enough being available to cover 90 per cent of the population.

Wodarg said there was “no other explanation” for what happened than the fact that the WHO worked in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry to manufacture the panic in order to generate vast profits, agreeing with host Alex Jones that the entire farce was a hoax.

He also explained how health authorities were “already waiting for something to happen” before the pandemic started and then exploited the virus for their own purposes.

Professor Ulrich Keil, director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Epidemiology, also slammed the swine flu epidemic as an overblown “angst campaign”, devised in conjunction with major drug companies to boost profits for vaccine manufacturers.

As Natural News’ Mike Adams reported, several members of the Emergency Committee expert panel that advised the World Health Organization (WHO) during the swine flu scare were receiving financial support from pharmaceutical manufacturers either during or prior to the epidemic.

Both H1N1 and seasonal flu shots have been linked with a number of different side-effects across the globe, including Guillain-Barré Syndrome as well as dystonia, a paralyzing neurological disorder.

The seasonal flu vaccine has also been linked with convulsions and fits in under-5′s.

Many batches of the swine flu vaccine included squalene and mercury amongst their ingredients, two substances that have been directly connected with the explosion of autism amongst children as well as other diseases. Individuals within government and the military were privileged to receive additive free shots that did not include these substances. German Chancellor Angela Merkel and government ministers, as well as German soldiers, were amongst those who received access to the so-called “friendly” version of the vaccine.

In order to head off legal claims for side-effects caused by the swine flu vaccination program, the U.S. government provided vaccine makers with blanket legal immunity before the shots began to be dispersed.

Citing concerns over safety, Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Health Minister Ewa Kopacz, with the broad support of the public, ensured that Poland was the only country in the world to completely reject the H1N1 vaccine.

“We are making this decision only in the interest of the Polish patient and the taxpayer,” Tusk said. “We will not take part because it’s not honest and it’s not safe for the patient.”

In a 2008 trial for a bird flu vaccine, three Polish doctors and six nurses faced criminal charges after the vaccine killed 21 homeless people who were participating in the test.

The Czech Republic rejected a swine flu vaccine produced by pharmaceutical manufacturer Baxter after the company was caught shipping vaccines contaminated with deadly live H5N1 avian flu virus to 18 countries by a lab at an Austrian branch of Baxter.

Given the routinely stated goal on behalf of mega-rich foundations that fund vaccination programs around the world, such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, to use vaccines as a way of sterilizing the planet’s population as part of the global eugenics soft-kill assault on humanity, it’s unsurprising that as more people become aware of this agenda, take-up rates of new as well as seasonal vaccines continue to decline.

As Jurriaan Maessen recently documented in his Infowars exclusive, in its 1968 yearly report, the Rockefeller Foundation acknowledged funding the development of so-called “anti-fertility vaccines” and their implementation on a mass-scale.

This program was then launched by a group that was created under auspices of the World Health Organization, World Bank and UN Population Fund entitled “Task Force on Vaccines for Fertility Regulation”. In the 1990′s, the WHO was mired in controversy after it distributed a “tetanus vaccine” to poor girls and women in the third world that was contaminated with human chorionic gonadotrophin (hCG), a hormone that induces involuntary abortion.

During a TED conference earlier this year, Bill Gates openly stated that vaccines would be used to lower the earth’s population in the name of combating climate change. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is one of the major funders of vaccine research and production in the third world.

Warning that the global population was heading towards 9 billion, Gates said, “If we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services (abortion), we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 per cent.”

Quite how an improvement in health care and vaccines that supposedly save lives would lead to a lowering in global population is an oxymoron, unless Gates was referring to vaccines that sterilize people, which is precisely the same method advocated in White House science advisor John P. Holdren’s 1977 textbook Ecoscience, which calls for a dictatorial “planetary regime” to enforce draconian measures of population reduction via all manner of oppressive techniques, including sterilization.

With people globally becoming increasingly aware of the role of vaccines in the agenda to reduce world population, the cover-up of debilitating diseases, soft kill side-effects, and instant fatalities as a result of vaccinations will continue to implode, until authorities are forced by law to implement vastly more stringent screening procedures and remove the toxic additives from vaccines that are causing these deaths and diseases.

http://www.infowars.com/vaccine-deaths-and-injuries-skyrocket-as-cover-up-implodes/

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“Not good…”

-F.F.

By Daniel Tencer

A federal cybersecurity bill that critics say creates a presidential “kill switch” for the Internet could be added on to a defense spending bill and passed without much debate, technology news sources report.

Sen. Thomas Carper (D-DE), one of the sponsors of the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, told GovInfoSecurity.com that the Senate is considering attaching the bill as a rider to a defense authorization bill likely to pass through Congress before the mid-term elections.

“It’s hard to get a measure like cybersecurity legislation passed on its own,” Carper said.

Carper, along with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), introduced the bill in June in an effort to combat cyber-crime and the threat of online warfare and terrorism. Critics say the bill would allow the president to disconnect Internet networks and force private websites to comply with broad cybersecurity measures. Future US presidents would have those powers renewed indefinitely.

The bill (PDF) states that Internet service providers, search engines and other Internet-related businesses “shall immediately comply with any emergency measure or action developed” by the Department of Homeland Security.

But many observers point out that that doesn’t necessarily amount to a “kill switch” — and, in fact, the president already has the power to shut off the Internet. As Time magazine points out, the Communications Act of 1934 grants the president the power to shut down wire communications during a time of war, and the Internet is now recognized as a wire communication medium.

Yet the proposed law authorizes the president to declare “cyber emergencies” — potentially expanding the president’s power to shut down the Internet to times when the US is not technically at war.

And even some backers of the proposed legislation argue the bill is too broad and vague, and the powers granted to the executive branch could be unpredictable as a result.

A summary (DOC) of the bill issued by Sen. Lieberman’s office describes the powers granted to the president:

The Act will provide a responsible framework, developed in coordination with the private sector, for the President to authorize emergency measures, limited in both scope and duration, to protect the nation’s most critical infrastructure if a cyber vulnerability is being exploited or is about to be exploited. The President must notify Congress in advance about the threat and the emergency measures that will be taken to mitigate it. Any emergency measures imposed must be the least disruptive necessary to respond to the threat. These emergency measures will expire after 30 days unless the President orders an extension. The bill does not authorize any new surveillance authorities, or permit the government to “take over” private networks.

The bill “authorizes the president to declare ‘cyber emergencies,’ without spelling out what would happen next,” states an editorial at the Scranton Times-Tribune. “It is certain that the Internet will be a prime means of communication during an emergency. Given the history of the government over-stepping even constitutional constraints during such times, the bill’s sponsors should retool it to be more specific.”

Security expert and Cryptography Research CEO Paul Kocher describes the bill as a “Rorschach blot — on one level it’s absurd, and on others it’s impractical and frightening.”

Kocher said, “When you build something that will shut down a massively critical piece of infrastructure that people have tried to make reliable, that’s a more frightening prospect than anything that could have inspired such a defense … It’s a very blunt weapon.”

GovInfoSecurity notes that the House of Representatives passed a version of the defense authorization bill last spring that included cyber-security measures. If the Senate follows suit, a final version of the cyber-security legislation would be worked out in conference committee.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/0828/congress-internet-kill-switch-defense-bill/

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“Not good…”

-F.F.

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http://www.infowars.com/the-ultimate-red-pill-will-break-your-trance/

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Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Tuesday, Aug 24th, 2010

Law enforcement agencies in Washington D.C. have begun to use technology that they say can predict when crimes will be committed and who will commit them, before they actually happen.

The Minority Report like pre-crime software has been developed by Richard Berk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

Previous incarnations of the software, already being used in Baltimore and Philadelphia were limited to predictions of murders by and among parolees and offenders on probation.

According to a report by ABC News, however, the latest version, to be implemented in Washington D.C., can predict other future crimes as well.

“When a person goes on probation or parole they are supervised by an officer. The question that officer has to answer is ‘what level of supervision do you provide?’” Berk told ABC News, intimating that the program could have a bearing on the length of sentences and/or bail amounts.

The technology sifts through a database of thousands of crimes and uses algorithms and different variables, such as geographical location, criminal records and ages of previous offenders, to come up with predictions of where, when, and how a crime could possibly be committed and by who.

The program operates without any direct evidence that a crime will be committed, it simply takes datasets and computes possibilities.

“People assume that if someone murdered then they will murder in the future,” Berk also states, “But what really matters is what that person did as a young individual. If they committed armed robbery at age 14 that’s a good predictor. If they committed the same crime at age 30, that doesn’t predict very much.”

Critics have urged that the program encourages categorizing individuals on a risk scale via computer mathematics, rather than on real life, and that monitoring those people based on such a premise is antithetic to a justice system founded on the premise of the presumption of innocence.

Other police departments and law agencies across the country have begun to look into and use similar predictive technologies. The Memphis Police Department, for example uses a program called Operation Blue CRUSH, which uses predictive analytics developed by IBM.

Other forms of pre-crime technology in use or under development include surveillance cameras that can predict when a crime is about to occur and alert police, and even neurological brain scannersthat can read people’s intentions before they act, thus

detecting whether or not a person has “hostile intent”.

It is not too far fetched to imagine all these forms of the technology being used together in the future by law enforcement bodies.

The British government has previously debated introducing pre-crime laws in the name of fighting terrorism. The idea was that suspects would be put on trial using MI5 or MI6 intelligence of an expected terror attack. This would be enough to convict if found to be true “on the balance of probabilities”, rather than “beyond reasonable doubt”.

The government even has plans to collect lifelong records on all residents starting at the age of five, in order to screen for those who might be more likely to commit crimes in the future.

Another disturbing possibility for such technology comes in the form of a financial alliance of sortsbetween Internet search engine giant Google and the investment arm of the CIA and the wider U.S. intelligence network.

Google and In-Q-Tel have recently injected a sum of up to $10 million each into a company calledRecorded Future, which uses analytics to scour Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information, which is used to “assemble actual real-time dossiers on people.”

The company describes its analytics as “the ultimate tool for open-source intelligence” and says it can also “predict the future”.

Recorded Future takes in vast amounts of personal information such as employment changes, personal education and family relations. Promotional material also shows categories covering pretty much everything else, including entertainment, music and movie releases, as well as other innocuous things like patent filings and product recalls.

Those detached from any kind of moral reality will say “If you’ve got nothing to hide then what is the problem with being scanned for pre-crime? If it keeps us all safe from murderers, rapists and terrorists I’m all for it”.

How far towards a literal technological big brother police state will we slip before people wake up to the fact?

http://www.infowars.com/pre-crime-technology-to-be-used-in-washington-d-c-2/

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“‎(by design) break down the economy…

(you get) desperate people doing desperate things to survive…

(they get) the excuse to usher in a total lockdown police state.

Homeland Security is for YOU… not fake arab terrorists. Sounds scary, right? Doesn’t have to be. If people stop living in denial and focus… tyranny will be squashed quick like.”

-Fred Face 8/25/10

WASHINGTON — Nonlethal weapons such as high-power microwave devices should be used on American citizens in crowd-control situations before they are used on the battlefield, the Air Force secretary said Tuesday.

Domestic use would make it easier to avoid questions in the international community over any possible safety concerns, said Secretary Michael Wynne.

“If we’re not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation,” said Wynne. “(Because) if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press.”

The Air Force has funded research into nonlethal weapons, but he said the service isn’t likely to spend more money on development until injury issues are reviewed by medical experts and resolved.

Nonlethal weapons generally can weaken people if they are hit with the beam. Some of the weapons can emit short, intense energy pulses that also can be effective in disabling some electronic devices.

On another subject, Wynne said he expects to pick a new contractor for the next generation of aerial refueling tankers by next summer. He said a draft request for bids will be put out next month, and there are two qualified bidders: The Boeing Co. and a team of Northrop Grumman Corp. and European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co., the majority owner of European jet maker Airbus SAS.

The contract is expected to be worth at least $20 billion.

Chicago-based Boeing lost the tanker deal in 2004 amid revelations that it had hired a top Air Force acquisitions official who had given the company preferential treatment.

Air Force tightens its belt
Wynne also said the Air Force, which is already chopping 40,000 active duty, civilian and reserves jobs, is now struggling to find new ways to slash about $1.8 billion from its budget to cover costs from the latest round of base closings.

He said he can’t cut more people, and it would not be wise to take funding from military programs that are needed to protect the country. But he said he also encounters resistance when he tries to save money on operations and maintenance by retiring aging aircraft.

“We’re finding out that those are, unfortunately, prized possessions of some congressional districts,” said Wynne, adding that the Air Force will have to “take some appetite suppressant pills.” He said he has asked employees to look for efficiencies in their offices.

The base closings initially were expected to create savings by reducing Air Force infrastructure by 24 percent.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14806772/

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“None Dare Call It Tyranny.”

By Sheldon Richman

If you want to know what tyranny is like, look around.

The national government — specifically the executive branch — can do pretty much what it wants. It could bomb Iran tomorrow without a declaration of war from Congress. It can — and does — conduct secret wars and covert operations against countries that have done nothing to us. Of course, they are secret only to the ignorant taxpayers who must finance them and perhaps suffer when the provoked retaliation occurs. It can have men behind PlayStation consoles in Nevada fire Hellfire missiles from aerial drones on people in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

This tyrannical government can send any foreigner picked up anywhere in the world to third countries known for torturing prisoners. It can hold people accused of nothing indefinitely in prisons in Cuba and Afghanistan and torture them into making false confessions. It can conduct a war crimes trial in a military kangaroo court for a man, Omar Khadr, held captive for eight years after he was picked up at the age of 15 during a U.S. assault on villagers near Kabul. His torture-induced “confessions” will be admissible. All this is in violation of commitments under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict not to treat children in war as though they were adults.

It can assassinate even American citizens abroad without a scent of due process.

It is a government that can write its own warrants without judicial review — and call them national security letters — in order to conduct fishing expeditions in anyone’s electronic records. But that isn’t enough power for the present Progressive administration, which wants the freedom to examine our browser histories and email correspondents’ names. The Bill of Rights, like the Geneva Convention, has become “quaint” and obsolete.

Like any self-respecting tyranny, it tries to keep the truth from its subjects. Comforting words camouflage the 50,000 armed and combat-ready troops that will remain in Iraq after “withdrawal.” Their “primary” mission is to train an army whose own general says won’t be ready for years. This gross deception follows on the heralded “surge,” which supposedly turned things around in Iraq. What “worked,” however, was not U.S. military prowess or Gen. David Petraeus’s brilliance, but the spreading of American taxpayers’ cash to buy off Sunni insurgents and the denouement of ethnic cleansing in Baghdad.

And, again, like any self-respecting tyranny, it bridles at leaks of classified documents that tell the people the truth. Solemn administration officials condemn Wikileaks and its sources for supposedly jeopardizing U.S. troops and Afghan collaborators, while adding that nothing new had been revealed. With no sense of irony, the same officials find blood on the hands of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, ignoring the rivers of blood their policies and weapons have produced in the Middle East and South Central Asia. Without those policies, there would be nothing to leak. Some call for the assassination of Assange, and for all we know he is on President Obama’s kill list. Meanwhile a courageous young soldier, Bradley Manning, who apparently leaked video of American troops committing cold-blooded murder in Baghdad, faces 52 years in prison.

Now we are being softened up for the next war, against Iran. As in 2002 with Iraq’s phantom WMDs, the empire advance men tell us Iran is building nuclear weapons, and Obama and Secretary of State Clinton say “all options are on the table,” which phrase includes hydrogen bombs. Once again a Big Lie is repeated without proof. The reason is simple: all evidence runs the other way. The government’s own intelligence agencies say Iran has no nuclear-weapons program, and the International Atomic Energy Agency is on the scene. But no matter. If it suits the tyrannical administration or its partner in empire, Israel, bombs of some kind will fall. The consequences all around will be horrible.

Can it really be tyranny if we get to vote? Yes. Thomas Jefferson warned of “elective despotism.” How valuable is your one vote when the government manipulates and distorts the flow of information, when Congress capitulates, and when the “adversarial” mainstream media act like government press agents, if not adoring lapdogs. The ugly truth is out there, but you have to want to know it.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1072

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by Andy Greenberg

As the privacy controversy around full-body security scans begins tosimmer, it’s worth noting thatcourthouses andairport security checkpoints aren’t the only places where backscatter x-ray vision is being deployed. The same technology, capable of seeing through clothes and walls, has also been rolling out on U.S. streets.

American Science & Engineering, a company based in Billerica, Massachusetts, has sold U.S. and foreign government agencies more than 500 backscatter x-ray scanners mounted in vans that can be driven past neighboring vehicles to see their contents, Joe Reiss, a vice president of marketing at the company told me in an interview. While the biggest buyer of AS&E’s machines over the last seven years has been the Department of Defense operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, Reiss says law enforcement agencies have also deployed the vans to search for vehicle-based bombs in the U.S.

“This product is now the largest selling cargo and vehicle inspection system ever,” says Reiss.

Here’s a video of the vans in action.

The Z Backscatter Vans, or ZBVs, as the company calls them, bounce a narrow stream of x-rays off and through nearby objects, and read which ones come back. Absorbed rays indicate dense material such as steel. Scattered rays indicate less-dense objects that can include explosives, drugs, or human bodies. That capability makes them powerful tools for security, law enforcement, and border control.

It would also seem to make the vans mobile versions of the same scanning technique that’s riled privacy advocates as it’s been deployed in airports around the country. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) is currently suing the DHS to stop airport deployments of the backscatter scanners, which can reveal detailed images of human bodies. (Just how much detail became clear last May, when TSA employee Rolando Negrin was charged with assaulting a coworker who made jokes about the size of Negrin’s genitalia after Negrin received a full-body scan.)

“It’s no surprise that goverments and vendors are very enthusiastic about [the vans],” says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of EPIC. “But from a privacy perspective, it’s one of the most intrusive technologies conceivable.”

AS&E’s Reiss counters privacy critics by pointing out that the ZBV scans don’t capture nearly as much detail of human bodies as their airport counterparts. The company’s marketing materials say that its “primary purpose is to image vehicles and their contents,” and that “the system cannot be used to identify an individual, or the race, sex or age of the person.”

Though Reiss admits that the systems “to a large degree will penetrate clothing,” he points to the lack of features in images of humans like the one shown at right, far less detail than is obtained from the airport scans. “From a privacy standpoint, I’m hard-pressed to see what the concern or objection could be,” he says.

But EPIC’s Rotenberg says that the scans, like those in the airport, potentially violate the fourth amendment. “Without a warrant, the government doesn’t have a right to peer beneath your clothes without probable cause,” he says. Even airport scans are typically used only as a secondary security measure, he points out. “If the scans can only be used in exceptional cases in airports, the idea that they can be used routinely on city streets is a very hard argument to make.”

The TSA’s official policy dictates that full-body scans must be viewed in a separate room from any guards dealing directly with subjects of the scans, and that the scanners won’t save any images. Just what sort of safeguards might be in place for AS&E’s scanning vans isn’t clear, given that the company won’t reveal just which law enforcement agencies, organizations within the DHS, or foreign governments have purchased the equipment. Reiss says AS&E has customers on “all continents except Antarctica.”

Reiss adds that the vans do have the capability of storing images. “Sometimes customers need to save images for evidentiary reasons,” he says. “We do what our customers need.”

http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2010/08/24/full-body-scan-technology-deployed-in-street-roving-vans/?boxes=techchannelsections

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The production of the RFID chips, an integral element of the new generation of German identity cards, has started after the government gave a 10 year contract to the chipmaker NXP in the Netherlands. Citizens will receive the mandatory new ID cards from the first of November.

The new ID card will contain all personal data on the security chip that can be accessed over a wireless connection.

The new card allows German authorities to identify people with speed and accuracy, the government said. These authorities include the police, customs and tax authorities and of course the local registration and passport granting authorities.

German companies like Infineon and the Dutch NXP, which operates a large scale development and manufacturing base in Hamburg, Germanyare global leaders in making RFID security chips. The new electronic ID card, which will gradually replace the old mandatory German ID cards, is one of the largest scale roll-outs of RFID cards with extended official and identification functionality.

The card will also have extended functionality, including the ability to enable citizens to identify themselves in the internet by using the ID card with a reading device at home. After registering an online account bonded to the ID card, are able to do secure online shopping, downloading music and most importantly interact with government authorities online, for example.

Biometric passports in a number of countries are equipped with RFID chips, containing a digital picture and fingerprints, and have been around for nearly 5 years after the United States required such passports for any person entering the country.

There are some concerns that the use of RFID chips will pose a security or privacy risk, however.

Early versions of the electronic passports, using RFID chips with a protocol called “basic access control” (BAC), where successfully hacked by university researchers and security experts.

The German ID card is using the BAC protocol as well, but only for the basic data which is printed on the front of the card, the picture and the name. Other fields are protected by a stronger proprietary protocol.

Illegal access to the stored data would be useful to create perfectly forged passports and for criminals to use hijacked identities for supposedly secure transactions online.

The responsible German ministry, however, cites the many advantages of employing a RFID chip, such as a longer card lifetime, the option to connect them to other future devices like RFID-reading mobile phones, and saving cost by being compatible with the existing infrastructure for the RFID passports.

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/44536/20100821/identity-cards-with-rfid-chip-on-track-in-germany.htm

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by Ron Holland

First They Destroy Private Healthcare in America – Yes, the socialist Democrats won their first battle to destroy the private healthcare system in the US but the automatic IRA bill now in Congress is their next attack to also control, confiscate and destroy the private retirement system. Ultimately, nationalizing healthcare is designed to create a major new government revenue stream by replacing private health insurance with a nationalized, mandatory, government program and their goal is identical with your retirement plan.

Washington will decide the annual forced healthcare premiums on all Americans with the middle and upper wage earners paying far higher premiums than the subsidized voting constituencies who will be the primary beneficiaries of the program. Their goal is to allow Washington to steal much of the annual health premiums (taxes) for current revenue needs and to bailout and subsidize with your premiums the health programs for the voting blocks of poor and underemployed, illegals, unions and the millions of city, county, state and federal government employees. Eventually there will be no private competition available except for the very wealthy and Washington will constantly increase premiums just as they raise taxes today.

Next They Steal Your Private Retirement Benefits – Just as with the Obama Administration plans eventual nationalization of healthcare, the tremendous amount of funds in private retirement plans and IRA accounts are also being targeted to meet future revenue needs. Bills have just been introduced in both the House and Senate to create the new Auto IRA accounts which will at first be voluntary but later will become mandatory like Social Security and I expect the early 3% employee after tax contribution levels to eventually rise to 10 to 15% of compensation rising even more than Social Security has increased over the years. Read this August 17th article in Investment News at for more information.

Just Robbery Pure & Simple – The Auto IRA is the first step to grab and control your retirement assets and replace our private system with a forced, government controlled Social Security type program. In addition they will force much of your retirement funds into buying junk treasury bonds along with the Federal Reserve when the dollar/national debt crisis hits as billions of retirement funds become the buyer of last resort when the rest of the world are dumping dollars and treasury securities. Americans with substantial private retirement benefits will also likely be “means tested” out of their promised Social Security benefits and discover their private retirement benefits will be subject to confiscatory levels of taxes and penalties which will even target previously taxed Roth IRA accounts.

Bipartisan Theft – But don’t think a GOP victory in the fall elections or 2012 will safeguard your retirement assets as Washington’s need for new wealth is a bipartisan effort by both political parties. Note that the leading “Washington based” conservative think tank disagrees with my analysis of the threat to your retirement assets. I take exception to the views of David John, The Heritage Foundation’s leading analyst on issues relating to pensions, financial institutions, asset building, and Social Security reform but read his The Automatic IRAs: A Conservative Way to Build Retirement Security and you will see how even some traditional conservatives are supporting the latest Washington retirement wealth and power grab.

Read More About the Retirement Threat & Protection Solutions – I have already covered the proposals in detail in two lengthy online reports: Get Ready For the Obama Retirement Trap at published on 1/28/2010 and The 10 Step Countdown To Retirement Plan Nationalizationat published on 3/22/2010.

Please take the time to review both reports in detail which covered the threats when the Obama Administration first proposed this new program back in January 2010 and also read David John’s glowing support for the new Washington retirement scheme. Then decide for yourself if Washington is here to help you for a change or out to steal you blind as usual. Together, the reports above provide a confiscation timeline and actions you can take now to defend your retirement security and benefits.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/holland/holland26.1.html

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“problem-reaction-solution.”   (textbook stuff).

-F.Egg

(NaturalNews) Amid the massive egg recall currently underway over potential salmonella poisoning, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been working hard to push its pasteurization agenda. The agency recently made an announcement recommending that all grocery stores and restaurants begin stocking pasteurized eggs instead of raw ones.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the number of salmonella cases being reported has been steadily increasing throughout the summer. Rather than the average 50 illnesses reported each week, June and July saw numbers as high as 200 per week, prompting a response from the FDA.

However, in typical FDA fashion, the agency has decided to ignore the actual cause of illness and contamination — filthy, industrialized food production systems — and instead call for all eggs to be cooked before being sold to consumers.

Other recent outbreak scares include both spinach and tomato recalls, after which the FDA made similar recommendations urging produce irradiation as the solution. But this philosophy fails to address the real problem with the current food system.

The industrial food system is both unsustainable and unhealthy. Whether with animals or produce, the methods typically used to raise food commercially are toxic and unsanitary, and are actually responsible for causing food contamination. Animals and produce that are raised organically and naturally, the way nature intended, do not become contaminated withsalmonella.

But none of this phases the nation’s regulatory agencies, which continue to push for killing food rather than trying to clean up the system and fix the problem at the source.

http://www.naturalnews.com/029538_FDA_egg_pasteurization.html

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“If they do, it should be clear as an unmuddied lake that your government is your enemy and it’s time for a revolution, a revolution, a revolution…”

-Fred Face 8/19/10

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, August 19, 2010

The net-neutrality ending deal with Verizon is just the beginning of Google’s plans to kill the open and free Internet as part of their takeover agenda to completely control the world wide web and force independent media websites, radio and TV shows out of existence for good.

Google’s agreement with Verizon to speed certain Internet content to users opens the door to the complete sterilization of the world wide web as a force for political change. Under Google’s takeover plan, the Internet will closely resemble cable TV, independent voices will be silenced and the entire Internet will be bought up by transnational media giants.

People who want to run a simple blog will be priced out of existence, online TV and radio shows will cease to exist as the Internet is swallowed up by the corporate borg.

True net neutrality means that independent news outlets who attract an audience by telling the truth can compete on an even keel with corporate giants like ABC, CBS and CNN. The Google-Verizon pact will end that level playing field and in turn eliminate everything that is outside of the mainstream.

“A non-neutral Internet means that companies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Google can turn the Net into cable TV and pick winners and losers online,” writes Josh Silver. “A problem just for Internet geeks? You wish. All video, radio, phone and other services will soon be delivered through an Internet connection. Ending Net Neutrality would end the revolutionary potential that any website can act as a television or radio network. It would spell the end of our opportunity to wrest access and distribution of media content away from the handful of massive media corporations that currently control the television and radio dial.”

The deal will also split the Internet into a two-tier system, a cyber toll road, where satisfactory speeds and service will only be obtainable by those willing to pay substantial fees.

The pact also gives Google and huge ISPs the leeway to block certain websites on wireless networks, meaning Prison Planet and Infowars will ‘go dark’ for millions of people.

Once Google’s fiercest critics have been silenced for good the company can then set about implementing its CIA-backed total information awareness program, which will scour Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information left by individual users, aiming to use this data to “predict the future” and completely direct and control people’s lives and behavior.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has announced that Google, in conjunction with the CIA, is set to become the ultimate Big Brother entity that “will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives” by constantly tracking their location via smart phones and telling them where to go and what to do.

Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)

We have previously reported on Google’s intimate and long standing connections to government spy networks.

There is also no doubt that Google is one of the corporations at the forefront of the government’s drive to use cybersecurity as a pretext for killing the free Internet, having previously worked with the NSA and the CIA.

The recent scandal involving the company’s street view roaming vehicles accessing the wi-fi details of internet users and mapping their online activities has also raised serious questions over intelligence links and abuse of privacy laws.

Check back soon for quotes and screenshots from an important new video in which Alex Jones breaks down Google’s plan to kill the web and explains why it’s the end of the Internet as we know it unless we stand up now and say no.

http://www.infowars.com/google-plans-to-kill-web-in-internet-takeover-agenda/

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“Is this arrogant prick for real. Little swarmy fuck. What about changing the illegal spying that your company takes part in? But the big joke is that google isn’t in bed with the NSA/CIA… they are the NSA/CIA.”

-Fred Face 8/18/10

By Murray Wardrop

Eric Schmidt suggested that young people should be entitled to change their identity to escape their misspent youth, which is now recorded in excruciating detail on social networking sites such as Facebook.

“I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” Mr Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal.

In an interview Mr Schmidt said he believed that every young person will one day be allowed to change their name to distance themselves from embarrasssing photographs and material stored on their friends’ social media sites.

The 55-year-old also predicted that in the future, Google will know so much about its users that the search engine will be able to help them plan their lives.

Using profiles of it customers and tracking their locations through their smart phones, it will be able to provide live updates on their surroundings and inform them of tasks they need to do.

“We’re trying to figure out what the future of search is,” Mr Schmidt said. “One idea is that more and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type.

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

He suggested, as an example, that because Google would know “roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are”, it could remind users what groceries they needed to buy when passing a shop.

The comments are not the first time Mr Schmidt has courted controversy over the wealth of personal information people reveal on the internet. Last year, he notoriously remarked: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Earlier this year, Google was condemned by the privacy watchdogs of 10 countries for showing a “disappointing disregard” for safeguarding private information of its users.

In a letter to Mr Schmidt, Britain’s Information Commissioner Chris Graham joined his counterparts in countries including Canada, France, Germany and Italy, in raising concerns over its Street View and Buzz social networking services.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7951269/Young-will-have-to-change-names-to-escape-cyber-past-warns-Googles-Eric-Schmidt.html#mce_temp_url#

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“This memo instructs government personnel to not access the Wikileaks website or download “publicized classified information,” namely over 70,000 classified documents on the war in Afghanistan. “Looks like they don’t want us government employees to know the truth,” remarked the person who sent the memo.

In essence, the memo confirms that the Pentagon is monitoring the web activity of its soldiers and employees.”

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By Daniel Tencer

Profiles of computer users ‘bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges’

A class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court last week alleges that Disney and other large corporations spied on visitors to their Web sites using “Flash cookies” installed on users’ browsers.

The lawsuit, filed in a US District Court in California on behalf of a group of parents and their children, alleges that Clearpsring, a company contracted by Disney, Warner Bros. Records, Playlist.com and other Web site operators, used its AddThis Web page tool to install “Flash cookies” in computer browsers which would then track individual computer users.

According to a report at CNET, the lawsuit states these cookies can’t be erased using the usual methods of erasing browser history because they are built on Flash technology. Additionally, SecPoint.com reports that these Flash cookies can even un-delete, or “re-spawn,” regular cookies that were erased by the user.

Once installed, these small pieces of software tracked users “across numerous Web sites, even spotting and tracking users when they accessed the Web from different computers, at home and at work,” the lawsuit alleges.

“The data could reveal details about a person’s financial situation, sexual preference, name, home, and e-mail addresses and telephone numbers,” reports Greg Sandoval at CNET. “Perhaps one of the most disturbing charges that plaintiffs make is that health information could also be acquired by these companies.”

The suit was filed by the Law Office of Joseph Malley — the same law firm that last monthlaunched another suit, that one against Clearspring competitor Quantcast, which works with ABC and NBC, among other companies. That lawsuit made similar allegations against Quantcast, saying the company used Flash cookies to invade users’ privacy.

An investigation by the Wall Street Journal, published last month, found that about six percent of the cookies installed by major Web sites on people’s computers were un-deletable Flash cookies. That information was then used to create detailed profiles of computer users.

“These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months,” WSJ reported.

The investigation concluded that “the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.”

A study from the University of California at Berkeley, published last year, found that, of its sample of major Web sites, more than half used Flash technology to track users. The study even identified government Web sites, such as WhiteHouse.gov, as using questionable tracking methods.

“Earlier litigation has confirmed the right of sites to place cookies, but certain tracking behaviors are still subject to legal questions,” the WSJ reports.

The plaintiffs in the Clearpring suit are petitioning to have their lawsuit classified as a class-action. They are seeking unspecified damages, CNET reports.

http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0815/lawsuit-disney-spied-surfing-habits/

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By FRANK ELTMAN, Associated Press Writer

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. – On New York’s Long Island, it’s used to prevent drownings. In Greece, it’s a tool to help solve a financial crisis. Municipalities update property assessment rolls and other government data with it. Some in law enforcement use it to supplement reconnaissance of crime suspects.

High-tech eyes in the sky — from satellite imagery to sophisticated aerial photography that maps entire communities — are being employed in creative new ways by government officials, a trend that civil libertarians and others fear are eroding privacy rights.

“As technology advances, we have to revisit questions about what is and what is not private information,” said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology.

Online services like Google and Bing give users very detailed images of practically any location on the planet. Though some images are months old, they make it possible for someone sitting in a living room in Brooklyn to look in on folks in Dublin or Prague, or even down the street in Flatbush.

Sean Walter, an attorney and first-term town supervisor in Riverhead, N.Y., insists he is a staunch defender of privacy rights and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

But Walter supported using Google Earth images to help identify about 250 Riverhead homes where residents failed to get building permits certifying their swimming pools complied with safety regulations. All but about 10 eventually came to town hall.

Walter said the focus was safety, not filling town coffers with permit money, which averaged about $150 depending on the size of the pool. A 4-foot fence is required, gates have to be self-closing and padlocked. All pools must have an alarm that sounds when sensors are activated indicating someone is in the pool.

“We have a town employee who is a personal friend of mine whose son was found face-down in a swimming pool,” Walter said. “He’s OK, but I don’t want to be the supervisor that attends the funeral of a child that drowns in a swimming pool.”

Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., fears that while Walter’s focus was safety, other municipalities may use the images to check for other transgressions.

“It’s only a matter of time,” Coney said. “There are lots of ordinances where this can be used. In California, where they deal with brush fires, could a satellite image show if a homeowner has brush growing too close to his home? What if someone has junk cars on their lot in violation of ordinances?”

Riverhead resident Tony Villar said the town’s action “could be considered Big Brother looking down at you.”

“But at the same time, if the government can listen to your telephone conversations in the name of terrorism,” he said.

Standing outside the Riverhead Public Library, Walter Casey of Flanders agreed. “I think it’s a great intrusion on people’s privacy; they should use it on the politicians’ backyards.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union’s Donna Lieberman said there are ways to enforce requirements “without this sort of engaging in Big Brother on high. Technically, it may be lawful, but in the gut it does not feel like a free society kind of operation.”

In Greece, officials are struggling with a debt crisis and have sought to catch tax-evaders by using satellite photos to spot undeclared swimming pools — indicators of taxable wealth.

Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz said in a statement that Google Earth acquires its information from a broad range of commercial and public sources.

“The same information is available to anyone who buys it from these widely available public sources,” she said. “Google’s freely available technology has been used for a variety of purposes, ranging from travel planning to scientific research to emergency response, rescue and relief in natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake.”

At least nine lawsuits seeking class-action status have been filed in the United States, contending that Google collected fragments of e-mails, Web-surfing data and other information from unencrypted wireless networks as it photographed neighborhoods for its “Street View” feature. Google is also facing investigations or inquiries in 38 states as well as in several countries, including Germany, Spain and Australia.

The Mountain View, Calif., company said in May it had inadvertently collected the data from public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries, but maintains it never used the data and hasn’t broken any laws.

Google Earth posts updates about every two weeks on selected images from its providers, with images ranging from a few weeks to a few years old.

For big cities like Chicago, tracking illegal pools, porches and decks through Google Earth requires frequent imaging updates, so the Chicago buildings department uses it as a reference tool on a case-by-case scenario, said spokesman Bill McCaffrey.

“We’re not opposed to adopting new technology, but until it advances where we can get photos of more recent updates, we don’t have any plans to implement it,” he said.

Smaller towns such as Champaign and Naperville, Ill. opted to use satellite images as reference only.

“Mostly it’s so we can see that we’re going to the right building when we go to do inspections,” said Ann Michalsen, lead inspector for code enforcement in Naperville.

It’s also important for police officers to know they have the right destination when executing search warrants, said Joe Pollini, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Most departments would use it as a preliminary step, but they would also use active surveillance with their own aircraft,” he said.

The nonprofit group Consumer Watchdog is seeking to determine the extent of the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration’s use of Google Earth in its investigations, spokesman John M. Simpson said last week.

Federal contracting records reviewed by Consumer Watchdog show that the FBI has spent more than $600,000 on Google Earth since 2007. The Drug Enforcement Administration, meanwhile, has spent more than $67,000.

Simpson has called on Congress to investigate how U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities are using Google technologies. The group says it has concerns that data could be used for racial profiling.

The New York Police Department’s Real Time Crime Center uses satellite imaging and computerized mapping systems to identify geographic patterns of crimes and to pinpoint possible addresses where suspects might flee — information relayed to investigators on the street. The NYPD also has two major security initiatives where a network of public and private cameras will eventually link and be searchable.

The NYCLU has filed lawsuits in opposition.

“We live in an environment where we are told that if it’s on camera, if you have a video record, that will make us safer,” Lieberman said. “That may be appealing, but it is an unproven assertion. There’s no evidence of that. Yet we see millions, if not billions, of post-9/11 money has gone to law enforcement for installing cameras in every conceivable nook and cranny.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100814/ap_on_hi_te/us_eyes_in_the_sky

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BY GLENN GREENWALD

Jeffrey Goldberg, in the new cover story in The Atlantic, on an Israeli attack on Iran:

Israel has twice before successfully attacked and destroyed an enemy’s nuclear program. In 1981, Israeli warplanes bombed the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, halting — forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions; and in 2007, Israeli planes destroyed a North Korean-built reactor in Syria.  An attack on Iran, then, would be unprecedented only in scope and complexity.

Good news!  Israel can successfully end a country’s nuclear program by bombing them, as proven by its 1981 attack on Iraq, which, says Goldberg, halted “forever, as it turned out — Saddam Hussein’s nuclear ambitions.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2002, trying to convince Americans to fear Iraq:

Saddam Hussein never gave up his hope of turning Iraq into a nuclear power. After the Osirak attack, he rebuilt, redoubled his efforts, and dispersed his facilities. Those who have followed Saddam’s progress believe that no single strike today would eradicate his nuclear program.

When it suited him back then, Goldberg made the exact opposite claim, literally, of the one he makes today.  Back then, Goldberg wouldn’t possibly claim what he claims now — that the 1981 strike permanently halted Saddam’s “nuclear ambitions” — because, back then, his goal was to scare Americans about The Threat of Saddam.  So in 2002, Goldberg warned Americans that Saddam had “redoubled” his efforts to turn Iraq into a nuclear power after the Israeli attack, i.e., that Saddam had a scarier nuclear program than ever before after the 1981 bombing raid.  But now, Goldberg has a different goal:  to convince Americans of the efficacy of bombing Iran, and thus, without batting an eye, he simply asserts the exact opposite factual premise:  that the Israelis successfully and permanently ended Saddam’s nuclear ambition back in 1981 by bombing it out of existence (and, therefore, we can do something similar now to Iran).

This is what a propagandist, by definition, does:  asserts any claim as fact in service of a concealed agenda without the slightest concern for whether it’s true.  Will the existence of a vast and menacing Iraqi nuclear program help my cause (getting Americans to attack Iraq)?  Fine, then I’ll trumpet that.  Now, however, it will help my cause (mainstreaming an attack on Iran) to claim that the Israelis permanently ended Iraq’s nuclear efforts in 1981, thus showing how well these attacks can work.  No problem:  I’ll go with that.  How can anyone take seriously — as a Middle East expert and especially as a journalist — someone with this blatant and thorough of an estrangement from any concern for truth?  Can anyone reconcile these factual claims?

Jonathan Schwarz, who flagged this contradiction, documents how Goldberg’s dishonest propaganda begins in the very first sentence of his newAtlantic article, which reads:  ”It is possible that at some point in the next 12 months, the imposition of devastating economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran will persuade its leaders to cease their pursuit of nuclear weapons.”  Schwarz explains the obvious:

The official position of the U.S. intelligence community about this remains the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. And it said Iran stopped pursuing nuclear weapons in 2003.  Maybe it was wrong, or maybe something’s changed since then.  But it is the essence of Goldberg-itude to simply ignore this and assert the opposite as unquestionable fact.

In other words, the core premise of Goldberg’s article — that Iran is currently pursuing nuclear weapons — is asserted, in the very first sentence, as indisputable fact without so much as acknowledging, let alone resolving, the substantial evidence casting serious doubt on that scary claim.  Sound familiar?  Moreover, as Schwarz compellingly documents, Goldberg’s latest historical assertion — that the 1981 Israeli attack ended Saddam’s nuclear efforts — is the precise opposite of reality:  Iraq had no genuine nuclear weapons program prior to 1981, but it was the Israeli attack which causedSaddam to conclude that he needed one.  That is what spawned the very substantial Iraqi efforts from 1981 to 1991 to develop nuclear weapons:  efforts which were actually ended by Operation Desert Storm and the subsequent U.N. inspection regime (which is what Scott Ritter relentlessly — and, thanks to the likes of Goldberg, with futility – attempted to point out in the run-up to the American attack on Iraq).

Goldberg wants to obfuscate those facts lest one conclude:  just as happened with Iraq, nothing would spur an Iranian desire for nuclear weapons more than a bombing campaign against their country. If you were an Iranian, is there anything that would convince you of the need for nuclear weapons more than watching Israel bomb your country?  I always thought it was difficult to imagine anything that could be more effective in convincing rational Iranians to proliferate than watching the U.S. invade and bomb at will nations that lack nuclear weapons while treating with the utmost respect those which have them.  What could possibly incentivize countries in general — and Iran in particular — to want to acquire nuclear weapons more than that behavior?  If anything could, it would be an Israeli (or American) attack on Iran.

More important than these specific factual contradictions, Schwarz very astutely describes Goldberg’s role in the propaganda effort concerning Iran.  Goldberg is not Bill Kristol or Charles Krauthammer, at least in terms of function.  He’s not going to run around overtly beating his chest demanding that the U.S. attack Iran (or that the U.S. support Israel’s attack):  at least not yet.  Although Goldberg did precisely that in the run-up to the attack on Iraq, his function now is more subtle, and more insidious.  He’s nothing if not shrewd, and certainly shrewd enough to know that if he spouts nakedly bellicose demands for a war with Iran, he’ll be quickly dismissed as a neocon fanatic, especially in light of his discredited and falsehood-filled campaign to persuade Americans to attack Iraq.  Indeed, Goldberg himself notes that even George Bush derided Kristol and Krauthammer as “the bomber boys.”  He’s much too smart to let himself be consigned to the lowly and limited (though important) role of fanning the flames of right-wing fanaticism; he’s intent on re-branding himself after what he did in 2002 and 2003 and preserving his mainstream influence.

Thus, his pose is objective journalist.  He’ll feign “ambivalence” about whether Iran should be bombed — thus showing how thoughtful and non-ideological he is — while infecting the discourse with the kinds of factual falsehoods documented here, all in service of skewing the debate towards ensuring an attack happens.  At its core, it’s only a slightly modified version of what he did with Iraq (I’m merely “reporting” on Saddam’s extensive relationship with Al Qaeda and his nuclear program/I’m merely “reporting” on the view of Israeli leaders that ”a nuclear Iran poses the gravest threat since Hitler to the physical survival of the Jewish people”).

It’s really one of the strangest and most revealing facts that the “objective journalist” to whom America’s political elites most faithfully turn for “reporting” on the Middle East is someone whose loyalty to Israel is so overarching that he actually went and joined the IDF (just try to imagine an American journalist reporting on this conflict for a large media outlet who previously joined the Iranian military or the military of any predominantly Muslim country).  There’s nothing wrong per se with his doing so or with maintaining loyalty to other countries; many Americans do so with all sorts of countries and for all sorts of reasons.  It’s also true that Goldberg’s intense, Israel-devoted agenda doesn’t preclude some good reporting; there are interesting and even revealing aspects in his article about how Israeli leaders think about Iran, or at least how they want Americans to believe they think about Iran.

But Jeffrey Goldberg is no more of an objective reporter on such matters than Benjamin Netanyahu is, and the fact that so many are willing to treat him as though he is provides a valuable testament to the ongoing vitality of the Supreme Law of Beltway Life:  Seriousness credentials, once vested, can never be revoked, no matter how grave one’s past sins of falsehood and error are.  The purpose of this Atlantic article is as obvious as it is odious:  to mainstream the debate over an Israeli or American attack on Iran by defending its rationale, all masquerading as objective reporting (I’m merely describing the substantial possibility that it could happen and, if it does, why it would be justifiable).  I’m tempted to say that anyone who falls for Jeffrey Goldberg’s act again deserves what they get, except that — as always — they’re not the ones who will pay the price for the fallout.

* * * * *

Goldberg’s article is, needless to say, suffused with comparisons of Iran to Nazi Germany — one after the next like this:

“The only reason Bibi [Netanyahu] would place Israel’s relationship with America in total jeopardy is if he thinks that Iran represents a threat like the Shoah,” an Israeli official who spends considerable time with the prime minister told me. “In World War II, the Jews had no power to stop Hitler from annihilating us. Six million were slaughtered. Today, 6 million Jews live in Israel, and someone is threatening them with annihilation. But now we have the power to stop them. Bibi knows that this is the choice.”

No discussion of any of this is complete without noting that it was endlessly claimed that it was Saddam who was the New Hitler in order ratchet up fear levels and justify an attack that country, too.  How many times can we be persuaded to attack the New Hitler?

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/12/goldberg/index.html

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by Richard C. Cook

“They make a desolation and call it peace.” -Tacitus

Was Alan Greenspan really as dumb as he looks in creating the late housing bubble that threatens to bring the entire Western debt-based economy crashing down?

Was something as easy to foresee as this really the trigger for a meltdown that could destroy the world’s financial system? Or was it done, perhaps, “accidentally on purpose”?

And if so, why?

Let’s turn to the U.S. personage that conspiracy theorists most often mention as being at the epicenter of whatever elite plan is reputed to exist. This would be David Rockefeller, the 92-year-old multibillionaire godfather of the world’s financial elite.

The lengthy Wikipedia article on Rockefeller provides the following version of a celebrated statement he allegedly made in an opening speech at the Bilderberg conference in Baden-Baden, Germany, in June 1991:

“We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during these years. But the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government which will never again know war, but only peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in the past centuries.”

This speech was made 17 years ago. It came at the beginning in the U.S. of the Bill Clinton administration. Rockefeller speaks of an “us.” This “us,” he says, has been having meetings for almost 40 years. If you add the 17 years since he gave the speech it was 57 years ago—two full generations.

Not only has “us” developed a “plan for the world,” but the attempt to “develop” the plan has evidently been successful, at least in Rockefeller’s mind. The ultimate goal of “us” is to create “the supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers.” This will lead, he says, toward a “world government which will never again know war.”

Just as an intellectual exercise, let’s assume that David Rockefeller is as important and powerful a person as he seems to think he is. Let’s give the man some credit and assume that he and “us” have in fact succeeded to a degree. This would mean that the major decisions and events since Rockefeller gave the speech in 1991 have probably also been part of the plan or that they have at least represented its features and intent.

Therefore by examining these decisions and events we can determine whether in fact Rockefeller is being truthful in his assessment that the Utopia he has in mind is on its way or has at least come closer to being realized. In no particular order, some of these decisions and events are as follows:

The implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement by the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations has led to the elimination of millions of U.S. manufacturing jobs as well as the destruction of U.S. family farming in favor of global agribusiness.

Similar free trade agreements, including those under the auspices of the World Trade Organization, have led to export of millions of additional manufacturing jobs to China and elsewhere.

Average family income in the U.S. has steadily eroded while the share of the nation’s wealth held by the richest income brackets has soared. Some Wall Street hedge fund managers are making $1 billion a year while the number of homeless, including war veterans, pushes a million.

The housing bubble has led to a huge inflation of real estate prices in the U.S. Millions of homes are falling into the hands of the bankers through foreclosure. The cost of land and rentals has further decimated family agriculture as well as small business. Rising property taxes based on inflated land assessments have forced millions of lower-and middle-income people and elderly out of their homes.

The fact that bankers now control national monetary systems in their entirety, under laws where money is introduced only through lending at interest, has resulted in a massive debt pyramid that is teetering on collapse. This “monetarist” system was pioneered by Rockefeller-family funded economists at the University of Chicago. The rub is that when the pyramid comes down and everyone goes bankrupt the banks which have been creating money “out of thin air” will then be able to seize valuable assets for pennies on the dollar, as J.P. Morgan Chase is preparing to do with the businesses owned by Carlyle Capital. Meaningful regulation of the financial industry has been abandoned by government, and any politician that stands in the way, such as Eliot Spitzer, is destroyed.

The total tax burden on Americans from federal, state, and local governments now exceeds forty percent of income and is rising. Today, with a recession starting, the Democratic-controlled Congress, while supporting the minuscule “stimulus” rebate, is hypocritically raising taxes further, even for middle-income earners. Back taxes, along with student loans, can no longer be eliminated by bankruptcy protection.

Gasoline prices are soaring even as companies like Exxon-Mobil are recording record profits. Other commodity prices are going up steadily, including food prices, with some countries starting to experience near-famine conditions. 40 million people in America are officially classified as “food insecure.”

Corporate control of water and mineral resources has removed much of what is available from the public commons, and the deregulation of energy production has led to huge increases in the costs of electricity in many areas.

The destruction of family farming in the U.S. by NAFTA (along with family farming in Mexico and Canada) has been mirrored by policies toward other nations on the part of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Around the world, due to pressure from the “Washington consensus,” local food self-sufficiency has been replaced by raising of crops primarily for export. Migration off the land has fed the population of huge slums around the cities of underdeveloped countries.

Since the 1980s the U.S. has been fighting wars throughout the world either directly or by proxy. The former Yugoslavia was dismembered by NATO. Under cover of 9/11 and by utilizing off-the-shelf plans, the U.S. is now engaged in the military conquest and permanent military occupation of the Middle East. A worldwide encirclement of Russia and China by U.S. and NATO forces is underway, and a new push to militarize space has begun. The Western powers are clearly preparing for at least the possibility of another world war.

The expansion of the U.S. military empire abroad is mirrored by the creation of a totalitarian system of surveillance at home, whereby the activities of private citizens are spied upon and tracked by technology and systems which have been put into place under the heading of the “War on Terror.” Human microchip implants for tracking purposes are starting to be used. The military-industrial complex has become the nation’s largest and most successful industry with tens of thousands of planners engaged in devising new and better ways, both overt and covert, to destroy both foreign and domestic “enemies.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. has the largest prison population of any country on earth. Plus everyday life for millions of people is a crushing burden of government, insurance, and financial fees, charges, and paperwork. And the simplest business transactions are burdened by rake-offs for legions of accountants, lawyers, bureaucrats, brokers, speculators, and middlemen.

Finally, the deteriorating conditions of everyday life have given rise to an extraordinary level of stress-related disease, as well as epidemic alcohol and drug addiction. Governments themselves around the world engage in drug trafficking. Instead of working to lower stress levels, public policy is skewed in favor of an enormous prescription drug industry that grows rich off the declining level of health through treatment of symptoms rather than causes. Many of these heavily-advertised medications themselves have devastating side-effects.

This list should at least give us enough to go on in order to ask a hard question. Assuming again that all these things are parts of the elitist plan which Mr. Rockefeller boasts to have been developing, isn’t it a little strange that the means which have been selected to achieve “peace and prosperity for the whole of humanity” involve so much violence, deception, oppression, exploitation, graft, and theft?

In fact it looks to me as though “our plan for the world” is one that is based on genocide, world war, police control of populations, and seizure of the world’s resources by the financial elite and their puppet politicians and military forces.

In particular, could there be a better way to accomplish all this than what appears to be a concentrated plan to remove from people everywhere in the world the ability to raise their own food? After all, genocide by starvation may be slow, but it is very effective. Especially when it can be blamed on “market forces.”

And can it be that the “us” which is doing all these things, including the great David Rockefeller himself, are just criminals who have somehow taken over the seats of power? If so, they are criminals who have done everything they can to watch their backs and cover their tracks, including a chokehold over the educational system and the monopolistic mainstream media.

One thing is certain: The voters of America have never knowingly agreed to any of this.

Richard C. Cook is a former U.S. federal government analyst, whose career included service with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury Department. His articles on economics, politics, and space policy have appeared on numerous websites. His book on monetary reform entitled We Hold These Truths: The Promise of Monetary Reform is in preparation. He is also the author of Challenger Revealed: An Insider’s Account of How the Reagan Administration Caused the Greatest Tragedy of the Space Age, called by one reviewer, “the most important spaceflight book of the last twenty years.” His website is at www.richardccook.com

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8450#mce_temp_url#

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By Angelo M. Codevilla

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

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By Nile Gardiner

What the great French historian Alexis de Tocqueville would make of today’s Obama administration were he alive today is anyone’s guess. But I would wager that the author of L’Ancien Régime and Democracy in America would be less than impressed with the extravagance and arrogance on display among the White House elites that rule America as though they had been handed some divine right to govern with impunity.

It is the kind of impunity that has been highlighted on the world stage this week by Michelle Obama’s hugely costly trip to Spain, which has prompted a New York Post columnist Andrea Tantaros to dub the First Lady a contemporary Marie Antoinette. As The Telegraph reports, while the Obamas are covering their own vacation expenses such as accommodation, the trip may cost US taxpayers as much as $375,000 in terms of secret service security and flight costs on Air Force Two.

The timing of this lavish European vacation could not have come at a worse moment, when unemployment in America stands at 10 percent, and large numbers of Americans are fighting to survive financially in the wake of the global economic downturn. It sends a message of indifference, even contempt, for the millions of Americans who are struggling just to feed their families on a daily basis and pay the mortgage, while the size of the national debt balloons to Greek-style proportions.

While the liberal-dominated US mainstream media have largely ignored the story, it is all over the blogosphere and talk radio, and will undoubtedly add to the President’s free falling poll ratings. As much as the media establishment turn a blind eye to stories like this, which are major news in the international media, the American public is increasingly turning to alternative news sources, including the British press, which has a far less deferential approach towards the White House.

The First Lady’s ill-conceived trip to Marbella and the complete disregard for public opinion and concerns over excessive government spending is symbolic of a far wider problem with the Obama presidency – the overarching disdain for the principles of limited government, individual liberty and free enterprise that have built the United States over the course of nearly two and a half centuries into the most powerful and free nation on earth.

It is epitomised above all by the President’s relentless drive towards big government against the will of the American people, and the dramatic increases in government spending and borrowing, which threaten to leave the US hugely in debt for generations. It is also showcased by Barack Obama’s drive towards a socialised health care system, which, as I’ve noted before, is “a thinly disguised vanity project for a president who is committed to transforming the United States from the world’s most successful large-scale free enterprise economy, to a highly interventionist society with a massive role for centralized government.”

There is however a political revolution fast approaching Washington that is driven not by mob rule but by the power of ideas and principles, based upon the ideals of the Founding Fathers and the US Constitution. It is a distinctly conservative revolution that is sweeping America and is reflected in almost every poll ahead of this November’s mid-terms. It is based on a belief in individual liberty, limited government, and above all, political accountability from the ruling elites. The Obama administration’s mantra may well be “let them eat cake”, as it continues to gorge itself on taxpayers’ money, but it will be looking nervously over its shoulder as public unease mounts.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100050002/the-obama-presidency-increasingly-resembles-a-modern-day-ancien-regime-extravagant-and-out-of-touch-with-ordinary-people/

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by Josh Silver

For years, Internet advocates have warned of the doomsday scenario that will play out on Monday: Google and Verizon will announce a deal that the New York Times reports “could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege.”

The deal marks the beginning of the end of the Internet as you know it. Since its beginnings, the Net was a level playing field that allowed all content to move at the same speed, whether it’s ABC News or your uncle’s video blog. That’s all about to change, and the result couldn’t be more bleak for the future of the Internet, for television, radio and independent voices.

How did this happen? We have a Federal Communications Commission that has been denied authority by the courts to police the activities of Internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast. All because of a bad decision by the Bush-era FCC. We have a pro-industry FCC Chairman who is terrified of making a decision, conducting back room dealmaking, and willing to sit on his hands rather than reassert his agency’s authority. We have a president who promised to “take a back seat to no one on Net Neutrality” yet remains silent. We have a congress that is nearly completely captured by industry. Yes, more than half of the US congress will do pretty much whatever the phone and cable companies ask them to. Add the clout of Google, and you have near-complete control of Capitol Hill.

A non-neutral Internet means that companies like AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Google can turn the Net into cable TV and pick winners and losers online. A problem just for Internet geeks? You wish. All video, radio, phone and other services will soon be delivered through an Internet connection. Ending Net Neutrality would end the revolutionary potential that any website can act as a television or radio network. It would spell the end of our opportunity to wrest access and distribution of media content away from the handful of massive media corporations that currently control the television and radio dial.

So the Google-Verizon deal can be summed up as this: “FCC, you have no authority over us and you’re not going to do anything about it. Congress, we own you, and we’ll get whatever legislation we want. And American people, you can’t stop us.

This Google-Verizon deal, this industry-captured FCC, and the way this is playing out is akin to the largest banks and the largest hedge funds writing the regulatory policy on derivative trading without any oversight or input from the public, and having it rubber stamped by the SEC. It’s like BP and Halliburton ironing out the rules for offshore oil drilling with no public input, and having MMS sign off.

Fortunately, while they are outnumbered, there are several powerful Net Neutrality champions on Capitol Hill, like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Henry Waxman, Jay Rockefeller, Ed Markey, Jay Inslee and many others. But they will not be able to turn this tide unless they have massive, visible support from every American who uses the Internet — whether it’s for news, email, shopping, Facebook, Twitter — whatever. So stop what you’re doing and tell them you’re not letting the Internet go the way of Big Oil and Big Banks. The future of the Internet, and your access to information depends on it.

Author’s note: Notice how a company can change their tune in the name of profitmaking. From Google in 2006: “Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can’t pay.”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/josh-silver/google-verizon-deal-the-e_b_671617.html

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“Another “conspiracy” theory gone mainstream. Yes, the pentagon has been taking samples of your babies blood. Every baby born in the US in the last 36 years has had their natural rights violated. What their going to do with it… who the fuck knows. Minority Report kinda shit.”

-Fred Face 8/8/10

AUSTIN (KXAN) – When Andrea Beleno gave birth to her son last year, she knew she’d do whatever it took to protect him.

But she never dreamed she’d be taking on the State of Texas to safeguard her son’s most private information.

And now, revelations are surfacing that not only did the state store that blood without parents’ knowledge – but they also actually bartered it for goods and services to for-profit companies, without the knowledge of parents or of state lawmakers.

Beleno and several other Texas families sued the State Department of Health Services after they learned the agency had been storing and using newborn blood samples, or blood spots, that were leftover after testing for the Newborn Screening Program.

The families weren’t suing for money. They were suing for the right to decide what happens to their babies’ blood specimens – and the information contained in them.

The suit prompted the Texas Legislature to step in and pass a new law giving parents the right to opt out of allowing the state to keep the samples leftover after screening.

Parents can direct Texas to destroy their child’s blood samples by submitting this form .

In December 2009, the Texas Department of State Health Services settled the lawsuit with Beleno and the families. As part of the settlement terms , the state agreed to destroy the nearly 5 million blood samples it had retained without consent and disclose how the spots had been used.

The state posted the list of research projects using the blood spots on its website.  The list gives a brief description of the 24 research projects that used just over 8,800 blood spots.

However, the number of research projects disclosed on its website didn’t match testimony by a DSHS official before the House Public Health Committee in March 2009.

Chairwoman Lois Kohlkorst asked DSHS lab director Susan Tanksley about the research and whether there had been any breakthroughs.

Tanksley said that there hadn’t been many – only 4 projects had been completed.

Texas Rep. John Davis asked whether the spots had been used for any criminal investigation purposes.

Tanksley denied any spots were used for that purpose.

But records obtained from DSHS show that’s not true.

In 2003 and in 2007, the state provided samples collected under the Newborn Screening Program for a project sponsored by the Department of Justice and conducted by the Armed Forces Institute for Pathology .

The samples were to help expand the DNA database for law enforcement purposes.

This was news that stunned parent Andrea Beleno.

“I think it’s a breach of public trust,” said Beleno.

Parents were kept in the dark about how the leftover spots were used and so were lawmakers. During extensive hearings about the Newborn Screening Program, there was no mention of how the vast majority of spots were used.

It took several requests, but KXAN finally obtained records that show that the state has been using the spots to barter with for-profit corporations for lab supplies, test kits and maintenance contracts.

Among those deals was a five year agreement in which the State provided 228,000 blood spots in exchange for $456,000 worth of lab supplies and maintenance services.

In another deal, the state provided at least 3600 spots in exchange for HIV test kits .

How much to charge and how to handle the billing was a source of internal discussions at DSHS.

We obtained one email sent by Barbara Kelly-King, who works in the Revenue Management Unit of DSHS.

In February 2006, Kelly-King responded to staff questions about how to bill for spots being provided to bioMerieux.

She wrote: “Originally this was to be handled through a contract but the Health and Safety Code 12.0122 entitled Sale of Laboratory Services does not allow for a contract. The lab is now asking bioMerieux to issue a $2.00 credit for every dried blood spot sent.”

A month later, on March 6, 2006, Lab Director Susan Tanksley’s email to staff says:

“We do not have a contract with bioMerieux but essentially an understanding that we will provide DBS [Dried Blood Spots] to them and they will in turn provide HIV reagents. Originally, we wanted a contract for $2/specimen, but we cannot provide this ‘laboratory service’ to them as they are a for-profit organization. Our attorney’s opinion was that it was acceptable to receive reagents in return for the DBS.”

See that whole email chain here.

By October of 2008, DSHS decided it could skip the bartering and charge a fee for providing spots to for-profit corporations. It charged MP Biomedicals $1,600 for 400 spots .

The same week, the State charged Avoiq $2,400 for 600 blood spots.

In another deal, a pending two-year contract with Avioq, DSHS agreed to provide a regular supply of blood spots at $4 each which would bring in $28,800 to the agency.

Carrie Williams, Acting Press Officer for the Texas Department Of State Health Services, said the charges were a nominal handling fee used to recoup taxpayer dollars.

nternal DSHS emails detail the processfor billing.

One dated August 26, 2008 asks how the income should be allocated: “What I’m looking for is this: which pot of moneywill it benefit us to book this under.”

In all, the State receives about 800,000 blood cards per year from babies born in Texas. By 2009, the number of stored spots had grown to about 5 million specimens.

When older spots were needed and were pulled from the A & M storage room supply, the university charged $15 for each specimen . All of those spots have since been destroyed as part of the settlement of the lawsuit filed by Andrea Beleno and the other parents.

Beleno said they were open to hearing options for preserving the spots for important research, but the state’s own actions have caused public distrust.

“I think the way they’ve behaved is unethical in the way that they’ve handled the disclosure of what they are actually doing,” said Beleno, “And I think it makes it really difficult for people to trust that they are in fact using those samples for public good rather than to make money.”

Williams says the agency is strengthening its process for reviewing and approving requests to use the spots. “The process will be more defined and will include more layers of review,” said Williams. She said the state was not selling the spots in any way shape or form. “Any benefit received from providing the bloodspots went directly back into the program or to the agency’s overall public health mission,” said Williams.

Any changes in the Newborn Screening Program will be up to the Legislature. The House Public Health Committee will be holding a hearing on May 17th to discuss the program and decide whether to recommend any changes to the program for the upcoming Legislative Session.

KXAN will be live streaming the hearing.

http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/in_depth/bartering-your-babys-blood

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“Naaaw?”

-F.F.

Bob Woffinden

Fluoride in tap water can cause bone cancer in boys, a disturbing new study indicates, although there is no evidence of a link for girls.

New American research suggests that boys exposed to fluoride between the ages of five and 10 will suffer an increased rate of osteosarcoma – bone cancer – bet-ween the ages of 10 and 19.

In the UK, fluoride is added to tap water on the advice of bodies such as the British Dental Association. The Department of Health maintains that it is a cost-effective public health measure that helps prevent tooth decay in children.

About 10 per cent of the population, six million people, receive fluoridated water, mainly in the Midlands and north-east, and the government plans to extend this, with Manchester expected to be next. About 170 million Americans live in areas with fluoridated water.

The increased cancer risks, identified in a newly available study conducted at the Harvard School of Dental Health, were found at fluoride exposure levels common in both the US and Britain. It was the first examination of the link between exposure to the chemical at the critical period of a child’s development and the age of onset of bone cancer.

Although osteosarcoma is rare, accounting for only about 3 per cent of childhood cancers, it is especially dangerous. The mortality rate in the first five years is about 50 per cent, and nearly all survivors have limbs amputated, usually legs.

The research has been made available by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), a respected Washington-based research organisation. The group reports that it has assembled a ’strong body of peer-reviewed evidence’ and has asked that fluoride in tap water be added to the US government’s classified list of substances known or anticipated to cause cancer in humans.

‘This is a very specific cancer in a defined population of children,’ said Richard Wiles, the group’s co-founder. ‘When you focus in and look for the incidence of tumours, you see the increase.

‘We recognise the potential benefits of fluoride to dental health,’ added Wiles, ‘but I’ve spent 20 years in public health, trying to protect kids from toxic exposure. Even with DDT, you don’t have the consistently strong data that the compound can cause cancer as you now have with fluoride.’

Half of all fluoride ingested is stored in the body, accumulating in calcifying tissue such as teeth and bones and in the pineal gland in the brain, although more than 90 per cent is taken into the bones.

MPs who have recently voted against fluoridation proposals in Parliament include Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and Michael Howard, the Conservative leader.

Anti-fluoride campaigners argue that the whole issue has become highly politically sensitive. If health scares about fluoride were to be recognised in the courts, the litigation, especially in the US, could be expected to run for decades. Consequently, scientists have been inhibited from publicising any adverse findings.

The new evidence only emerged by a circuitous process. It was contained in a Harvard dissertation by Dr Elise Bassin at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. The dissertation, completed in April 2001, obviously had merit because Bassin was awarded her doctorate.

However it has not been published. Environmental organisations were repeatedly denied access to it, and even bodies such as the US National Academy of Sciences could not get hold of a copy. Eventually two researchers from the Fluoride Action Network were allowed to read it in the rare books and special collections room at Harvard medical library.

Bassin told The Observer her work was still going through the peer-review process, and she hopes that it will then be published.

Dr Vyvyan Howard, senior lecturer in toxico-pathology at the University of Liverpool, has studied the new material.

‘At these ages the bones of boys are developing rapidly,’ he said, ’so if the bones are being put together abnormally because fluoride is altering the bone structure, they’re more likely to get cancer. It’s biologically plausible, and the epidemiological evidence seems pretty strong – it looks as if there’s a definite effect.’

There is at present no understanding as to why males should be affected rather than females.

A Department of Health spokesman said that the latest evaluation of research in the UK had identified no ill effects of fluoride.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2005/jun/12/medicineandhealth.genderissues

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• By Noah Shachtman

Any citizen, any foreign spy, any member of the Taliban, and any terrorist can go to the WikiLeaks website, and download detailed information about how the U.S. military waged war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2009. Members of that same military, however, are now banned from looking at those internal military documents. “Doing so would introduce potentially classified information on unclassified networks,” according to one directive issued by the armed forces.

That cry you hear? It’s common sense, writhing in pain.

There was a time, just a few months ago, when the Pentagon appeared to be growing comfortable with the emerging digital media landscape. Troops were free to blog and tweet, as long as they used their heads and didn’t disclose secrets. Thumb drives and DVDs could be employed, as long as they didn’t carry viruses or classified information. But the WikiLeaks disclosures — tens of thousands of classified documents — seem to have reversed that trajectory.

Now, the Marine Corps is telling troops and civilian employees in a memo:

[W]illingly accessing the WIKILEAKS website for the purpose of viewing the posted classified material [constitutes] the unauthorized processing, disclosure, viewing, and downloading of classified information onto an UNAUTHORIZED computer system not approved to store classified information. Meaning they have WILLINGLY committed a SECURITY VIOLATION.

The other branches of the armed services have put out similar notices. The memos were initially reported in the Washington Times. But the story has been removed from the paper’s website.

Sumit Agarwal, the former Google manager now serving as the Defense Department’s social media czar, explained the Pentagon’s logic in an e-mail to Danger Room.

“I think of it as being analogous to MP3s or a copyrighted novel online — widespread publication doesn’t strip away laws governing use of those,” he writes. ”If Avatar were suddenly available online, would be legal to download it? As a practical matter, many people would download it, but also as a practical matter, James Cameron would probably go after people who were found to be nodes who facilitated distribution. It would still be illegal for people to make Avatar available even if it were posted on a torrent site or the equivalent.”

“With minor changes to what is legal/illegal re: classified material vs a copyrighted movie, doesn’t the analogy hold?” Argawal asks. “One person making it available doesn’t change the laws re: classified material. Our position is simply that servicemembers ought not to use government computers to do something which is still completely illegal (traffic in classified material).”

But it’s an imperfect analogy, at best. Cameron might plausibly argue that each pirated version of Avatar reduces his customer base for legitimate versions of the movie (even if the opposite has proven to be true). Banning troops from reading the WikiLeaks war logs won’t in any way impact how potentially nefarious consumers of that information behave. This is the equivalent of Cameron banning his own staff from watching Avatar — even after it’s been posted online.

Meanwhile, Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell demanded Thursday that WikiLeaks “return all versions of all of these documents to the U.S. government and permanently delete them from its website, computers and records.”

But he quickly added: “I don’t know that we’re very confident they’ll have a change of heart. They’ve shown no indication thus far that they appreciate the gravity, the seriousness of the situation they have caused, the lives they have endangered, the operations they have potentially undermined, the innocent people who have potentially been put in harm’s way as a result. So I don’t know that we have a high degree of confidence that this — that this request, this demand, unto itself, will prevail upon them.”

Every officer in the military — and many of the enlisted men, too — have a basic, “secret,” clearance. That’s hundreds of thousands of potential sources to WikiLeaks. Seems to me that the only plausible explanation for the Pentagon’s arm-waving is to remind troops not to spill secrets. The question is: Does clinging to military regulations at the expense of basic logic encourage people to respect classification policy — or only make the secrecy regime seem more absurd?

Update: “Take ‘wikileaks’ out of your headlines,” one Army contractor e-mails Danger Room. The web filter “has been updated to block anything with wikileaks in the URL.”

“So, yeah, common sense out the window,” the contractor adds.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/pentagon-to-troops-taliban-can-read-wikileaks-you-cant/

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WRITTEN BY ALEX NEWMAN

Just four days after the Supreme Court essentially struck down the City of Chicago’s draconian handgun ban as unconstitutional, the City Council unanimously approved a tough new gun-control regime — the strictest in the nation, actually. The new rules went into effect on July 12. But they are already being challenged in court.

The “Responsible Gun Ownership Ordinance,” introduced by Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, purports to require city-issued “permits,” registration, and special training for residents who wish to own guns. It will also limit the number of handguns eligible residents may purchase to one per month.

Under the new rules, only one operable weapon per household is allowed. Handguns are forbidden outside of the home (including in garages, back yards, or on porches) and must be transported broken down and in a case. They cannot be sold within city limits, and only a list of “safe” guns drawn up by the police superintendent will be permitted.

Aldermen (city councilors) generally agreed with the Mayor’s anti-gun crusade, as evidenced by the 45-0 vote in favor of the new set of rules. Many Aldermen quoted in media reports expressed outrage that the High Court struck down the city’s ban in the recent 5-4 McDonald v. City of Chicago ruling.

Those favoring strict control measures like Chicago’s claim that gun ownership leads to increases in crime. Empirical evidence suggests the opposite is true. After the Supreme Court struck down Washington, D.C.’s draconian gun rules in 2008, the city experienced a 30-percent decrease in murder rates, explained John Lott, Jr., author of More Guns, Less Crime and one of the world’s foremost experts on the relationship between guns, gun control, and crime.

Because of the new restrictive rules, “I assume that relatively few people are going to register handguns in Chicago and as such I think that the change in the law will have a relatively small impact on crime rates,” Lott told The New American. “The regulations go as far towards banning guns as Chicago thinks that they can go,” he said, adding that the rules will disarm the poorest citizens, “who are most likely to be victims of crime.”

But at least two major lawsuits against the city’s new ordinance are already in progress, and more are anticipated in the near future. Joe Franzese, for example, owner of Second Amendment Arms in nearby Lake Villa, filed suit because he wants to open as many as five gun shops in Chicago. But the ordinance prohibits it. “I want to sell a legal product and you can’t outlaw a legal product,” he told theLibertyville Review.

In the lawsuit, Franzese attacks the new law from multiple angles: “By banning gun shops and the sale [of] handguns, Chicago and Mayor Daley currently maintain and actively enforce a set of laws, customs, practices and policies under color of state law which deprive individuals, including the plaintiffs, of their right to keep and bear arms, and engage in commerce by selling them, lawful products, in violation of the Second and 14th Amendments to the United States Constitution.”

Another lawsuit challenging the new rules was filed by four Chicago residents who want to bear arms, and the non-profit Illinois Association of Firearms Retailers, which says some of its members want to operate gun stores and shooting ranges in the city. The plaintiffs, backed by the National Rifle Association, hope to have the restrictive regulations struck down because they violate constitutionally protected rights.

Attorney Stephen Holbrook, who serves as outside counsel to the NRA and worked on the McDonald case, said the city was basically flaunting the Supreme Court’s decision. “But if the courts take the Second Amendment seriously, the chances are good” that Chicago’s new ordinance will be struck down, he told The New American.

Gun Owners of America, widely regarded as the nation’s fiercest and most principled defender of gun rights, also attacked the ordinance. “Obviously these policies are a failure; they don’t protect the people,” Executive Director Larry Pratt told The New American, pointing to gun-crime statistics and highlighting the fact that Aldermen are allowed to carry weapons. “Crime will remain high in Chicago because many law-abiding people are going to be daunted by the new law,” he said, predicting that the restrictions could end up back at the Supreme Court.

Potential outcomes from legal challenges remain very much uncertain, since the Supreme Court ruled that “reasonable restrictions” were still permissible under the Second Amendment. Just what exactly “reasonable” means is hard to know, but it will likely determine whether Chicago’s new ordinance is upheld.

“The right to keep and bear arms is not ‘a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose,’” claimed Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito in the majority opinion rejecting Chicago’s outright ban.

How that wording will be interpreted by the courts remains to be seen, but it will surely have serious implications for state and local gun laws across the country, many of which are already coming under fire after the court’s ruling.

http://thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/crime/4194-chicagos-new-gun-control-regime-challenged-in-court

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Feds admit they lied over storing images, why trust them over safety, functionality and efficiency of radiation-firing machines?

The proof comes in the form of a letter (PDF), obtained by The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), in which William Bordley, an associate general counsel with the Marshals Service, admits that “approximately 35,314 images…have been stored on the Brijot Gen2 machine” used in the Orlando, Fla. federal courthouse.

Full Story HERE

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• By Katie Drummond

The Army’s got a one-two punch to perfect vaccinations and offer scientists the ability to quickly develop inoculations that stave off new dangers. First, they’ll shoot troops up using a “gene gun,” that’s filled with DNA-based vaccines. Then they’ll follow it up with “short electrical pulses to the delivery site.”

The Pentagon’s still after a comprehensive way to inoculate troops and civilians against existing illnesses, rapidly respond to emerging threats, and even predict pathogenic mutations before they happen. To that end, the military’s already funding a handful of projects, from plant-based vaccine production to genetic signatures for ultra-early diagnosis.

In a small business solicitation released last week, the Army put out a call for “Multiagent Synthetic DNA Vaccines Delivered by Noninvasive Electroporation.” The program would start by transforming conventional development methods, like standard egg-based vaccines.

The old-school methods are slow, don’t allow for readily combined vaccines, and can pose sterility risks. DNA-based vaccines, on the other hand, would be quick to engineer and offer reliable immunity — provided the DNA can enter host cells to trigger the production of immunity proteins.

Right now, DNA-based vaccines are injected into muscles, meaning a genetically engineered plasmid is delivered to “intracellular spaces,” and “is not efficiently taken up by the host cells.” So the Army would instead like to shoot people. Seriously.

In its solicitation, the Army says it wants DNA vaccines that are painted onto microscopic beads, then “deposited into skin cells by gas propulsion.” And since that method can only inject a small dose of DNA, they want researchers to combine the approach with intramuscular electroporation, which “involves injecting the DNA then quickly applying short electrical pulses.” The electric charge creates pores in cell membranes, making it easier for DNA to enter targeted cells.

Sounds great, except that current approaches to intramuscular electroporation are invasive, and, obviously, they hurt. One study in rats also noted the “possibility of low and transient tissue damage induced by electroporation.” The Army wants a gadget that doesn’t rely on jamming needles and electrical pulses into muscle, and instead are after “injection and noninvasive electroporation [that] can be performed using a single integrated device.”

DNA-based vaccines are also still in their infancy: in 2005, the first-ever DNA vaccine for horses was approved, but human trials have yet to generate stellar results. And speaking of invasive: the Army’s delivery method of choice, gene guns, use helium gas to blast DNA into cells and often require surgically exposed muscle tissue to get the job done.

In other words, the Army’s asking for a non-invasive way to do what’s not yet possible, even using surgical methods. If researchers do come up with a device that meets the lofty criteria, though, it’d be just what the Pentagon’s looking for:  a reliable way to engineer and deliver combination vaccines — not to mention a quick way to fight back against “unknown, emerging, or genetically engineered pathogens.”

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/armys-vaccine-plan-inject-troops-with-gas-propelled-electro-charged-dna/

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“Snitch Bitches Of America…”

-F.F.

For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010

Expands “If You See Something, Say Something” Campaign to the Washington, D.C., area

Washington, D.C. – Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano today announced a series of initiatives to support state and local law enforcement and community groups across the country in identifying and mitigating threats to their communities and expanded DHS’ “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign to the Washington, D.C., area in conjunction with National Night Out, an annual anticrime campaign involving citizens, police and neighborhood groups.

“Homeland security begins with hometown security, and our efforts to confront threats in our communities are most effective when they are led by local law enforcement and involve strong collaboration with the communities and citizens they serve,” said Secretary Napolitano.

Secretary Napolitano was joined at today’s event by Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton, Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia Police Chief Cathy Lanier, Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority Police Chief Michael Taborn, and Homeland Security Advisory Council Chairman Judge William Webster.

The new measures announced today, detailed here (PDF – 2 pages, 25 KB), are based on recommendations made by the Homeland Security Advisory Council’s (HSAC) “Countering Violent Extremism” Working Group—comprised of chiefs of police, sheriffs, community leaders and homeland security experts—on ways DHS can better support community-based efforts to combat violent extremism in the United States.

The “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign—originally implemented by New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority and funded, in part, by $13 million from DHS’ Transit Security Grant Program—is a simple and effective program to raise public awareness of indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats and emphasize the importance of reporting suspicious activity to the proper transportation and law enforcement authorities.

The Washington, D.C., area “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign will leverage the Metropolitan Police Department’s long-standing participation in the Nationwide Suspicious Activity Reporting (SAR) Initiative—leveraging best practices from the law enforcement community while engaging the public in identifying and reporting suspicious activity.

Today’s launch represents the third major expansion of the “If You See Something, Say Something” initiative this summer—following expansions to Amtrak and general aviation in July. In the coming months, DHS will continue to expand the campaign nationally with public education materials, advertisements and other outreach tools to engage travelers, businesses, community organizations and public and private sector employees to remain vigilant and play an active role in keeping the country safe.

For more information, visit www.dhs.gov.

http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/pr_1280864546408.shtm

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“Sorry to say, we told you so.”

-F.F.

by Declan McCullagh

For the last few years, federal agencies have defended body scanning by insisting that all images will be discarded as soon as they’re viewed. The Transportation Security Administration claimed last summer, for instance, that “scanned images cannot be stored or recorded.”

Now it turns out that some police agencies are storing the controversial images after all. The U.S. Marshals Service admitted this week that it had surreptitiously saved tens of thousands of images recorded with a millimeter wave system at the security checkpoint of a single Florida courthouse.

This follows an earlier disclosure (PDF) by the TSA that it requires all airport body scanners it purchases to be able to store and transmit images for “testing, training, and evaluation purposes.” The agency says, however, that those capabilities are not normally activated when the devices are installed at airports.

Body scanners penetrate clothing to provide a highly detailed image so accurate that critics have likened it to a virtual strip search. Technologies vary, with millimeter wave systems capturing fuzzier images, and backscatter X-ray machines able to show precise anatomical detail. The U.S. government likes the idea because body scanners can detect concealed weapons better than traditional magnetometers.

This privacy debate, which has been simmering since the days of the Bush administration, came to a boil two weeks ago when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that scanners would soon appear at virtually every major airport. The updated list includes airports in New York City, Dallas, Washington, Miami, San Francisco, Seattle, and Philadelphia.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, has filed a lawsuitasking a federal judge to grant an immediate injunction pulling the plug on TSA’s body scanning program. In a separate lawsuit, EPIC obtained a letter (PDF) from the Marshals Service, part of the Justice Department, and released it on Tuesday afternoon.

These “devices are designed and deployed in a way that allows the images to be routinely stored and recorded, which is exactly what the Marshals Service is doing,” EPIC executive director Marc Rotenberg told CNET. “We think it’s significant.”

William Bordley, an associate general counsel with the Marshals Service, acknowledged in the letter that “approximately 35,314 images…have been stored on the Brijot Gen2 machine” used in the Orlando, Fla. federal courthouse. In addition, Bordley wrote, a Millivision machine was tested in the Washington, D.C. federal courthouse but it was sent back to the manufacturer, which now apparently possesses the image database.

The Gen 2 machine, manufactured by Brijot of Lake Mary, Fla., uses a millimeter wave radiometer and accompanying video camera to store up to 40,000 images and records. Brijot boasts that it can even be operated remotely: “The Gen 2 detection engine capability eliminates the need for constant user observation and local operation for effective monitoring. Using our APIs, instantly connect to your units from a remote location via the Brijot Client interface.”

This trickle of disclosures about the true capabilities of body scanners–and how they’re being used in practice–is probably what alarms privacy advocates more than anything else.

A 70-page document (PDF) showing the TSA’s procurement specifications, classified as “sensitive security information,” says that in some modes the scanner must “allow exporting of image data in real time” and provide a mechanism for “high-speed transfer of image data” over the network. (It also says that image filters will “protect the identity, modesty, and privacy of the passenger.”)

“TSA is not being straightforward with the public about the capabilities of these devices,” Rotenberg said. “This is the Department of Homeland Security subjecting every U.S. traveler to an intrusive search that can be recorded without any suspicion–I think it’s outrageous.” EPIC’s lawsuit says that the TSA should have announced formal regulations, and argues that the body scanners violate the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits “unreasonable” searches.

TSA spokeswoman Sari Koshetz told CNET on Wednesday that the agency’s scanners are delivered to airports with the image recording functions turned off. “We’re not recording them,” she said. “I’m reiterating that to the public. We are not ever activating those capabilities at the airport.”

The TSA maintains that body scanning is perfectly constitutional: “The program is designed to respect individual sensibilities regarding privacy, modesty and personal autonomy to the maximum extent possible, while still performing its crucial function of protecting all members of the public from potentially catastrophic events.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20012583-281.html

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“Good. States know what’s better for them, than criminal federal government.”

-F.F.

BY TONY MESSENGER

ST. LOUIS • Missouri voters on Tuesday overwhelmingly rejected a federal mandate to purchase health insurance, rebuking President Barack Obama’s administration and giving Republicans their first political victory in a national campaign to overturn the controversial health care law passed by Congress in March.

“The citizens of the Show-Me State don’t want Washington involved in their health care decisions,” said Sen. Jane Cunningham, R-Chesterfield, one of the sponsors of the legislation that put Proposition C on the August ballot. She credited a grass-roots campaign involving Tea Party and patriot groups with building support for the anti-Washington proposition.

With most of the vote counted, Proposition C was winning by a ratio of nearly 3 to 1. The measure, which seeks to exempt Missouri from the insurance mandate in the new health care law, includes a provision that would change how insurance companies that go out of business in Missouri liquidate their assets.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Cunningham said at a campaign gathering at a private home in Town and Country. “Citizens wanted their voices to be heard.”

About 30 Proposition C supporters whooped it up loudly at 9 p.m. when the returns flashed on the television showing the measure passing with more than 70 percent of the vote.

“It’s the vote heard ’round the world,” said Dwight Janson, 53, from Glendale, clad in an American flag-patterned shirt. Janson said he went to one of the first Tea Party gatherings last year and hopped on the Proposition C bandwagon because he wanted to make a difference.

“I was tired of sitting on the sidelines bouncing my gums,” he said.

Missouri was the first of four states to seek to opt out of the insurance purchase mandate portion of the health care law that had been pushed by Obama. And while many legal scholars question whether the vote will be binding, the overwhelming approval gives the national GOP momentum as Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma hold similar votes during midterm elections in November.

“It’s a big number,” state Sen. Jim Lembke, R-Lemay, said of the vote. “I expected a victory, but not of this magnitude. This is going to propel the issue and several other issues about the proper role of the federal government.”

From almost the moment the Democratic-controlled Congress passed the health care law — which aims to increase the number of Americans with health insurance — Republicans have vowed to try to repeal it. Their primary argument is that they believe the federal government should not be involved in mandating health care decisions at the local level.

While repeal might seem an unlikely strategy, the effort to send a message state by state that voters don’t approve of being told they have to buy insurance could gain momentum.

That’s what Republicans are counting on at least, hoping that the Missouri vote will give the national movement momentum.

“It’s like a domino, and Missouri is the first one to fall,” Cunningham said. “Missouri’s vote will greatly influence the debate in the other states.”

Proposition C faced little organized opposition, although the Missouri Hospital Association mounted a mailer campaign opposing the ballot issue in the last couple of weeks. The hospital association, which spent more than $300,000 in the losing effort, said that without the new federal law, those who don’t have insurance will cause health care providers and other taxpayers to have higher costs.

“The only way to get to the cost problem in health care is to expand the insurance pool,” said hospital association spokesman Dave Dillon. He said the hospital association didn’t plan to sue over the law, but he expected it would be challenged.

“I think there is going to be no shortage of people who want to use the courts to resolve this issue,” he said.

Democrats also generally opposed Proposition C, though they didn’t spend much time or money talking about it.

In the closing days of the campaign, many politicians ’sidled up” to Proposition C, Cunningham said, seeing the momentum the issue had gained.

Among them was U.S. Rep. Roy Blunt, who won the Republican primary for U.S. Senate on Tuesday night. Late last week, Blunt announced his support of Proposition C.

On Monday, Blunt said he hoped Missouri voters would send a “ballot box message” to the Obama’s administration by overwhelmingly passing the measure.

The question now is whether the administration will respond by suing the state to block passage of the law, much as it did in Arizona recently over illegal immigration.

The issue in both is the same: When state laws conflict with federal laws, the courts have generally ruled in favor of the federal government, because of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Richard Reuben, a law professor at the University of Missouri School of Law, said that if the federal government sues on the issue, it would likely win. Several other Missouri legal and political scholars agreed.

But Cunningham is undaunted. She’s got her own experts, and they’re ready to do battle in court.

“Constitutional experts disagree,” she said. “There is substantial legal status to this thing.”

http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_c847dc7c-564c-5c70-8d90-dfd25ae6de56.html

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By Michael Snyder

As the first of the 80 million Baby Boomers have begun to retire, it has become increasingly apparent that the United States is facing a pension crisis of unprecedented magnitude.  State and local government pension plans are woefully underfunded, dozens of large corporate pension plans either have collapsed or are on the verge of collapsing, Social Security is a complete and total financial disaster and about half of all Americans essentially have nothing saved up for retirement.  So yes, to say that we are facing a retirement crisis would be a tremendous understatement.  There is simply no way that we can keep all of the financial promises that we have made to the Baby Boomer generation.  Unfortunately, the crumbling U.S. economy simply cannot support the comfortable retirement of tens of millions of elderly Americans any longer.  The truth is that we are all going to have to start fundamentally changing the way that we think about our golden years.

Once upon a time, you could count on getting a big, fat pension if you put 30 years into a job.  But now pension plans everywhere are failing.  State and local governments are cutting back and are raising retirement ages.  A majority of Americans have even lost faith in the Social Security system, which was supposed to be the most secure of them all.

The reality is that we are moving into a time when there is not going to be such a thing as “financial security” as we have known it in the past.  Things have fundamentally changed, and we are all going to have to struggle to stay above water in the economic nightmare that is coming.

Part of the reason we have such a gigantic economic mess on the way is because we have promised vastly more than we can deliver to future retirees.  When you closely examine the numbers, it quickly becomes clear that a financial tsunami is about to hit us that is going to be so devastating that it will change everything that we know about retirement.

The following are 22 statistics about America’s coming pension crisis that will make you lose sleep at night….

Private Pension Plans And Retirement Funds

1 - One recent study found that America’s 100 largest corporate pension plans were underfunded by $217 billion at the end of 2008.

2 – Approximately half of all workers in the United States have less than $2000 saved up for retirement.

3 – According to one recent survey, 36 percent of Americans say that they don’t contribute anything at all to retirement savings.

4 – The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation says that the number of pensions at risk inside failing companies more than tripled during the recession.

5 – According to another recent survey, 24% of U.S. workers admit that they have postponed their planned retirement age at least once during the past year.

State And Local Government Pensions

6- Pension consultant Girard Miller recently told California’s Little Hoover Commission that state and local government bodies in the state of California have $325 billion in combined unfunded pension liabilities.  When you break that down, it comes to $22,000 for every single working adult in California.

7 – According to a recent report from Stanford University, California’s three biggest pension funds are as much as $500 billion short of meeting future retiree benefit obligations.

8 – In New Jersey, the governor has proposed not making the state’s entire $3 billion contribution to its pension funds because of the state’s $11 billion budget deficit.

9 – It has been reported that the $33.7 billion Illinois Teachers Retirement System is 61% underfunded and is on the verge of total collapse.

10 – The state of Illinois recently raised its retirement age to 67 and capped the salary on which public pensions are figured.

11 – The state of Virginia is requiring employees to pay into the state pension fund for the first time ever.

12 – In New York City, annual pension contributions have increased sixfold in the past decade alone and are now so large that they would be able to finance entire new police and fire departments.

13- Robert Novy-Marx of the University of Chicago and Joshua D. Rauh of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management recently calculated the combined pension liability for all 50 U.S. states.  What they found was that the 50 states are collectively facing $5.17 trillion in pension obligations, but they only have $1.94 trillion set aside in state pension funds.  That is a difference of 3.2 trillion dollars.

Social Security

14 – According to one recently conducted poll, 6 out of every 10 non-retirees in the United States believe that the Social Security system will not be able to pay them benefits when they stop working.

15 – A very large percentage of the federal budget is made up of entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare that cannot be reduced without a change in the law. Approximately 57 percent of Barack Obama’s 3.8 trillion dollar budget for 2011 consists of direct payments to individual Americans or is money that is spent on their behalf.

16 – 35% of Americans over the age of 65 rely almost entirely on Social Security payments alone.

17 – According to the Congressional Budget Office, the Social Security system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes in 2010.  That was not supposed to happen until at least 2016.  The Social Security deficits are projected to get increasingly worse in the years ahead.

18 – 56 percent of current retirees believe that the U.S. government will eventually cut their Social Security benefits.

19 - In 1950, each retiree’s Social Security benefit was paid for by 16 U.S. workers.  In 2010, each retiree’s Social Security benefit is paid for by approximately 3.3 U.S. workers.  By 2025, it is projected that there will be approximately two U.S. workers for each retiree.

20 – The shortfall in entitlement programs in the years ahead is mind blowing.  The present value of projected scheduled benefits surpasses earmarked revenues for entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare by about 46 trillion dollars over the next 75 years.

21 – According to a recent U.S. government report, soaring interest costs on the U.S. national debt plus rapidly escalating spending on entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare will absorb approximately 92 cents of every single dollar of federal revenue by the year 2019.  That is before a single dollar is spent on anything else.

22 – Right now, interest on the U.S. national debt and spending on entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare is somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 percent of GDP.  By 2080, those combined expenditures are projected to eat up approximately 50 percent of GDP.

http://www.blacklistednews.com/news-9972-0-13-13–.html

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“The lazy boy axis of evil.”

-F.F.

Jurriaan Maessen
Infowars.com
August 2, 2010

As recently as 2006, White House science czar repeated his call for curbing human population for the sake of the environment and “substantial carbon taxes”.

In the article titled “The Energy Innovation imperative: Addressing Oil Dependence, Climate Change, and Other 21st Century Energy Challenges“, Holdren admits (among other things) that notions such as “notably improving health care, reproductive rights, and educational opportunities for women” are, although “attractive in their own right”, only measures by which reduced population growth can be achieved. In regards to population-issues Holden writes (page 15):

“Lower is better for many reasons. If world population were 8 billion in 2100 rather than the midrange UN forecast of about 10 billion, holding down the carbon emissions from the energy to make everybody prosperous would be that much easier. Fortunately, reduced population growth can be achieved by measures that are attractive in their own right (notably improving health care, reproductive rights, and educational opportunities for women).”

Holdren not only makes clear he isn’t satisfied by the UN-target of 10 billion by the year 2100 (he would prefer cutting that number by 2 billion), he readily admits that improving health, reproductive rights and educational opportunities for women are means to that end.

In the same year Holdren published his essay, professor of medical demography of the London school of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, John Cleland, admitted to- and rejected- the fact that the scientific and political communities use coded language when speaking of population control. Speaking in front of representatives of the UN Population fund, the International Planned Parenthood Foundation, European Commission, World Bank and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Cleland stated (page 33):

“No more shrouding our statements in code. Because code just confuses people.(…) It does this cause no service at all to continue to shroud family planning in the obfuscating phrase “sexual and reproductive health”. People don’t really know what it means. If we mean family planning or contraception, we must say it. If we are worried about population growth, we must say it. We must use proper, straightforward language. I am fed up with the political correctness that daren’t say the name population stabilization, hardly dares to mention family planning or contraception out of fear that somebody is going to get offended. It is pathetic!”

In the mid-seventies, the current White House science czar had no problem using straightforward language, no problem at all, when he argued for a wide range of measures to cut population size to an “acceptable” level. In the much-debated textbook Ecoscience, Holdren was not hindered by political correctness when he proposed a number of gruesome measures to lower worldwide fertility-levels:

“Adding a sterilant to drinking water or staple foods is a suggestion that seems to horrify people more than most proposals for involuntary fertility control. Indeed, this would pose some very difficult political, legal, and social questions, to say nothing of the technical problems. No such sterilant exists today, nor does one appear to be under development. To be acceptable, such a substance would have to meet some rather stiff requirements: it must be uniformly effective, despite widely varying doses received by individuals, and despite varying degrees of fertility and sensitivity among individuals; it must be free of dangerous or unpleasant side effects; and it must have no effect on members of the opposite sex, children, old people, pets, or livestock.”

In the 2006 article mentioned before, John Holdren also touched upon the possibility of a carbon-tax:

“Perhaps most importantly in the context of the character of energy challenges as elaborated in this article, companies are likely to continue to under-invest in developing and deploying low- and no-carbon energy options until there is a stronger marketplace incentive for such action, either in the form of a substantial carbon tax or its practical equivalent in the form of economy-wide emissions caps implemented through tradable permits.”

It’s becoming clear that the aim of reducing the world’s population was still firmly on John P. Holdren’s mind in 2006, just as it was in 1977 when he co-authored Ecoscience. What has changed is the language he chooses to use.

http://www.infowars.com/in-2006-article-white-house-science-czar-still-talks-population-reduction-and-a-“substantial-carbon-tax”/

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“To many of you strong people are waking up and getting angry about the realities of the worlds political & economic systems… and how you are being robed of your amazing human potential (body & mind). So the establishments got something to snuff that……..

(Once again we are under a scientific dictatorship… and we won’t be for long if more people do what’s right…   begin to admit it… then fight it).

-Fred Face 8/3/10

The future: The cure for stress could be converted into a vaccine and mean big changes for society.

By RACHEL QUIGLEY

Forget the age-old remedies of yoga, meditation or popping pills. Relieving chronic stress could soon be as simple as having an injection, according to scientists.

Academics say they are close to developing the first vaccine for stress – a single jab that would help us relax without slowing down.

After 30 years of research into cures for stress, Dr Robert Sapolsky, professor of neuroscience at Stanford University in California, believes it is possible to alter brain chemistry to create a state of ‘focused calm’.

Professor Sapolsky claims he is on the path to a genetically engineered formula that would remove the need for relaxation therapies or prescription drugs.

Chronic stress, as opposed to everyday worries, is linked to illnesses ranging from diabetes to heart attacks. Professor Sapolsky, who first observed the damage caused by stress on animals in Kenya, has been studying hormones called glucocorticoids, which are part of the body’s immune system and help fight cancer and inflammation.

All mammals produce these hormones, which help them deal with a threat  -  often by running away.

But Professor Sapolsky has observed that, while a zebra will turn off the stress chemicals after escaping from a lion, modern man not only produces too many glucocorticoids in response to everyday alarms but cannot turn them off afterwards.

He says the hormone becomes toxic both biologically, by destroying brain cells and weakening the immune system, and socially, when people continue to snap at their friends or family hours after the original cause of tension has vanished.

After early setbacks, the Stanford team has adapted a herpes virus to carry engineered ‘neuroprotective’ genes deep into the brain to neutralise the rogue hormones before they can cause damage. The virus is now shown to work on rats.

‘To be honest, I’m still amazed that it works,’ Professor Sapolsky told Wired magazine recently.

He warned that human trials are years away, but added: ‘We have proved that it’s possible. We can reduce the neural damage caused by stress.’

Last week, a Stanford University colleague, who called the potential vaccine ‘the Sapolsky shot’, said: ‘In humans this engineered virus would short-circuit the neural feedback caused by stress, that lingering feeling of tension after a crisis has passed.

‘It would leave you fresher and ready to deal with another threat, so you can maintain your drive, but with more focused calm rather than bad temper and digestion.

‘This could change society.’ Professor Sapolsky’s preparatory work was published last October by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Of course, until the vaccine has been completed, those feeling overstretched will have to resort to more tried and tested methods.

Last week, Professor Sapolsky left Stanford to take his own ‘proven medicine’ for stress: He turned off his email and is spending August with his family.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1299540/Jab-stop-stress-slowing-down.html

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“Hence the suspicion surrounding the events of 9/11 & all the power that our government has gained because of it…. “suspicion” for some people.”

-F.F.

By Sheldon Richman

Those who understand the exploitative nature of big government suspected that the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks had little to do with the security of the American people and much to do with power and money. Still, the magnitude of the scam, as revealed by the Washington Post last week, is astonishing.

Naturally, the politicians justify the growth in intelligence operations on national security grounds. To make sure such attacks never happen again, they said, new powers, agencies, personnel, and facilities were imperative.

Now the truth is out: the post—9/11 activity has been an obscene feeding frenzy at the public trough. Any resemblance to efforts at keeping Americans safe is strictly coincidental.

“The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work” the Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin write. “After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.”

It would be a mistake to chalk up the government’s conduct to bureaucratic bumbling. This is not bumbling. It is highway robbery. Everyone who was well connected, either in government or the “private” sector, wanted a piece of the action, and chances are that he — and many others — got it. It doesn’t matter that multiple agencies do the same work and keep their findings secret from one another. It doesn’t matter that the volume of paperwork is beyond anyone’s capacity to absorb it. What matters is money, power, and prestige. This is the mother of all boondoggles.

Chew on some of the numbers from the Post investigation and see if it sounds as though protection of American society was a national-intelligence priority:

* “Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.”

* “An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.”

* “In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square feet of space.”

Moreover, the Post writes, “51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks,” and “Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year — a volume so large that many are routinely ignored” (emphasis added).

Since 9/11 no fewer than 263 intelligence and counterterrorism organizations have been “created or reorganized.”

And what about cost?

“The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 2 1/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn’t include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.” In other words, no one knows how much the whole thieving operation costs.

According to Priest and Arkin, “[Many] officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the [Office of the Director of National Intelligence] is in charge of.”

It comes as no surprise that the mega-bureaucracy isn’t even much help fighting wars: “When Maj. Gen. John M. Custer was the director of intelligence at U.S. Central Command, he grew angry at how little helpful information came out of the [National Counterterrorism Center]. In 2007, he visited its director at the time, retired Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, to tell him so. ‘I told him that after 4 1/2 years, this organization had never produced one shred of information that helped me prosecute three wars!’ he said loudly, leaning over the table during an interview” (emphasis added).

These revelations should have any professed opponent of big government screaming bloody murder. So far the silence from conservatives has been deafening.

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=1042

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by Andy Greenberg

Updated with IDG’s confirmation from Adrian Lamo, changes in wording to address Vigilant staff’s volunteer status.

A semi-secret government contractor that calls itself Project Vigilant surfaced at the Defcon security conference Sunday with a series of revelations: that it monitors the traffic of 12 regional Internet service providers, hands much of that information to federal agencies, and encouraged one of its “volunteers,” researcher Adrian Lamo, to inform the federal government about the alleged source of a controversial video of civilian deaths in Iraq leaked to whistle-blower site Wikileaks in April.

Chet Uber, the director of Fort Pierce, Fl.-based Project Vigilant, says that he personally asked Lamo to meet with federal authorities to out the source of a video published by Wikileaks showing a U.S. Apache helicopter killing several civilians and two journalists in a suburb of Baghdad, a clip that Wikileaks labeled “Collateral Murder.” Lamo, who Uber said worked as an “adversary characterization” analyst for Project Vigilant, had struck up an online friendship with Bradley Manning, a former U.S. Army intelligence analyst who currently faces criminal charges for releasing the classified video.

In June, Uber said he learned from Lamo’s father that the young researcher had identified Manning as the video’s source, and pressured him to meet with federal agencies to name Manning as Wikileaks’ whistleblower. He then arranged a meeting with employees of “three letter” agencies and Lamo, who Uber said had mixed feelings about informing on Manning.

“I’m the one who called the U.S. government,” Uber said. “All the people who say that Adrian is a narc, he did a patriotic thing. He sees all kinds of hacks, and he was seriously worried about people dying.”

Uber says that Lamo later called him from the meeting, regretting his decision to inform on Manning. “I’m in a meeting with five guys and I don’t want to do this,” Uber says Lamo told him at the time. Uber says he responded, “You don’t have any choice, you’ve got to do this.”

“I said, ‘They’re not going to throw you in jail,’” Uber said. “‘Give them everything you have.’”

Wikileaks didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. IDG reporter Robert McMillan confirmed Uber’s relationship with Lamo, who told McMillan that “Mr. Uber was, among a few others, an instrumental voice in helping me come to my ultimate decision.”

Uber’s Wikileaks revelation is one of the first public statements from the semi-secret Project Vigilant. He says the 600-person “volunteer” organization functions as a government contractor bridging public and private sector security efforts. Its mission: to use a variety of intelligence-gathering efforts to help the government attribute hacking incidents. “Bad actors do bad things and you have to prove that they did them,” says Uber. “Attribution is the hardest problem in computer security.”

According to Uber, one of Project Vigilant’s manifold methods for gathering intelligence includes collecting information from a dozen regional U.S. Internet service providers (ISPs). Uber declined to name those ISPs, but said that because the companies included a provision allowing them to share users’ Internet activities with third parties in their end user license agreements (EULAs), Vigilant was able to legally gather data from those Internet carriers and use it to craft reports for federal agencies. A Vigilant press release says that the organization tracks more than 250 million IP addresses a day and can “develop portfolios on any name, screen name or IP address.”

“We don’t do anything illegal,” says Uber. “If an ISP has a EULA to let us monitor traffic, we can work with them. If they don’t, we can’t.”

And whether that massive data gathering violates privacy? The organization says it never looks at personally identifying information, though just how it defines that information isn’t clear, nor is how it scrubs its data mining for sensitive details.

ISP monitoring is just one form of intelligence that Vigilant employs, says Uber. It also gathers a variety of open source intelligence and employs numerous agents around the world. In Iran, for instance, Uber says Vigilant created an anonymous Internet proxy service that allowed it to receive information from local dissidents prior to last year’s election, including early information indicating that the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was skewed by fraud.

Uber, who formerly founded a private sector group called Infragard that worked closely with the FBI, compares the organization’s techniques with Ghostnet, the Chinese cyber espionage campaign revealed last year that planted spyware on computers of many governments and NGOs. “We’ve developed a network for obfuscation that allows us to view bad actors,” he says.

Uber says he’s speaking publicly about Vigilant at Defcon because he wants to recruit the conference’s breed of young, skilled hackers. By July 2011, the organization hopes to have more than 1,300 new employees.

The organization already has a few big names on its roster. According to a San Francisco Examiner article last month, its volunteer staff includes former NSA official Ira Winkler and Suzanne Gorman, former security chief for the New York Stock Exchange.

http://blogs.forbes.com/firewall/2010/08/01/stealthy-government-contractor-monitors-u-s-internet-providers-says-it-employed-wikileaks-informant/

Related Story From 2002:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/you-are-a-suspect.html

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“Coming to a hospital near you with Obamacare… ya dummy “left” suckers. Sorry about that.”

-F.F.

By Laura Donnelly, Health Correspondent

Some of the most common operations — including hip replacements and cataract surgery — will be rationed as part of attempts to save billions of pounds, despite government promises that front-line services would be protected.

An investigation by The Sunday Telegraph has uncovered widespread cuts planned across the NHS, many of which have already been agreed by senior health service officials. They include:

* Restrictions on some of the most basic and common operations, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic procedures.

* Plans to cut hundreds of thousands of pounds from budgets for the terminally ill, with dying cancer patients to be told to manage their own symptoms if their condition worsens at evenings or weekends.

* The closure of nursing homes for the elderly.

* A reduction in acute hospital beds, including those for the mentally ill, with targets to discourage GPs from sending patients to hospitals and reduce the number of people using accident and emergency departments.

* Tighter rationing of NHS funding for IVF treatment, and for surgery for obesity.

* Thousands of job losses at NHS hospitals, including 500 staff to go at a trust where cancer patients recently suffered delays in diagnosis and treatment because of staff shortages.

* Cost-cutting programmes in paediatric and maternity services, care of the elderly and services that provide respite breaks to long-term carers.

The Sunday Telegraph found the details of hundreds of cuts buried in obscure appendices to lengthy policy and strategy documents published by trusts. In most cases, local communities appear to be unaware of the plans.

Dr Peter Carter, the head of the Royal College of Nursing, said he was “incredibly worried” about the disclosures.

He urged Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, to “get a grip” on the reality of what was going on in the NHS.

The Government has promised to protect the overall budget of the NHS, which will continue to receive above-inflation increases, but said the service must make “efficiency savings” of up to £20 billion by 2014, which would be diverted back to the front line.

Mr Lansley said last month: “This protection for the NHS is protection for patients – to ensure that the sick do not pay for the debt crisis.”

Dr Carter said: “Andrew Lansley keeps saying that the Government will protect the front line from cuts – but the reality appears to be quite the opposite. We are seeing trusts making job cuts even when they have already admitted to being short staffed.

‘‘The statements he makes may be well intentioned – but we would implore him to get a grip on the reality, because these kinds of cuts are incredibly worrying.”

Katherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, said the cuts were “astonishingly brutal” and expressed particular concern at moves to ration operations such as hip and knee operations.

“These are not unusual procedures, this is a really blatant attempt to save money by leaving people in pain,” she said.

“Looking at these kinds of cuts, which trusts have drawn up in such secrecy, it particularly worries me how far they disadvantage the elderly and the vulnerable.

‘‘We cannot return to the days of people waiting in pain for years for a hip operation or having to pay for operations privately.”

She added that it was “incredibly cruel” to draw up savings plans based on denying care to the dying.

On Thursday, the board of Sutton and Merton primary care trust (PCT) in London agreed more than £50 million of savings in two years. The plan included more than £400,000 to be saved by “reducing length of stay” in hospital for the terminally ill.

As well as sending more patients home to die, the paper said the savings would be made by admitting fewer terminally ill cancer patients to hospital because they were struggling to cope with symptoms such as pain. Instead, more patients would be given advice on “self management” of their condition.

Bill Gillespie, the trust’s chief executive, said patients would stay at home, or be discharged from hospital only if that was their choice, and would be given support in their homes.

This week, Hertfordshire PCT plans to discuss attempts to reduce spending by rationing more than 50 common procedures, including hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery and orthodontic treatment.

Doctors across the county have already been told that their patients can have the operations only if they are given “prior approval” by the PCT, with each authorisation made on a “case by case” basis.

Elsewhere, new restrictions have been introduced to limit funding of IVF.

While many infertile couples living in Yorkshire had previously been allowed two cycles of treatment — still short of national guidance to fund three cycles — all the primary care trusts in the county are now restricting treatment to one cycle per couple.

A “turnaround” plan drawn up by Peterborough PCT intends to make almost £100 million of savings by 2013.

Its cuts include closing nursing and residential homes and services for the mentally ill, sending 500 fewer patients to hospital each month, and cutting £17 million from acute and accident and emergency services.

Two weeks ago, Mid Yorkshire Hospitals trust agreed plans to save £55 million in two years, with £20 million coming from about 500 job losses.

Yet, a month before the decision was taken, senior managers at a board meeting described how staff shortages were already causing delays for patients being diagnosed and treated for breast cancer.

Mr Lansley said any trusts that interpreted the Government’s demands for efficiency savings as budget or service cuts were wrong to do so, and were “living in the past”.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/7908742/Axe-falls-on-NHS-services.html

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By JULIA ANGWIN

Hidden inside Ashley Hayes-Beaty’s computer, a tiny file helps gather personal details about her, all to be put up for sale for a tenth of a penny.

The file consists of a single code— 4c812db292272995e5416a323e79bd37—that secretly identifies her as a 26-year-old female in Nashville, Tenn.

The code knows that her favorite movies include “The Princess Bride,” “50 First Dates” and “10 Things I Hate About You.” It knows she enjoys the “Sex and the City” series. It knows she browses entertainment news and likes to take quizzes.

“Well, I like to think I have some mystery left to me, but apparently not!” Ms. Hayes-Beaty said when told what that snippet of code reveals about her. “The profile is eerily correct.”

Ms. Hayes-Beaty is being monitored by Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company that uses sophisticated software called a “beacon” to capture what people are typing on a website—their comments on movies, say, or their interest in parenting and pregnancy. Lotame packages that data into profiles about individuals, without determining a person’s name, and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers. Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s tastes can be sold wholesale (a batch of movie lovers is $1 per thousand) or customized (26-year-old Southern fans of “50 First Dates”).

“We can segment it all the way down to one person,” says Eric Porres, Lotame’s chief marketing officer.

One of the fastest-growing businesses on the Internet, a Wall Street Journal investigation has found, is the business of spying on Internet users.

The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

• The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.

• Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.

• These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

The new technologies are transforming the Internet economy. Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.

In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.

The data on Ms. Hayes-Beaty’s film-watching habits, for instance, is being offered to advertisers on BlueKai Inc., one of the new data exchanges.

“It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”

The Journal examined the 50 most popular U.S. websites, which account for about 40% of the Web pages viewed by Americans. (The Journal also tested its own site, WSJ.com.) It then analyzed the tracking files and programs these sites downloaded onto a test computer.

As a group, the top 50 sites placed 3,180 tracking files in total on the Journal’s test computer. Nearly a third of these were innocuous, deployed to remember the password to a favorite site or tally most-popular articles.

But over two-thirds—2,224—were installed by 131 companies, many of which are in the business of tracking Web users to create rich databases of consumer profiles that can be sold.

The top venue for such technology, the Journal found, was IAC/InterActive Corp.’s Dictionary.com. A visit to the online dictionary site resulted in 234 files or programs being downloaded onto the Journal’s test computer, 223 of which were from companies that track Web users.

The information that companies gather is anonymous, in the sense that Internet users are identified by a number assigned to their computer, not by a specific person’s name. Lotame, for instance, says it doesn’t know the name of users such as Ms. Hayes-Beaty—only their behavior and attributes, identified by code number. People who don’t want to be tracked can remove themselves from Lotame’s system.

And the industry says the data are used harmlessly. David Moore, chairman of 24/7 RealMedia Inc., an ad network owned by WPP PLC, says tracking gives Internet users better advertising.

“When an ad is targeted properly, it ceases to be an ad, it becomes important information,” he says.

Tracking isn’t new. But the technology is growing so powerful and ubiquitous that even some of America’s biggest sites say they were unaware, until informed by the Journal, that they were installing intrusive files on visitors’ computers.

The Journal found that Microsoft Corp.’s popular Web portal, MSN.com, planted a tracking file packed with data: It had a prediction of a surfer’s age, ZIP Code and gender, plus a code containing estimates of income, marital status, presence of children and home ownership, according to the tracking company that created the file, Targus Information Corp.

Both Targus and Microsoft said they didn’t know how the file got onto MSN.com, and added that the tool didn’t contain “personally identifiable” information.

Tracking is done by tiny files and programs known as “cookies,” “Flash cookies” and “beacons.” They are placed on a computer when a user visits a website. U.S. courts have ruled that it is legal to deploy the simplest type, cookies, just as someone using a telephone might allow a friend to listen in on a conversation. Courts haven’t ruled on the more complex trackers.

The most intrusive monitoring comes from what are known in the business as “third party” tracking files. They work like this: The first time a site is visited, it installs a tracking file, which assigns the computer a unique ID number. Later, when the user visits another site affiliated with the same tracking company, it can take note of where that user was before, and where he is now. This way, over time the company can build a robust profile.

One such ecosystem is Yahoo Inc.’s ad network, which collects fees by placing targeted advertisements on websites. Yahoo’s network knows many things about recent high-school graduate Cate Reid. One is that she is a 13- to 18-year-old female interested in weight loss. Ms. Reid was able to determine this when a reporter showed her a little-known feature on Yahoo’s website, the Ad Interest Manager, that displays some of the information Yahoo had collected about her.

Yahoo’s take on Ms. Reid, who was 17 years old at the time, hit the mark: She was, in fact, worried that she may be 15 pounds too heavy for her 5-foot, 6-inch frame. She says she often does online research about weight loss.

“Every time I go on the Internet,” she says, she sees weight-loss ads. “I’m self-conscious about my weight,” says Ms. Reid, whose father asked that her hometown not be given. “I try not to think about it…. Then [the ads] make me start thinking about it.”

Yahoo spokeswoman Amber Allman says Yahoo doesn’t knowingly target weight-loss ads at people under 18, though it does target adults.

“It’s likely this user received an untargeted ad,” Ms. Allman says. It’s also possible Ms. Reid saw ads targeted at her by other tracking companies.

Information about people’s moment-to-moment thoughts and actions, as revealed by their online activity, can change hands quickly. Within seconds of visiting eBay.com or Expedia.com, information detailing a Web surfer’s activity there is likely to be auctioned on the data exchange run by BlueKai, the Seattle startup.

Each day, BlueKai sells 50 million pieces of information like this about specific individuals’ browsing habits, for as little as a tenth of a cent apiece. The auctions can happen instantly, as a website is visited.

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