Fascism + Solutions

[joeblast]

hah, about nil, I think. there will be too many voices claiming there would be some explosion in gun violence - despite what just about every bit of data suggests wrt gun density and overall levels of violence in a given locale.

[joeblast]

this is about as amusing as howard stern asking homeless people about which candidate they're going to vote for

 

[zerostao]

boycott verizon

 

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2012/12/fisa-passes-warrantless-wiretapping-will-live/60403/

Edited June 6, 2013 by zerostao

[joeblast]

related, and probably a repost, but

 

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/05/70908

[Apech]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data

 

PRISM is watching you.

[gendao]

WASHINGTON (AP) — A leaked document has laid bare the monumental scope of the government's surveillance of Americans' phone records — hundreds of millions of calls

 

a court order, first disclosed Wednesday by The Guardian newspaper in Britain, that requires the communications company Verizon to turn over on an "ongoing, daily basis" the records of all landline and mobile telephone calls of its customers, both within the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.

 

Separately, The Washington Post and The Guardian reported Thursday the existence of another program used by the NSA and FBI that scours the nation's main Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, emails, documents and connection logs to help analysts track a person's movements and contacts. It was not clear whether the program, called PRISM, targets known suspects or broadly collects data from other Americans.

 

The companies include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. The Post said PalTalk has had numerous posts about the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. It also said Dropbox would soon be included

 

One outraged senator, Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said of the phone-records collecting: "When law-abiding Americans make phone calls, who they call, when they call and where they call is private information. As a result of the discussion that came to light today, now we're going to have a real debate."

 

The surveillance powers are granted under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, which was renewed in 2006 and again in 2011.

 

"This confirms our worst fears," said Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project. "If the government can track who we call," he said, "the right to privacy has not just been compromised — it has been defeated."

 

Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., who sponsored the USA Patriot Act that governs the collection, said he was "extremely troubled by the FBI's interpretation of this legislation."

 

Attorney General Eric Holder sidestepped questions about the issue during an appearance before a Senate subcommittee, offering instead to discuss it at a classified session that several senators said they would arrange.

 

House Speaker John Boehner called on Obama to explain why the program is necessary.

 

The disclosure comes at a particularly inopportune time for the Obama administration. The president already faces questions over the Internal Revenue Service's improper targeting of conservative groups, the seizure of journalists' phone records in an investigation into who leaked information to the media, and the administration's handling of the terrorist attack in Libya that left four Americans dead.

 

The Verizon order, granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on April 25 and good until July 19, requires information on the phone numbers of both parties on a call, as well as call time and duration, and unique identifiers, according to The Guardian.

 

"Verizon continually takes steps to safeguard its customers' privacy," he wrote. "Nevertheless, the law authorizes the federal courts to order a company to provide information in certain circumstances, and if Verizon were to receive such an order, we would be required to comply."

 

Under Bush, the NSA built a highly classified wiretapping program to monitor emails and phone calls worldwide. The full details of that program remain unknown

 

The FISA court order, signed by Judge Roger Vinson, compelled Verizon to provide the NSA with electronic copies of "all call detail records or telephony metadata created by Verizon for communications between the United States and abroad" or "wholly within the United States, including local telephone calls," The Guardian said.

 

The law on which the order explicitly relies is the "business records" provision of the Patriot Act.

NSA taps in to internet giants' systems to mine user data, secret files reveal

• Top secret PRISM program claims direct access to servers of firms including Google, Facebook and Apple

• Companies deny any knowledge of program in operation since 2007

 

Some of the world's largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft – which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan "Your privacy is our priority" – was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

 

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

 

Collectively, the companies cover the vast majority of online email, search, video and communications networks.

The NSA has become the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever.

Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of the “total information awareness” program created during the first term of the Bush administration—an effort that was killed by Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for invading Americans’ privacy.

 

The upshot, according to this official: “Everybody’s a target; everybody with communication is a target.”

 

For the NSA, overflowing with tens of billions of dollars in post-9/11 budget awards, the cryptanalysis breakthrough came at a time of explosive growth, in size as well as in power.

 

NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it’s all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the old adage that NSA stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.

 

When construction is completed in 2013, the heavily fortified $2 billion facility in Bluffdale will encompass 1 million square feet.

 

Once it’s operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA’s cloud. The center will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US.

 

Before yottabytes of data from the deep web and elsewhere can begin piling up inside the servers of the NSA’s new center, they must be collected. To better accomplish that, the agency has undergone the largest building boom in its history, including installing secret electronic monitoring rooms in major US telecom facilities. Controlled by the NSA, these highly secured spaces are where the agency taps into the US communications networks, a practice that came to light during the Bush years but was never acknowledged by the agency.

 

For the first time, a former NSA official has gone on the record to describe the program, codenamed Stelar Wind, in detail. William Binney was a senior NSA crypto-mathematician largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network.

 

The former NSA official held his thumb and forefinger close together: “We are that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Binney left the NSA in late 2001, shortly after the agency launched its warrantless-wiretapping program. “They violated the Constitution setting it up,” he says bluntly. “But they didn’t care. They were going to do it anyway, and they were going to crucify anyone who stood in the way. When they started violating the Constitution, I couldn’t stay.” Binney says Stelar Wind was far larger than has been publicly disclosed and included not just eavesdropping on domestic phone calls but the inspection of domestic email. At the outset the program recorded 320 million calls a day, he says, which represented about 73 to 80 percent of the total volume of the agency’s worldwide intercepts. The haul only grew from there. According to Binney—who has maintained close contact with agency employees until a few years ago—the taps in the secret rooms dotting the country are actually powered by highly sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light.

 

The software, created by a company called Nar us that’s now part of Boeing, is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland and searches US sources for target addresses, locations, countries, and phone numbers, as well as watch-listed names, keywords, and phrases in email. Any communication that arouses suspicion, especially those to or from the million or so people on agency watch lists, are automatically copied or recorded and then transmitted to the NSA.

 

The scope of surveillance expands from there, Binney says. Once a name is entered into the Nar us database, all phone calls and other communications to and from that person are automatically routed to the NSA’s recorders. “Anybody you want, route to a recorder,” Binney says. “If your number’s in there? Routed and gets recorded.” He adds, “The Nar us device allows you to take it all.” And when Bluffdale is completed, whatever is collected will be routed there for storage and analysis.

 

According to Binney, one of the deepest secrets of the Stelar Wind program—again, never confirmed until now—was that the NSA gained warrantless access to AT&T’s vast trove of domestic and international billing records, detailed information about who called whom in the US and around the world. As of 2007, AT&T had more than 2.8 trillion records housed in a database at its Florham Park, New Jersey, complex.

 

Verizon was also part of the program, Binney says, and that greatly expanded the volume of calls subject to the agency’s domestic eavesdropping. “That multiplies the call rate by at least a factor of five,” he says. “So you’re over a billion and a half calls a day.” (Spokespeople for Verizon and AT&T said their companies would not comment on matters of national security.)

 

After he left the NSA, Binney suggested a system for monitoring people’s communications according to how closely they are connected to an initial target. The further away from the target—say you’re just an acquaintance of a friend of the target—the less the surveillance. But the agency rejected the idea, and, given the massive new storage facility in Utah, Binney suspects that it now simply collects everything. “The whole idea was, how do you manage 20 terabytes of intercept a minute?” he says. “The way we proposed was to distinguish between things you want and things you don’t want.” Instead, he adds, “they’re storing everything they gather.” And the agency is gathering as much as it can.

 

Once the communications are intercepted and stored, the data-mining begins. “You can watch everybody all the time with data- mining,” Binney says. Everything a person does becomes charted on a graph, “financial transactions or travel or anything,” he says.

 

According to Adrienne J. Kinne, who worked both before and after 9/11 as a voice interceptor at the NSA facility in Georgia, in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks “basically all rules were thrown out the window, and they would use any excuse to justify a waiver to spy on Americans.” Even journalists calling home from overseas were included. “A lot of time you could tell they were calling their families,” she says, “incredibly intimate, personal conversations.” Kinne found the act of eavesdropping on innocent fellow citizens personally distressing. “It’s almost like going through and finding somebody’s diary,” she says.

 

Before he gave up and left the NSA, Binney tried to persuade officials to create a more targeted system that could be authorized by a court. At the time, the agency had 72 hours to obtain a legal warrant, and Binney devised a method to computerize the system. “I had proposed that we automate the process of requesting a warrant and automate approval so we could manage a couple of million intercepts a day, rather than subvert the whole process.” But such a system would have required close coordination with the courts, and NSA officials weren’t interested in that, Binney says. Instead they continued to haul in data on a grand scale. Asked how many communications—”transactions,” in NSA’s lingo—the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at “between 15 and 20 trillion, the aggregate over 11 years.”

 

There is still one technology preventing untrammeled government access to private digital data: strong encryption. Anyone—from terrorists and weapons dealers to corporations, financial institutions, and ordinary email senders—can use it to seal their messages, plans, photos, and documents in hardened data shells. For years, one of the hardest shells has been the Advanced Encryption Standard, one of several algorithms used by much of the world to encrypt data. Available in three different strengths—128 bits, 192 bits, and 256 bits—it’s incorporated in most commercial email programs and web browsers and is considered so strong that the NSA has even approved its use for top-secret US government communications. Most experts say that a so-called brute-force computer attack on the algorithm—trying one combination after another to unlock the encryption—would likely take longer than the age of the universe.

Great usage of OUR tax dollars!!

 

Well, I guess America gets what America voted for..

 

As a freshman at Columbia University in 1970, future Attorney General Eric Holder participated in a five-day occupation of an abandoned Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) headquarters with a group of black students later described by the university’s Black Students’ Organization as “armed,”

Holder was then among the leaders of the Student Afro-American Society (SAAS), which demanded that the former ROTC office be renamed the “Malcolm X Lounge.” The change, the group insisted, was to be made “in honor of a man who recognized the importance of territory as a basis for nationhood.”

 

Holder, now the United States’ highest-ranking law enforcement official

 

The ROTC headquarters was ultimately renamed the Malcolm X lounge as the SAAS organization demanded. It later became a hang-out spot for another future U.S. leader, Barack Obama, according to David Maraniss’ best-selling ”Barack Obama: The Story.”

 

The BSO reported on its website as recently as 2010 that those students were “armed with guns.”

 

The SAAS also actively supported the Black Panthers and the Black Power movement

 

Though Columbia never met all of the black militants’ demands, it brought more black students to campus through its affirmative action program, introduced Black Studies courses and hired black radical Charles V. Hamilton — co-author of “Black Power” with Black Panther Party ”Honorary Prime Minister” Stokely Carmichael (by then renamed Kwame Ture).

 

In March 1970 the SAAS released a statement supporting twenty-one Black Panthers charged with plotting to blow up department stores, railroad tracks, a police station and the New York Botanical Gardens.

 

Less than a month later, that organization joined other minority activist groups in a coalition that demanded the retraction of a letter to President Gerald Ford, signed by six Columbia professors, that argued against affirmative action and racial quotas.

 

“Merit should be rewarded, without regard to race, sex, creed, or any other external factor,” the professors wrote to President Ford. Following a campaign marked by what two of those professors called “rhetoric and names hurled” at them, they changed their position and denied they actually opposed affirmative action.

 

The Columbia Spectator’s editorial page later argued against affirmative action as a factor in university admissions, touching off another controversy with the coalition that included the Black American Law Students Association. “Affirmative action is just a nice name for a quota, and quotas are just a nice name for racism,” the editorial board wrote.

"Ironically," Eric Holder would have labeled himself an "armed, radical terorrist" and arrested Obama for being a pothead.

Edited June 7, 2013 by vortex

[joeblast]

staging events has got to stop

 

http://www.myfoxdetroit.com/story/22527213/leduff-detroit-polices-simulated-purse-snatching-goes-awry

[joeblast]

HFT algorithms should be made illegal. what of "free" if you're trying to compete with programs that can screw with you on a millisecond level? Nothing short of criminal.

 

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-07/here-todays-482-millisecond-nfp-leak-and-subsequent-gold-slam-and-trading-halts-trea

[zerostao]

this phone and net snooping must be what was meant by transperency, right?

[ralis]

Glenn Greenwald, journalist for the Guardian, broke the story on the NSA data collecting. To blame any one President is missing the point given that these surveillance programs go back decades. The Congress is ultimately responsible for reigning in such blatant disregard for the Constitution!

 

Every single time any major media outlet reports on something that the government is hiding, that political officials don't want people to know, such as the fact that they are collecting the phone records of all Americans, regardless of any suspicion of wrongdoing, the people in power do exactly the same thing. They attack the media as the messenger and they are trying to discredit the story. This has been going back decades, ever since the Pentagon papers were released by the New York Times, and political officials said you are endangering national security. The only thing we've endangered is the reputation of the people in power who are building this massive spying apparatus about any accountability who are trying to hide from the American people what it is that they are doing.

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/09/glenn-greenwald-this-week-should-expect-more-revelations_n_3411834.html

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order

 

 

Orwellian crowd control as depicted in '1984'. http://www.amazon.com/Nineteen-eighty-four-ebook/dp/B004EEP7JW/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370798296&sr=1-1&keywords=1984

 

Hobbes was positing in 'Leviathan' that an absolute monarch is necessary to reign in human nature via a rigidly defined 'social contract', in this case evolving technology which can be used to enforce an orderly social behavior/construct, defined by the ruling elite. This is just another case of fear being used against the masses. There are some that believe that humans must be ruled by an 'iron fist'.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Leviathan-Philosophical-Classics-Thomas-Hobbes/dp/0486447944

 

How much power will this put in the hands of a future President as this technology evolves? Is power the ultimate drug/addiction?

 

Fascism does not come about by the government working alone but by the intrusion/partnership of the corporate world. Corporations developing technology that can be used for sinister purposes.

 

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/all-the-infrastructure-a-tyrant-would-need-courtesy-of-bush-and-obama/276635/

 

 

Edited June 9, 2013 by ralis

[zerostao]

ok ralis, i agree it is all presidents and in collusion with the rest of govt, and probably including scotus,

shadow govt, and the worldwide corporations.

proposed solution?

edit>> we can blame kant too, but we need a solution

Edited June 9, 2013 by zerostao

[ralis]

ok ralis, i agree it is all presidents and in collusion with the rest of govt, and probably including scotus,

shadow govt, and the worldwide corporations.

proposed solution?

edit>> we can blame kant too, but we need a solution

 

 

1. Repeal 'Citizens United' which will eliminate corporation speech in influencing politics. Money is not speech! Corporations are not persons.

 

2. Enforce the 'Sherman Antitrust Act by breaking up the corporate monopolies.

 

3. Bring back the 'Fairness Doctrine'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

 

4. Reinstate 'Glass Steagall' or a more powerful version which will break up the Wall Street banks. Investment banking will be separate from commercial banking. Wall Street has been supporting the multinational corporations with cheap money. E.g. Goldman Sachs can borrow money from the Fed at .75% interest, then invests those loans to short the market or whatever it wishes.

 

5. Corporate licensing must be for a limited amount of time. No exceptions.

 

6. If a corporation violates it's charter, then such entity receives the death penalty.

 

7. Intellectual property patents will expire in x number of years. Microsoft and other behemoths will no longer dominate.

 

8. Reinstate corporate taxes of at least 70% over the first 2 million such that business owners will grow a company as opposed to looting it. Before Reagan the marginal rate was 70%. After Reagan reduced the rates, the wealthy use the tax cuts to invest in the markets which overvalued; stocks, commodities etc. which lead to bubble markets.

Edited June 9, 2013 by ralis

[ralis]

Another example of corporate fascist power. Warner Bros. levies fines against P2P file sharing. How in the hell can a corporation levy a fine without legal due process in a court of law?

 

 

http://torrentfreak.com/warner-bros-were-fining-file-sharers-who-use-non-six-strike-isps-130607/

[zerostao]

when money is speech there certainly is no such thing as free speech.

what would all the congressman do without the fat political contributions from goldman sachs?

if we compromise from the 70% rate to the 28% rate that reagon brought in, that would be 49%.

taxes on overseas us corporations 85%. overseas us corporations wtf anyways. traitors

fairness doctrine sounds fair.

 

http://zend2.com/

 

returning the authority of the us constitution to include the bill of rights.

break up the big banks, also the us offers bonds each month and then buys them themself

this is part of the problem as it artificially sets the market. what type of market does that, if i harvest apples and set them out on a fruit stand and then decide to buy them all myself ? seems like i would get sick from eating apples.

clone and reinstate teddy roosevelt. if that doesnt work clone thomas jefferson and george washington.

 

support the group anonymous , i have no idea how to do that however.

start manufacturing guillotines ? and clone andrew jackson

march on monsanto , there is no benefit from gmo to the consumer the only benefit is for the corp

 

the upper middle class needs to step away from the elite.

end a never ending war that was only a war designed to arrive at the conditions we now have.

there is the chance that our military instead of turning on its own citizens would do the correct, right, and just thing

if it came to that.

 

Edited June 9, 2013 by zerostao

[zerostao]

sounds like warner brothers is practicing extortion and there is going to be alot more of that coming i reckon

[ralis]

Latest update on the NSA. Edward Snowden who is the source of the leak to Glenn Greenwald was interviewed after he fled to Hong Kong. A whistleblower with balls! I imagine the government will want to prosecute him under the espionage act.

 

 

I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building.

 

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/09/edward-snowden-nsa-leak-guardian-whistleblower-nsa-revelations_n_3412245.html

[ralis]

when money is speech there certainly is no such thing as free speech.

what would all the congressman do without the fat political contributions from goldman sachs?

if we compromise from the 70% rate to the 28% rate that reagon brought in, that would be 49%.

taxes on overseas us corporations 85%. overseas us corporations wtf anyways. traitors

fairness doctrine sounds fair.

 

http://zend2.com/

 

returning the authority of the us constitution to include the bill of rights.

break up the big banks, also the us offers bonds each month and then buys them themself

this is part of the problem as it artificially sets the market. what type of market does that, if i harvest apples and set them out on a fruit stand and then decide to buy them all myself ? seems like i would get sick from eating apples.

clone and reinstate teddy roosevelt. if that doesnt work clone thomas jefferson and george washington.

 

support the group anonymous , i have no idea how to do that however.

start manufacturing guillotines ? and clone andrew jackson

march on monsanto , there is no benefit from gmo to the consumer the only benefit is for the corp

 

the upper middle class needs to step away from the elite.

end a never ending war that was only a war designed to arrive at the conditions we now have.

there is the chance that our military instead of turning on its own citizens would do the correct, right, and just thing

if it came to that.

 

 

If you use http://zend2.com/ make certain there are no DNS leaks.

Edited June 9, 2013 by ralis

[ralis]

Bill Moyers interviews Richard Wolff who details some solutions to the problem.

 

[ralis]

Just read the interview with Edward Snowden. If what he says is true, the NSA is far worse than anyone can imagine.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-why

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/edward-snowden-says-motive-behind-leaks-was-to-expose-surveillance-state/2013/06/09/aa3f0804-d13b-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html

Edited June 10, 2013 by ralis

[ralis]

Government insists that 'Prism program' be kept secret.

 

 

Frankly, it’s difficult to understand what DOJ is saying. The Government seems to have a knee-jerk inclination towards secrecy, one that often – as in this case – simply defies logic. The government's bottom line is this: their rules trump the public's statutory rights. But it's not the province of the Executive branch to determine which rights citizens get to assert.

 

 

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/government-says-secret-court-opinion-law-underlying-prism-program-needs-stay

 

Are we seeing an end to the great experiment of Democracy? Is Democracy too much too handle? For unevolved humans it is!

[ralis]

This is a good one.

 

 

Congressman Michael McCaul, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, said protecting American lives was the most important mission. But McCaul, a Texas Republican, said one way to ease some concerns about the phone records program might be to curtail the government's role in storing the data and turn that responsibility over to private companies.

 

 

 

"I think it's the warehousing of all the phone records from all the major carriers within the federal government is what gives most people the great concern," McCaul said. "I think it could be run through the private sector as we used to do it, and that's something I think we'll be looking at in the Congress."

 

Oh yea! Just let the private sector take care of it. Give the corporations more power!

 

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/sns-rt-us-usa-security-lawmakersbre9580ab-20130609,0,711549.story

[ralis]

I forgot to mention that Edward Snowden worked for a private corporate contractor for the NSA.

[Tung]

I forgot to mention that Edward Snowden worked for a private corporate contractor for the NSA.

 

Yes and thats why they businesses can say, we don't work whit the government, and the government can say we don't do any surveillance.

 

 

And of course the definition they use for words like surveillance and what ever is not the same as the public use.

 

Of course he only had fraction of insight to what the Nsa are doing, this is old news, an retired nsa worker has already been talking about this for some time.

[joeblast]

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-06-09/nsa-whistleblower-reveals-himself

[zerostao]

with all of this news coming at us at rapid fire rate

irs and they say it is cased closed lmao

the ap/fox news media

this nsa leak

and an american defects to china

which is the more surprising?