U.S. Government spying on entire U.S., to nobody's surprise

[SpasticGramps]

steps which would go a long way towards fixing a broken, out dated system.

History show us that a system this large, corrupt, and broken gets fixed when it eventually collapses onto itself.

A new system arises from the decayed old one. Sometimes for better. Many times for worse.

I'm not poo'ing poo'ing voting. The end result is nonetheless going to be the same IMO.

When nations lose faith in their political and economic system nothing is off the table. I look at the Middle East, Japan, Europe, China, and more and more now the US and see a global population losing faith in an broken, old, and out dated totalitarian system.

 

[idiit]

^ exactly.

 

[Tudo]

PRISM underlines that the US has almost achieved what the USSR could only dream of: a global security state where every citizen's life is transparent and documented through data. But as this urge to control is taken forwards through state possession of DNA - a human's most basic code - resistance against Washington's rapidly expanding surveillance will also spread across the planet. - Tom Engelhardt (



DISPATCHES FROM AMERICA
The making of a global security state
By Tom Engelhardt

As happens with so much news these days, the Edward Snowden revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) spying and just how far we've come in the building of a surveillance state have swept over us 24/7 - waves of leaks, videos, charges, claims, counterclaims, skullduggery, and government threats. When a flood sweeps you away, it's always hard to find a little dry land to survey the extent and nature of the damage. Here's my attempt to look beyond the daily drumbeat of this developing story (which, it is promised, will go on for weeks, if not months) and identify five urges essential to understanding the world Edward Snowden has helped us glimpse.

1: The urge to be global
Corporately speaking, globalization has been ballyhooed since at least the 1990s, but in governmental terms only in the 21st century has that globalizing urge fully infected the workings of the American state itself. It's become common since 9/11 to speak of a "national security state". But if a week of ongoing revelations about NSA surveillance practices has revealed anything, it's that the term is already grossly outdated. Based on what we now know, we should be talking about an American global security state.

Much attention has, understandably enough, been lavished on the phone and other metadata about American citizens that the NSA is now sweeping up and about the ways in which such activities may be abrogating the First and Fourth Amendments of the US constitution. Far less attention has been paid to the ways in which the NSA (and other US intelligence outfits) are sweeping up global data in part via the just-revealed PRISM and other surveillance programs.

Sometimes, naming practices are revealing in themselves, and the National Security Agency's key data mining tool, capable in March 2013 of gathering "97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide", has been named "Boundless Informant". If you want a sense of where the US intelligence community imagines itself going, you couldn't ask for a better hint than that word "boundless". It seems that for our spooks, there are, conceptually speaking, no limits left on this planet.

Today, that "community" seeks to put not just the US but the world fully under its penetrating gaze. By now, the first "heat map" has been published showing where such information is being sucked up from monthly: Iran tops the list (14 billion pieces of intelligence); then come Pakistan (13.5 billion), Jordan (12.7 billion), Egypt (7.6 billion), and India (6.3 billion). Whether you realize this or not, even for a superpower that has unprecedented numbers of military bases scattered across the planet and has divided the world into six military commands, this represents something new under the sun. The only question is what?

The 20th century was the century of "totalitarianisms". We don't yet have a name, a term, for the surveillance structures Washington is building in this century, but there can be no question that, whatever the present constraints on the system, "total" has something to do with it and that we are being ushered into a new world. Despite the recent leaks, we still undoubtedly have a very limited picture of just what the present American surveillance world really looks like and what it plans for our future. One thing is clear, however: the ambitions behind it are staggering and global.

In the classic totalitarian regimes of the previous century, a secret police/surveillance force attempted, via every imaginable method, including informers, wire tappers, torture techniques, imprisonment, and so on to take total control of a national environment, to turn every citizen's life into the equivalent of an open book, or more accurately a closed, secret file lodged somewhere in that police system.

The most impressive of these efforts, the most global, was the Soviet one, simply because the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - the USSR - was an imperial power with a set of disparate almost-states (those SSRs of the Caucasus and Central Asia) within its borders, and a series of Eastern European satellite states under its control as well. None of the 20th-century totalitarian regimes, however, ever imagined doing the same thing on a genuinely global basis. There was no way to do so.

Washington's urge to take control of the global communications environment, lock, stock, and chat room, to gather its "data" - billions and billions of pieces of it - and via inconceivably powerful computer systems, mine and arrange it, find patterns in it, and so turn the world into a secret set of connections, represents a remarkable development.

For the first time, a great power wants to know, up close and personal, not just what its own citizens are doing, but those of distant lands as well: who they are communicating with, and how, and why, and what they are buying, and where they are traveling, and who they are bumping into (online and over the phone).

Until recently, once you left the environs of science fiction, that was simply beyond imagining. You could certainly find precursors for such a development in, for instance, the Cold War intelligence community's urge to create a global satellite system that would bring every inch of the planet under a new kind of surveillance regime, that would map it thoroughly and identify what was being mapped down to the square inch, but nothing so globally up close and personal.

The next two urges are intertwined in such a way that they might be thought as a single category: your codes and theirs.

2: The urge to make you transparent
The urge to possess you, or everything that can be known about you, has clearly taken possession of our global security state. With this, it's become increasingly apparent, go other disturbing trends. Take something seemingly unrelated: the recent Supreme Court decision that allows the police to take a DNA swab from an arrestee (if the crime he or she is charged with is "serious"). Theoretically, this is being done for "identification" purposes, but in fact it's already being put to other uses entirely, especially in the solving of separate crimes.

If you stop to think about it, this development, in turn, represents a remarkable new level of state intrusion on private life, on your self. It means that, for the first time, in a sure-to-widen set of circumstances, the state increasingly has access not just - as with NSA surveillance - to your Internet codes and modes of communication, but to your most basic code of all, your DNA. As Justice Antonin Scalia put it in his dissent in the case, "Make no mistake about it: as an entirely predictable consequence of today's decision, your DNA can be taken and entered into a national DNA database if you are ever arrested, rightly or wrongly, and for whatever reason." Can global DNA databases be far behind?

If your DNA becomes the possession of the state, then you are a transparent human being at the most basic level imaginable. At every level, however, the pattern, the trend, the direction is the same (and it's the same whether you're talking about the government or giant corporations). Increasingly, access to you, your codes, your communications, your purchases, your credit card transactions, your location, your travels, your exchanges with friends, your tastes, your likes and dislikes is what's wanted - for what's called your "safety" in the case of government and your business in the case of corporations.

Both want access to everything that can be known about you because who knows until later what may prove the crucial piece of information to uncover a terrorist network or lure in a new network of customers. They want everything, at least, that can be run through a system of massive computers and sorted into patterns of various potentially useful kinds. You are to be, in this sense, the transparent man or transparent woman. Your acts, your life patterns, your rights, your codes are to be an open book to them - and increasingly a closed book to you. You are to be their secret and that "you" is an ever more global one.

3: The urge to make themselves opaque
With this goes another reality. "They" are to become ever less accessible, ever more impenetrable, ever less knowable to you (except in the forms in which they would prefer you to know them). None of their codes or secrets are to be accessed by you on pain of imprisonment. Everything in the government - which once was thought to be "your" government - is increasingly disappearing into a professional universe of secrecy.

In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, the government classified 92 million documents. And they did so on the same principle that they use in collecting seemingly meaningless or harmless information from you: that only in retrospect can anyone know whether a benign-looking document might prove anything but. Better to deny access to everything.

In the process, they are finding new ways of imposing silence on you, even when it comes to yourself. Since 2001, for instance, it has become possible for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to present you with a National Security Letter, which forces you to turn over information to them, but far more strikingly gags you from ever mentioning publicly that you got such a letter. Those who have received such letters (and 15,000 of them were issued in 2012) are legally enjoined from discussing or even acknowledging what's happening to them; their lives, that is, are no longer theirs to discuss. If that isn't Orwellian, what is?

President Barack Obama offered this reassurance in the wake of the Snowden leaks: the National Security Agency, he insisted, is operating under the supervision of all three branches of the government. In fact, the opposite could be said to be true. All three branches, especially in their oversight roles, have been brought within the penumbra of secrecy of the global security state and so effectively co-opted or muzzled. This is obviously true with our ex-professor of constitutional law and the executive branch over which he now presides and which has in recent years been ramping up its own secret operations.

When it comes to congress, the people's representatives who are to perform oversight on the secret world have been presented with the equivalent of National Security Letters; that is, when let in on some of the secrets of that world, they find they can't discuss them, can't tell the American people about them, can't openly debate them in congress. In public sessions with congress, we now know that those who run our most secret outfits, if pushed to the wall by difficult questions, will as a concession respond in the "least untruthful manner" possible, as Director of National Intelligence James Clapper put it last week.

Given the secret world's control over congress, representatives who are horrified by what they've learned about our government's secrecy and surveillance practices, like Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, can only hint at their worries and fears. They can, in essence, wink at you, signal to you in obscure ways that something is out of whack, but they can't tell you directly. Secrecy, after all.

Similarly, the judiciary, that third branch of government and other body of oversight, has, in the 21st century, been fully welcomed into the global security state's atmosphere of total secrecy. So when the surveillance crews go to the judiciary for permission to listen in on the world, they go to a secret court, a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) court, locked within that secret world.

It, in turn, notoriously rubber-stamps whatever it is "they" want to do, evidently offering no resistance whatsoever to "their" desires. (Of the 6,556 electronic surveillance requests submitted to the court in Obama's first term in office, for instance, only one was denied.) In addition, unlike any other court in America, we, the American people, the transparent and ignorant public, can know next to nothing about it. And you know perfectly well why: the overriding needs of secrecy.

What, though, is the point of "oversight" if you can't do anything other than what that secret world wants you to do? We are, in other words, increasingly open to them and "they" are increasingly closed to us.

4: The urge to expand
As we've known at least since Dana Priest and William Arkin published their stunning series, "Top Secret America", in the Washington Post in 2010, the US intelligence community has expanded post-9/11 to levels unimaginable even in the Cold War era. Then, of course, it faced another superpower, not a small set of jihadis largely located in the backlands of the planet. It now exists on, as Arkin says, an "industrial scale". And its urge to continue growing, to build yet more structures for surveillance, including a vast US$2 billion NSA repository in Bluffdale, Utah, that will be capable of holding an almost unimaginable yottabyte (equivalent of 1 trillion terabytes) of data, is increasingly written into its DNA.

For this vast, restless, endless expansion of surveillance of every sort and at every level, for the nearly half-million or possibly far more private contractors, aka "digital Blackwater", now in the government surveillance business - about 70% of the national intelligence budget reportedly goes to the private sector these days - and the nearly 5 million Americans with security clearances (1.4 million with top security clearances, more than a third of them private contractors), the official explanation is "terrorism".

It matters little that terrorism as a phenomenon is one of the lesser dangers Americans face in their daily lives and that, for some of the larger ones, ranging from food-borne illnesses to cars, guns, and what's now called "extreme weather", no one would think about building vast bureaucratic structures shrouded in secrecy, funded to the hilt, and offering Americans promises of ultimate safety.

Terrorism certainly rears its ugly head from time to time, and there's no question that the fear of some operation getting through the vast US security net drives the employees of our global security state. As an explanation for the phenomenal growth of that state, however, it simply doesn't hold water. In truth, compared to the previous century, US enemies are remarkably scarce on this planet.

So forget the official explanation and imagine our global-security-state-in-the-making in the grip of a kind of compulsive disorder in which the urge to go global makes the most private information of citizens everywhere the property of the American state and expanding surveillance endlessly simply trumps any other way of doing things.

In other words, "they" can't help themselves. The process, the phenomenon, has them by the throat, so much so that they can imagine no other way of being. In this mood, they are paving the way for a new global security - or rather insecurity - world. They are, for instance, hiking spending on "cyber-security", have already secretly launched the planet's first cyber-war, are planning for more of them, intend to dominate the future cyber-landscape in a staggering fashion, continue to gather global data of every sort on a massive scale, and more generally are acting in ways that they would consider criminal if other countries engaged in them.

5: The urge to leak
The massive leaks of documents by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have few precedents in American history. Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers leak is their only obvious predecessor. They are not, however, happenstances of our moment. They are signs of what's to come. If, in surveillance terms, the urge to go global and impose ultimate secrecy on both the state's secrets and yours, to prosecute whistleblowers to the maximum (at this point usually via the Espionage Act or, in the case of Manning, via the charge of "aiding the enemy", and with calls of "treason" already in the air when it comes to Snowden), it's natural that the urge to leak will rise as well.

If the surveillance state has reached an industrial level of operations, and ever more secrets are being brought into computer systems, then vast troves of secrets exist to be revealed, already cached, organized, and ready for the plucking. If the security state itself goes global, then the urge to leak will go global, too.

In fact, it already has. It's easy to forget that WikiLeaks was originally created not just for American secrets but any secrets. Similarly, Manning uploaded his vast trove of secrets from Iraq, and Snowden, who had already traveled the world in the service of secrecy, leaked to an American columnist living in Brazil and writing for a British newspaper. His flight to Hong Kong and dream of Icelandic citizenship could be considered another version of the globalizing impulse.

Rest assured, they will not be the last. An all-enveloping atmosphere of secrecy is not a natural state of being. Just look at us individually. We love to tell stories about each other. Gossiping is one of the most basic of human activities. Revealing what others don't know is an essential urge. The urge, that is, to open it all up is at least as powerful as the urge to shut it all down.

So in our age, considering the gigantism of the US surveillance and intelligence apparatus and the secrets it holds, it's a given that the leak, too, will become more gigantic, that leaked documents will multiply in droves, and that resistance to regimes of secrecy and the invasion of private life that goes with them will also become more global.

It's hard from within the US to imagine the shock in Pakistan, or Germany, or India, on discovering that your private life may now be the property of the US government. (Imagine for a second the reaction here if Snowden had revealed that the Pakistani or Iranian or Chinese government was gathering and storing vast quantities of private emails, texts, phone calls, and credit card transactions from American citizens. The uproar would have been staggering.)

As a result of all this, we face a strangely contradictory future in which ever more draconian regimes of secrecy will confront the urge for ever greater transparency. President Obama came into office promising a "sunshine" administration that would open the workings of the government to the American people. He didn't deliver, but Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden, and other leakers have, and no matter how difficult the government makes it to leak or how hard it cracks down on leakers, the urge is almost as unstoppable as the urge not to be your government's property.

You may have secrets, but you are not a secret - and you know it.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture (just published in a Kindle edition), runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.


http://atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-180613.html

 

[HempKat]

History show us that a system this large, corrupt, and broken gets fixed when it eventually collapses onto itself.

A new system arises from the decayed old one. Sometimes for better. Many times for worse.

I'm not poo'ing poo'ing voting. The end result is nonetheless going to be the same IMO.

When nations lose faith in their political and economic system nothing is off the table. I look at the Middle East, Japan, Europe, China, and more and more now the US and see a global population losing faith in an broken, old, and out dated totalitarian system.

Perhaps, but I just don't like suggesting that it's totally helpless and there is nothing we can do because it was just that kind of apathetic thinking that got us here in the first place. Whatever happens, whether we get what we already have back on track and working the way it was meant to, or it crashes and burns and something new arises from the ashes, we got to stop thinking we can put a few people in office and then turn our backs and trust them to only do the right thing for the next several years. That was okay in the late 1700's and with a much smaller, more spread out, less diverse population with less access to information and education. Now a days it's very wishful (bordering on crazy) thinking it can be that way.

 

[bentom187]

The Pursuit Of Liberty
[YOUTUBEIF]vqF9haLXD0A[/YOUTUBEIF]

i present ,ye old roman/pegan death cult tolitarian system....

if anyone want's to see how far gone this nation/species, is you can take a peek down the rabbit hole of history.it might not be nice but ignoring it makes it worst. apathy is the enemy. also check the video's description box for references,i just don't want this post to be deleted for being too long and slightly off topic.i will PM people with material if they would like to know more.



The U.S. is a Corporation Shipwreck on the Sea of Souls
[YOUTUBEIF]0SbD7rhj7sk[/YOUTUBEIF]

The Three Crowns
[YOUTUBEIF]rMVzCfk27Yc[/YOUTUBEIF]

"WHAT HAPPENED TO THE CONSTITUTION"
[YOUTUBEIF]UsMvrXtX0us[/YOUTUBEIF]

The results of due diligence........

CQV Cestui Que Vie Trust -- Appointing the Judge Trustee in New Hampshire
[YOUTUBEIF]gQ0Y_jjlCTQ[/YOUTUBEIF]

 

[SpasticGramps]

we got to stop thinking we can put a few people in office and then turn our backs and trust them to only do the right thing for the next several years.

The banks will never let someone hold a position of real importance. They've owned those seats since at least since 1913. Pay for play is the name of the game.

Just because I've lost faith is this financial dictatorship doesn't I'm apathetic. By no means.

I vote with my dollars. That is real power no matter the amount.

And I'm going to stick it up their ass as hard as I possibly can.

 

[CannaBunkerMan]

Thanks guys for caring about this issue. NONE of my friends on Facebook could give a shit.

 

[resinryder]

And today in other news that's not surprising---

The producers of an upcoming documentary on TWA Flight 800—which exploded and crashed into the waters off Long Island, N.Y., on July 17, 1996, killing all 230 people on board—claim to have proof that an explosion outside the Paris-bound flight caused the crash. And six former investigators who took part in the film say there was a cover-up and want the case reopened.

"There was a lack of coordination and willful denial of information," Hank Hughes, a senior accident investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board, said on Wednesday during a conference call with reporters. "There were 755 witnesses. At no time was information provided by the witnesses shared by the FBI."

Jim Speer, an accident investigator at the time of the crash for the Airline Pilots Association, who sifted through the recovered wreckage in a hangar, said he discovered holes consistent with those that would be formed by a high-energy blast in the right wing. He requested it be tested for explosives. When the test came back positive, he said, he was "physically removed" from a room by two CIA agents.

They would not speculate on the reasons for the alleged coverup.

After a four-year investigation, the NTSB concluded the plane was destroyed by a center fuel tank explosion likely caused by a spark from faulty wiring.

But according to Tom Stalcup, a co-producer of the documentary, the investigators have new "radar and forensic evidence proving that one or more ordnance explosions outside the aircraft caused the crash." The film will premiere on EPIX on July 17, the 17th anniversary of the crash.

"These investigators were not allowed to speak to the public or refute any comments made by their superiors and/or NTSB and FBI officials about their work at the time of the official investigation," a news release announcing the documentary said. "They waited until after retirement to reveal how the official conclusion by the (NTSB) was falsified and lay out their case."

The investigators filed a petition to the NTSB calling for a new probe. The NTSB had said it would review any petition related to the 1996 crash, which touched off one of the most complex air disaster investigations in U.S. history.

The CIA and FBI conducted a parallel investigation to determine if a bomb or missile had brought down the plane.

Dozens of eyewitnesses in the Long Island area "recalled seeing something resembling a flare or firework ascend and culminate in an explosion," the CIA said in a 2008 report. "Had the crash been the result of state-sponsored terrorism, it would have been considered an act of war." Also from the report:

The CIA responded to the FBI’s request within 24 hours of the crash. This support consisted primarily of help from the Counterterrorist Center in the Directorate of Operations and from a small group of analysts in the Office of Weapons, Technology and Proliferation in the Directorate of Intelligence.

But after an eight-month investigation, the CIA "concluded with confidence and full substantiation that the eyewitnesses had not seen a missile."

The CIA's deputy director of intelligence wrote in a 1997 memo,"Our analysis demonstrates that the eyewitness sightings of greatest concern to us—the ones originally interpreted to be of a possible missile attack—took place after the first of several explosions aboard the aircraft."

"We went back and interviewed these people and found them to be quite credible," Hughes said on Wednesday.

He added: "We have no hidden agenda here; we just want the truth."

 

[bentom187]

hey we need to trust these guys.... they broke the law,and didn't tell us about it before, now they can fly drone's without any rules ,I mean its a acceptable risk when your neighbors dog could be a Taliban.

well then again, I guess we are friends now LOL I guess they will just forget the 12 yrs of drone strikes.US to begin meetings with Taliban

and jhon mcain and his company of war criminal democrats and republicans,support the enemy in public view.whilespying on us LOL

but our better's in congress wouldn't think of betraying the American public.....

The "Free Syrian Army" Has a Brigade Called "Osama bin Laden", Same FSA that
[YOUTUBEIF]DdWVOI3NsR8[/YOUTUBEIF]

and something I noticed before that we should all notice

UN Ambassador Nominee Samantha Power Wants Sovereignty Redistribution



and the main article:


FBI director admits domestic use of drones for surveillance


The FBI uses drones for domestic surveillance purposes, the head of the agency told Congress early Wednesday.

Robert Mueller, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, confirmed to lawmakers that the FBI owns several unmanned aerial vehicles, but has not adopted any strict policies or guidelines yet to govern the use of the controversial aircraft.
“Does the FBI use drones for surveillance on US soil?” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) asked Mr Mueller during an oversight hearing on Capitol Hill Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Yes,” Mueller responded bluntly, adding that the FBI’s operation of drones is “very seldom.”

Asked by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) to elaborate, Mueller added, “It’s very seldom used and generally used in a particular incident where you need the capability.” Earlier in the morning, however, Mueller said that the agency was only now working to establish set rules for the drone program.

Mueller began answering questions just after 10 a.m. EDT. He briefly touched on the recently exposed NSA surveillance program that has marred the reputation of the United States intelligence community. Mueller said 22 agents have access to a vast surveillance database, including 20 analysts and two overseers.

When Sen. Al Franken (D-Minnesota) asked Mueller later in the morning if he’d consider being more open about the FBI’s surveillance methods, the director expressed reluctance to be more transparent. Mueller said the FBI has and will continue to weigh the possibility of publishing more information about its spy habits, but warned that doing so would be to the advantage of America’s enemies.

“There is a price to be paid for that transparency,” Mueller said. “I certainly think it would be educating our adversaries as to what our capabilities are.”

 

[redbudduckfoot]

Yup, let arm the Taliban rebels. Makes tons of sense. See the video of that dude eating his enemies heart? Fucking crazy.

Rbdf

 

[Pinball Wizard]

 

[vta]

Obama White House spying on half of America
By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or Affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, quoted in full above, was written to guarantee what the Framers called "the right to be let alone," and what we have come to call "the right to privacy."

The Supreme Court has ruled consistently and repeatedly that its contemporary purposes are to prevent dragnets and fishing expeditions, lest the rights of the innocent be assaulted along with those of the guilty.

In fact, when enforced, it compels all in government to show some evidence of guilt before a judge can authorize the secret or forceful seizure of private information from or about you.

In criminal prosecutions, when the government fails to follow the Fourth Amendment, the courts discard whatever evidence has been offered that is the fruit of those failures.

Thursday morning, the American people awoke to learn of the most monumental, gargantuan violation of American values in our history.

We learned, according to published reports, that the Obama Department of Justice, the same folks who improperly seized emails from Fox News and telephone conversations from the Associated Press, has nearly half of all adult Americans in its cross hairs.

We learned that the DoJ sought a search warrant for every phone call of every customer of Verizon in the United States, without showing evidence of guilt against anyone.

Verizon reports that it has 113 million customers and handles one billion telephone calls in America every day.

Since at least April 25th of this year, every one of those calls had the names of the callers and all persons on the calls, their telephone numbers, their locations, and the length of the calls identified and sent directly to the National Security Agency--America's domestic spies--on a daily and an on-going basis.

When caught red handed Thursday morning, the feds asked us to trust them when they proclaimed that they are only monitoring the calls, they are not actually listening to them.

Who would trust them?

The Constitution doesn't trust them. We have not seen as broad and wide and deep a violation of the Fourth Amendment in our history. But thanks to the Patriot Act--that's the Bush-era statute that lets federal agents write their own search warrants in blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment--the feds went to a secret court and asked and received a warrant unknown to history and unheard of in its scope to monitor the behavior of nearly half the nation; and they did so without telling us.

Who would trust them?

Everyone who works for the government has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land. It was written to create the federal government and to keep it off the people's backs. It is now in shambles.

Who would trust them?

President Obama, who must have approved of this, Attorney General Holder, who must have authorized it, and U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson who signed an open-ended search warrant ordering it are so blind to personal liberty in a free society that they are unworthy to hold their offices.

They have unleashed spies upon half of us, and upon our doctors, lawyers, judges, police, elected officials, generals, admirals, troops, journalists, and neighbors; they have even unleashed spies on the White House staff, the Supreme Court, and the CIA.

Enough is enough.

Today, the American people know that the trade-off of liberty for safety is a ruse. It may make the job of spies easier, but it surely doesn't make us safer or more free.

Breaking down doors in the night and arresting bad guys on a whim might make us safer, but who would want to live in such a society?

What is the value of the Constitution if the government can violate it on such an unimaginable scale, and get away with the violations?

Shortly after the Constitutional Convention completed its work in Philadelphia in 1787, legend has it that a vagrant approached Benjamin Franklin and asked him what the Convention produced. He reportedly answered "A republic, Sir, if you can keep it."

Thursday morning we learned that the Republic has been lost. It is now a dictatorship.


Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. His latest is “Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom.”

 

[vta]

Another one from The Judge

Another one from The Judge


Liberty in shambles
By Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

When British soldiers were roaming the American countryside in the 1760s with lawful search warrants with which they had authorized themselves to enter the private homes of colonists in order to search for government-issued stamps, Thomas Paine wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”

The soul-searching became a revolution in thinking about the relationship of government to individuals. That thinking led to casting off a king and writing a Constitution.

What offended the colonists when the soldiers came legally knocking was the violation of their natural right to privacy, their right to be left alone.

We all have the need and right to be left alone. We all know that we function more fully as human beings when no authority figure monitors us or compels us to ask for a permission slip. This right comes from within us, not from the government.

Thomas Jefferson made the case for natural rights in the Declaration of Independence (“endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights”).

The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution to reduce to writing the guarantees of personal liberty. (“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of … religion … speech … press … assembly…” “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…” “The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”)

And, of course, to prevent the recurrence of soldier-written search warrants and the government dragnets and fishing expeditions they wrought, the Constitution mandates that only judges may issue search warrants, and they may do so only on the basis of probable cause of crime, and the warrants must “particularly describ(e) the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Last week, we discovered that the government has persuaded judges to issue search warrants not on the constitutionally mandated basis, but because it would be easier for the feds to catch terrorists if they had a record of our phone calls and our emails and texts.

How did that happen?

In response to the practice of President Richard Nixon of dispatching FBI and CIA agents to wiretap his adversaries under the guise of looking for foreign subversives, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978.

It prohibited all domestic surveillance in the U.S., except if authorized by a judge based on probable cause of crime, or if authorized by a judge of the newly created and super-secret FISA court. That court was empowered to issue warrants based not on probable cause of crime, but on probable cause of the target being an agent of a foreign power.

The slippery slope began.

Soon the feds made thousands of applications for search warrants to this secret court every year; and 99 percent of them were granted.

The court is so secret that the judges who sit on it are not permitted to keep records of their decisions. Notwithstanding the ease with which the feds got what they wanted from the FISA court, Congress lowered the standard again from probable cause of being an agent of a foreign power to probable cause of being a foreign person.

After 9/11, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This permitted federal agents to write their own search warrants, as if to mimic the British soldiers in the 1760s. It was amended to permit the feds to go to the FISA court and get a search warrant for the electronic records of any American who might communicate with a foreign person.

In 30 years, from 1979 to 2009, the legal standard for searching and seizing private communications -- the bar that the Constitution requires the government to meet -- was lowered by Congress from probable cause of crime to probable cause of being an agent of a foreign power to probable cause of being a foreign person to probable cause of communicating with a foreign person.

Congress made all these changes, notwithstanding the oath that each member of Congress took to uphold the Constitution.

It is obvious that the present standard, probable cause of communicating with a foreign person, bears no rational or lawful resemblance to the constitutionally mandated standard: probable cause of crime.

Now we know that the feds have seized the telephone records of more than 100 million Americans and the email and texting records of nearly everyone in the U.S. for a few years.

They have obtained this under the laws that permit them to do so. These laws -- just like the ones that let British soldiers write their own search warrants -- were validly enacted, but they are profoundly unconstitutional.

They are unconstitutional because they purport to change the clear and direct language in the Constitution, and Congress is not authorized to make those changes.

These laws undermine the reasons the Constitution was written, one of which was to guarantee the freedom to exercise one’s natural rights.

These laws directly contradict the core American value that our rights come from our humanity and may not be legislated away -- not by a vote of Congress, not by the consensus of our neighbors, not even by agreement of all Americans but one.

The government says we should trust it. Who in his right mind would do so after this?

President Obama says the feds have your phone records but are not listening to your calls and will not read your emails.

Who would believe him?

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, testified that the feds were not gathering vast data on Americans. Who would trust him?

The NSA says that Congress knew about all this, but its members were prohibited from telling the American people. What kind of a democracy is that?

The modern-day British soldiers -- our federal agents -- are not going from house to house; they are going from phone to phone and from computer to computer, enabling them to penetrate every aspect of our lives.

If anything violates the lessons of our history, the essence of our values and the letter of the Constitution, it is this.

 

[DrFever]

you know I can tell you pretty much how it all started .... see USA owed a shit load of money to other countries after the war so instead of these countries demanding payment in gold Nixon decided before the all the countries wiped out USA's gold he will take usa out of the gold standard how much Gold you think is in Fort knox i would bet nothing is there
But in all seriousness you REALLY wanna know why there spying on each and every one of us , pretty simple see with the out of control tax policy , USA is worried that the people will take a run at the government and truthfully its not to long before this will happen
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgMx2F41XD0

You got to watch this vid

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMU4poWSDuU

 

[SpasticGramps]

Faith is fickle.

I believe the question becomes, when does the collective in the US begin acting like Greece or Turkey or Brazil or Italy, or Egyp,t or Libya, Syria, or Tunisia, or Spain or Japan, etc etc....?

FBI admits using drones to spy in US The Hill

The FBI uses drones to watch specific targets within the United States, bureau Director Robert Mueller revealed on Wednesday.

The news seemed to catch lawmakers by surprise, prompting calls for more oversight and scrutiny of the FBI’s use of unmanned aircraft for domestic surveillance.

Mueller, making what will likely be his final appearance on Capitol Hill as FBI director, tried to reassure members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that the bureau uses drones infrequently for surveillance in the U.S., and only in regards to specific investigations.

“Our footprint is very small,” Mueller said. “We have very few and have limited use.”

But with trust in the intelligence community slipping after revelations about secret surveillance at the National Security Agency, lawmakers indicated they would not let the subject drop.

Just a little bit of Neo-Statsi wet dreams says the head of the NATIONAL crime agency.

No worries mate. Just keepin' an eye out on ya. Says Big Brothers eye ball.

People believe fascism died with Germany in '45.

Nay, I say.

Welcome to the ole' USSA. The Emperor wears no clothes now.

 

[resinryder]

It would take us, all of us, as American citizens, to vote every single incumbent out of office for a cycle of 3 to 4 elections. Let them know that in the long term that we will not tolerate our elected officials selling us out to lobbyist, defense contractors, or any damn one else that wishes to deprive us of our liberties. Senators need to have their terms cut to the exact term limits that representatives currently have. 2 years and no more. It's been a long time coming but those who make the laws have finally gone to far. They are arrogant, unapproachable, self enriching sorry motherfuckers that need to choke on a thick dick!
But that's a pipe dream. They will find a way to turn it to their advantage before November 4, 2014.

 

[bentom187]

considering googles track record of trust worthiness I think i'll pass on this. assuming we will have a choice.


We'll be uploading our entire MINDS to computers by 2045 and our bodies will be replaced by machines within 90 years, Google expert claims

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, believes we will be able to upload our entire brains to computers within the next 32 years - an event known as singularity
Our 'fragile' human body parts will be replaced by machines by the turn of the century
And if these predictions comes true, it could make humans immortal

In just over 30 years, humans will be able to upload their entire minds to computers and become digitally immortal - an event called singularity - according to a futurist from Google.

Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, also claims that the biological parts of our body will be replaced with mechanical parts and this could happen as early as 2100.
Kurweil made the claims during his conference speech at the Global Futures 2045 International Congress in New York at the weekend.


Scroll down for video
The conference was created by Russian multimillionaire Dmitry Itskov and featured visonary talks about how the world will look by 2045.

Kurzweil said: 'Based on conservative estimates of the amount of computation you need to functionally simulate a human brain, we'll be able to expand the scope of our intelligence a billion-fold.'

He referred to Moore's Law that states the power of computing doubles, on average, every two years quoting the developments from genetic sequencing and 3D printing.

In Kurweil's book, The Singularity Is Near, he plots this development and journey towards singularity in a graph

This singularity is also referred to as digital immortality because brains and a person's intelligence will be digitally stored forever, even after they die.

He also added that this will be possible through neural engineering and referenced the recent strides made towards modeling the brain and technologies which can replace biological functions.

Examples of such technology given by LiveScience include the cochlear implant - an implant that is attached to the brain's cochlear nerve and electronically stimulates it to restore hearing to someone who is deaf.

Other examples include technology that can restore motor skills after the nervous system is damaged.

Earlier this year, doctors from Cornell University used 3D printing to create a prosthetic ear using cells of cartilage.

A solid plastic mould was printed and then filled with high-density collagen gel.The researchers then added cartilage cells into the collagen matrix.

Kurweil was invited to the conference because he has previously written books around the idea of singularity.

Expanding on this idea Martine Rothblatt, CEO of biotech company United Therapeutics introduced the idea of 'mindclones'.

These are digital versions of humans that can live forever and can create 'mindfiles' that are a place to store aspects of our personalities.

She said it would run on a kind of software for consciousness and told The Huffington Post: 'The first company that develops mindware will have [as much success as] a thousand Googles.'

Rothblatt added that the presence of mindware could lead to replacing other parts of the body with 'non-biological' parts.

This is a concept that Kurweil also discussed and was the basis of his book Fantastic Voyage.

In this book he discusses immortality and how he believes the human body will develop.

He said: 'We're going to become increasingly non-biological to the point where the non-biological part dominates and the biological part is not important any more.

'In fact the non-biological part - the machine part - will be so powerful it can completely model and understand the biological part. So even if that biological part went away it wouldn't make any difference.


'We'll also have non-biological bodies - we can create bodies with nano technology, we can create virtual bodies and virtual reality in which the virtual reality will be as realistic as the actual reality.

'The virtual bodies will be as detailed and convincing as real bodies.

'We do need a body, our intelligence is directed towards a body but it doesn't have to be this frail, biological body that is subject to all kinds of failure modes.

'But I think we'll have a choice of bodies, we'll certainly be routinely changing our parent body through virtual reality and today you can have a different body in something like Second Life, but it's just a picture on the screen.

'Research has shown that people actually begin to subjectively identify with their avatar.

'But in the future it's not going to be a little picture in a virtual environment you're looking at. It will feel like this is your body and you're in that environment and your body is the virtual body and it can be as realistic as real reality.

'So we'll be routinely able to change our bodies very quickly as well as our environments. If we had radical life extension only we would get profoundly bored and we would run out of thing to do and new ideas.
'In additional to radical life extension we're going to have radical life expansion.

'We're going to have million of virtual environments to explore that we're going to literally expand our brains - right now we only have 300 million patterns organised in a grand hierarchy that we create ourselves.

'But we could make that 300 billion or 300 trillion. The last time we expanded it with the frontal cortex we created language and art and science. Just think of the qualitative leaps we can't even imagine today when we expand our near cortex again.'

Ray Kurzweil — Immortality by 2045
[YOUTUBEIF]f28LPwR8BdY[/YOUTUBEIF]

 

[HempKat]

The banks will never let someone hold a position of real importance. They've owned those seats since at least since 1913. Pay for play is the name of the game.

Just because I've lost faith is this financial dictatorship doesn't I'm apathetic. By no means.

I vote with my dollars. That is real power no matter the amount.

And I'm going to stick it up their ass as hard as I possibly can.

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When I talk about apathy I'm not talking about you per se. I'm talking about all the people over the years who didn't pay attention and didn't vote and who justified it by saying "my vote doesn't matter anyway". Which individually is true, however get enough people saying that and then someone gets in office that shouldn't be and you get the kind of government we have now.

I disagree that the banks own the seats of government. Rather they own the people in them. For the people in them to be truly effective for the banks they need to stay there though. If the banks have to keep buying people off every election eventually they won't have the financial power you speak of.

The true power is and always will be with the people otherwise no government would ever fail. If the people didn't have the power there never would have been a French or American Revolution, there never would have been a fall of the USSR and there never would have been an Arab Spring. That's not to say war and violent rebellion is the only way. Rebellion comes in many forms. Recently it was seen here in the US when the oil companies were trying to drive gas prices up to $5+ per gallon as the national average. The people said fuck that and started being more careful about when they drove, started buying more fuel efficient cars and pressuring the car makers for even more fuel efficient cars. As a result the gloom and doom predictions of gas prices staying at $5+ and going higher haven't happened.

 

[Rouge]

How many times do you get "this phone call is being recorded for quality purposes"? How come I have no say in this? Well.... at least they (big business) tell you that they are spying on you whereas my govt and elected representatives do not.
By the way, we must already a totalitarian and/or fascist state. My God, it happened so fast. The largest prison population on this Earth is one piece of evidence. The largest global empire ever, the largest military ever, unprovoked wars on other countries, debt slavery for everyone but the upper classes, corporate takeover of the govt thru bribing.... oops, I meant lobbying, irrelevancy of voting,....... I could go on...... The enemy is ....US OR perhaps the nation state has become obsolete.

 

[Hank Hemp]

I'm a hillbill and don't spell good.

I'm a hillbill and don't spell good.

It would take us, all of us, as American citizens, to vote every single incumbent out of office for a cycle of 3 to 4 elections. Let them know that in the long term that we will not tolerate our elected officials selling us out to lobbyist, defense contractors, or any damn one else that wishes to deprive us of our liberties. Senators need to have their terms cut to the exact term limits that representatives currently have. 2 years and no more. It's been a long time coming but those who make the laws have finally gone to far. They are arrogant, unapproachable, self enriching sorry motherfuckers that need to choke on a thick dick!
But that's a pipe dream. They will find a way to turn it to their advantage before November 4, 2014.

So how do spell term limits?