The NYT on "spy balloons" in Afghanistan - a day late and a dollar short

i've visited afghanistan, kabul in particular, at least a half dozen times over the past few years... when i arrived there in september 2009, the first thing i noticed was the surveillance airship floating over the vicinity of the main mosque and in fact i put up a blog post featuring a photo of it i had taken from the roof of our guesthouse (see here)... after inquiring, i was told that it had been there for a few months but that such tethered surveillance craft had been a familiar feature over military bases around the country for at least a couple of years... 

so, in may of 2012, the nyt "breaks" the story...

The dirigible, a white 117-foot-long surveillance balloon called an aerostat by the military, and scores more like it at almost every military base in the country, have become constant features of the skies over Kabul and Kandahar, and anywhere else American troops are concentrated or interested in.

Shimmering more than 1,500 feet up in the daytime haze, or each visible as a single light blinking at night, the balloons, with infrared and color video cameras, are central players in the American military’s shift toward using technology for surveillance and intelligence.

In recent years, they have become part of a widening network of devices — drones, camera towers at military bases and a newer network of street-level closed-circuit cameras monitoring Kabul’s roads — that have allowed American and Afghan commanders to keep more eyes on more places where Americans are fighting.

The dirigibles are now such a common feature in daily Afghan life that some people here shrug and say they hardly notice them. Other parts of the network have become lasting parts of the urban landscape as well, particularly in Kabul, where long-necked closed-circuit cameras overlook locations susceptible to attacks, like the Supreme Court building, traffic circles and main highways past the military camps.

But other Afghans describe a growing sense of oppression, the feeling that even as the Americans are starting to pack up to leave, the foreigners’ eyes will always be on them.

It is often expressed in typically Afghan fashion, as a grumbled undercurrent of quips and brooding pronouncements: “It is an American kite,” or “Afghans and Americans are up there.” (They are not; there is no one in the balloons.) “It shows us that, sure, the Americans are still here,” and, “It is not effective because there are still these suicide attacks and car bombs."

For others, the cameras are an outrageous intrusion into private lives, putting women and children on display for foreigners whom they see as immoral.

the value of this article for me which, i shamefacedly confess, i did not even think about until i read it, is the intrusiveness of such surveillance on afghans' private lives... we put bamboo screening around the rooftop terrace of our guesthouse for two main reasons - so we could be up there without being seen from the street or neighboring buildings and making targets of ourselves but also so we couldn't look down into the walled compounds of our neighbors and watch their women, an absolute no-no... it's just one more example that reinforces the idea that many afghans already have which is that we are disrespectful barbarians who don't give a rat's ass for their customs and their beliefs... and we wonder why they hate us... 

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Powerlessness and Occupy

chris hedges...

The security and surveillance state has a vast arsenal and array of tools at its disposal. It operates in secret. It dissembles and lies. It hides behind phony organizations and individuals who use false histories and false names. It has millions of dollars to spend, the capacity to deny not only its activities but also its existence. Its physical assets honeycomb the country. It can wiretap, eavesdrop and monitor every form of communication. It can hire informants, send in clandestine agents, recruit members within the movement by offering legal immunity, churn out a steady stream of divisive propaganda and amass huge databases and clandestine operations centers. And it is authorized to use deadly force.

How do we fight back? We do not have the tools or the wealth of the state. We cannot beat it at its own game. We cannot ferret out infiltrators. The legal system is almost always on the state’s side. If we attempt to replicate the elaborate security apparatus of our oppressors, even on a small scale, we will unleash widespread paranoia and fracture the movement. If we retreat into anonymity, hiding behind masks, then we provide an opening for agents provocateurs who deny their identities while disrupting the movement. If we fight pitched battles in the streets we give authorities an excuse to fire their weapons.

[...]

We must assume we are targets. And we must fight back by relying on our strength, which in the great paradox of resistance movements is embodied in our weakness. This does not mean we will avoid being repressed or persecuted. It will not keep us safe from slander, lies or jail. But it does offer the capacity to create internal divisions in the apparatus of the oppressors rather than permit the oppressors to create internal divisions within the movement. Divided loyalties create paralysis. And it is our job to paralyze them, not allow them to paralyze us.

the assumption that we are targets is both a safe and a correct assumption... there's a big difference in basing an assumption on multiple observations of reality and making an assumption based purely on paranoia...

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The more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language ... the more powerful we will become

chris hedges...

Corporate power is global, and resistance to it cannot be restricted by national boundaries. Corporations have no regard for nation-states. They assert their power to exploit the land and the people everywhere. They play worker off of worker and nation off of nation. They control the political elites in Ottawa as they do in London, Paris and Washington. This, I suspect, is why the tactics to crush the Occupy movement around the globe have an eerie similarity—infiltrations, surveillance, the denial of public assembly, physical attempts to eradicate encampments, the use of propaganda and the press to demonize the movement, new draconian laws stripping citizens of basic rights, and increasingly harsh terms of incarceration.

Our solidarity should be with activists who march on Tahrir Square in Cairo or set up encampamentos in Madrid. These are our true compatriots. The more we shed ourselves of national identity in this fight, the more we grasp that our true allies may not speak our language or embrace our religious and cultural traditions, the more powerful we will become.

i have often been dismayed at how much of a bubble we live in here in the u.s... it's particularly apparent to me when i return from outside the country... the only global perspective most of us have is what dribbles down to us from our propaganda-spouting media (iran, iraq, afghanistan, arab spring, etc.) or from a dim awareness that virtually everything we buy - short of automobiles and food - comes from china...

fortunately, the occupy movement has begun to move beyond that kind of insular thinking at least to the extent that an increasing number of those involved identify with what's happening in tahrir square, spain and chile...

hedges is right... there is a global awakening and we need to embrace it as such... when i talk with my afghan friends - as i do regularly - i find they are struggling with the same issues of repression by their super-rich elites as their compatriots in egypt and our own occupy protestors here in the u.s... the false dichotomies of patriotism and nationalism heaped on us by our handlers only serve to keep us from the full realization that the "99%" are under the thumb of the "1%" globally, not just inside our borders...

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Narus, Israeli-founded and now Boeing-owned, rears its ugly head in Egypt

aha... and why are we not surprised...?

timothy karr via the huffpost on narus...

Telecom Egypt, the nation's dominant phone and Internet service provider, is a state-run enterprise, which made it easy on Friday morning for authorities to pull the plug and plunge much of the nation into digital darkness.

Moreover, Egypt also has the ability to spy on Internet and cell phone users, by opening their communication packets and reading their contents. Iran used similar methods during the 2009 unrest to track, imprison and in some cases, "disappear" truckloads of cyber-dissidents.

The companies that profit from sales of this technology need to be held to a higher standard. One in particular is an American firm, Narus of Sunnyvale, Calif., which has sold Telecom Egypt "real-time traffic intelligence" equipment.

Narus, now owned by Boeing, was founded in 1997 by Israeli security experts to create and sell mass surveillance systems for governments and large corporate clients.

The company is best known for creating NarusInsight, a supercomputer system which is allegedly used by the National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time.

Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.

Other Narus global customers include the national telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- two countries that regularly register alongside Egypt near the bottom of Human Rights Watch's world report.

i started posting on narus in 2007 (see my posts here)... it's one of the companies to be most feared in domestic surveillance and, now that it's owned by boeing, means that its power has increased exponentially...

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A Wikileaks lesson for all of us - there is no safety or confidentiality in electronic communication

in a way, it's almost schadenfreude... those of us who pay the slightest bit of attention have known for quite some time that everything we do electronically, whether it's an atm withdrawal or something as mundane as swiping a supermarket discount card, can be - and probably is - sniffed at the very least and more likely recorded somewhere in the vast terabytes - or petabytes or exabytes - of government databases... however, it's gratifying to see that the tables can be turned...

US embassy cables: The job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment

Clearly, there is no longer such a thing as a safe electronic archive, whatever computing's snake-oil salesmen claim. No organisation can treat digitised communication as confidential. An electronic secret is a contradiction in terms.

[...]

Words on paper can be made secure, electronic archives not. The leaks have blown a hole in the framework by which states guard their secrets. ... [T]he walls round policy formation and documentation are all but gone. All barriers are permeable.

and that's a good thing... let's hear it for transparency, even the inadvertent kind...

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Iceland may become investigative journalism haven spurred by surveillance campaign against Wikileaks

if this can be pulled off, it would be major cool...

here's some of the scoop... read more at raw story...

In an extraordinary editorial, the whistleblower site WikiLeaks has demanded that the United States "stop spying" on its operations.

"Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been the subject of hostile acts by security organizations," founder Julian Assange writes. "We've become used to the level of security service interest in us and have established procedures to ignore that interest. But the increase in surveillance activities this last month, in a time when we are barely publishing due to fundraising, are excessive."

On Tuesday evening, followers of the WikiLeaks Twitter feed were startled to read, "WikiLeaks is currently under an aggressive US and Icelandic surveillance operation." This was followed a few minutes later by "If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our Apr 5 film. And you know who is responsible." A succeeding message warned, "We have airline records of the State Dep/CIA tails. Don't think you can get away with it. You cannot. This is WikiLeaks."

Friday's editorial finally fills in the background of those cryptic messages. Assange apparently believes that his group is under close surveillance by US intelligence because of its planned release of "a classified U.S. military video showing civilian kills by U.S. pilots" under the command of General David Petraeus.

Most of the incidents that he cites, however, have occurred in Iceland, where WikiLeaks representatives have been holding discussions with members of the Icelandic parliament about the possibility of turning that nation into a haven for investigative journalism.

we need more people like assange out there, particularly as our super-rich elites and their government stooges move to grab more and more control over information flow...

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Obama’s faux populism

robert scheer...

Barack Obama’s faux populism is beginning to grate, and when yet another one of those “we the people” e-mails from the president landed on my screen as I was fishing around for a column subject, I came unglued. It is one thing to rob us blind by rewarding the power elite that created our problems but quite another to sugarcoat it in the rhetoric of a David taking on those Goliaths.

In each of the three most important areas of policy with which he has dealt, Obama speaks in the voice of the little people’s champion, but his actions cater fully to the demands of the most powerful economic interests.

With his escalation of the war in Afghanistan, he has given the military-industrial complex an excuse for the United States to carry on in spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, without a credible military adversary in sight. His response to the banking meltdown was to continue George W. Bush’s massive giveaway of taxpayer dollars to Wall Street, and his health care reform has all the earmarks of a boondoggle for the medical industry profiteers.

generally speaking, faux populism aside, obama started to grate on me quite some time ago... yes, the sell-out to wall street, the health care providers, big pharma and the corporate military industrial government complex is disappointing enough but when added to the dogged insistence on perpetuating virtually all of bush-era torture, detention, and surveillance policies it becomes positively galling...

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Afghanistan photoblogging

there's nothing i like better than watching all the kites soaring in the skies over kabul and the absolute pleasure the kids - and adults! - get from flying them... this afternoon (friday), we're heading over to an afghan colleague's house to fly kites from his roof... we did that last year in november and he managed to take out the kites of three neighbor kids - much to their dismay - before another kid a couple of streets over cut his loose...


Kite-fighting in Kabul during the Eid holiday

then there's this sobering reminder of that "other" reality...


Surveillance airship over Kabul with two kites in upper left

that little number is new in the kabul skies since i was last here... i'm pretty sure i'm not only on live tv while i'm taking my ease on the roof terrace, i'm also confident it's reading my emails...


Proposed surveillance airship for Afghanistan


and it looks like bigger and better is on the way...

The plan to deploy an autonomous, free-flying, surveillance airship to Afghanistan is gaining, er, buoyancy. A consortium led by the US Army’s Space & Missile Defense Command is scheduled to be established by October 1 and a contract awarded for the Long Endurance Multi-intelligence Vehicle (LEMV) demonstration by the end of December.

coming soon to a neighborhood near you...

final thought: they're really missing a bet by not selling display advertising a la the goodyear blimp...

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Cell phones in Cuba...? Eavesdropping on conversations...? NO-O-O-O-O-OOO...! Say it isn't so...!

this might seem a bit trivial in the high-impact news department and maybe it is... however, i think it's right up at the top of the list in the ironic propaganda spin department... read it and see if you agree...

First microwaves, now cell phones. Is this the new Cuba? Raul Castro is revolutionizing his brother's island in small but significant ways — the latest in a decree Friday allowing ordinary Cubans to have cell phone service, a luxury previously reserved for the select few. The new president could be betting greater access to such modern gadgets will quell demand for deeper change.

Many Cubans hope cell phones and new appliances are only the beginning for a post-Fidel Castro government that will improve their lives. Communist bureaucracy currently limits everything from Internet access to home ownership.

Could cellular phones in dissidents' hands give state security forces an edge in monitoring their conversations or tracking their movements by satellite? Perhaps, but government opponents — including the few who have cell phones — already assume someone's always listening.

Until now, the only people legally allowed to have a cell plan were foreigners, Cubans working for foreign companies and top government officials. Thousands more illegally use phones registered to foreign friends or relatives.

"Finally. We have waited too long for this," said Elizabeth, a middle-aged housewife waiting in line to pay her home telephone bill. She wouldn't give her last name because she already has a cell phone through a foreign co-worker of her husband.

so, accusing raúl of tossing bread and circus to the masses, eh...? accusing raúl of monitoring phone conversations, eh...? accusing raúl of tracking citizens' whereabouts, eh...? tell me... does this ring any bells at all...?

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Surveillance technology moving right along

a surveillance camera that can determine both age and gender...



are we feeling safe yet...?

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Microsoft takes spying to a new level

still MORE we aren't seeing in our domestic news media...

from the uk timesonline...

Microsoft submitted a patent application in the US for a “unique monitoring system” that could link workers to their computers. Wireless sensors could read “heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement facial movements, facial expressions and blood pressure”, the application states.

The system could also “automatically detect frustration or stress in the user” and “offer and provide assistance accordingly”. Physical changes to an employee would be matched to an individual psychological profile based on a worker’s weight, age and health. If the system picked up an increase in heart rate or facial expressions suggestive of stress or frustration, it would tell management that he needed help.

i'm sure the objective is to insure that there isn't a square inch on the face of the earth where we AREN'T under surveillance... if such a system is available for use on computer work stations in our places of employment, you can pretty well figure it's ALREADY in use covertly, and probably has been for some time now...

(thanks to kevin at cryptogon...)

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this now rogue government

Two salient videos that respond to this now rogue government which has clearly gone astray, include Amy Goodman's interview of Studs Terkel on Democracy Now!

The Huffington Post/Truthout's interview of Jeremy Scahill on the exigent dangers that Blackwater poses to America, is another.

Both videos are well worth your time, by going into explaining the illegitimacy of our government, as it has been unlawfully exercising its authority.

In "DECEPTION 101 - PRIMER ON DECEPTION", it states: "there is no constitutional principle that says that the President of the United States or the Executive Branch must tell the truth." -- Joseph W. Caddell (pdf)

That perhaps explains the cheap shot that George Bush took at teenagers on Tuesday, as if any teenager has ever burned money like him. The off-hand slight appears to have been timed to set the public up for agreement that teenagers are irresponsible, concomitant with government's plans to ram through yet more laws marginalizing kids on the Internet with yet even more child apartheid bills that they are constantly and malevolently springing by the fistfuls.

Next, consider how the deception practiced by government doesn't just trade genocide for oil, or treat people like the Blacks and Native American Indians were treated; they are presumably poised to hand out billions of dollars to private cronies such as Blackwater in order to enforce their frauds. Can you imagine Blackwater with billion dollar computers? Yet additional billions and billions of dollars have gone missing alongside government's myriad deceits, so how does the common man stand against that kind of wicked, crooked and ruthless power? Aside from government's weapons of killing and torture and imprisoning and taxing, deception appears to be their next effective cudgel. Should we believe anything then, that issues from the mouths of government?

By the time people realize that the State has its own sexual appetites and it will not be happy ultimately with its cameras only in the master bedrooms, it should at that point be easier for all to see that government cameras are eventually destined for the children's bedrooms and baths, as well, so that with all this newfangled micro-management, government will know the exact moment that the children step out of line as well.

Incidentally, the record shows that laws against pornography are of historically recent advent and that the initial purpose was to keep children from masturbating at all in the first place. That surely will make former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders scowl.

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cheap shot artists in government

(h/t) DU for pointing us to "Naomi Wolf / Viet Dinh interview, Part 2"



And just when you think things cannot get any more over-the-top Draconian, with religion masquerading as law, now Pravda reports this: "US House of Representatives to fight against sex predators in Internet".

The U.S. House of Representatives will track down people who use the Internet to prey on children, working through bills that would make it easier to monitor and prosecute cyber crimes against juveniles and to educate children about online dangers.

'We need to think of this as a war', said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a Democrat, sponsor of one of a half-dozen sex predator, child pornography and Internet safety bills heading for passage Wednesday. The bills were put together by the Democratic majority but enjoyed wide bipartisan support.

Her bill would approve spending $1 billion (680 million EUR) over the next eight years to combat online child exploitation. It would create a Justice Department office to coordinate prosecution efforts; increases money for a program that helps state and local law enforcement; and provides more dollars to hire agents and improve forensic lab capabilities dedicated to child exploitation cases. It passed 415-2.

She said law enforcement has identified nearly 500,000 individuals trafficking in child pornography over the Internet, but because of a lack of resources, only about 2 percent are under investigation.

The other bills would:

-Approve $5 million (3.4 million EUR) a year for five years for an initiative that conducts Internet safety programs for children. An additional $5 million a year would go for competitive grants for similar initiatives. The bill passed by voice vote.

-Respond to a court decision last year to throw out a child pornography conviction on the grounds that the material moved on the Internet did not constitute interstate commerce. It would specify that Internet transmissions do fulfill the commerce clause. A vote on the bill sponsored was pending.

-Enhance federal agent and probation officer efforts to monitor the computer use of convicted sex offenders. It would authorize courts to require, as a condition of probation, that convicted sex offenders cooperate in installing Internet filtering and monitoring systems. The bill also would increase prison terms for those who lie about their age in order to engage in criminal sexual conduct with a minor. It passed 417-0.

-Make it easier to prosecute federal child pornography law. The proposal would clarify that knowingly accessing child pornography on the Internet constitutes possession even if the person does not download or save the content. It also would subject those who profit from child pornography to money laundering charges. A vote on the bill was pending.

-Require the Federal Trade Commission to increase public awareness and education about Internet safety. The proposal, passed 398-6."

Do the American people, or heck, the people-of-the-world, (since they're all pretty much herded too by this country's machinations and coercion), have any idea how gullible they are to this kind of manipulation?

I predicted there would be a slew of giga-crap coming out of this government about the time they ram through the Telcom Immunity Bill. So now it seems quite clear that their warrantless domestic spying has been carried out on this pretext all along, at "policing pornography". Now we understand a great deal better, at least some of the nature of their as-of-yet undisclosed breadth and extent of their illegal spying.

This legislation is long the product of lies, worse now that ever before. Government has long since put the commercial studios producing actual child sex videos, out of business. Yet they claim it is now a $30 billion industry. It is nothing near the sort. They then put the nude model sites out of business. Now they are claiming it is the ultimate felony to appreciate child bathing suit and underwear models. These lawmakers are SICK, SICK, SICK. There now remain but a very limited number of baithing suit and underwear models sites at this point in time.

The government no longer even posts decoy sites with nudes, as they claim clothed-sites qualify as pornography, so putting up nude decoy sites seems to them no longer necessary.

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hidden hands and machinations

Here is an interview of Naomi Wolf by Viet Dinh, who is responsible for writing much of the cursed P.A.T.R.I.O.T Act.



The following description can be found posted liberally around the Web, and it builds upon some of the understanding of what we learned from Alex Jones' video posted here previously, that mentioned the House of Rothschild:

Adam Weishaupt, a young professor of canon law at Ingolstadt University in Germany, was a Jesuit priest and an initiate of the Illuminati. Researchers agree that he was financed by the House of Rothschild (mentioned in 'Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars'). Weishaupt advocated 'abolition of all ordered national governments, abolition of inheritance, abolition of private property, abolition of patriotism, abolition of the individual home and family life as the cell from which all civilizations have stemmed, and abolition of all religions established and existing so that the ideology of totalitarianism may be imposed on mankind.' In the same year that he founded the Illuminati he published Wealth of Nations, the book that provided the ideological foundation for capitalism and for the Industrial Revolution. It is no accident that the Declaration of Independence was written in the same year. Every tenet was the same.

Date and beliefs confirm that Weishaupt's Illuminati is the same as the Afghan Illuminated Ones and the other cults which called themselves 'illuminated.' The Alumbrados of Spain were the same as were the 'illuminated' Guerinets of France. In the United States they were known as the Jacobin clubs. Secrets within secrets within secrets--but always at the heart is the Brotherhood. Weishaupt was betrayed and set up for persecution because he ignored the rule that the word 'illuminati' or the existence of the Brotherhood would never be exposed to public knowledge. His exposure and outlawing accomplished several goals of the still - hidden and still very powerful brotherhood. It allowed members to debunk claims of its existence on the grounds that the Illuminati had been exposed and outlawed and thus was no longer a reality. It allowed members to deny allegations of conspiracy of any kind. Weishaupt may have been a fool--or he may have been doing exactly what he was told. Weishaupt said, 'The great strength of our Order lies in its concealment; let it never appear in its own name, but always covered by another name, and another occupation.'"

Found at the forbidden knowledge:

[T]here is a power so organized, so subtle, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it." -- President Woodrow Wilson

[...]

The "real" Illuminati is the name of an organization founded in Bavaria in 1776 by Adam Weishaupt. Weishaupt formed a secret society within another secret society, Freemasonry. Some believe that Weishaupt created the Illuminati with the express purpose of overthrowing governments and bringing about a new social order. Others, as you will read, disagree. Many opinions exist as to the origins, motives, and the ultimate fate of the Illuminati.

[...]

Some (e.g. M. William Cooper) believe that the Illuminati were purposely allowed to flourish within the Lodges of Freemasonry, so that they could eventually claim that the had been invaded unknowingly, but the awful conspiracy had been squelched. This, according to Cooper, is a cover to deflect accusations, and to hide the fact that it merely went underground to resurface later under myriad different names.

[...]

'The great strength of our Order lies in its concealment; let it never appear in any place in its own name, but always concealed by another name, and another occupation. None is fitter than the lower degrees of Freemasonry; the public is accustomed to it, expects little from it, and therefore takes little notice of it. Next to this, the form of a learned or literary society is best suited to our purpose, and had Freemasonry not existed, this cover would have been employed; and it may be much more than a cover, it may be a powerful engine in our hands... A Literary Society is the most proper form for the introduction of our Order into any state where we are yet strangers.'

-- John Robinson, quoting Adam Weishaupt, in "Proofs of a Conspiracy" 1798, re-printed by Western Islands, Boston, 1967, p. 112

So does it really matter whether they are concealed as Freemasons, Skull and Bones, or Bilderbergs, at any given particular point in time?

Following the destruction of a regional 50-year-old nudist colony to a government-sanctioned pogrom, I became quite attuned to those religious crusades, all about.

So when I learned, in 2001, that the Freemasons were hosting a multi-national conference to eliminate child pornography and to raise the age-of-consent, uniformly, among the states and the countries of the world, I made it a point to attend. The conference was attended by government officials and members of academia alike, who thereupon, declared a crusade. They cunningly manufactured quite a scare.

Here is from an article posted in the Register that same year:

America fully brainwashed by cybercrime FUD
By: Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 03/04/2001 at 22:15 GMT

Child-protective hysterics who want to eavesdrop on the electronic comings and goings of ordinary citizens in the name of legions of exploited little lambs have successfully won the hearts and washed the brains of nearly all Americans.

The US populace is 'deeply worried' about Internet crime; and on-line kiddie porn looms as the greatest terror in the collective imagination. Fully ninety-two per cent of Americans -- far more than have ever so much as touched a personal computer -- claim to be outraged by Internet KP, and half characterize it as 'the single most heinous crime that takes place on line', according to a new survey by the Pew Charitable Trust Internet Project.

[...]

Second on the menu of imagined horrors terrifying Americans is credit card theft. Eighty-seven per cent are 'concerned' and sixty-nine per cent are 'very concerned', in spite of the glaring fact that only a tiny handful have actually had their account numbers stolen and misused due to Internet shopping.

'Only eight per cent of those who say their credit card was swiped reported that the thief might have gotten the information because the consumer had provided it on line', the survey notes.

As with the kiddie porn horror, women are slightly more frightened of on-line fraudsters than men by a margin of seventy-two to sixty-five per cent.

Next comes the widespread anxiety of Internet terrorism, with eighty-two per cent of Americans claiming to be 'concerned' about organized efforts to bring all of civilization to its knees with viruses and packet floods. As one might expect, those who have never used the Internet are considerably more eager to believe in it.

Fear of contracting viruses and Trojans, and being victimized by malicious hackers, rounds out the list of persistent fears keeping America awake all night.

So it was at this point quite clear, that the campaign of the morals crusaders was to provoke a total surveillance of the Internet, on concocted fear-mongering.

In June 2001, the then Surgeon General, David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D., included the following paragraph in his report on our need for each reclaiming our sexuality, and thus mitigated some of the moral crusader's, laboriously concocted, tempest-in-a-teapot:

[T]his Surgeon General's Call to Action is offered as a framework.

It is, however, only a first step-a call to begin a mature and thoughtful discussion about sexuality. We must understand that sexuality encompasses more than sexual behavior, that the many aspects of sexuality include not only the physical, but the mental and spiritual as well, and that sexuality is a core component of personality. Sexuality is a fundamental part of human life. While the problems usually associated with sexual behavior are real and need to be addressed, human sexuality also has significant meaning and value in each individual's life. This call, and the discussion it is meant to generate, is not just intended for health care professionals or policy makers. It is intended for parents, teachers, clergy, social service professionals - all of us."

When 911 came along, these shadowy powers simply substituted that pretext, instead.

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Cafferty file: viewer comments on "redefining privacy"

additional thoughts after my post on the 11th and mettle's post of the 12th...

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Hypocrisy anyone?

Now that the government is demanding the People's lives to be an open book to government and its team, how is this for hypocrisy? Government helps itself to private data and communications and then file-shares them amongst various departments and others.

Compare what Slashdot reports as one of government's latest adventures: Government is posturing as for teaming with MPAA to coerce the colleges and universities to spy on the private communications of the schools' very own students in order to compromise them in exposure to MPAA litigation.

This latest tactic is so far over-the-top that it cannot realistically be considered anything other than a red herring used to distract many people from Congress' coming Telcom Immunity vote.

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Unbelievable...! Our government says we should trust them with all of our private information...!

sure... take my credit card account numbers, my email and online chat records, my internet telephone conversations (i just concluded a two-hour business conference call linking myself, austin, texas, and buenos aires, argentina), my mobile phone calls, my atm withdrawals, my airline travel records, even my supermarket affinity card transactions... great god almighty, we simply MUST put a stop to this...!

A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.

it's so obvious, we are being desensitized to having our civil liberties taken away and our constitution rendered essentially meaningless...

(thanks to john at americablog...)

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coming to a community near you

Pravda reports:

'The cities are the problem' [says the] director of the Joint Urban Operations Office at U.S. Joint Forces Command. [...] 'This is the next fight'

[...]

The largest contractors in the military-corporate complex are already hard at work helping the Pentagon prepare for future urban occupations. Raytheon, L-3 Communications, and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) - the 5th, 7th, and 10th largest Pentagon contractors last year, taking in a combined $18.4-plus billion from the Department of Defense - have all signed Cooperative Research and Development Agreements with the U.S. Joint Forces Command, according to Berry "Dan" Fox, the Deputy Director of Science and Technology at its Joint Urban Operations Office.

[...]

According to Dan Fox of the Joint Urban Operations Office, the Department of Justice, like the military, is currently working on sense-through-wall technologies. His associate Duane Schattle is collaborating with the U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) - set up by the Bush administration in 2002 and whose area of operations is 'America's homefront'

[note from profmarcus - here's the link to the original post in tomdispatch...]

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breaking up [monopolies] is hard to do

After Downing Street reports: Pelosi Asks for Impeachable Offenses:

[I]n an October 10th interview with Ed Schultz, [Speaker Pelosi] said 'if anyone knows of impeachable offenses that can pass the Congress, then please let me know'.

Ok, lets start here:

Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony"

-- from the Sherman Antitrust Act

The very nature of the 5th Estate, that marriage of corporations with the Intelligence Community, (or more generally, with government), is antitrust.

We have seen unrelenting and perpetual consolidations going on under this scheme. We have seen outrageous no bid contracts that continually favor Administration cronies. The entire Department of Defense cannot give an accurate accounting of its money spent. Private Armies are now said to outnumber our government forces. There is little secret that the auspices of the newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence has been pushing for privatization of the Internet by the telcoms, et al., through the machinations of "immunities" and by packet sniffing.

A recent cover for further expansion of ubiquitous packet sniffing might be this little reported undertaking, under the moniker of "super V-chip". This is likely a cover for not really even a single chip at all, but rather, total spying everywhere.

This just in: AT&T may be getting a windfall. VoIP had threatened their Market Power.

Societies are able to work as well as they do on the planet precisely because of the Internet. Journals that used to take 30 days to circulate amongst professionals in a given field, are available immediately. Responses are available within minutes to new discoveries. Unfettered political ideas now currently generally abound.

Once the Internet becomes privatized, it will be used as simply another technology of political control, and its usefulness to everyday people will be limited. There will surely be a collapse of society as we know it on that day.

Update: fresh comments by Cindy Sheehan re Nanci Pelosi at CounterPunch:

No matter how many times Ms. Pelosi and George Bush share tea and giggles and no matter how often she 'prays' for him, George is not the Decider and she is only the Leader of the House of Representatives not the people. We are the sovereigns in this country and I tried to demonstrate this when I demanded a meeting with another haughty public servant: George Bush"

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Robot bug spies: the camera follows you home

damn... what did i read that had robot bug surveillance...? i'm sure it was in some science-fiction novel... can anyone out there help me out...? jim...? mettle...? stu...?


Dragonfly Spy

you can damn well be sure that, if there's an article about them in the washington post, the military and the cia have been using them for years and the technology is vastly more advanced than what is described here...

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

Out in the crowd, Bernard Crane saw them, too.

"I'd never seen anything like it in my life," the Washington lawyer said. "They were large for dragonflies. I thought, 'Is that mechanical, or is that alive?' "

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

NOW you don't just have to keep your eye on the pole-mounted surveillance camera, you have to think about the camera following you home...

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

shit, i really don't want to have to pay attention to the flies sitting on my window screen when i'm sitting at the computer...

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