Guardian: More Ongoing NSA Spying on Americans

XKeyscore: NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’

 

Apparently if you ever visited a foreign website or communicated with a foreigner, that’s enough for them to open up your life to low-level mercenary contractor “analysts” for spying.  Or if you communicated with someone else who visited a foreign website, or communicated with a foreigner — again, enough so-called “justification” for spying on your for the rest of your life.  This is the criminal surveillance state, and Edward Snowden’s revelations expose more and more of this criminal conspiracy.  This is treason against the American people, waging a cyber war against them, and a gross, deliberate assault on the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

 

Paul Schrader Kickstarted The Canyons

With all the Lindsay hysteria, people may have overlooked what happened here:

Schrader:

“The total investment for Bret and I was $3,000 each. And then Kickstarter gave us $160,000, and then everything else was deferred. One of the attractions to doing this, other than working with Bret, was just the curiosity factor. Is it possible to make, is it possible for me to make a film under this new paradigm? This kind of group cooperative paradigm. Where everything is driven by social media. The fundraising that we would keep asking for volunteers on Facebook. We’d ask for extras on Facebook. We got that house, which is really a six-star boat, we got that house through Facebook. For free. Everything about this film from the inception to the casting to the financing, the making, the promoting, and now the release, was intended to be done in a way unlike I’ve ever done before.”

 

For Something Completely Different

Trailer

I don’t know if I’ll agree with a single point in this film, but the nut case behind it is pretty funny.  Ideologues Don’t Make Corrections.

PostHuman (short)

It must have been fate that had me watch this short right after I posted my Battlestar Galactica review.  One of the voices is none other than Tricia Helfer — the blonde Cylon bombshell (she also did Playboy).

The style instantly reminded me of Aeon Flux.

Sins of Man: Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)

“It’s time to junk some toasters.”

The relaunch of the cheesy 80’s space opera was actually quite a bit more serious, faster paced and more dramatic than the original.  The theme, calling our attention to our own shortcomings, our own deadly sins, is intertwined throughout the various storylines, and repeats during the series.  Galactica is a highly political show, and battles between factions and forces play out plausibly, given the world.  Various political battles seek to alter the destiny of the survivors, pitting democracy against militarism and dictatorship.

We are, in the real world, at the cusp of a technological catastrophe.  Chemical, radiological and genetic experiments and associated pollution — and of course war — now stand to push us toward extinction, our own doing.  This arrogance of our species is reflected in the show in some profound ways.

The Galactica miniseries introduces well-defined characters and setups, some noticeably altered from the original iteration (Starbuck a muscular woman this time, and a possible romance between her and Apollo).

The show has a militaristic veneer, but war is not the glorious accomplishment sold to the public in many other slick packages.  It’s horrific, costly and futile.  An anti-war slant accompanies this tale of machines evolving to destroy their masters and being quite efficient at doing so.  This is not a new plot device, but it’s done well.  Actually it’s done really well, with so many cliffhanger “you are fracked” moments, that I soon found myself addicted, watching the entire 4 seasons on Amazon Prime.

Machines, and their cold mindset, obliterate 12 planets of humans in a nuclear attack.  The remaining refugees must flee with the last remaining battle star to find a safe refuge.  The Cylons now look and act human, actually like sexy blonde actresses when they choose to.  It’s pulpy, but it repeatedly hammers home its themes.  A vain computer genius compromises the security of civilization, and their defense network is rendered useless.

Personal interests take precedence over what is best for the many, and consequences unfold.  Personal love affairs blind parties and keep them from properly carrying out their duties.  Security is pitted against personal stakes and human foibles.  These character weaknesses are designed into the story.

Cylons infiltrate the security of the fleeing ships and can turn up anywhere.  What’s more, they are quasi-independent, unlike the Borg of Star Trek origin.  These biological Cylons simulate human complexity so well that they exist in a grey area, not knowing if they too are somehow alive, possess souls and can exercise free will, even in opposition to the Cylon directives and genocidal efforts.  This duality is explored more fully by season two, and individual Cylons challenge preconceptions that this is a species or race based war, and throw it back into more ideological terms of right and wrong, genocide and domination.

Like all sci-fi, and all TV for that matter, plot holes emerge if you want to get nitpicky.  Here, however, I’m not that concerned as the show usually returns to capable hands and mature minds.  They may veer occasionally but usually return the compass needle to true north and progress the story by leaps and bounds.

“If there’s one thing we know about human beings with certainty, they are masters of self-destruction.”

Paranoia runs through the fleet, as the Cylons could be anyone and anywhere.  They blend so well into human life, that often they don’t even realize what they are until they are activated.  In that capacity they mirror saboteurs, sleeper cells, terrorists.  Amping the paranoia post-9/11 is a natural choice.  As the X-Files focused on sinister government operatives who work in the shadows, the shadow government, Battlestar Galactica has exported the unknown and mysterious enemy among us to outer space.

Interestingly, myth and religion play a prominent part.  Prophecies are being fulfilled, and the old stories are repeated in real time with dire consequences for humanity.  Religion is examined for and against, while the magical wheels turn in the background to fulfill the ship’s destiny.

Oddly, the Cylons too have evolved to embrace religion, a God that comprises everything and everyone, including them.  The Cylons believe they are on a religious mission too, and now that they have achieved humanoid form, the question of whether they do believe, and more importantly, whether they themselves now have souls, is explored.  The Cylons are not one-dimensional “toasters” anymore.  They have unique personalities, rivalries even.  Some may even side with the humans in the interest of self-preservation or perhaps for moral reasons; it’s never completely clear.

Attitudes toward genocide against the Cylons are tested, as the Cylons for the most part prosecute their genocidal campaign against their creators, these humans of the 12 tribes.

Earth is the 13^th tribe, of course, the lost one they are desperately seeking to rejoin.  Their Frankenstein’s monster race of killer robots trails along behind them.

 

Rule by the worst

 

Say it loud: This is what kakistocracy looks like.

 

HR 347 Just Criminalized Protest Against Government Officials – in blatant, knowing, flagrant violation of the First Amendment

“For one thing, the law makes it easier for the government to criminalize protest. Period. It is a federal offense, punishable by up to 10 years in prison to protest anywhere the Secret Service might be guarding someone. For another, it’s almost impossible to predict what constitutes “disorderly or disruptive conduct” or what sorts of conduct authorities deem to “impede or disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business or official functions.””

 

EPA report: methane from fracking contaminated wells near Dimock, Pa., but agency says the water’s safe to drink.

“methane and other gases released during drilling (including air from the drilling) apparently cause significant damage to the water quality.”

“This presentation represents one [on-scene coordinator’s] thoughts regarding 12 samples and was not shared with the public because it was a preliminary evaluation that requires additional assessment in order to ascertain its quality and validity,” said EPA spokeswoman Alisha Johnson.”

“The issue here is, why wasn’t EPA interested in following up on this to understand it better?”

The Important Things We DONT Have Money For And The Crazy Things We DO Have Money For

…Large numbers of federal employees have been hit with mandatory furloughs in 2013 due to the sequester…

…but somehow the federal government is able to spend tens of millions of dollars to fill our skies with surveillance drones.

The U.S. government is so broke that it has had to borrow more than a trillion dollars from China…

…but somehow we have plenty of money to help “modernize China’s energy grid”.

The U.S. Congress has cut $60,000,000 for schools on Indian reservations across the country…

…but somehow the IRS is able to pay out $70,000,000 in bonuses to their workers.

DARPA to Genetically Engineer Humans by Adding a 47th Chromosome?

“A human artificial chromosome (HAC) is a microchromosome that can act as a new chromosome in a population of human cells. That is, instead of 46 chromosomes, the cell could have 47 with the 47th being very small, roughly 6-10 megabases in size, and able to carry new genes introduced by human researchers.”

US developing mind reading

 

No Comment

US News & World Report:

Poll: 78 Percent of Young Women Approve of Weiner

 

P.S.

I’m in the wrong racket.

 

 

UTR: War Made Easy (2007)

The Big Lies of US Presidents

Norman Solomon, Sean Penn and others bring us the modern history of war propaganda and deception.  The American global empire since WW2 is examined, with war pretexts showing similar patterns and designed to rally, not to inform the public.  Official enemies are demonized regularly to drum up support for the next war, all the while professing that America never seeks violence. This parlor trick has been done so many times that it still amazes how the public can be so gullible, so ignorant, so stupid.

Archival footage shows the same lies, from Johnson to Bush Sr. to Clinton to Shrub.  The same war in the name of peace gibberish that plays so well in the ignorant heartland.  When a president starts talking about peace, watch out; Orwellian double-speak is more than a fiction.

“Actually, war becomes perpetual when it is used as a rationale for peace.”

War Made Easy is a compendium, much like What I’ve Learned About U.S. Foreign Policy.  But the editing is tighter and more focused.  This is the real history of our nation that isn’t permitted on corporate network news, not in this succinct, hard hitting, structured fashion.  Voices who call attention to US imperialism and deception do not get invited to corporate news studios.

Sad true fact is that every president in my lifetime should be tried as a war criminal for the same types of aggressive Nuremberg violations that led to the execution of Nazi war criminals after WW2.   And yet I did not see the Nuremberg statutes mentioned by Solomon.  He cushions his critique, perhaps to appeal to the deluded middle American audience, or perhaps he lacks the gumshen to shoot that straight?

Here Solomon tortures the language to make Obama seem less heinous than McCain in 2008.  Of course Solomon is a fixture in foundation-funded professional left-leaning propaganda outfits like Alternet.   Interestingly, not one mention is made of third parties in the election, or of a future that includes third parties.   With all the verbal contortions, acknowledging the charlatanism of the militarist, Obama, no alternative is even acknowledged as a possibility — ever, in perpetuity, amen.

Anyway, how does one know when the President is lying?

His lips are moving.

The US public has been systematically brainwashed into falsely believing that no criminal conspiracies can occur in the federal government.  In reality little else goes on.

In War Made Easy, the lies are exposed, deception called out — but it is never called a “crime.”  It is never suggested to demand impeachment.  It never compares war criminals from other nations to those here in the United States.   Is this a function of the foundation-funded media that critiques within a spectrum, that defines the boundaries of protest?

Media Liars

Thankfully, Solomon does destroy the propaganda of the corporate news media.  They are fair game.  The media, the willing executioners of imperial propaganda, are simply shown doing what they do now that the truth has come out and exposed their reports as deceptions, embedded war propaganda, hostile frothing partisan Brownshirt barking, etc.

“There’s a kind of an acculturated callousness as to what happens at the other end of US weapons.”

Network cheerleading for war and censoring out peace voices is shown explicitly, as the imperial media is laid bare as willing accomplices of death and destruction.  Media profits soar when they hype war and battle coverage.  This makes people more likely to tune in and see their commercials.  In partnership with the Pentagon and US officials, war lies are not questioned, not investigated, and actual journalists such as Phil Donahue in 2003, are simply fired.

Trailer

Website

Norman Solomon at the University of California, speech: War Made Easy.

“U.S. journalists don’t win Pulitzers for questioning the U.S. empire.”

This film should make you very angry if you have anything approaching a sense of morality or conscience regarding America’s Crimes Against Humanity and those depraved murderous psychopaths who run it, and who get away with mass murder on a fairly regular basis.

Snowden’s Father B-I-T-C-H Slaps Obama

 

This needs to turn around.  Either you believe in the Constitutional Bill of Rights and a free society … or you don’t.

 

---

 

A letter from Edward Snowden’s father and his lawyer, Bruce Fein, to President Obama:

Bruce Fein & Associates, Inc.
722 12th Street, N.W., 4th Floor
Washington, D.C. 20005
Phone: 703-963-4968
bruce@thelichfieldgroup.com

July 26, 2013
President Barack Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20500

Re: Civil Disobedience, Edward J. Snowden, and the Constitution

Dear Mr. President:

You are acutely aware that the history of liberty is a history of civil disobedience to unjust laws or practices. As Edmund Burke sermonized, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”

Civil disobedience is not the first, but the last option. Henry David Thoreau wrote with profound restraint in Civil Disobedience: “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

Thoreau’s moral philosophy found expression during the Nuremburg trials in which “following orders” was rejected as a defense. Indeed, military law requires disobedience to clearly illegal orders.

A dark chapter in America’s World War II history would not have been written if the then United States Attorney General had resigned rather than participate in racist concentration camps imprisoning 120,000 Japanese American citizens and resident aliens.

Civil disobedience to the Fugitive Slave Act and Jim Crow laws provoked the end of slavery and the modern civil rights revolution.

We submit that Edward J. Snowden’s disclosures of dragnet surveillance of Americans under § 215 of the Patriot Act, § 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Amendments, or otherwise were sanctioned by Thoreau’s time-honored moral philosophy and justifications for civil disobedience. Since 2005, Mr. Snowden had been employed by the intelligence community. He found himself complicit in secret, indiscriminate spying on millions of innocent citizens contrary to the spirit if not the letter of the First and Fourth Amendments and the transparency indispensable to self-government. Members of Congress entrusted with oversight remained silent or Delphic. Mr. Snowden confronted a choice between civic duty and passivity. He may have recalled the injunction of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.” Mr. Snowden chose duty. Your administration vindictively responded with a criminal complaint alleging violations of the Espionage Act.

From the commencement of your administration, your secrecy of the National Security Agency’s Orwellian surveillance programs had frustrated a national conversation over their legality, necessity, or morality. That secrecy (combined with congressional nonfeasance) provoked Edward’s disclosures, which sparked a national conversation which you have belatedly and cynically embraced. Legislation has been introduced in both the House of Representatives and Senate to curtail or terminate the NSA’s programs, and the American people are being educated to the public policy choices at hand. A commanding majority now voice concerns over the dragnet surveillance of Americans that Edward exposed and you concealed. It seems mystifying to us that you are prosecuting Edward for accomplishing what you have said urgently needed to be done!

The right to be left alone from government snooping–the most cherished right among civilized people—is the cornerstone of liberty. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson served as Chief Prosecutor at Nuremburg. He came to learn of the dynamics of the Third Reich that crushed a free society, and which have lessons for the United States today.

Writing in Brinegar v. United States, Justice Jackson elaborated:
The Fourth Amendment states: “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.”

These, I protest, are not mere second-class rights but belong in the catalog of indispensable freedoms. Among deprivations of rights, none is so
effective in cowing a population, crushing the spirit of the individual and putting terror in every heart. Uncontrolled search and seizure is one of the
first and most effective weapons in the arsenal of every arbitrary government. And one need only briefly to have dwelt and worked among a people possessed of many admirable qualities but deprived of these rights to know that the human personality deteriorates and dignity and self-reliance
disappear where homes, persons and possessions are subject at any hour to unheralded search and seizure by the police.

We thus find your administration’s zeal to punish Mr. Snowden’s discharge of civic duty to protect democratic processes and to safeguard liberty to be unconscionable and indefensible.

We are also appalled at your administration’s scorn for due process, the rule of law, fairness, and the presumption of innocence as regards Edward.

On June 27, 2013, Mr. Fein wrote a letter to the Attorney General stating that Edward’s father was substantially convinced that he would return to the United States to confront the charges that have been lodged against him if three cornerstones of due process were guaranteed. The letter was not an ultimatum, but an invitation to discuss fair trial imperatives. The Attorney General has sneered at the overture with studied silence.

We thus suspect your administration wishes to avoid a trial because of constitutional doubts about application of the Espionage Act in these circumstances, and obligations to disclose to the public potentially embarrassing classified information under the Classified Information Procedures Act.

Your decision to force down a civilian airliner carrying Bolivian President Eva Morales in hopes of kidnapping Edward also does not inspire confidence that you are committed to providing him a fair trial. Neither does your refusal to remind the American people and prominent Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate like House Speaker John Boehner, Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann,and Senator Dianne Feinstein that Edward enjoys a presumption of innocence. He should not be convicted before trial. Yet Speaker Boehner has denounced Edward as a “traitor.”

Ms. Pelosi has pontificated that Edward “did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents.” Ms. Bachmann has pronounced that, “This was not the act of a patriot; this was an act of a traitor.” And Ms. Feinstein has decreed that Edward was guilty of “treason,” which is defined in Article III of the Constitution as “levying war” against the United States, “or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.”

You have let those quadruple affronts to due process pass unrebuked, while you have disparaged Edward as a “hacker” to cast aspersion on his motivations and talents. Have you forgotten the Supreme Court’s gospel in Berger v. United States that the interests of the government “in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done?”

We also find reprehensible your administration’s Espionage Act prosecution of Edward for disclosures indistinguishable from those which routinely find their way into the public domain via your high level appointees for partisan political advantage. Classified details of your predator drone protocols, for instance, were shared with the New York Times with impunity to bolster your national security credentials. Justice Jackson observed in Railway Express Agency, Inc. v. New York: “The framers of the Constitution knew, and we should not forget today, that there is no more effective practical guaranty against arbitrary and unreasonable government than to require that the principles of law which officials would impose upon a minority must be imposed generally.”

In light of the circumstances amplified above, we urge you to order the Attorney General to move to dismiss the outstanding criminal complaint against Edward, and to support legislation to remedy the NSA surveillance abuses he revealed. Such presidential directives would mark your finest constitutional and moral hour.

Sincerely,
Bruce Fein
Counsel for Lon Snowden
Lon Snowden

The Camera That Changed The World (free)

 

One hour documentary on the handheld, portable cinema camera, and the rise of documentary filmmaking in 1960.

 

Peter Dale Scott: Reality Check

 

Asia-Pacific Journal:

US Government Protection of Al-Qaeda Terrorists and the US-Saudi Black Hole

In reality, as I shall show, royal family protection from Qatar and Saudi Arabia (concealed by the 9/11 Commission) was repeatedly given to key figures like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged “principal architect of the 9/11 attacks.” This finding totally undermines the claim that the wars fought by America in Asia since 9/11 have been part of a global “war on terror.” On the contrary, the result of the wars has been to establish a permanent U.S. military presence in the oil- and gas-rich regions of Central Asia, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Pakistan – the principal backers of the jihadi terrorist networks the U.S. been supposedly fighting. Meanwhile the most authentic opponents in the region of these Sunni jihadi terrorists – the governments of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran – have been overthrown by U.S. invasion or military support (in the case of Iraq and Libya) subverted with U.S. support (in the case of Syria), or sanctioned and threatened as part of an “axis of evil” (in the case of Iran). The protection to terrorists described in this essay, in other words, has been sustained partly in order to support the false premises that have underlain U.S. Asian wars for more than a decade. And the blame cannot be assigned all to the Saudis. Two months before 9/11, FBI counterterrorism expert John O’Neill described to the French journalist Jean-Charles Brisard America’s “impotence” in getting help from Saudi Arabia concerning terrorist networks. The reason? In Brisard’s paraphrase, “Just one: the petroleum interests.”5 Former CIA officer Robert Baer voiced a similar complaint about the lobbying influence of “the Foreign Oil Companies Group, a cover for a cartel of major petroleum companies doing business in the Caspian. . . . The deeper I got, the more Caspian oil money I found sloshing around Washington.”6 The decade of protection for terrorists demonstrates the power of this secretive dimension of the American deep state: the dark forces in our society responsible for protecting terrorists, over and above the parallel government institutionalized on and after 9/11.7 –

…Consider the FBI’s instruction in 1993 to the Canadian RCMP to release the al-Qaeda organizer Mohamed Ali, who then proceeded to Nairobi in the same year to begin planning the U.S. Embassy bombing of 1998. –

Simpsons Co-Creator Dying: Helping Humanity

Hollywood Reporter:

Sam Simon, Terminally Ill ‘Simpsons’ Co-Creator Vows to Give Away Fortune

“Simon: I want medical experiments on animals stopped. They don’t do anything, and they don’t work. Veganism is an answer for almost every problem facing the world in terms of hunger and climate change. It helps people’s health. Meat is the biggest greenhouse gas producer. There’s also the cruelty and suffering aspect.”