Privacy, Tyranny

The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control

Antony Loewenstein
The Guardian : July 11, 2014

William Binney is one of the highest-level whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA. He was a leading code-breaker against the Soviet Union during the Cold War but resigned soon after September 11, disgusted by Washington’s move towards mass surveillance.

On 5 July he spoke at a conference in London organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism and revealed the extent of the surveillance programs unleashed by the Bush and Obama administrations.

“At least 80% of fibre-optic cables globally go via the US”, Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80% of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

The NSA will soon be able to collect 966 exabytes a year, the total of internet traffic annually. Former Google head Eric Schmidt once argued that the entire amount of knowledge from the beginning of humankind until 2003 amount to only five exabytes.

Binney, who featured in a 2012 short film by Oscar-nominated US film-maker Laura Poitras, described a future where surveillance is ubiquitous and government intrusion unlimited.

“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control”, Binney said, “but I’m a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.”

He praised the revelations and bravery of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and told me that he had indirect contact with a number of other NSA employees who felt disgusted with the agency’s work. They’re keen to speak out but fear retribution and exile, not unlike Snowden himself, who is likely to remain there for some time.

Unlike Snowden, Binney didn’t take any documents with him when he left the NSA. He now says that hard evidence of illegal spying would have been invaluable. The latest Snowden leaks, featured in the Washington Post, detail private conversations of average Americans with no connection to extremism.

It shows that the NSA is not just pursuing terrorism, as it claims, but ordinary citizens going about their daily communications. “The NSA is mass-collecting on everyone”, Binney said, “and it’s said to be about terrorism but inside the US it has stopped zero attacks.”

(read the full article at The Guardian)

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Privacy, Tyranny

Whistleblower: NSA stores 80% of all phone calls, not just metadata – full audio

Whistleblower says the NSA lies about what it stores.

RT: July 12, 2014

At least 80 percent of all audio calls are gathered and stored by the NSA, whistleblower William Binney has revealed. The former code-breaker says the spy agency’s ultimate aim is no less than total population control.

The National Security Agency lies about what it stores, said William Binney, one of the highest profile whistleblowers to ever emerge from the NSA, at a conference in London organized by the Center for Investigative Journalism on July 5. Binney left the agency shortly after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center because he was disgusted at the organizations move towards public surveillance.

“At least 80 percent of fiber-optic cables globally go via the US,” Binney said. “This is no accident and allows the US to view all communication coming in. At least 80 percent of all audio calls, not just metadata, are recorded and stored in the US. The NSA lies about what it stores.”

Binney has no evidence to substantiate his claims as he did not take any documents with him when he left the NSA. However, he insists the organization is untruthful about its intelligence gathering practices and their ultimate aim. He says that recent Supreme Court decisions have led him to believe the NSA won’t stop until it has complete control over the population.

“The ultimate goal of the NSA is total population control,” Binney said, “but I’m a little optimistic with some recent Supreme Court decisions, such as law enforcement mostly now needing a warrant before searching a smartphone.”

During his speech at the conference, Binney praised spy-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden for disseminating the classified documents that revealed the NSA’s global spy programs. The latest revelations showed that contrary to the NSA’s claims, the majority of information the agency gathers is from ordinary citizens with no connection to terrorism.

(read the full article at RT)

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Health/Environment

Tsunami warning issued as 6.8 magnitude earthquake strikes off Fukushima coast

A 6.8 magnitude earthquake as been reported approximately 150 kilometers from Fukushima prefecture, off the coast of Japan at a depth of about 10km. There have been tsunami advisories issued for Fukushima, Iwate & Miyagi prefectures.

Tsunami advisories have
been issued for the Fukushima prefecture, as well as for nearby
Iwate and Miyagi prefectures.

UPDATE: Tsunami advisory has been dropped, no word yet on any damage to nuclear plant from earthquake

Written by Alternative Free Press
Creative Commons License
Tsunami warning issued as 6.8 magnitude earthquake strikes off Fukushima coast by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

source: RT

Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

The United Nations is Complicit in the Massacre of Civilians in Ukraine

Michel Chossudovsky and Julie Lévesque
Global Research, July 09, 2014

In what at first appears to be a neutral statement on the violence in Ukraine, urging “all sides to put down their arms” and condemning “strong hate speech from all sides”, United Nations Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay tacitly placed the blame on the people of Donetsk and Lugansk, who are the unspoken victims of aerial bombings and mortar shelling by the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Despite numerous reports, video and photographic evidence to the effect that the Ukraine Armed Forces have been targeting civilian areas, High Commissioner Navi Pillay, basing her statements on the report of the UN Monitoring Mission to Ukraine is emphatic:

“both sides are equally to blame… and people are caught  in the crossfire between armed groups and the Ukrainian Government.”

Navi Pillay’s official statement on behalf of the United Nations is convoluted. It conveys the impression that the self-defense forces in Donesk and Lugansk rather than the Ukrainian Armed Forces including the National Guard are responsible for the abductions and killings not to mention the heavy outflow of people who are fleeing the region:

Pillay also noted that abductions by armed groups continue to be reported daily and that houses, schools and infrastructure, including water and electricity plants, have been damaged – in some cases severely enough to lead to power cuts.

The UN human rights monitoring team in Ukraine has received reports that armed groups are using the roofs of residential buildings to install anti-aircraft systems, and that they are occupying private apartments to organise sniper positions, seriously endangering residents who are not involved in the fighting. Shelling has also been reported in residential areas held by these armed groups.

The term  “armed groups” is used repeatedly by the UN Human Rights High Commissioner without revealing the identity of the “armed groups” and without clarifying who is responsible for the killings of innocent civilians.

These killings were ordered by the government of president Petro Poroshenko. The  evidence amply confirms that these killings are organized by the Armed Forces and National Guard.

Ms. Pillay is fully aware that civilian infrastructure, schools and residential areas were targeted by the Ukrainian Air Force, and that only government forces possess aircraft capable of conducting bombing raids.

According to Ms. Pillay, the Ukraine government confirmed “numerous cases of death of people in Donetsk and Luhansk who are caught in the middle of the ongoing security operations.”

This is not an “ongoing security operation”, it is an outright bombing and shelling operation directed against Ukrainian civilians led by Ukraine government forces. And Western military advisers are collaborating with government forces. 

(read the full article at Global Research)

Geopolitics/War, Privacy, Tyranny

Law-abiding public figures latest revealed victims of NSA spying

Bombshell revelations from journalists Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain expose extensive government spying on public figures, including a political candidate, a civil rights activist, lawyers, and academics

Government spying on law-abiding public figures is tearing apart the fabric of our democracy

OpenMedia: July 8, 2014

In the wake of this evening’s bombshell revelations from journalists Glenn Greenwald and Murtaza Hussain, citizens are demanding action to rein in the power of spy agencies like the U.S. NSA and Canada’s CSEC. In an in-depth piece on their website The Intercept, Greenwald and Hussain exposed how the NSA spied extensively on the private lives of prominent public figures in the American-Muslim community. Victims include a senior political candidate for the U.S. Republican Party, high-profile academics, lawyers, and the head of a large civil rights organization.

The article revealed that:

  • The NSA targeted over 7,400 email addresses for in-depth surveillance, 202 of which were explicitly identified as belonging to U.S. citizens.
  • The Americans targeted by the NSA for surveillance came from a variety of backgrounds, and held diverse political views. Among the targets was Faisal Gill, a former Navy officer who stood as a candidate for the U.S. Republican Party in Virginia and worked in the George W. Bush White House.
  • Also targeted was Rutgers University Professor Hooshang Amirahmadi and former California State University Professor Agha Saeed.
  • Other victims include Nihad Awad, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim-American civil rights group in the U.S.

The news comes on the heels of recent revelations from the Washington Post, which showed that NSA spying operations intercept far more data from innocent people than from targeted individuals. The daily lives of over 10,000 innocent people were tracked and catalogued extensively, including intimate details of their personal lives.

“Tonight’s revelations prove what we’ve long suspected – that our spy agencies are running hugely invasive and reckless surveillance operations against their own citizens,” says OpenMedia.ca Executive Director Steve Anderson. “This kind of spying tears at the very fabric of our democracy and we’re already seeing how it can affect law-abiding citizens in their daily lives. Clearly government spying operations are out-of-control and must be reined in.”

Anderson continued: “Sadly, here in Canada the government is actually in the midst of ramming through Bill C-13, legislation that would increase warrantless surveillance of innocent Canadians and which the Supreme Court has just said is likely unconstitutional. There are reports of sensitive private information being collected on law-abiding Canadians without their knowledge and then distributed to employers without their consent. This is a daily concern for many people now. Thanks to this government we have a growing privacy deficit despite the fact that Canadians are increasingly concerned about their data security. The Conservatives are quickly turning into the anti-privacy party, and it’s time for them to change course”

Canadians are asking questions about the extent of CSEC’s involvement with NSA spying operations, given the long history of close cooperation between CSEC and the NSA, and recently revealed proof that CSEC spied on thousands of innocent Canadian air travellers. OpenMedia.ca, which is leading a huge non-partisan coalition calling for greater privacy protections, says the government needs to come clean about how many Canadians have been swept up in CSEC databases.

OpenMedia.ca has been working with over 50 major organizations in the Protect our Privacy Coalition to demand effective legal measures to safeguard Canadians’ privacy from government spies. The BC Civil Liberties Association, a coalition member, has also launched a constitutional challenge that aims to put a stop to all illegal government spying on Canadians.

CSEC has over 2000 employees and an annual budget of over $420 million. Taxpayers are spending over $4 billion to build and operate a lavish new CSEC headquarters, which the CBC has described as a “spy palace” and as “the most expensive government building ever built”.

Over 40,000 people have pledged their support to Privacy Coalition calls for new legislation to protect citizens’ privacy from government spying, with more signing on every day at http://OurPrivacy.ca

cc
Source: OpenMedia

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Alternative Free Press

Health/Environment, WTF

20 MPs & government ministers abused children for “decades”

Ex-senior judge Butler-Sloss to head child sex abuse inquiry

BBC: July 8, 2014

Retired senior judge Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, 80, has been named as the chairman of a wide-ranging review into historical child sex abuse.

Lady Butler-Sloss led the Cleveland child abuse inquiry in the late 1980s.

The announcement came shortly before the Home Office’s top civil servant was set to be quizzed by MPs about the handling of historical sex abuse allegations involving politicians.

Mark Sedwill is to face questions from the Commons Home Affairs Committee.

He will be asked about how his department lost or destroyed 114 files that could shed light on alleged abuse in the 1980s.

Baroness Butler-Sloss’s broader, independent inquiry, will look at how seriously public bodies and other important institutions have taken their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse.

‘Appalling cases’

The probe aims to address public concern over failings exposed by recent child sex abuse cases involving celebrities such as Jimmy Savile and Rolf Harris.

Announcing the peer’s appointment, Home Secretary Theresa May said: “In recent years we have seen appalling cases of organised and persistent child sex abuse that have exposed serious failings by public bodies and important institutions.

“That is why the government has established an independent panel of experts to consider whether these organisations have taken seriously their duty of care to protect children from sexual abuse.

“I am pleased to announce today that Baroness Butler-Sloss has been appointed to lead this inquiry.”

Baroness Butler-Sloss said: “I’m honoured to have been invited to lead this inquiry – the next step is to appoint the panel and agree the terms of reference.

“We will begin this important work as soon as possible.”

Lady Butler-Sloss was coroner for the inquests into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Al Fayed until she stepped down in 2007.

Her report on child sex abuse in Cleveland during the 1980s – which had led to more than 100 children being removed from their families – resulted in the Children’s Act 1989.

Lady Butler-Sloss’s inquiry is part of a two-pronged attack by Mrs May, who has also appointed Peter Wanless, the head of the NSPCC, to focus on concerns the Home Office failed to act on allegations of child sex abuse contained in a dossier handed over in the 1980s by former Tory MP Geoffrey Dickens.

Prominent figures

Earlier on Tuesday Jim Gamble, former head of the police’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, criticised the decision to bring in “amateurs” to find out what happened to the files, instead of “professional investigators”.

Labour leader Ed Miliband said he would look at whether the proposed inquiries were “sufficiently comprehensive and sufficiently over-arching to get at the truth about what happened”.

And The Bishop of Durham, The Right Rev Paul Butler, said he feared the “whole story won’t come out” unless witnesses had to answer questions on oath.

A review commissioned last year by Mr Sedwill, into the Home Office’s handling of child abuse allegations between 1979 and 1999, found that some 114 files were missing, although he found no evidence that they had been removed or destroyed “inappropriately”.

Mrs May said she was confident the work commissioned by Mr Sedwill had been “carried out in good faith”, but added that with “allegations as serious as these the public need to have complete confidence in the integrity of the investigation’s findings”.

It is likely the MPs will use the Home Affairs Select Committee session at 15:15 BST to ask Mr Sedwill to explain what he knew about the Dickens’ dossier and the whereabouts of the 114 files.

Keith Vaz, the committee’s Labour chairman, said his members would be careful not to jeopardise any live cases. “This is not a police investigation – this is an investigation on process so we’ll not be going into names of people,” he told the BBC.

The meeting follows claims by former child protection manager Peter McKelvie that at least 20 prominent figures – including former MPs and government ministers – abused children for “decades”.

Mr McKelvie, whose allegations led initially to a 2012 police inquiry, said a “powerful elite” of paedophiles carried out “the worst form” of abuse.

Giving his first television interview for 20 years – Mr McKelvie told the BBC: “I would say we are looking at upwards of 20 (people) and a much larger number of people who have known about it and done nothing about it, who were in a position to do something about it.”

Mr McKelvie said some of those who were alleged to have abused children had now died.

He told the BBC he had spoken to victims over “many, many years” and that children – “almost exclusively boys” – were moved around like “lumps of meat”.

They had been subjected to the “worst form of abuse”, including rape, he said.

(read the full article at BBC)

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Health/Environment

Study links oilsands pollution to higher cancer rates

Study indicates link between oilsands pollution and higher cancer rates in area residents and animals.

By Dean Bennett
The Canadian Press: July 7, 2014

A new study by two Alberta First Nations and University of Manitoba scientists says there is a link between oilsands pollutants and higher levels of heavy metals in wildlife, and higher cancer rates in residents.

“There’s something unique that is happening in Fort Chipewyan,” Stéphane McLachlan, the lead researcher from the university, told a news conference Monday. “It’s a situation that is alarming and demands attention.”

The report — titled Environmental and Human Health Implications of Athabasca Oil Sands — is the result of three years of research. It was funded by the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and the Mikisew Cree First Nation.

The study says it found 23 cases of cancer in 94 participants.

“Cancer occurrence increased significantly with participant employment in the oilsands and with the increased consumption of traditional foods and locally caught fish,” said the report.

It also found total levels of carcinogens in the traditionally hunted foods were higher compared with similar studies around the world.

But it found the dietary intake was low because community members were turning away from the traditional foods in favour of store-bought sustenance.

The methodology combined scientific methods with anecdotal information from community members.

The study also reported generally higher concentrations of industrial heavy metals in moose, duck, muskrat and beaver. It reported the arsenic and mercury levels in muskrat, duck and moose to be of concern to young children. There were also elevated cadmium levels in moose, beaver, and duck.

It said selenium levels in all wildlife were high enough to be a concern to adults and children alike.

Steve Courtoreille, chief of the Mikisew Cree Nation, said everyone interviewed is concerned about the general decline in health.

“It’s time the government does something,” said Courtoreille. “The reality is our people are dying.”

(read the full article at The Star)

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Privacy, Tyranny

Nearly All The Emails Collected By The NSA Came From Regular Citizens, Not Terrorists

Lauren C. Williams
Think Progress: July 6, 2014

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is nine times more likely to read an email from the average American than those belonging to official terrorist suspects, according to an investigative report released late Saturday by The Washington Post. Only 10 percent of the emails and instant messages it collects come from official foreign targets thanks to loose guidelines that allow analysts to capture communications from anyone involved in a person’s contact list, chat room or email chain.

The report analyzed 160,000 intercepted emails and instant message conversations from more than 11,000 accounts leaked by former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden. The Washington Post found that nine in 10 involved ordinary citizens that weren’t the supposed to be part of the agency’s surveillance investigations. They simply got caught in the web because they were contacts on a target’s list or because they happened to enter the same chat room as a suspect. Analysts could also collect online chats and emails that weren’t written in English as reason enough to believe the person wasn’t American and a potential suspect.

The emails and instant messages chronicled the daily life of more 10,000 people and contained intimate details including sexual affairs, mental health issues, money woes and philosophical debates. Also, nearly half of the NSA’s surveillance documents obtained by The Washington Post contained email addresses, names and other identifying information the NSA linked to American citizens or residents.

Other than revealing deeply personal information from private citizens, the surveillance files revealed some valuable intelligence, including “fresh revelations about a secret overseas nuclear project, double-dealing by an ostensible ally, a military calamity that befell an unfriendly power, and the identities of aggressive intruders into U.S. computer networks,” The Washington Post reported.

But overall, the NSA’s bulk data collection has not yielded much valuable information. Earlier this year, a presidential panel found the NSA’s mass phone surveillance program that collected telephone data from calls and text messages was not nearly successful enough to justify the collection of innocent people’s information. An independent study from the New America Foundation also concluded that mass surveillance “has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism.”

(read the full article at Think Progress)

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Health/Environment

Fukushima Cooling Turned Off; Only 9 days to prevent ‘unsafe’ overheating

Fukushima has 9 days to prevent ‘unsafe’ overheating

RT: July 6, 2014

Fukushima operator TEPCO has been forced to switch off the cooling system at mothballed Reactor Unit 5, after it was discovered that it had been leaking water. In nine days, if the system is not repaired, temperatures will exceed dangerous levels.

Engineers have discovered that 1,300 liters of water leaked from a cooling system intended to stabilize the temperature of the spent fuel at the Reactor Unit 5, which was offline but loaded with fuel rods when the plant was damaged by the earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.

The source of the leak was a 3 mm-diameter hole near a flow valve, a statement published by the Japanese energy giant on Sunday asserts. However it is unclear from company data if the location of the opening has been discovered, or whether it was calculated with flow measurements.

At the time when the cooling system was switched off at around 12pm on Sunday, the temperature in the pool in which the rods are submerged was 23C but started increasing by 0.193 degrees per hour, TEPCO says.

If no new cold water is pumped in at such rate it will reach the dangerous threshold of 65C by the midpoint of the month in roughly 9 days.

Such temperatures, which have not been routinely seen at the plant since the failing of the cooling system in the immediate aftermath, would increase the possibility of dangerous reactions and further radiation leaks in the plant.

(read the full article at RT)

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Corporate Welfare, Health/Environment

Study confirms fracking wastewater causing central US earthquakes

Just 4 fracking wastewater sites cause 20 percent of all central US earthquakes – study

RT: July 4, 2014

Just four wastewater wells in Oklahoma – where energy companies dump water after completing the hydraulic fracturing process – have caused scores of earthquakes this year, some 30 km from the site, according to a new study by top US universities.

The report, published in Science magazine, focused on the Midwestern state, which has produced 45 percent of the country’s magnitude 3 or bigger seismic shocks in the past five years – with the numbers rising rapidly to match the intensification of fracking activities in the area.

While hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, – which involves pressuring rock formations with liquid until they crack, and then extracting the oil and gas within – poses an inherent risk of earthquakes, according to the authors, the biggest culprits were the wastewater wells, where the liquids used for fracking are pumped, once a reservoir is opened.

“The disposed fluids are capable of contributing to the seismic activity,” Katie Keranen, a geophysics professor at Cornell, and the lead author of the study, told The Oklahoman newspaper.

“These wells are capable. That doesn’t exclude anything else from contributing, but we have no reason to think these are tectonic. They don’t match tectonic activity in other areas. It does seem these are just linked to wastewater. Our research focuses on wastewater and shows it is sufficient.”

(read the full article at RT)

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