Corporate Welfare, Health/Environment

California authorizes oilfield dumping into drinking water

Associated Press: February 5, 2015

Regulators in California, the country’s third-largest oil-producing state, have authorized oil companies to inject production fluids and waste into what are now federally protected aquifers more than 2,500 times, risking contamination of underground water supplies that could be used for drinking water or irrigation, state records show.

While some of the permits go back decades, an Associated Press analysis found that nearly half of those injection wells — 46 percent — were permitted or began injection in the last four years under Gov. Jerry Brown, who has pushed state oil and gas regulators to speed up the permitting process. And it happened despite warnings from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency since 2011 that state regulators were failing to do enough to shield groundwater reserves from the threat of oilfield pollution.

In California, “we need a big course correction. We need to get the system back in compliance,” said Jared Blumenfeld, regional administrator for the EPA. “Californians expect their water is not being polluted by oil producers … This poses that very real danger.”

The injections are convenient to oil companies because drilling brings up 13 gallons of wastewater for every gallon of petroleum. And one of the easiest disposal methods is simply to send that waste back underground.

(read the full article at Washington Post)

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Drugs

Marijuana Doesn’t Make You More Likely To Crash Your Car

Carimah Townes
Think Progress : February 7, 2015

A study from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration concludes that driving after smoking marijuana does not make you more likely to get into a car crash — especially when compared to driving after alcohol consumption.

Researchers studied 9,000 drivers over the past year to examine marijuana’s impact on driving. Although 25 percent of marijuana users were more likely to be involved in a car crash than people who did not use the drug, gender, age, and race/ethnicity of marijuana users were considered, demographic differences actually contributed substantially to crash risk. Younger drivers had a higher crash rate than older ones, and men crashed more than women.

On the other hand, drivers who consumed alcohol were significantly more likely to crash. Those with a 0.08 percent breath alcohol level crashed four times more than sober drivers, and people with a 0.15 percent level were 12 times more likely to crash.

In the study, testing positive for marijuana was defined as having delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinal (THC) in the system. The number of legal drug users and illegal drug users involved in crashes was statistically insignificant.

Nevertheless, marijuana use does impact drivers’ senses, the study warned, and the number of drivers with marijuana in their system is on the rise. According to the Office of Impaired Driving and Occupant Protection director, Jeff Michael, “Drivers should never get behind the wheel impaired, and we know that marijuana impairs judgment, reaction times and awareness.”

Media reports and anti-pot legalization advocates have hyped the idea that “drugged driving” would wreak havoc on the roads now that states are beginning to legalize marijuana. In fact, highway fatalities have gone down since Colorado legalized marijuana.

The NHTSA findings, published Friday, come on the heels of another marijuana study conducted by Emory University. Researchers at the university concluded that people who smoked one joint a day did not have significantly impaired lung function, when compared to non-smokers.

(read the full article at ThinkProgress)

RELATED:
Study shows THC blood tests can’t test impairment

Arizona Supreme Court Rules Cannabis Drug Test Does Not Prove Impairment

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Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

I’ve seen the secrets of TTIP, and it is built for corporations not citizens

Molly Scott Cato
The Guardian : February 4, 2015

It appears that, even though I am past 50, my opportunities to become a spy have not expired. This is because, as an MEP, I have now been granted privileged access to the European parliament restricted reading room to explore documents relating to the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) deal. But before I had the right to see such “top secret” documents, which are restricted from the gaze of most EU citizens, I was required to sign a document of some 14 pages, reminding me that “EU institutions are a valuable target” and of the dangers of espionage. Crucially, I had to agree not to share any of the contents with those I represent.

The delightful parliamentary staff required me to leave even the smallest of my personal items in a locked cupboard, as they informed me how tiny cameras can be these days. Like a scene from a James Bond film, they then took me through the security door into a room with secure cabinets from which the documents were retrieved. I was not at any point left alone.

This week hundreds of protesters against TTIP have descended on the European parliament. They are quite rightly concerned about the threat that this treaty poses to the British government’s ability to conduct its affairs in their interests. On a range of issues, from food safety standards and animal welfare to public services and financial regulation, there are deep concerns that the harmonisation of standards across the Atlantic really means a reduction of standards on both sides.

But how are we to know for certain? All discussions about TTIP have been hypothetical, since the negotiations are taking place in secret. In order to read even brief notes of what has been discussed I have to be reminded of my duties not to undertake espionage for foreign powers. Repeated complaints about secrecy from my fellow Green members have resulted in our being admitted to the restricted reading room but we are still not able to share what we discover there with our constituents or with journalists. What we do know is that 92% of those involved in the consultations have been corporate lobbyists. Of the 560 lobby encounters that the commission had, 520 were with business lobbyists and only 26 (4.6%) were with public interest groups. This means that, for every encounter with a trade union or consumer group, there were 20 with companies and industry federations.

What I am able to reveal from my visit to the library is that I left without any sense of reassurance either that the process of negotiating this trade deal is democratic, or that the negotiators are operating on behalf of citizens. The whole process, from the implicit accusation of industrial espionage, to the recognition about who is actually engaged in the negotiations, makes it clear that this is a corporate discussion, not a democratic one. I picture a room full of bureaucrats trying to find ways to facilitate the business of the world’s most powerful companies, many of which have a turnover larger than the economic activity of some EU member states.

So why would anyone want a world that contains a giant trading area stretching from Alaska to the Black Sea? I think the vision arises from a sense of the need to order and control; the sense that uniformity is equivalent to security. But it is also clear that the decisions about what this uniform system of regulation and trade would look like are devised by corporations whose very DNA is the profit motive, and which are legally required to serve shareholders at the expense of all others.

(read the full article at The Guardian)

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Privacy, Tyranny

Levitation : Canada running global mass surveillance program; monitor 15 million downloads daily

Canada’s spy agency is running its own global Internet mass surveillance program – and Canadians are among the targets

Amber Hildebrandt, Michael Pereira and Dave Seglins
CBC: January 28, 2015

Canada’s electronic spy agency sifts through millions of videos and documents downloaded online every day by people around the world, as part of a sweeping bid to find extremist plots and suspects, CBC News has learned.

Details of the Communications Security Establishment project dubbed “Levitation” are revealed in a document obtained by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden and recently released to CBC News.

Under Levitation, analysts with the electronic eavesdropping service can access information on about 10 to 15 million uploads and downloads of files from free websites each day, the document says.

“Every single thing that you do — in this case uploading/downloading files to these sites — that act is being archived, collected and analyzed,” says Ron Deibert, director of the University of Toronto-based internet security think-tank Citizen Lab, who reviewed the document.

In the document, a PowerPoint presentation written in 2012, the CSE analyst who wrote it jokes about being overloaded with innocuous files such as episodes of the musical TV series Glee in their hunt for terrorists.

CBC analyzed the document in collaboration with the U.S. news website The Intercept, which obtained it from Snowden.

(read the full article at CBC)

Canada Casts Global Surveillance Dragnet Over File Downloads

Ryan Gallagher and Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept: January 28, 2015

Canada’s leading surveillance agency is monitoring millions of Internet users’ file downloads in a dragnet search to identify extremists, according to top-secret documents.

The covert operation, revealed Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration with The Intercept, taps into Internet cables and analyzes records of up to 15 million downloads daily from popular websites commonly used to share videos, photographs, music, and other files.

The revelations about the spying initiative, codenamed LEVITATION, are the first from the trove of files provided by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden to show that the Canadian government has launched its own globe-spanning Internet mass surveillance system.

According to the documents, the LEVITATION program can monitor downloads in several countries across Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and North America. It is led by the Communications Security Establishment, or CSE, Canada’s equivalent of the NSA. (The Canadian agency was formerly known as “CSEC” until a recent name change.)

The latest disclosure sheds light on Canada’s broad existing surveillance capabilities at a time when the country’s government is pushing for a further expansion of security powers following attacks in Ottawa and Quebec last year.

Ron Deibert, director of University of Toronto-based Internet security think tank Citizen Lab, said LEVITATION illustrates the “giant X-ray machine over all our digital lives.”

“Every single thing that you do – in this case uploading/downloading files to these sites – that act is being archived, collected and analyzed,” Deibert said, after reviewing documents about the online spying operation for CBC News.

David Christopher, a spokesman for Vancouver-based open Internet advocacy group OpenMedia.ca, said the surveillance showed “robust action” was needed to rein in the Canadian agency’s operations.

“These revelations make clear that CSE engages in large-scale warrantless surveillance of our private online activities, despite repeated government assurances to the contrary,” Christopher told The Intercept.

(read the full article at The Intercept)

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Geopolitics/War

‘We didn’t even really know who we were firing at’ – former US drone operator

RT: January 22, 2015

Former US drone sensor operator Brandon Bryant admits he “couldn’t stand” himself for his participation in the country’s drone program for six years – firing on targets whose identities often went unconfirmed.

Since 2001, and increasingly under the Obama administration, the US has been carrying out drone strikes against targets believed to be affiliated with terrorist organizations in countries like Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. The program, which has been shrouded in secrecy, has been routinely criticized for the high number of resultant civilian casualties.

Pakistan’s Peshawar High Court ruled in 2013 that the attacks constitute a war crime and violate the UN Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Meanwhile the Obama administration continues to insist that drone warfare is a precise and effective method of combat.

According to data collected by the human rights group Reprieve and published last November, attempts to kill 41 targeted individuals across Pakistan and Yemen resulted in the deaths of some 1,147 people. Often a kill requires multiple strikes, the group noted.

Bryant, who worked as a sensor operator, manning drones’ cameras and other intelligence gathering hardware, worked from an airbase in Nevada. The operator who left his post in 2011 spoke harshly of the program and the leadership responsible for approving it.

“There was no oversight. I just know that the inside of the entire program was diseased and people need to know what happens to those that were on the inside,” he told RT’s Anissa Naouai. “People need to know the lack of oversight, the lack of accountability that happen.”

Bryant decried the “black hole putrid system that is either going to crush you or you’re going to conform to it,” and apologized to families of victims whose deaths he was responsible for. By his estimation, he helped kill some 1626 people. “I couldn’t stand myself for doing it” he added.

(read the full article & watch the video at RT)

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Drugs, Original, Tyranny

Canada’s Mandatory Minimum Sentences Declared Unconstitutional, Again

AlternativeFreePress.com

BC Provincial Court Judge Reg Harris has found that Canada’s mandatory minimum sentences for trafficking drugs are unconstitutional. Specifically finding that “the impugned legislation casts a net much wider than is necessary to address the stated objective of protecting young persons,” and that “persons can become subject to the mandatory minimum in circumstances where their actions do not run the risk of exposing youth to the vagaries of drug trafficking.”

This is not the first time that Harper’s tough on drugs legislation has been found unconstitutional. Just under a year ago, BC Provincial Court Judge Joseph Galati sentenced Joseph Ryan Lloyd to 191 days behind bars, saying that that the 1 year mandatory minimum sentence prescribed was a violation of the Charter of Rights and declared it “of no force and effect.” Last year also saw the courts find that it was unconstitutional to forbid licensed medical marijuana users from possessing cannabis edibles.

Harper’s Con-government has an extensive history of writing unconstitutional legislation. In 2013 Ontario’s top court ruled that their three-year mandatory minimum sentence for gun possession is “cruel and unusual punishment,” and their 2014 anti-prostitution law is excepted to be ruled unconstitutional in the future. They also face similar criticism of their Citizen Voting Act, recent changes to the Citizenship Act, and their omnibus budget bills.

Written by Alternative Free Press
Creative Commons License
Canada’s Mandatory Minimum Sentences Declared Unconstitutional, Again by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Sources:
Drug-dealing law intended to protect minors is unconstitutional, judge decides
B.C. judge says mandatory minimum for drug offences is unconstitutional
Lawyers argue law to revoke Canadian citizenship is unconstitutional
Canada’s new anti-prostitution law is still unconstitutional, say sex workers
Mandatory minimum sentences for gun crimes ruled unconstitutional

Corporate Welfare, Privacy, Tyranny

The RCMP Spent $1.6 Million to Run an Unconstitutional Spying Program

Justin Ling
Vice: January 20, 2015

Canada’s federal police continued to snoop on Canadians’ cellphones and computers for at least a month after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, new documents prove.

Financial records obtained by VICE through the Access to Information Act show the extent to which the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) used federal legislation to obtain information on Canadians from all major phone companies without warrants. Instead, police paid small fees for each of these requests.

The Supreme Court ruled that practise illegal in its June 13, 2014, decision on R. v. Spencer, writing that police need judicial authorization before making those sorts of requests.

However, the records show Telus and Bell both continued to fork over Canadians’ information even after that decision was handed down.

The Newfoundland and Labrador detachment of the RCMP made 51 requests for a “phone search” to Telus between July 1 and August 1, 2014. They paid $76 for the searches. Over the course of July, the British Columbia detachment also made 129 phone search requests to Telus, and another 27 to Bell—two phone searches and 25 Service Profile Identifier (SPID) requests—running the west coast RCMP division $258.

SPID information is used to help police identify which phone lines they are able to put taps or traces on.

Many invoices cover the entire month of June, so it is unclear if the requests stopped exactly on June 13, or whether they continued later into the month.

VICE’s analysis of the records show that the RCMP paid over $1.6 million to Canada’s cellphone companies since 2010 in order to skirt the normal process of having these requests approved by a judge.

The documents only deal with the RCMP […] The documents do not include data from provincial police forces, who likely made the bulk of these Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) requests. Nor do they include the spy agencies Canadian Security Intelligence Service or Communications Security Establishment Canada, or the Canada Revenue Agency, which have also been known to use the process.

(read the full article at Vice)

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Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

Stephen Harper lied to Canadians about Iraq role

Stephen Harper misled Canadians about Iraq role, opposition says

Bruce Campion-Smith & Tonda MacCharles
The Star: January 20, 2015

Revelations that Canadian soldiers in Iraq have seen front-line action is sparking renewed debate about the mission as opposition leaders say Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not come clean about the true role of the troops.

NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair on Tuesday point-blank accused Harper of misleading Canadians, saying the revelations that soldiers have been directing airstrikes and even exchanged gunfire with extremists calls into question the government’s promise of a “non-combat” mission.

“He told Canadians they would not be involved in combat. He did not tell the truth,” Mulcair said.

Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau said the prime minister was not “forthright” about what the mission involved from the get-go.

“The prime minister made some statements in the fall around this mission that turn out today to not to have been entirely truthful,” Trudeau said.

The two leaders were reacting to a Monday update by the Canadian Armed Forces that an elite team of soldiers on a training mission in Iraq have seen more front-line action than was previously disclosed.

This even though the soldiers were dispatched to northern Iraq last September on a mission to train Iraqi and Kurdish fighters with the pledge that they would not be involved in combat themselves.

(read the full article at The Star)

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Drugs, Privacy, Tyranny

New police radars can ‘see’ inside homes

Brad Heath
USA Today : January 20, 2015

At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside, a practice raising new concerns about the extent of government surveillance.

Those agencies, including the FBI and the U.S. Marshals Service, began deploying the radar systems more than two years ago with little notice to the courts and no public disclosure of when or how they would be used. The technology raises legal and privacy issues because the U.S. Supreme Court has said officers generally cannot use high-tech sensors to tell them about the inside of a person’s house without first obtaining a search warrant.

The radars work like finely tuned motion detectors, using radio waves to zero in on movements as slight as human breathing from a distance of more than 50 feet. They can detect whether anyone is inside of a house, where they are and whether they are moving.

[…]

“The idea that the government can send signals through the wall of your house to figure out what’s inside is problematic,” said Christopher Soghoian, the American Civil Liberties Union’s principal technologist. “Technologies that allow the police to look inside of a home are among the intrusive tools that police have.”

Agents’ use of the radars was largely unknown until December, when a federal appeals court in Denver said officers had used one before they entered a house to arrest a man wanted for violating his parole. The judges expressed alarm that agents had used the new technology without a search warrant, warning that “the government’s warrantless use of such a powerful tool to search inside homes poses grave Fourth Amendment questions.”

By then, however, the technology was hardly new. Federal contract records show the Marshals Service began buying the radars in 2012, and has so far spent at least $180,000 on them.

(read the full article at USA Today)

Tyranny, WTF

Did FBI “Set Up” Capitol Bombing Suspect? They’ve Done It 49 Times Since 9/11!

Ben Swann : January 20, 2015

The 20 year-old Ohio man charged with plotting to blow up the U.S. Capitol building was a “peace loving, momma’s boy”, according to his father.

Christopher Lee Cornell is from just outside Cincinnati, Ohio. According to federal authorities he was plotting to attack the capitol with pipe bombs and to shoot government officials as they fled the building. According to court documents, his arrest came after he reportedly posted to Twitter his support for Muslim terrorists and then showed his plans to an FBI informant who contacted him. At the end of August, Cornell had allegedly written the informant an instant message saying the two of them should carry out a lone wolf attack as a way of supporting ISIS.

He didn’t think ISIS or al Qaeda would give them an official sign-off, but he felt he didn’t need it. As we have reported, Cornell’s father has told various media outlets including CNN and CBS news that his son was definitely “set up.”

So, is Cornell’s father correct? Is it possible that his son was set up by that FBI informant? Keep in mind, Cornell purchased two AR-15 rifles and 600 rounds of ammo before he was arrested in the parking lot of a gun store in Cincinnati. His father says that Christopher worked seasonal, minimum wage jobs and had saved about $1,200 dollars. The guns and ammo purchased at the store were worth about $1,800 dollars.

There are a lot of questions about this story, including how the informant found Cornell in the first place. How long had they communicated? Who actually posed the idea of the attack? Did Cornell have his own means or the opportunity to carry out such an attack? All of these questions are important because the FBI has made these kinds of arrests over 500 times since 9/11. What we almost never hear, however, is how these arrests are made and the role of the so called informants.

Take for instance the case of 8 “anarchists” who had plotted to blow up a bridge in the Cuayhoga County National Park near Cleveland in 2012. When the case made it to court, it was revealed that the one person in the group who had led the brainstorming of targets, showed them bridges to case out, pushed them to buy C-4 military-grade explosives, provided the contact for weapons, gave them money for the explosives and demanded they develop a plan because “we on the hook” for the weapons… was the FBI informant.

Another example, in 2004 there was the case of Shahawar Siraj who was charged with plotting to blow up a subway station in NYC. Siraj’s attorneys say he was set up because “Siraj had no explosives, no timetable for an attack and little understanding about explosives.”
In fact, they say it was the informant who had pushed for the attack. Most conversations between Siraj and the informant were recorded, except for the very first conversation and other “key” conversations. Those became he said, she said arguments. At one point, Siraj had even said that he needed to talk with his mother before he would have been willing to do anything and that was when the FBI stepped in.

And then there is the case of the Newburgh 4, four black muslim men, sentenced for plotting to blow up a bronx synagogue using car bombs and plotting to fire a stinger missile at US military planes. In an unprecedented case, these men were offered up to $250,000 dollars by the informant to help with the bombing, as well as free vacations to Puerto Rico and expensive cars. The judge in this case, after giving three of the four 25 year sentences, was clear stating “Nothing that any of these men did was the product of any independent motivation on their parts.” “It is beyond question that government created the crime here.”

These are only a few examples. In fact, an investigation in 2011 shows that more than 500 times after 9/11 the government has arrested and charged similar suspects. In 158 of those cases an informant was involved. What’s more, in 49 of those cases the informant is the one who proposes the act of terror and then coordinates the plot.

(read the full article and view pictures at Ben Swann)

RELATED: FBI create another terrorist to entrap

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