Geopolitics/War

Bush/Cheney Created Conditions That Led Directly to ISIL

Robert Palmer
Huffington Post : September 15, 2014

It takes a lot of gall for people like Dick Cheney to utter even one critical word about President Obama’s strategy to eliminate the threat of ISIL in the Middle East.

In fact, it was the unnecessary Bush/Cheney Iraq War that created the conditions that led directly to the rise of the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant” (ISIL).

Former George H.W. Bush Secretary of State James Baker said as much on this week’s edition of “Meet the Press.” He noted that after the first President Bush had ousted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991, the U.S. had refrained from marching on Baghdad precisely to avoid kicking over the sectarian hornet’s nest that was subsequently unleashed by the Bush/Cheney attack on Iraq in 2003.

But it wasn’t just the War in Iraq itself that set the stage for the subsequent 12 years of renewed, high-intensity sectarian strife between Sunni’s and Shiites in the Middle East. It was also what came after.

Bush’s “de-Baathification program” eliminated all vestiges of Sunni power in Iraqi society and set the stage for the Sunni insurrection against American occupation and the new Shiite-led government. Bush disbanded the entire Sunni-dominated Iraqi Army and bureaucracy. He didn’t change it. He didn’t make it more inclusive of Shiites and Kurds. He just disbanded it. It is no accident that two of the top commanders of today’s ISIL are former commanders in the Saddam-era Iraqi military.

General Petraeus took steps to reverse these policies with his “Sunni Awakening” programs that engaged the Sunni tribes against what was then known as Al Qaeda in Iraq. But the progress he made ultimately collapsed because the Bush/Cheney regime helped install Nouri Al-Maliki as Prime Minister who systematically disenfranchised Sunnis throughout Iraq.

And that’s not all. The War in Iraq — which had nothing whatsoever to do with “terrorism” when it was launched — created massive numbers of terrorists that otherwise would not have dreamed of joining extremist organizations. It did so by killing massive numbers of Iraqis, creating hundreds of thousands of refugees, imprisoning thousands, and convincing many residents of the Middle East that the terrorist narrative was correct: that the U.S. and the West were really about taking Muslim lands.

And after all, contrary to Dick Cheney’s absurd assertion that U.S. forces would be greeted in Iraq as “liberators,” no one likes a foreign nation to occupy their country.

The War did more than any propagandist could possibly do to radicalize vulnerable young people. And by setting off wave after wave of sectarian slaughter it created blood feuds that will never be forgiven.

The Iraq War — and the Sunni power vacuum caused first by U.S. policies and then Al Maliki — created the perfect conditions that allowed a vicious band of extremists to take huge swaths of territory.

And now many of the same people who caused this foreign policy disaster have the audacity to criticize President Obama’s measured efforts to clean up the mess they created. And they do so often without ever saying what they themselves would do to solve the horrific problems that they created.

It reminds you of a bunch of arsonists standing at the scene of a fire criticizing the techniques used by the firefighters who are trying to extinguish the blaze they themselves have set.

(read the full article at Huffington Post)

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Health/Environment

Mount Polley whistleblower was bullied & fired for warning about tailings pond

Mount Polley whistleblower lost job, then home

Damien Gillis
The Common Sense Canadian : September 8, 2014

Larry Chambers warned Imperial Metals that its tailings pond was bound to fail – and he was fired for it, the Likely, BC resident told media in Vancouver earlier today.

He and his wife, Lawna Bourassa-Keuster, have now lost their home on once-beautiful Quensnel Lake – too afraid to drink the cloudy and discoloured water, which they brought with them to Vancouver in a jar.

[…]

“We, like most of the residents, live in Likely for its beauty and peacefulness. This is heartbreaking to see.”

The couple didn’t pull any punches when discussing the company’s attitude toward safety during a press conference hosted by the Union of BC Indian Chiefs and featuring a Secwepemc First Nation representative as well. After complaining in writing to the Ministry of Energy and Mines about safety conditions at the mine, Chambers says he received a phone call “saying my services were no longer needed there.”

Chambers described instances of being bullied by supervisors at the mine for insisting on safety standards that were not being properly implemented.

It was an ongoing concern about the size of tailing pond and half the employees there knew there was a problem. This just shows you, as soon as you say something, you’re out of there.

(read the full article at The Common Sense Canadian)

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Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Privacy

The U.S. Government’s Secret Plans to Spy for American Corporations

Glenn Greenwald
The Intercept : September 5, 2014

Throughout the last year, the U.S. government has repeatedly insisted that it does not engage in economic and industrial espionage, in an effort to distinguish its own spying from China’s infiltrations of Google, Nortel, and other corporate targets. So critical is this denial to the U.S. government that last August, an NSA spokesperson emailed The Washington Post to say (emphasis in original): “The department does ***not*** engage in economic espionage in any domain, including cyber.”

After that categorical statement to the Post, the NSA was caught spying on plainly financial targets such as the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras; economic summits; international credit card and banking systems; the EU antitrust commissioner investigating Google, Microsoft, and Intel; and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. In response, the U.S. modified its denial to acknowledge that it does engage in economic spying, but unlike China, the spying is never done to benefit American corporations.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for instance, responded to the Petrobras revelations by claiming: “It is not a secret that the Intelligence Community collects information about economic and financial matters…. What we do not do, as we have said many times, is use our foreign intelligence capabilities to steal the trade secrets of foreign companies on behalf of—or give intelligence we collect to—U.S. companies to enhance their international competitiveness or increase their bottom line.”

But a secret 2009 report issued by Clapper’s own office explicitly contemplates doing exactly that. The document, the 2009 Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review—provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden—is a fascinating window into the mindset of America’s spies as they identify future threats to the U.S. and lay out the actions the U.S. intelligence community should take in response. It anticipates a series of potential scenarios the U.S. may face in 2025, from a “China/Russia/India/Iran centered bloc [that] challenges U.S. supremacy” to a world in which “identity-based groups supplant nation-states,” and games out how the U.S. intelligence community should operate in those alternative futures—the idea being to assess “the most challenging issues [the U.S.] could face beyond the standard planning cycle.”

One of the principal threats raised in the report is a scenario “in which the United States’ technological and innovative edge slips”— in particular, “that the technological capacity of foreign multinational corporations could outstrip that of U.S. corporations.” Such a development, the report says “could put the United States at a growing—and potentially permanent—disadvantage in crucial areas such as energy, nanotechnology, medicine, and information technology.”

How could U.S. intelligence agencies solve that problem? The report recommends “a multi-pronged, systematic effort to gather open source and proprietary information through overt means, clandestine penetration (through physical and cyber means), and counterintelligence” (emphasis added). In particular, the DNI’s report envisions “cyber operations” to penetrate “covert centers of innovation” such as R&D facilities.

In a graphic describing an “illustrative example,” the report heralds “technology acquisition by all means.” Some of the planning relates to foreign superiority in surveillance technology, but other parts are explicitly concerned with using cyber-espionage to bolster the competitive advantage of U.S. corporations. The report thus envisions a scenario in which companies from India and Russia work together to develop technological innovation, and the U.S. intelligence community then “conducts cyber operations” against “research facilities” in those countries, acquires their proprietary data, and then “assesses whether and how its findings would be useful to U.S. industry”

(read the full article including source documents at The Intercept)

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Corporate Welfare, WTF

Pull Your Hair Out As You Learn the Common Core Way of Doing 6 + 9

Robby Soave
Reason: September 3, 2014

Parents in New York are having trouble helping their kids with math homework now that the curriculum is aligned to the national Common Core standards, so a local news channel has released some videos explaining the new lessons.

Ready to pull your hair out? […] 9 + 6.

Instead of just, well, adding 9 and 6, students must run a gauntlet of extra addition, “decomposing” 6 into 1 and 5, “anchoring” 9 to 1 to make 10, and then adding the leftover 5. The new way requires a lot more time, a higher vocabulary, and more work. But it’s somehow supposed to be “more comfortable” for young learners, in the estimation of standards peddlers.

How parents must long for the good old days of rote memorization! (Incidentally, a recent Stanford University study found that rote memorization is important for developing brains.)

The videos also illustrate why adapting to Core-aligned curriculum is a difficult—and expensive—process for schools. New instructional materials must be purchased, teachers retrained, tests rewritten, etc.

(Read the article at Reason including source links)

Read more from Reason on Common Core here.

Drugs, Tyranny

Saudi Arabia Beheads Four Brothers Over Marijuana

Mike Adams
High Times: August 28, 2014

While the United States continues to enforce ridiculous and outdated drug policies to perpetuate slave labor within the American prison system, the drug laws in foreign lands are proving to be even more sinister, with recent reports suggesting that Saudi Arabia is beheading people for smuggling marijuana.

Earlier last week, four Saudi brothers charged with trafficking marijuana into the kingdom, were found guilty and sentenced to die by the hands of a sword-wielding executioner. Although the government news agency did not provide much information regarding the actual execution, the initial report indicates the men were decapitated near the southwestern city of Najran for smuggling “a large quantity of hashish” into the Arab state.

Unfortunately, the negotiation tactics by the human rights organization Amnesty International were not successful in providing the men with a stay of execution. Family members reached out to the organization in hopes that they could persuade Saudi officials to spare the lives of the brothers, but the interior ministry quickly snuffed out these attempts.

(read the full article at High Times)

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Geopolitics/War, Tyranny

Harper government asks public servants to delete emails

Mike De Souza
The Star: August 27, 2014

The Conservative government is telling public servants to delete emails with no “business value,” opening the door to the destruction of potentially valuable records, say critics.

Employees must still preserve information as required by law, a government spokeswoman says, but instructions obtained by the Star show that employees were being told to delete some reference materials related to their work, including memos and copies of departmental documents.

Several departments have issued the instructions in recent weeks to delete records as part of a new two-gigabyte limit imposed on email inboxes for all federal employees based on a new standard , introduced by the secretariat of Treasury Board President Tony Clement .

“Clean up your mailbox and delete everything of no business value,” said a recent message sent to Environment Canada employees this summer.

The Environment Canada message included a poster listing different categories of what could be deleted and what should be preserved.

Documents “approved by your manager” were among the records that the department told employees to save. But some business-related emails fell into a “transitory” category that also includes “messages from your friends” or an “invitation to a party.”

The Environment Canada poster described these as “transitory reference” materials — which could include memorandums, copies of government reports, or reference material for subsequent work. The poster, which identified memos with an image of a paper airplane, showed these types of “transitory” documents going into a trash can.

The NDP’s access to information critic, MP Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay) , slammed the instructions, warning that they might erase evidence of political interference or mistakes by managers prior to decisions on federal policies.

“We’ve seen many times where draft reports may contain very vital political information that could be changed, either through political interference or an attempt to whitewash an issue,” Angus said in an interview.

(read the full article at The Star)

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Corporate Welfare, Geopolitics/War, Original, Tyranny

Obama Pursuing Global Corporate Welfare Climate Accord

AlternativeFreePress.com

The Obama administration is pushing for an international climate change agreement to funnel more tax dollars into the hands of large corporations. The New York Times reports that despite the fact that the Constitution requires a president obtain approval from a two-thirds majority of the Senate, Obama plans on sidestepping his oath with “some legal and political magic”.

The climate accord would legally require countries to enact domestic climate change policies as well as make voluntarily pledges to specific levels of emissions cuts and to channel money “to poor countries to help them adapt to climate change”.

That may sound nice, but there are several reasons why this is a problem…

1. Foreign Aid is Corporate Welfare.

In Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins describes how he would convince the government leaders of underdeveloped countries to accept huge loans they could never pay off. He explains how those countries were then pressured politically so much that they were effectively neutralized and their economies crippled. Perkins describes the role of an Economic Hit Man as “a highly paid professionals who cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars. They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign “aid” organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources. Their tools included fraudulent financial reports, rigged elections, payoffs, extortion, sex, and murder. They play a game as old as empire, but one that has taken on new and terrifying dimensions during this time of globalization.”

Let’s look at an example of how nice sounding green initiatives are often just corporate welfare…

The BC’s Pacific Carbon Trust takes about $14 million dollars from taxpayers per year and transfers it to large corporations.

Jordan Bateman with the Canadian Taxpayers Federation explains that “taxpayer money flowed exclusively into the pockets of corporations, including some of the largest companies in the province. Lafarge, a $20 billion company, was paid by the Trust for 22,998 carbon credits. Encana, an $8.8 billion company, sold 84,276 credits. Canfor, a $2.5 billion company, sold 41,573 credits. Other sellers included TimberWest and Interfor.”

2. Binding Agreements & Loss Of Sovereignty.

While this climate agreement may not yet legally bind countries into the corporate welfare scheme, that is the endgame.

The New York Times reports that officials fear this type of agreement which will not will not bind countries to spend billions of dollars. They desperately want a binding agreement. Richard Muyungi, a climate negotiator for Tanzania is quoted “Without an international agreement that binds us, it’s impossible for us to address the threats of climate change… We are not as capable as the U.S. of facing this problem, and historically we don’t have as much responsibility. What we need is just one thing: Let the U.S. ratify the agreement. If they ratify the agreement, it will trigger action across the world.”

These international agreements seek to destroy nations sovereignty, they attempt to override laws of local, regional and national governments… and this has been planned for a long time.

The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 by David Rockefeller, it’s members include business leaders, Heads of State, UN bureaucrats, diplomats, politicians and government officials from all over the world.

In 1990 The Club of Rome published The First Global Revolution, where they outlined how they would create or exaggerate environmental threats with the intention of manipulating the public into giving up their sovereignty to one world government:

“The common enemy of humanity is man.
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up
with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming,
water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these
dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

3. Debt.

This climate agreement is being presented under the guise of rich countries helping countries in need, but really it is countries already in debt, getting into more debt, in order to get other countries into debt.

The “rich” countries are not really rich when you consider their debt, every dollar of aid given is borrowed with interest owing and compounding. Increasing debt and devaluing the dollar.

The “developing” countries can certainly use help, but the strings attached to this type of help will leave them with more debt than they can handle. This will leave them vulnerable to exploitation and allow corporations to pillage resources.

Banksters (central banks) create fiat currency and loan it to the government, it is then given to banksters (world bank / IMF) who loan it to developing countries. Debt on top of debt, interest plus more interest.

Written by Alternative Free Press
Creative Commons License
Obama Pursuing Global Corporate Welfare Climate Accord by AlternativeFreePress.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Sources:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/us/politics/obama-pursuing-climate-accord-in-lieu-of-treaty.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/jordan-bateman/carbon-bc_b_1723907.html
http://www.green-agenda.com/globalrevolution.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit_Man

Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Corporate Welfare, Drugs

Pennsylvania Superior Court: Mandatory Minimum Sentences are Unconstitutional

The Joint Blog: August 25, 2014

The Pennsylvania Superior Court has ruled that mandatory minimum sentences – including those imposed on nonviolent drug crimes – are unconstitutional, a ruling which will have a large and immediate impact on the state’s legal system.

The court made the ruling as part of a case against a Montgomery County man, James Newman, who received a mandatory 5-year sentence for possession of drugs (cocaine) and a gun. The court vacated the sentence, and called the current practice of mandatory minimum sentencing “unconstitutional”.

(read the full article at The Joint Blog)

The full opinion can be found at http://www.pacourts.us.

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Corporate Welfare, Health/Environment

Fraud at the CDC uncovered, 340% increased risk of autism hidden from public

CNN iReport : August 24, 2014

A top researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) played a key role in helping uncover data manipulation by the CDC. This fraud obscured a higher incidence of autism in African-American boys. The whistleblower, Dr. William Thompson, came forward after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for original data on an autism study was filed and these highly sensitive documents were received with the assistance of U.S. Representative Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. The CDC documents and discussions with the whistleblower reveal widespread manipulation of scientific data and top-down pressure on CDC scientists to suppress a causal link between the MMR vaccine and later autism diagnosis, particularly in a subset of African-American males who received their immunization “on-time” in accordance with the recommended CDC schedule.


The received documents from the CDC show that in 2003 a 340% increase in autism in African American boys related to the MMR vaccine was discovered and then hidden due to pressure from senior officials. The CDC researchers then recalculated their results by removing a population to get the results that were desired.


William Thompson has worked for the government agency for over a decade and confirmed that “the CDC knew about the relationship between the age of first MMR vaccine and autism incidence in African-American boys as early as 2003, but chose to cover it up.” He remarked “we’ve missed ten years of research because the CDC is so paralyzed right now by anything related to autism. They’re not doing what they should be doing because they’re afraid to look for things that might be associated.” He alleges criminal wrongdoing by his supervisors, and he expressed deep regret about his role in helping the CDC hide data.

 

Thompson’s revelations call into question the nine other studies cited by the CDC as evidence denying a link between vaccines and autism. They also have spurred a change.org petition to have the fraudulent study retracted from the Journal of Pediatrics, which published it in 2004.


A recently released memo from 2004 of Dr. Thompson expressing concerns to Dr. Gerberding, the head of the CDC at the time, about this problematic study has citizens upset. Does this mean Dr. Gerberding could have committed perjury during a congressional hearing? More investigation will be needed to know.

The letter obtained under FOIA : CDC-Gerberding-Warning-Vaccines-Autism

 

[…]

 

The US Department of Health Resources and Services Administration has already recognized autism as a secondary cause of vaccine injury as documented in the Update to the Vaccine Injury Table following the 2011 IOM report. They did reject Autism as a direct adverse effect of the MMR specifically, but in view of these revelations that may be revisited.
http://hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/iomreportupdate030812.pdf

 

More on this story from Yahoo News!
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/study-focus-autism-foundation-finds-133000584.html

 

The peer reviewed analysis of the original CDC data showing a 340% increase in autism in African American boys due to the MMR vaccine can be found here
http://www.translationalneurodegeneration.com/content/3/1/16

 

CBS coverage can be found at

 

http://www.cbs46.com/story/26316561/focus-autism-releases-findings-on-2003-cdc-autism-study-higher-autism-rate-among-african-american-boys-receiving-mmr-shot-earlier-than-36-months#.U_noAOE5EeE.twitter

 

UPDATE: CDC responds to claims stating that they recognize this study showed an increased risk of autism from the MMR:

 

 

“findings revealed that vaccination between 24 and 36 months was slightly more common among children with autism, and that association was strongest among children 3-5 years of age.”

 

They dismissed this with an assumption that parents with children that have autism rushed to get vaccinated for school.

 

“most likely a result of immunization requirements for preschool special education program attendance in children with autism.”

 

This raises questions as there are immunization requirements for all children attending public school and they already excluded children that had a vaccine exemption, so this should not have differed from the controls.

 

The CDC also states that “Additional studies and a more recent rigorous review by the Institute of Medicine have found that MMR vaccine does not increase the risk of autism”. The Studies that the CDC uses to confirm no link between the MMR and autism are 4 that they list on their website at (http://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/Vaccines/MMR/MMR.html ). A quick look at these 4 studies raises several questions.

 

  • One is the study talked about in this article showing a significant connection

  • A second was done by the infamous Dr. Thorsen who is awaiting extradition to the US on Fraud and is listed on the CDC’s most wanted list putting any of his work into question and this is outside of other potential problems with the study that have been brought up.

  • A third is an exploratory study of very small sample sizes, 28 children total, making this unreliable. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2526159/

  • The last one also used a small control sample size of only 31 children and relied on parent interviews to provide medical and behavioral information. Beyond that they did find that oer half (50%) of children with autism did regress shortly after the MMR vaccine (<5 months) even though they then concluded there was no connection. http://www.bu.edu/autism/files/2010/03/2006-Richler-et-al-MMR-Vaccine1.pdf

 

This begs the question as to why there are only these four studies used to support the claims that the MRR is safe and yet a quick search of PubMed finds A 2012 peer reviewed research paper studying over 500,000 children that found significant increase adverse effects after certain MMR vaccinations including a 22 Times increased risk of meningitis, 500% increase risk of febrile seizure, and other major side effects including a blood clotting disorder.

 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22336803

 

(read the full article at CNN)

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Alternative Free Press -fair use-

Privacy, Tyranny

The Surveillance Engine: How the NSA Built Its Own Secret Google

Ryan Gallagher
The Intercept: August 25, 2014

The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.

The documents provide the first definitive evidence that the NSA has for years made massive amounts of surveillance data directly accessible to domestic law enforcement agencies. Planning documents for ICREACH, as the search engine is called, cite the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration as key participants.

ICREACH contains information on the private communications of foreigners and, it appears, millions of records on American citizens who have not been accused of any wrongdoing. Details about its existence are contained in the archive of materials provided to The Intercept by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Earlier revelations sourced to the Snowden documents have exposed a multitude of NSA programs for collecting large volumes of communications. The NSA has acknowledged that it shares some of its collected data with domestic agencies like the FBI, but details about the method and scope of its sharing have remained shrouded in secrecy.

ICREACH has been accessible to more than 1,000 analysts at 23 U.S. government agencies that perform intelligence work, according to a 2010 memo. A planning document from 2007 lists the DEA, FBI, Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency as core members. Information shared through ICREACH can be used to track people’s movements, map out their networks of associates, help predict future actions, and potentially reveal religious affiliations or political beliefs.

The creation of ICREACH represented a landmark moment in the history of classified U.S. government surveillance, according to the NSA documents.

“The ICREACH team delivered the first-ever wholesale sharing of communications metadata within the U.S. Intelligence Community,” noted a top-secret memo dated December 2007. “This team began over two years ago with a basic concept compelled by the IC’s increasing need for communications metadata and NSA’s ability to collect, process and store vast amounts of communications metadata related to worldwide intelligence targets.”

The search tool was designed to be the largest system for internally sharing secret surveillance records in the United States, capable of handling two to five billion new records every day, including more than 30 different kinds of metadata on emails, phone calls, faxes, internet chats, and text messages, as well as location information collected from cellphones. Metadata reveals information about a communication—such as the “to” and “from” parts of an email, and the time and date it was sent, or the phone numbers someone called and when they called—but not the content of the message or audio of the call.

ICREACH does not appear to have a direct relationship to the large NSA database, previously reported by The Guardian, that stores information on millions of ordinary Americans’ phone calls under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. Unlike the 215 database, which is accessible to a small number of NSA employees and can be searched only in terrorism-related investigations, ICREACH grants access to a vast pool of data that can be mined by analysts from across the intelligence community for “foreign intelligence”—a vague term that is far broader than counterterrorism.

Data available through ICREACH appears to be primarily derived from surveillance of foreigners’ communications, and planning documents show that it draws on a variety of different sources of data maintained by the NSA. Though one 2010 internal paper clearly calls it “the ICREACH database,” a U.S. official familiar with the system disputed that, telling The Intercept that while “it enables the sharing of certain foreign intelligence metadata,” ICREACH is “not a repository [and] does not store events or records.” Instead, it appears to provide analysts with the ability to perform a one-stop search of information from a wide variety of separate databases.

In a statement to The Intercept, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed that the system shares data that is swept up by programs authorized under Executive Order 12333, a controversial Reagan-era presidential directive that underpins several NSA bulk surveillance operations that target foreign communications networks. The 12333 surveillance takes place with no court oversight and has received minimal Congressional scrutiny because it is targeted at foreign, not domestic, communication networks. The broad scale of 12333 surveillance means that some Americans’ communications get caught in the dragnet as they transit international cables or satellites—and documents contained in the Snowden archive indicate that ICREACH taps into some of that data.

Legal experts told The Intercept they were shocked to learn about the scale of the ICREACH system and are concerned that law enforcement authorities might use it for domestic investigations that are not related to terrorism.

“To me, this is extremely troublesome,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. “The myth that metadata is just a bunch of numbers and is not as revealing as actual communications content was exploded long ago—this is a trove of incredibly sensitive information.”

Brian Owsley, a federal magistrate judge between 2005 and 2013, said he was alarmed that traditional law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and the DEA were among those with access to the NSA’s surveillance troves.

“This is not something that I think the government should be doing,” said Owsley, an assistant professor of law at Indiana Tech Law School. “Perhaps if information is useful in a specific case, they can get judicial authority to provide it to another agency. But there shouldn’t be this buddy-buddy system back-and-forth.”

Jeffrey Anchukaitis, an ODNI spokesman, declined to comment on a series of questions from The Intercept about the size and scope of ICREACH, but said that sharing information had become “a pillar of the post-9/11 intelligence community” as part of an effort to prevent valuable intelligence from being “stove-piped in any single office or agency.”

Using ICREACH to query the surveillance data, “analysts can develop vital intelligence leads without requiring access to raw intelligence collected by other IC [Intelligence Community] agencies,” Anchukaitis said. “In the case of NSA, access to raw signals intelligence is strictly limited to those with the training and authority to handle it appropriately. The highest priority of the intelligence community is to work within the constraints of law to collect, analyze and understand information related to potential threats to our national security.”

One-Stop Shopping

The mastermind behind ICREACH was recently retired NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander, who outlined his vision for the system in a classified 2006 letter to the then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte. The search tool, Alexander wrote, would “allow unprecedented volumes of communications metadata to be shared and analyzed,” opening up a “vast, rich source of information” for other agencies to exploit. By late 2007 the NSA reported to its employees that the system had gone live as a pilot program.

The NSA described ICREACH as a “one-stop shopping tool” for analyzing communications. The system would enable at least a 12-fold increase in the volume of metadata being shared between intelligence community agencies, the documents stated. Using ICREACH, the NSA planned to boost the amount of communications “events” it shared with other U.S. government agencies from 50 billion to more than 850 billion, bolstering an older top-secret data sharing system named CRISSCROSS/PROTON, which was launched in the 1990s and managed by the CIA.

To allow government agents to sift through the masses of records on ICREACH, engineers designed a simple “Google-like” search interface. This enabled analysts to run searches against particular “selectors” associated with a person of interest—such as an email address or phone number—and receive a page of results displaying, for instance, a list of phone calls made and received by a suspect over a month-long period. The documents suggest these results can be used reveal the “social network” of the person of interest—in other words, those that they communicate with, such as friends, family, and other associates.

(Read more at The Intercept, including source documents)

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