Privacy

New Snowden Docs Confirm NSA Can Record 100% Of A Nation’s Phone Calls

NSA surveillance program reaches ‘into the past’ to retrieve, replay phone calls

By Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani
Washington Post: March 18, 2014

The National Security Agency has built a surveillance system capable of recording “100 percent” of a foreign country’s telephone calls, enabling the agency to rewind and review conversations as long as a month after they take place, according to people with direct knowledge of the effort and documents supplied by former contractor Edward Snowden.

A senior manager for the program compares it to a time machine — one that can replay the voices from any call without requiring that a person be identified in advance for surveillance.

The voice interception program, called MYSTIC, began in 2009. Its RETRO tool, short for “retrospective retrieval,” and related projects reached full capacity against the first target nation in 2011. Planning documents two years later anticipated similar operations elsewhere.

In the initial deployment, collection systems are recording “every single” conversation nationwide, storing billions of them in a 30-day rolling buffer that clears the oldest calls as new ones arrive, according to a classified summary.

The call buffer opens a door “into the past,” the summary says, enabling users to “retrieve audio of interest that was not tasked at the time of the original call.” Analysts listen to only a fraction of 1 percent of the calls, but the absolute numbers are high. Each month, they send millions of voice clippings, or “cuts,” for processing and long-term storage.

At the request of U.S. officials, The Washington Post is withholding details that could be used to identify the country where the system is being employed or other countries where its use was envisioned.

No other NSA program disclosed to date has swallowed a nation’s telephone network whole. Outside experts have sometimes described that prospect as disquieting but remote, with notable implications for a growing debate over the NSA’s practice of “bulk collection” abroad.

Bulk methods capture massive data flows “without the use of discriminants,” as President Obama put it in January. By design, they vacuum up all the data they touch — meaning that most of the conversations collected by RETRO would be irrelevant to U.S. national security interests.

In the view of U.S. officials, however, the capability is highly valuable.

In a statement, Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for the National Security Council, declined to comment on “specific alleged intelligence activities.” Speaking generally, she said that “new or emerging threats” are “often hidden within the large and complex system of modern global communications, and the United States must consequently collect signals intelligence in bulk in certain circumstances in order to identify these threats.”

NSA spokeswoman Vanee Vines, in an e-mailed statement, said that “continuous and selective reporting of specific techniques and tools used for legitimate U.S. foreign intelligence activities is highly detrimental to the national security of the United States and of our allies, and places at risk those we are sworn to protect.”

Some of the documents provided by Snowden suggest that high-volume eavesdropping may soon be extended to other countries, if it has not been already. The RETRO tool was built three years ago as a “unique one-off capability,” but last year’s secret intelligence budget named five more countries for which the MYSTIC program provides “comprehensive metadata access and content,” with a sixth expected to be in place by last October.

The budget did not say whether the NSA now records calls in quantity in those countries or expects to do so. A separate document placed a high priority on planning “for MYSTIC accesses against projected new mission requirements,” including “voice.”

Ubiquitous voice surveillance, even overseas, pulls in a great deal of content from Americans who telephone, visit and work in the target country. It may also be seen as inconsistent with Obama’s Jan. 17 pledge “that the United States is not spying on ordinary people who don’t threaten our national security,” regardless of nationality, “and that we take their privacy concerns into account.”

In a presidential policy directive, Obama instructed the NSA and other agencies that bulk acquisition may be used only to gather intelligence related to one of six specified threats, including nuclear proliferation and terrorism. The directive, however, also noted that limits on bulk collection “do not apply to signals intelligence data that is temporarily acquired to facilitate targeted collection.”

The emblem of the MYSTIC program depicts a cartoon wizard with a telephone-headed staff. Among the agency’s bulk collection programs disclosed over the past year, its focus on the spoken word is unique. Most of the programs have involved the bulk collection of metadata — which does not include call content — or text, such as e-mail address books.

Telephone calls are often thought to be more ephemeral and less suited than text for processing, storage and search. And there are indications that the call-recording program has been hindered by the NSA’s limited capacity to store and transmit bulky voice files.

In the first year of its deployment, a program officer wrote that the project “has long since reached the point where it was collecting and sending home far more than the bandwidth could handle.”

Because of similar capacity limits across a range of collection programs, the NSA is leaping forward with cloud-based collection systems and a gargantuan new “mission data repository” in Utah. According to its overview briefing, the Utah facility is designed “to cope with the vast increases in digital data that have accompanied the rise of the global network.”

Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, said history suggests that “over the next couple of years they will expand to more countries, retain data longer and expand the secondary uses.”

Spokesmen for the NSA and the office of Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. declined to confirm or deny expansion plans or discuss the criteria for any change.

Based on RETRO’s internal reviews, the NSA has a strong motive to deploy it elsewhere. In the documents and in interviews, U.S. officials said RETRO is uniquely valuable when an analyst uncovers a new name or telephone number of interest.

With up to 30 days of recorded conversations in hand, the NSA can pull an instant history of the subject’s movements, associates and plans. Some other U.S. intelligence agencies also have access to RETRO.

Highly classified briefings cite examples in which the tool offered high-stakes intelligence that would not have existed under traditional surveillance programs in which subjects are identified for targeting in advance. In contrast with most of the government’s public claims about the value of controversial programs, the briefings supply names, dates, locations and fragments of intercepted calls in convincing detail.

Present and former U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity to provide context for a classified program, acknowledged that large numbers of conversations involving Americans would be gathered from the country where RETRO operates.

The NSA does not attempt to filter out their calls, defining them as communications “acquired incidentally as a result of collection directed against appropriate foreign intelligence targets.”

Until about 20 years ago, such incidental collection was unusual unless an American was communicating directly with a foreign intelligence target. In bulk collection systems, which are exponentially more capable than the ones in use throughout the Cold War, calls and other data from U.S. citizens and permanent residents are regularly ingested by the millions.

Under the NSA’s internal “minimization rules,” those intercepted communications “may be retained and processed” and included in intelligence reports. The agency generally removes the names of U.S. callers, but there are several broadly worded exceptions.

An independent group tasked by the White House to review U.S. surveillance policies recommended that incidentally collected U.S. calls and e-mails — including those obtained overseas — should nearly always “be purged upon detection.” Obama did not accept that recommendation.

Vines, in her statement, said the NSA’s work is “strictly conducted under the rule of law.”

RETRO and MYSTIC are carried out under Executive Order 12333, the traditional grant of presidential authority to intelligence agencies for operations outside the United States.

Since August, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and others on that panel have been working on plans to assert a greater oversight role for intelligence-gathering abroad. Some legislators are considering whether Congress should also draft new laws to govern those operations.

Experts say there is not much legislation that governs overseas intelligence work.

“Much of the U.S. government’s intelligence collection is not regulated by any statute passed by Congress,” said Timothy H. Edgar, the former director of privacy and civil liberties on Obama’s national security staff. “There’s a lot of focus on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is understandable, but that’s only a slice of what the intelligence community does.”

All surveillance must be properly authorized for a legitimate intelligence purpose, he said, but that “still leaves a gap for activities that otherwise basically aren’t regulated by law, because they’re not covered by FISA.”

Beginning in 2007, Congress loosened 40-year-old restrictions on domestic surveillance because so much foreign data crossed U.S. territory. There were no comparable changes to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens and residents whose calls and e-mails now routinely cross international borders.

(Read the full article and the leaked source documents at Washington Post)

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Health/Environment, Original

Study Confirms Genetically Modified Corn Doesn’t Work

By AlternativeFreePress.com

A study conducted by a team led by Aaron Gassmann, an entomologist at Iowa State University in Ames, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences details how genetically modified corn is no longer efficient at killing the western corn rootworm (Diabrotica virgifera virgifera):

“Beginning in 2009, western corn rootworm with resistance to maize producing the Bt toxin Cry3Bb1 imposed severe injury to Cry3Bb1 maize in Iowa. We show that cross-resistance exists between Cry3Bb1 maize and mCry3A maize and is associated with severe injury to Bt maize in farmers’ fields. These results illustrate that Bt crops producing less than a high dose of toxin against target pests may select for resistance rapidly; consequently, current approaches for managing Bt resistance should be reexamined.”

The abstract concludes, “These first cases of resistance by western corn rootworm highlight the vulnerability of Bt maize to further evolution of resistance from this pest and, more broadly, point to the potential of insects to develop resistance rapidly when Bt crops do not achieve a high dose of Bt toxin.” Gassmann warns, “Unless management practices change, it’s only going to get worse…There needs to be a fundamental change in how the technology is used.”

This has occurred because of a combination of corruption and incompetence. The EPA is a joke and today’s average farmer doesn’t really know how to farm. Rather than tend the soil and rotate crops, they just keep growing GM corn and ask the chemical company to “fix” any issue.

Wired quotes two entomologists:

Entomologist Bruce Tabashnik of the University of Arizona called Bt resistance “an increasingly serious problem,” and said that refuge sizes need to be increased dramatically and immediately. He and other scientists have pushed the EPA to double current refuge requirements, but so far without success.

“Biotech companies have successfully lobbied EPA for major reductions in refuge requirements,” said Tabashnik.

Entomologist Elson Shields of Cornell University agrees. “Resistance was caused because the farmers did not plant the required refuges and the companies did not enforce the planting of refuges,” said Shields, who has written that “a widespread increase in trait failure may be just around the corner.”

Shields also lamented the difficulty he and other academic scientists long experienced when trying to study Bt corn. Until 2010, after organized objections by entomologists at major agricultural universities forced seed companies to allow outside researchers to study Bt corn, the crop was largely off-limits. Had that not been the case, said Shields, resistance could have been detected even earlier, and perhaps stalled before it threatened to become such a problem.

“Once we had legal access, resistance was documented in a year,” Shields said. “We were seeing failures earlier but were not allowed to test for resistance.”

Corruption and incompetence.

Sources for this article:

1. Field-evolved resistance by western corn rootworm to multiple Bacillus thuringiensis toxins in transgenic maize http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/03/12/1317179111

2. Voracious Worm Evolves to Eat Biotech Corn Engineered to Kill It http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/rootworm-resistance-bt-corn/

Written by Alternative Free Press
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Geopolitics/War

Simple Stuff About Ukraine

By Philip Giraldi
Antiwar: March 18, 2014

On March 6th President Barack Obama signed an executive order “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Contributing to the Situation in Ukraine” which permits Washington to seize the assets of any “United States person” who opposes current US policies vis-à-vis that country. The order claims absurdly that the status quo in Ukraine and the Crimean referendum constitute a “national emergency” for the United States. Anyone who directly or indirectly is involved in “actions or policies that threaten the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine” can have his or her assets seized. That means if you think a referendum by Crimeans that might result in union with Russia is not necessarily a bad idea and you write a letter to the local paper saying so it could be good-bye bank account. There is no appeal mechanism in the executive order.

Obama’s transition to the tin hat brigade is eerily similar to an order signed by George W. Bush in 2007, the “Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq.” Taking both orders together, it is a clear indication of how low we have sunk so as to penalize any dissent over policies that have never been openly debated or voted on by the American public, but I suppose Bush would explain proudly that he “brought democracy” to Iraq while Obama would change the subject by noting that he killed Usama bin-Laden. Either way, the criminalizing of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights ends up making the rest of what happens relatively unimportant, nothing more than what our war masters refer to as collateral damage.

I am no expert on what is going on in Ukraine, apart from speaking a little Russian, an ability which many Ukrainian citizens reportedly also have. But it is clear that some unfortunate patterns relating to the past twenty years or so appear to be resurfacing in spite of the fact that most observers would likely agree that Washington has made a complete hash of the post-bipolar world that has prevailed since 1991. We are already seeing Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, demonized for years in the mainstream media, compared to Hitler by no less than Hillary Clinton and a supporting chorus of neocons. We are back in the bunkers and it is 1938 in Munich. Again we are being called on to oppose evil, the same clarion call sounded over every overseas crisis for the past twenty years.

But the evil is us. We started the Ukraine problem by meddling with a democratically elected Ukrainian government which was admittedly corrupt and autocratic, but legal nonetheless. We openly provided the type of support that enabled a diverse group of demonstrators to bring President Viktor Yanukovich down and US diplomats spoke on a phone about who might head an alternative government that would be to Washington’s taste.

And the seeds of the conflict, one of a series that have roiled Eastern Europe for the past twenty years, were actually planted earlier when the United States violated an understanding with Moscow not to take advantage of the fall of the Soviet empire by advancing its zone of influence. Nearly all Eastern Europe states now have a relationship with the western dominated European Union, some as full members, and most are also in NATO, a defensive alliance aimed at Russia. If Moscow is alarmed, it has a right to be so.

Ukraine, once referred to as “little Russia” because of its cultural similarity to its larger neighbor is the birthplace of the Russian Orthodox faith, and sits squarely on Russia’s border. Putin, a Russian nationalist, could not ignore a threat to Moscow’s national security, just as the United States would never look the other way in the event of a takeover in Mexico by a mob aligned with either Russia or China, so how this crisis has been playing out should not surprise anyone.

A little history is in order. The Crimea, part of Ukraine only since 1954, was a Tartar Khanate under the protection of the Ottoman Empire until it was annexed by Catherine the Great in 1783. It became part of Russia, its capital Sebastopol the only Russian ice free naval base, operating on the Black Sea. Most Crimeans identify ethnically as Russians rather than as Ukrainians and Russia continues to operate its major naval base, complete with a large garrison, under a long term bilateral agreement with the Ukrainian government. Russia sees its ability to use the Crimea as a vital national security interest and it is hard to deny that Moscow has a legitimate stake regarding what occurs in Ukraine.

In post-Soviet Europe there were indeed good practical reasons to encourage the transition to popular government of some kind for nations that had suffered under totalitarianism for forty-five years, but the process has both gotten out of hand and has focused too much on introducing western democratic norms without any regard for local ability to absorb such an development. This has meant that aspiring politicians who are good at talking democracy (and often speak English) generally get Washington’s support in their pastel revolutions and then out to be either completely corrupt or hopelessly incompetent leaders. This process is currently playing out in Ukraine, as it played out earlier in places like Georgia. As in the case of Georgia, which was the aggressor in a war with Russia, we Americans are being told that we must stand by Ukraine with military support, a short hand way to suggest that the US must stop Russia now even if it does mean starting World War III. Senator John McCain is, as usual, leading the charge, claiming that Russia is a “gas station masquerading as a country.” If I were Putin I might well respond that McCain is a psychopath pretending to be a statesman.

All of the above would seem to indicate that Washington would be wise to pause and consider its actual interests in Ukraine. I would suggest that there are no actual American interests, not even the good old Obama tried-and-true universal excuse to intervene “Responsibility to protect” or R2P, as there are no massacres taking place.

So here is the simple truth about Ukraine – we have no genuine national interests there and we are needlessly provoking Russia which does have legitimate interests. Putin might not be Adlai Stevenson, but he is a reliable actor on the world stage who will do what he thinks is best for his country and will do it regardless of what Europeans or Americans think. He also, not irrelevantly, has enough nuclear weapons and delivery systems to destroy both the United States and the rest of the world. Washington, meanwhile, has little leverage over what is happening anyway and it has to be a complete mystery why there is a passion to “do something,” particularly when doing something will no doubt make most things worse, just as it has almost everywhere since 1991. Slapping on sanctions and pouring billions of dollars we don’t have into a bottomless pit is not rational. Risking bringing back the Cold War just because we can in support of a group of Ukrainian new “leaders” that we understand as poorly as we do the leaders in the Syrian insurgency is folly.

(Read the full article and find source links at Antiwar.com)

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Geopolitics/War

Double Standards and Hypocrisy: Where are the Sanctions against the West?

By Iskandar Arfaoui
Global Research: March 18, 2014

As the US and the European Union impose sanctions on 21 officials from Russia and Ukraine for helping the people of Crimea to make a democratic choice to become a part of the Russian Federation, one specific question arises – where were all the sanctions when the West was carrying out genuinely illegal wars and interventions that resulted in destruction and thousands of innocent civilians being killed?

Unlike Russia, which has not fired one single shot in Crimea, nor has been seen as an invader by the people of Crimea, the West, primarily the United States and NATO countries, have caused havoc and destruction all over the world with little or no repercussions. Below are just three examples which warrant toughest sanctions to be imposed on Western powers.

The Iraq War

The Lancet journal in 2006 published an estimate of 654,965 excess Iraqi deaths related to the war of which 601,027 were caused by violence. In terms of financial costs, the non-partisan Congressional Research Service estimates that the US will have spent almost $802bn (£512.8bn) on funding the war by the end of fiscal year 2011, with $747.6bn (£478bn) already appropriated. The dire consequences of Western invasion continued way beyond 2003. Sectarian violence in the conflict began to grow from early 2005. But the destruction of an important Shia shrine in February 2006 saw attacks between Sunni and Shia militias increase dramatically. This caused many Iraqi families to abandon their homes and move to other areas within the country or to flee abroad. The International Organization for Migration, IOM, which monitors numbers of displaced families, estimates that in the four years 2006-2010, as many as 1.6 million Iraqis were internally displaced, representing 5.5% of the population.

Libyan Bloody intervention

The intervention in Libya was supposed to be about saving lives and protecting civilians from the murdered Colonel Gaddafi. Instead it quickly became a catastrophe. Firstly, it is important to note that NATO acted completely outside its mandate. Secondly, just as currently in Syria, the West supported vile and blood thirsty rebels who took it upon themselves to create massacre after massacre. Amnesty International has produced compendious evidence of mass abduction and detention, beating and routine torture, killings and atrocities by the rebel militias Britain, France and the US have backed. Throughout that time African migrants and black Libyans have been subject to a relentless racist campaign of mass detention, lynchings and atrocities on the usually unfounded basis that they have been loyalist mercenaries. What is now known, is that while the death toll in Libya when NATO intervened was perhaps around 1,000-2,000 (judging by UN estimates), eight months later it became more than ten times that figure. Estimates of the numbers of dead range from 10,000 up to 50,000. The National Transitional Council puts the losses at 30,000 dead and 50,000 wounded. Currently, Libya continues to be in a state of anarchy with frequent assassinations, complete lack of security and towns controlled by aggressive militia.

US Drone Strikes

The impact of President Barack Obama’s drone strikes has been devastating to many communities in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan. In Pakistan alone, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) reports that from June 2004 through mid-September 2012, available data indicate that drone strikes killed 2,562-3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom 474-881 were civilians, including 176 children. TBIJ reports that these strikes also injured an additional 1,228-1,362 individuals. Where media accounts do report civilian casualties, rarely is any information provided about the victims or the communities they leave behind. Furthermore, current US targeted killings and drone strike practices undermine respect for the rule of law and international legal protections and may set dangerous precedents. There is clear doubt on the legality of strikes on individuals or groups not linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and who do not pose imminent threats to the US. The US government’s failure to ensure basic transparency and accountability in its targeted killing policies, to provide necessary details about its targeted killing program, or adequately to set out the legal factors involved in decisions to strike hinders necessary democratic debate about a key aspect of US foreign and national security policy.

(Read the full article at Global Research)

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Privacy

If Spying on Senate is So Bad, Why is it OK For Them To Spy On Us?

By Ron Paul
Ron Paul Institute For Peace & Prosperity: March 16, 2014

The reaction of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) to last week’s revelations that the CIA secretly searched Senate Intelligence Committee computers reveals much about what the elites in government think about the rest of us. “Spy on thee, but not on me!”

The hypocrisy of Sen. Feinstein is astounding. She is the biggest backer of the NSA spying on the rest of us, but when the tables are turned and her staff is the target she becomes irate. But there is more to it than that. There is an attitude in Washington that the laws Congress passes do not apply to Members. They can trample our civil liberties, they believe, but it should never affect their own freedom.

Remember that much of this started when politicians rushed to past the PATRIOT Act after 9/11. Those of us who warned that such new powers granted to the state would be used against us someday were criticized as alarmist and worse. The violations happened just as we warned, but when political leaders discovered the breach of our civil liberties they did nothing about it. It was not until whistleblowers like Edward Snowden and others informed us of the abuses that the “debate” over surveillance that President Obama claimed to welcome could even begin to take place! Left to politicians like Dianne Feinstein, Mike Rogers, and President Obama, we would never have that debate because we would not know.

Washington does not care about our privacy. When serious violations are discovered they most often rush to protect the status quo instead of defending the Constitution. Senator Feinstein did just that as the NSA spying revelations began to create pressure on the Intelligence Community. Her NSA reform legislation was nothing but a smokescreen: under the guise of “reform” it would have codified in law the violations already taking place. When that fact became too obvious to deny, the Senate was forced to let the legislation die in the committee.

What is interesting, and buried in the accusations and denials, is that the alleged CIA monitoring was over an expected 6,000 page Senate Intelligence Committee report on the shameful and un-American recent CIA history of torture at the “gulag archipelago” of secret prisons it set up across the world after the attacks of 9/11. We can understand why the CIA might have been afraid of that information getting out.

When CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou exposed the CIA’s role in torturing prisoners he was sent to prison for nearly three years. But Senator Feinstein and her colleagues didn’t lift a finger to support him. So again you have the double standards and hypocrisy.

The essence of this problem has to do with the difficulty in managing the US empire. When the government behaves as an empire rather than as a republic, lying to the rest of us is permissible. They spy on everybody because they don’t trust anybody. The answer is obvious: rein in the CIA; remove its authority to conduct these kinds of covert actions. Rein in government. Lawmakers should not defend Fourth Amendment rights only when their staffs have been violated. They should do it all the time for all of us. The people’s branch of government must stand up for the people. Let’s hope that Sen. Feinstein has had her wake-up call and will now finally start defending the rest of us against a government that increasingly sees us as the enemy.

(Source: Ron Paul Institute For Peace & Prosperity)

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Health/Environment

US Navy exposed to Fukushima radiation levels exceeding Japanese claims

Report: USS Reagan exposed to radiation levels exceeding what Japanese government said

By Matthew M. Burke
Stars and Stripes: March 14, 2014

SASEBO NAVAL BASE, Japan — When the USS Ronald Reagan arrived off the coast of Japan’s main Honshu Island on March 13, 2011, it was greeted by radiation levels that far exceeded what Navy leadership had been told to expect by the Japanese government, according to a new report in the Asia-Pacific Journal.

The report, “Mobilizing Nuclear Bias: The Fukushima Nuclear Crisis and the Politics of Uncertainty,” says that the carrier was exposed to levels of radiation that were 30 times greater than normal as the carrier steamed for the coast to aid victims of the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami.

Navy leadership has said that sailors were not exposed to harmful levels, even though those aboard were told to scrub the ship and equipment in protective suits. But the damage to the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima plant was far worse than initially feared.

The report, released Feb. 17, and documents obtained by its author Kyle Cleveland, an associate sociology professor at Temple University Japan, fuel questions that remain more than three years later over what the Japanese government and TEPCO knew and what they told the U.S. as the nuclear disaster was escalating. Debate also continues over the level at which exposure to radiation becomes a health risk.

The report comes on the heels of a January directive from Congress, instructing the Defense Department to look at the potential health impact on the Navy first responders in Japan. In 2012, sailors and Marines filed a lawsuit alleging that TEPCO’s misinformation coaxed U.S. forces closer to the affected areas and made them sick. An amended suit was filed last month.

Unexpected readings

Cleveland began to study the crisis so that he could accurately advise his Study Abroad students on safety in the aftermath of the disaster, he told Stars and Stripes. Through his research and document requests, he examined the Fukushima Dai-ichi meltdown, the unconfirmed information released by the Japanese and the Navy response in the first month afterward.

Cleveland reported that the U.S. government tried to maintain a delicate diplomatic balance, leading a rescue effort and advising their Japanese allies while not fully trusting Japan’s assessment of the danger. At the same time, the Navy was identifying the potential scope of the problem while taking steps to ensure the safety of its servicemembers.

“As the crisis unfolded and efforts to bring the reactors under control were initially proving ineffective, concerns increased that radiation dispersion was unmitigated, and with radiation monitoring by the U.S. military indicating levels significantly beyond TEPCO’s conservative assessments, the United States broke with Japan, recommending an 80km exclusionary zone, and initiating military assisted departures for embassy staff and Department of Defense dependents from Japan,” Cleveland wrote. “These actions deviated significantly from Japan’s assessments (which had established a 30km evacuation zone), creating a dynamic where the U.S. … attempted to impose a qualitatively different crisis management response.”

Cleveland’s report included transcribed telephone conversations between U.S. based federal government officials, nuclear authorities, U.S. embassy officials in Tokyo and military staff in the Pacific Command. In one such conversation, Adm. Kirkland Donald, then director of naval reactors; Michael Weber from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Donald’s patrol director Troy Mueller; and Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman discussed issues on the ground.

Poneman asked Donald about the difference between radiation levels they were finding and what they were being told by the Japanese. Mueller told Poneman that levels detected 100 nautical miles away were about 30 times those in a normal air sample out at sea. “We thought based on what we had heard on the reactors that we wouldn’t detect that level even at 25 miles,” he said. “So it’s much greater than what we had thought. We didn’t think we would detect anything at 100 miles.”

Mueller said that it would take a person 10 hours to reach a threshold where exposure at that level would become a thyroid dose issue.

Donald and Mueller also described airborne particulate levels being detected at 2 1/2 times above normal using on-board sensors. Air crews traveling to a Japanese vessel 50 miles off shore from the plant had five times the minimum detectable levels on their shoes when no radiation was expected at that distance, they said.

Weber said that the readings were greater than what was expected but were still fairly insignificant.

A final Defense Department report regarding radiation doses during Operation Tomodachi, including for those aboard the Reagan, agreed that the levels were too low to see any adverse health effects.

“The reported radiation doses to fleet-based individuals were at least one order of magnitude less than any dose associated with adverse health effects,” according to the report, which was released on the Operation Tomodachi Registry in September.

(Read the full article at Stars & Stripes)

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Health/Environment

NY Times: Pacific Ocean Radioactive Cesium 137 Could Be 10,000 Times As High As Contamination After Chernobyl

Ignored study found that Fukushima cesium-137 levels could be 10,000 times higher than after Chernobyl in Pacific surface waters. Researchers say they face obstruction and pressure to downplay harmful impact.

Concerns Over Measurement of Fukushima Fallout

By David McNeill
New York Times: March 17, 2014

TOKYO — In the chaotic, fearful weeks after the Fukushima nuclear crisis began, in March 2011, researchers struggled to measure the radioactive fallout unleashed on the public. Michio Aoyama’s initial findings were more startling than most. As a senior scientist at the Japanese government’s Meteorological Research Institute, he said levels of radioactive cesium 137 in the surface water of the Pacific Ocean could be 10,000 times as high as contamination after Chernobyl, the world’s worst nuclear accident.

Two months later, as Mr. Aoyama prepared to publish his findings in a short, nonpeer-reviewed article for Nature, the director general of the institute called with an unusual demand — that Mr. Aoyama remove his own name from the paper.

“He said there were points he didn’t understand, or want to understand,” the researcher recalled. “I was later told that he did not want to say that Fukushima radioactivity was worse than Chernobyl.” The head of the institute, who has since retired, declined to comment for this article. Mr. Aoyama asked for his name to be removed, he said, and the article was not published.

The pressure he felt is not unusual — only his decision to speak about it. Off the record, university researchers in Japan say that even now, three years after the triple meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, they feel under pressure to play down the impact of the disaster. Some say they cannot get funds or university support for their work. In several cases, the professors say, they have been obstructed or told to steer clear of data that might cause public “concern.”

“Getting involved in this sort of research is dangerous politically,” said Joji Otaki, a biologist at Japan’s Ryukyu University who has written papers suggesting that radioactivity at Fukushima has triggered inherited deformities in a species of butterfly. His research is paid for through private donations, including crowdfunding, a sign, he said, that the public supports his work. “It’s an exceptional situation,” he said.

The precise health impact of the Fukushima disaster is disputed. The government has defined mandatory evacuation zones around the Daiichi plant as areas where cumulative dose levels might reach 20 millisieverts per year, the typical worldwide limit for nuclear-power-plant workers. The limit recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection is one millisievert per year for the public, though some scientists argue that below 100 millisieverts the threat of increased cancers is negligible.

In an effort to lower radiation and persuade about 155,000 people to return home, the government is trying to decontaminate a large area by scraping away millions of tons of radioactive dirt and storing it in temporary dumps. Experts at Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology put the cost of this project at $50 billion — widely considered an underestimate.

The chance to study in this real-life laboratory has drawn a small number of researchers from around the world. Timothy A. Mousseau, a professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina who has written widely on Chernobyl, studies the impact of radiation on bird and insect life. He has published papers suggesting abnormalities and defects in some Fukushima species. But he said his three research excursions to Japan had been difficult.

In one case, a Japanese professor and two postdoctoral students dropped out of a joint research paper, telling him they could not risk association with his findings. “They felt it was too provocative and controversial,” he said, “and the postdocs were worried it could hamper their future job prospects.”

Mr. Mousseau is careful to avoid comparisons with the Soviet Union, which arrested and even imprisoned scientists who studied Chernobyl. Nevertheless, he finds the lukewarm support for studies in Japan troubling: “It’s pretty clear that there is self-censorship or professors have been warned by their superiors that they must be very, very careful,” he said.

The “more insidious censorship” is the lack of funding at a national level for these kinds of studies, he added. “They’re putting trillions of yen into moving dirt around and almost nothing into environmental assessment.”

Long before an earthquake and tsunami triggered the Fukushima meltdown, critics questioned the influence of Japan’s powerful nuclear lobby over the country’s top universities. Some professors say their careers have been hobbled because they expressed doubts about the nation’s nuclear policy and the coalition of bureaucrats, industrialists, politicians and elite academics who created it.

Mr. Aoyama, who now works at Fukushima University, sees no evidence of an organized conspiracy in the lack of openness about radiation levels — just official timidity. Despite the problems with his Nature article, he has written or co-written eight published papers since 2011 on coastal water pollution and other radiation-linked themes.

But stories of problems with Fukushima-related research are common, he said, including accounts of several professors’ being told not to measure radiation in the surrounding prefectures. “There are so many issues in our community,” he said. “The key phrase is ‘don’t cause panic.”’

He is also critical of the flood of false rumors circulating about the reach of Fukushima’s radioactive payload.

Ken Buesseler, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s department of marine chemistry and geochemistry, in Massachusetts, who has worked with Mr. Aoyama, said he has spent much of his professional energy fighting the rumor mill. The cause is not helped, he added, by institutional attempts to gag Japanese professors.

“Researchers are told not to talk to the press, or they don’t feel comfortable about talking to the press without permission,” Mr. Buesseler said. A veteran of three post-earthquake research trips to Japan, he wants the authorities to put more money into investigating the impact on the food chain of Fukushima’s release of cesium and strontium. “Why isn’t the Japanese government paying for this, since they have most to gain?”

One reason, critics say, is that after a period of national soul searching, when it looked as if Japan might scrap its commercial reactors, the government is again supporting nuclear power. Since the conservative Liberal Democrats returned to power, in late 2012, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has begun trying to sell Japan’s nuclear technology abroad.

Much of the government funding for academic research in Japan is funneled through either the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science or the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. Proposals are screened by government officials and reviewed by an academic committee.

(Read the full article at New York Times)

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Geopolitics/War

EU Wreaks of Hypocrisy on “undemocratic” Crimea Referendum

Institution that ignores its own citizens’ referendums decries Crimea vote as undemocratic

The EU’s Stunning Hypocrisy on Crimea

By Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars: March 17, 2014

The European Union’s characterization of the Crimean vote to join Russia as “undemocratic” is laced with stunning hypocrisy given that the EU ignored its own citizens when they rejected the European Constitution on numerous occasions.

Following yesterday’s referendum in which people in the black sea peninsula voted 97% in favor of becoming part of the Russian federation, the EU responded by slapping sanctions on 21 Russian and Ukrainian officials, declaring the referendum to be “illegal”.

That’s standard operating procedure for the European Union, which habitually denigrates the will of its own people by ignoring popular votes and referendums if it doesn’t like the result.

When voters in both France and the Netherlands rejected the EU Constitution in 2005, instead of accepting the outcome, the European Union simply re-named the Constitution and re-introduced it as the Lisbon Treaty, forcing Europeans to vote once again.

Even when Irish voters rejected the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, the EU simply changed the rules which mandated that the treaty could only be passed with a unanimous vote from all member states and passed it anyway, flying in the face of any notion of democracy.

In brazenly declaring that the EU would ignore referendums, Giscard d’Estaing even went on record to admit that the Lisbon Treaty “had been carefully crafted to confuse the public.”

By denouncing Crimea’s vote as undemocratic and illegal, the EU is displaying its usual brand of jaw-dropping hypocrisy. This is an institution that has repeatedly violated the democratic will of its own citizens by holding recurring referendums until Europeans simply gave in and accepted the result the bureaucratic parasites in Brussels were pushing for all along.

The United States and the EU’s denunciation of the Crimean vote is also beyond a joke when one considers the fact that the initial Euromaidan uprising, which led to the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected government, was bankrolled by the United States itself via the State Department in concert with groups such as the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy.

(Read the full article at Infowars)

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Geopolitics/War

Putin signs order to recognize Crimea as a sovereign independent state

RT: March 17, 2014

President Vladimir Putin has signed an order that Russia recognizes Crimea as a sovereign and independent state. The Autonomous Republic of Crimea held a referendum on Sunday with over 96% voting for integration into Russia.

“According to the will of the peoples of the Crimea on the all-Crimean referendum held on March 16, 2014, [I order] to recognize the Republic of Crimea, in which the city of Sevastopol has a special status, as a sovereign and independent state,” the document reads.

The order comes into force immediately.

Crimea was declared an independent sovereign state, the Republic of Crimea, on Monday, the autonomous Ukrainian regional parliament’s website stated.

Crimea also addressed the UN seeking recognition as a sovereign state.

“The Republic of Crimea intends to build its relations with other states on the basis of equality, peace, mutual neighborly cooperation, and other generally agreed principles of political, economic and cultural cooperation between states,” the parliament said.

The Crimean parliament also unanimously voted to integrate the region into Russia.

The parliament’s resolution comes after Sunday’s referendum which resulted in over 96 percent of voters answering ‘yes’ to the autonomous republic joining Russia. The overall voter turnout in the referendum was 81.37%, according to the head of the Crimean parliament’s commission on the referendum, Mikhail Malyshev.

(Read the full article at RT)

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