TBR News June 7, 2017

Jun 07 2017

The Voice of the White House

      Washington, D.C., June 7, 2017: “There are no secrets anymore. Those who work in huge complexes in small cubicles think that their organization is so well-guarded that nothing ever finds it way outside the glass walls. The President makes a phone call to a top official, knowing that his system is totally secure. The CIA sends reports to Langley, knowing that their communications system can never be breached. The FBI’s enormous files on citizens is, they absolutely know, is totally secure. In fact, all of these beliefs are fictional. One agency has broken into the secure system of another and one country knows the secrets of another. Isn’t it amazing how Vladimir Putin always is one or two steps ahead of the neo-con and CIA plottings? Either this is an example of second sight or, more than likely, insight.”

 

Table of Contents

  • Fifty Years Later, NSA Keeps Details of Israel’s USS Liberty Attack Secret
  • SECRECY NEWS
  • How Do I watch You? Let me count the ways….

 

Fifty Years Later, NSA Keeps Details of Israel’s USS Liberty Attack Secret

June 6 2017

by Miriam Pensack

The Intercept

On June 8, 1967, an Israeli torpedo tore through the side of the unarmed American naval vessel USS Liberty, approximately a dozen miles off the Sinai coast. The ship, whose crew was under command of the National Security Agency, was intercepting communications at the height of the Six Day War when it came under direct Israeli aerial and naval assault.

Reverberations from the torpedo blast sent crewman Ernie Gallo flying across the radio research room where he was stationed. Gallo, a communications technician aboard the Liberty, found himself and his fellow shipmates in the midst of an attack that would leave 34 Americans dead and 171 wounded.

This week marks the 50th anniversary of the assault on the USS Liberty, and though it was among the worst attacks in history against a non-combatant U.S. naval vessel, the tragedy remains shrouded in secrecy. The question of if and when Israeli forces became aware they were killing Americans has proved a point of particular contention in the on-again, off-again public debate that has simmered over the last half a century. The Navy Court of Inquiry’s investigation proceedings following the incident were held in closed sessions, and the survivors who had been on board received gag orders forbidding them to ever talk about what they endured that day.

Now, half a century later, The Intercept is publishing two classified documents provided in the cache of files leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden related to the attack and its aftermath. They reveal previously unknown involvement by Government Communications Headquarters, the U.K. signals intelligence agency; internal NSA communications that seem to bolster a signals-intelligence analyst’s account of the incident, which framed it as an accident; as well as a Hebrew transliteration system unique to the NSA that was in use at least as recently as 2006.

The first document, a formerly unreleased NSA classification guide, details which elements of the incident the agency still regarded as secret as of 2006. The second lists a series of unauthorized Signals Intelligence disclosures that “have had a detrimental effect on our ability to produce intelligence against terrorist targets and other targets of national concern.” Remarkably, information relevant to the attack on the Liberty falls within this highly secret category.

Though neither document reveals conclusive information about the causes of the assault, both highlight that at the time of their publication—approximately four decades after the incident—the NSA was determined to keep even seemingly minor details about the attack classified. The agency declined to comment for this article.

The classification guide, dated November 8, 2006, indicates previously-unknown GCHQ involvement in the ship’s intelligence gathering. The specifics of this involvement remain classified, and it is therefore unclear if involvement was of a material nature on board the ship or through other means. GCHQ declined to comment.

The guide also reveals NSA’s own classified Hebrew transliteration system, the existence of which underlines that the agency has historically counted Israel as an intelligence target even as the nation acted as a key partner in signals collection. This inherent tension in the U.S.-Israeli relationship was also manifest on the Liberty, where the Hebrew translators brought aboard the ship were referred to as “special Arabic” linguists, according to journalist James Bamford, in order to conceal their surveillance of Israeli communications.

The Six Day War between Israel and its neighbors Jordan, Syria, and Egypt was a conflict that the United States chose to stay out of, despite Israel’s entreaties for military support. Egypt and Syria were Soviet allies at odds with American-aligned Israel. The local conflict  could easily have turned into a direct conflict between the superpowers, which neither the United States nor the USSR wanted. The countries directly involved were left to fend for themselves in what proved to be an overwhelming military and territorial victory for Israel – one that doubled the fledgling country’s size in less than a week.

Though the United States refused to intervene on behalf of its ally, it was nevertheless eavesdropping on Israeli military communications during war. There, according to Bamford, lies the rub: over the course of Israel’s remarkable territorial acquisition and military victory, it allegedly committed a war crime by slaughtering  Egyptian prisoners of war in city of El Arish in the northern Sinai. Bamford argued in his 2001 book, Body of Secrets, that the USS Liberty’s proximity to the Sinai, and its ability to intercept Israel’s motives and activities during the Six Day War, may have prompted Israel’s attack on the vessel. Other national security experts, including Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, disputed Bamford’s analysis, however. According to Aftergood, who directs the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, the killing of Egyptian POWs never happened. “[There] appears to be no verifiable evidence that such a massacre ever took place, and Bamford’s description of events at El Arish doesn’t hold up,” Aftergod wrote in 2001 following the publication of Body of Secrets.

Ultimately, both the United States’ and Israel’s investigations deemed the attack on the Liberty an accident that resulted when Israel mistook the American spy ship for an Egyptian freighter. Bamford considers that conclusion a cover-up, however, citing the gag order issued to survivors, as well as the fact that NSA’s Deputy Director at the time, Louis Tordella, referred to the Israeli Defense Forces Preliminary Inquiry into the attack “a nice whitewash.” Still, other sources assert that any notion of cover-up is mere paranoia. According to a spokesperson at the Israeli Ministry of Foreign affairs, the Liberty assault was “a tragic accident … that was settled between the parties involved years ago,” and that, “[a]s is the case with many of these matters, there are always enough conspiracy theories to go around, but they never hold water.”

The USS Liberty’s legacy indeed fed conspiracy theories, and Bamford is not alone in asserting a cover-up. The Liberty Veterans Association, an organization comprised of survivors of the 1967 attack, has called for a robust and transparent investigation into the incident for decades, to no avail.

In a statement to The Intercept, Ernie Gallo, who currently serves as the president of the Liberty Veterans Association, said, “We now know that the Navy Court of Inquiry was merely for show, as the officers were told to come to the conclusion the Liberty did [its] job and the attack was accidental.” Bamford also references the magnitude and length of the attack as proof of its deliberateness: the ship was hit repeatedly, first by planes dropping thousand-pound bombs and napalm, and then by torpedo boats. Israeli forces also jammed the Liberty’s antennas and communication channels, took out the four .50-caliber machine guns on board, and reportedly shot at life rafts and crew members as they attempted to evacuate the vessel. “It was an attack in broad daylight,” said Bamford. “They were flying a large U.S. flag. [The ship] said USS Liberty on the back … I mean, what do you need?”

The incident and its aftermath took a significant psychological toll on survivors, many of whom were reported to suffer from PTSD.One survivor and member of the Liberty Veterans Association, James Ennes, was shot in the femur during the attack, and was then instructed to never discuss it. Ernie Gallo had a fellow crewmate die in his arms. It was decades before survivors began sharing their experiences, and were sometimes criticized for being anti-Semitic or slanderous of Israel for doing so.

Not all veterans involved believe in a cover up, however. Former Navy Chief Petty Officer Marvin Nowicki, the chief Hebrew-language analyst aboard a U.S. Navy EC-121 spy plane that was intercepting Israeli aircraft communications as they were assaulting the Liberty, believed the attack was an accident. He stated in a letter to the Wall Street Journal in 2001 that though he heard and recorded Israeli pilots’ and captains’ references to the U.S. flag flying on the deck of the Liberty, these remarks were made only after the attack was underway, and not before. It was when aircraft and motor torpedo boat operators moved closer to the Liberty, recalled Nowicki, that they were able to recognize and therefore reference the American flag.

Unbeknownst to Nowicki at the time, his letter to the editor sparked concerns at NSA that he had revealed classified information on the Liberty. The second Snowden document, dated 2002, referenced several disclosures in his letter “surrounding National Security Agency sources and methods or NSA’s ability to successfully exploit a foreign target.” Though the document does not specify which details in Nowicki’s article constituted such disclosures, it does reference materials related to the investigation. Nowicki, in a statement that would stir apparent concern at both the NSA and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, called the accident a “gross error.” “How can I prove it?” he wrote. “I can’t unless the transcripts/tapes are found and released to the public. I last saw them in a desk drawer at NSA in the late 1970s before I left the service.” After several unsuccessful attempts to reach Nowicki via phone or email, he ultimately responded to a mailed request for comment. He returned The Intercept’s original posted letter, on which he had hastily scrawled: “I cannot comply w[ith] your request. The last time I spoke publicly, I was visited by NCIS agents.” (NCIS stated that it had no records related to Nowicki’s claim.)

Even 50 years after the attack, and in a radically different geopolitical climate than that of the Six Day War, extremely limited information is available about the assault and its subsequent investigations. Inquiries by the media and by the survivors have yielded profoundly limited results, despite considerable attempts; ABC’s Nightline interviewed survivors decades after the attack, the results of which never aired. And while James Bamford presumes this is because interested parties didn’t want unsavory information about Israel broadcast on mainstream American television, Nightline’s then-host Ted Koppel said otherwise: “At the risk of contributing to the veneer of ‘cover-up’ that surrounds any discussion of the USS Liberty story, my only recollection is that we did nothing because we found nothing new or substantive.” Neither, it seems, has anyone else.

 

SECRECY NEWS

From the FAS Project on Government Secrecy

Volume 2017, Issue No. 42

June 7, 2017

CRS TITLES LISTED IN NEW ANNUAL REPORT

The Congressional Research Service prepared 1,197 new reports and publications last year, as well as 2,471 updates of previous reports. The new reports were identified by title and number in an internal version of the CRS annual report for fiscal year 2016 that has not been previously made public.

Among the notable 2016 reports listed in the new annual report but not previously cited here were these:

Closing Space: Restrictions on Civil Society Around the World and U.S. Responses, April 8, 2016

U.S. Electronic Attack Aircraft, July 26, 2016

The public version of the CRS annual report that is posted on the Library of Congress website is abridged and does not include the listing of new CRS products or other appendices from the full report.

Newly updated Congressional Research Service reports from the past week include these

Stafford Act Assistance and Acts of Terrorism, June 2, 2017

Small Business Administration: A Primer on Programs and Funding, June 5, 2017

The Debt Limit Since 2011, June 5, 2017

Iran: Politics, Human Rights, and U.S. Policy, June 2, 2017

STATE DEPARTMENT PRESS BRIEFINGS RESUME

The Department of State held its first general press briefing on June 6 following a five-week hiatus.

Spokesperson Heather Nauert presided over the briefing, which included a typically broad range of press questions and official responses.

Ms. Nauert said the briefings would resume on a regular schedule from now on.

“The plan is right now we’re going to do twice a week on camera and I look forward to talking with you all otherwise, okay? We’ll see you again real soon,” she said.

 

How Do I watch You? Let me count the ways….

June 7, 2017

by Harry von Johnston, PhD

Millions of Americans, and other nationalities, are spied on daily and vast amounts of personal data acquired and stored.

The cover story is that this is designed to “locate and neutralize” Muslim terrorists, both inside and outside of the United States, but in fact, according to a U.S. Army document, the actual purposes of the mass surveillance is to build significant data bases on any person likely to present a domestic threat to established authority.

This fear has its roots in massive popular rejection of the Vietnam war with its attendant mass meetings, defiance of the government and the development of ad hoc student groups firmly, and often very vocally, opposed to the war.

There was a great deal of civic unrest on college campuses throughout the 1960s as students became increasingly involved in a number of social and political movements ranging from the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, and, of course, the Anti-War Movement. Over 30,000 people left the country and went to Canada, Sweden, and Mexico to avoid the draft.

The bureaucracy then found itself under siege and has stated subsequently that this must not happen again and that any kind of meaningful civil disobedience is to get negative mention in the media and members of such groups subject to arrest and detention.

The Obama and Trump administrations are punishing any government whistle-blower with such severity as to discourage others from revealing negative official information.

FEMA has a network of so-called “detention camps” throughout the United States, most only sites, to be used in the event of noteworthy civil disturbance.

The current programs of mass surveillance are known and approved at the highest levels in the government, to include the President

Government, faux government, and government-subsidized private organizations.

The high technology consists of such subjects as surveillance cameras in public places, drones, satellites, interceptions of telephone, computer and mail communications.

There are as of this instance, no less than five million names on the officlal government Terrorist Identies Datamart Environment list and nearly sixty thousand names on the TSA no-fly list.

Nearly five thousand died domestically in the 9/11 attacks and only thirty-seven subsequently but the death toll outside the United States, due to Muslim radical actions has exceeded over ten thousand with a death toll of ninty eight thousand in the Syrian civil war and an estimated one million in the sectarian wars in Iraq following the American invasion and occupation

This vast program of politically-motivated illegal domestic surveillance, ordered by Bush, is only part of an ambitious program brought forward in the first year of the Bush administration by Karl Rove. Rove was the architect of the ‘GOP Rules’ program, the basic premise of which was to secure a permanent control, by the Republican Party, of both branches of Congress, the White House and the leadership of all the agencies of control such as the CIA, later the DHS, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and, most important, the U.S. Army.

Rove, an accomplished student of history, had carefully studied the circumstances that permitted Adolf Hitler to rise to power in 1933. His was not a solid electoral victory but he was only a participant in a coalition government. What brought him to the beginning of absolute power was the Reichstag fire. It was long preached that this incendiary act was the result of Goering’s activities to facilitate an atmosphere of public panic but Fritz Tobias has effectively demolished this shibboleth and in fact, the fire was set by a lunatic young Dutch communist without any assistance from either the Nazis or the Communists.

Nevertheless, in its wake, the fire did create such an atmosphere of national fear that Hitler was able to tighten his control over the legislators and push through the Enabling Act that gave him the power to establish the control he badly needed. And a year later, the old Prussian Secret State Police, the Gestapo, was put into the hands of Heinrich Mueller who eventually set up a national card index with information on every German citizen.

Given the weak origins of Bush’s presidency, Rove contemplated his own Reichstag Fire and when the Israeli Mossad reported to the top Bush administration officials that they had penetrated a group of Saudi terrorists working in Hollywood, Florida and that this group was planning an aerial attack on important American business and government targets, Rove had found his Reichstag Fire.

Bush was informed by the Israeli government at every stage of the pending attack but advised the Israelis that he did not want to interfere with it “until the last possible moment so as to be able to arrest the entire group.”

As the plot progressed and Washington learned that the major targets would be the World Trade Centers in New York, and the Pentagon and the Capitol building in Washington, someone high up in the administration, currently unknown, wanted the Israelis to convince the Saudis to attack the side of the Pentagon that was currently unoccupied due to reconstruction. There was no point, the plotters decided, to kill the useful Secretary of Defense who was a member of their team.

The attack on the Capitol would, they reasoned, fall when Congress was in session ( In 2001, the first session of the 107th Congress was from January 3, 2001  through December 20, 2001 and the House and Senate planned to begin their 10 day Thanksgiving recess, between November 17 and November 27 of that year) and this meant that if a large commercial aircraft, loaded with aviation fuel, slammed at high speed  into either wing of the immense building while Congress was in session, it could reasonably be expected that a siginficant number of Federal legislatiors would be killed or incapacitated.

This, coupled with the attacks on the Pentagon and the WTC, would give the Bush people the very acceptable excuse for the President to step up, (after he returned from a safe and distant vacation,) and assume ‘special powers” to “protect this nation from new attacks” until Congress could be “satisfactorily reformed” via somewhat distant “special elections” to fill the vacancies created by the Saudi attackers.

Then, it would be quite acceptable, and even demanded, that the Army would establish “law and order” in the country and that other agencies would step forward to “guard this nation against” possible “ongoing terrorist attacks.” ‘Speak not of the morrow for thou knowest not what it might bring forth’ is a Biblical admonition that apparently Bush, Rove and Cheney never considered.

The aircraft designated to slam into the Capitol building and immolate both sides of the aisle, crashed as the very fortunate result of its passenger’s actions and that part of the plan had to be shelved. But not so the formulation of the machinery designed solely to clamp down on any possible dissident voices in the country and ensure a very long term Republican policical control.

The Saudi terrorist attacks went forward as planned, minus the one on the members of Congress and Bush indeed rose to the occasion and promised to protect the American public. A Department of Homeland Security was set up under the incompetent Governor Ridge but as for the rest of the plan for Republic permanence, it began to disintegrate bit by bit, due entirely to the gross incompetence of its leaders. The Bush-Rove-Cheney plan consisted, in the main, of the following:

  1. Federal control of all domestic media, the internet, all computerized records, through overview of all domestic fax, mail and telephone conversations,

2 .A national ID card, universal SS cards being mandatory,

  1. Seizure and forced deportation of all illegal aliens, including millions of Mexicans and Central Americans, intensive observation and penetration of Asian groups, especially Indonesian and Chinese,
  2. A reinstitution of a universal draft (mandatory service at 18 years for all male American youths…based on the German Arbeitsdienst.
  3. Closer coordination of administration views and domestic policies with various approved and régime supportive religious groups,
  4. An enlargement of the planned “no travel” lists drawn up in the Justice Department that would prevents “subversive” elemetst from flying, (this list to include “peaceniks” and most categories of Muslims)
  5. The automatic death penalty for any proven acts of sedition,
  6. The forbidding of abortion, any use of medical marijuana,
  7. Any public approval of homosexual or lesbian behavior to include magazines, websites, political action groups and soon to be forbidden and punishable.

As the popularity of drones for domestic surveillance grows in the United States, so do privacy concerns for citizens just going about their daily business. Designer Adam Harvey has come up with a line of anti-drone clothing that is much more stylish than an aluminum foil hat.

The anti-drone clothes include a hoodie, a scarf, and a burqa. They are made with a metalized fabric designed to thwart thermal imaging. They work by reflecting heat and masking the person underneath from the thermal eye of a drone. The designs may hide you from certain drone activities, but they would definitely make you noticeable to people out on the street.

The scarf and burqa are both inspired by traditional Muslim clothing designs. Harvey explains the choice, saying, “Conceptually, these garments align themselves with the rationale behind the traditional hijab and burqa: to act as ‘the veil which separates man or the world from God,’ replacing God with drone.”

The anti-drone garments are part of a larger line of clothing called Stealth Wear. These are called “New Designs for Countersurveillance.” The manufacturer states: “Collectively, Stealth Wear is a vision for fashion that addresses the rise of surveillance, the power of those who surveil, and the growing need to exert control over what we are slowly losing, our privacy.”

If drones get to be more commonplace in our communities, it’s not too much of a stretch to see this sort of fashion becoming more mainstream, much like RFID-blocking wallets and passport holders.

INTERNET

The government intelligence agencies and their allied private contractors now regularly accesses all emails, chats, searches, events, locations, videos, photos, log-ins and any information people post online with a warrant, which the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court always  grants secretly and without being ever made public.

And the revelation of Prism, a secret government program for mining major Internet companies, states that the government now has direct access to Internet companies’ data without a warrant.

Every company impacted – Google, YouTube, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype, PalTalk and AOL – publically deny knowing about the program or giving any direct access to their servers. These denials are intented to bolster public confidence in their services because in reality, all of these entities cooperate fully with requests for customer information.

Google is the supplier of the customized core search technology for Intellipedia, a highly-secure online system where 37,000 U.S. domestic and foreign area spies and related personnel share information and collaborate on investigative missions.

And there is absolutely nothing one can commit to the Internet that is private in any sense of the word

In addition, Google is linked to the U.S. spy and military systems through its Google Earth software venture. The technology behind this software was originally developed by Keyhole Inc., a company funded by Q-Tel http://www.iqt.org/ , a venture capital firm which is in turn openly funded and operated on behalf of the CIA.

Google acquired Keyhole Inc. in 2004. The same base technology is currently employed by U.S. military and intelligence systems in their quest, in their own words, for “full-spectrum dominance” of the American, and foreign, political, social and economic spheres.

However, Internet Service Providers and the entertainment industry are now taking Internet monitoring to a whole new level….

If someone download copyrighted software, videos or music, all Internet service providers (ISP)  have the ability to detect this downloading.

On Thursday, July 12. 2017  the nation’s largest ISPs will all voluntarily implement a new anti-piracy plan that will engage network operators in the largest digital spying scheme in history, and see some users’ bandwidth completely cut off until they sign an agreement saying they will not download copyrighted materials.

Word of the start date has been largely kept secret since ISPs announced their plans.  The deal was brokered by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), and coordinated by the Obama Administration.

The vast majority of computer surveillance involves the monitoring of data and traffic on the Internet. In the United States for example, under the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, all phone calls and broadband Internet traffic (emails, web traffic, instant messaging, etc.) are required to be available for unimpeded real-time monitoring by Federal law enforcement agencies., to include the FBI, NSA, the CIA and the DHS.

There is far too much data on the Internet for human investigators to manually search through all of it and so automated Internet surveillance computers sift through the vast amount of intercepted Internet traffic and identify and report to human investigators traffic considered interesting by using certain “trigger” words or phrases, visiting certain types of web sites, or communicating via email or chat with suspicious individuals or groups. Billions of dollars per year are spent, by agencies such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, and the FBI, to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems such as Carnivore, NarusInsight, and ECHELON to intercept and analyze all of this data, and extract only the information which is useful to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. One flaw with NSA claims that the government needs to be able to suck up Internet data from services such as Skype and Gmail to fight terrorists: Studies show that would-be terrorists don’t use those services. The NSA has to collect the metadata from all of our phone calls because terrorists, right? And the spy agency absolutely must intercept Skypes you conduct with folks out-of-state, or else terrorism. It must sift through your iCloud data and Facebook status updates too, because Al Qaeda.Terrorists are everywhere, they are legion, they are dangerous, and, unfortunately, they don’t really do any of the stuff described above.

Even though the still-growing surveillance state that sprung up in the wake of 9/11 was enacted almost entirely to “fight terrorism,” reports show that the modes of communication that agencies like the NSA are targeting are scarcely used by terrorists at all.

A recent Bloomberg piece points to a 2012 report on terrorism which found that most serious terrorists steer clear of the most obvious platforms—major cell networks, Google, Skype, Facebook, etc.

Or, as Bloomberg more bluntly puts it, the “infrastructure set up by the National Security Agency … may only be good for gathering information on the stupidest, lowest-ranking of terrorists. The Prism surveillance program focuses on access to the servers of America’s largest Internet companies, which support such popular services as Skype, Gmail and iCloud. These are not the services that truly dangerous elements typically use.”

And why would they? Post-911 warrantless wiretapping practices are well known, NSA-style data collection was well-rumored, and we all knew the Department of Homeland Security was already scanning emails for red-flag keywords. Of course terrorists would take precautions. Bloomberg elaborates:

In a January 2012 report titled “Jihadism on the Web: A Breeding Ground for Jihad in the Modern Age,” the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service drew a convincing picture of an Islamist Web underground centered around “core forums.” These websites are part of the Deep Web, or Undernet, the multitude of online resources not indexed by commonly used search engines.

In 2010, Google estimated that it had indexed just 0.004% of the internet—meaning the vast majority of the web is open for surreptitious message-sending business. Terrorists simply aren’t dumb enough to discuss their secret plans over Skype or to email each other confidential information on Gmail.

So, essentially, the NSA is deeply compromising our privacy so that it can do an extremely shitty job of looking for terrorists. Nice.

Computers can be a surveillance target because of the personal data stored on them. If someone is able to install software, such as the FBI’s Magic Lantern and CIPAV, on a computer system, they can easily gain unauthorized access to this data. Such software can be, and is   installed physically or remotely. Another form of computer surveillance, known as van Eck phreaking, involves reading electromagnetic emanations from computing devices in order to extract data from them at distances of hundreds of meters. The NSA runs a database known as “Pinwale”, which stores and indexes large numbers of emails of both American citizens and foreigners.

EMAIL

The government agencies have been fully capable to look at any and all emails.

A warrant can easily grant access to email sent within 180 days. Older emails are available with an easier-to-get subpoena and prior notice.

Government officials also are fully capable of reading all the ingoing and outgoing emails on an account in real time with a specific type of wiretap warrant, which is granted with probable cause for specific crimes such as terrorism.

Google received 122,503 user data requests involving 2,375,434 users from the U.S. government in 2017. It granted about 98 percent of those requests.

Microsoft, with its Outlook/Hotmail email service, received 61,538 requests involving 52,291 users, at least partially granting 92 percent of those requests.

PHONES

With the advent of smartphones and SIM cards, cellphones are no longer strictly for storage of digits and 180-character short messages.

Cellphones assist in navigating for car trips, to enable making Internet purchases and to watch events on television stations.   It is possible to deposit checks with a bank app and a camera, locate businesses of interest and also to use transportation by using a QR-code. Phones hold our coupons, our favorite cat videos and functions as a credit card when we forget ours at home.

The NSA collects subscriber information from major cell phone carriers. This information is primarily based on metadata, such as location and duration of calls, along with numbers dialed, all in search of links to suspected terrorists.

From 2013, to date, law enforcement agencies made 2.3 million requests for subscriber information.

These government requests for surveillance information from the NSA, are limited to metadata. That doesn’t mean that the content of conversations is off-limits. To listen in, the government just needs a warrant, one that’s granted through the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The court approves almost every request, fully denying just nine out of 133,900 government applications for surveillance over its 33-year existence, according to Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reports submitted to Congress.

.Although this is not new technology, law enforcement authorities are using our own cell phones to spy on us more extensively than ever before as a recent Wired article described….

Mobile carriers responded to a staggering 1.3 million law enforcement requests last year for subscriber information, including text messages and phone location data, according to data provided to Congress.

A single “request” can involve information about hundreds of customers. So ultimately the number of Americans affected by this could reach into “the tens of millions” each year.

The number of Americans affected each year by the growing use of mobile phone data by law enforcement could reach into the tens of millions, as a single request could ensnare dozens or even hundreds of people. Law enforcement has been asking for so-called “cell tower dumps” in which carriers disclose all phone numbers that connected to a given tower during a certain period of time.

So, for instance, if police wanted to try to find a person who broke a store window at an Occupy protest, it could get the phone numbers and identifying data of all protestors with mobile phones in the vicinity at the time — and use that data for other purposes.

Perhaps you should not be using your cell phone so much anyway. After all, there are more than 500 studies that claim to show that cell phone radiation is harmful to humans.

The official and unofficial tapping of telephone lines is widespread. In the United States for instance, the Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) requires that all telephone and VoIP communications be available for real-time wiretapping by Federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Two major telecommunications companies in the U.S.—AT&T Inc. and Verizon—have contracts with the FBI, requiring them to keep their phone call records easily searchable and accessible for Federal agencies, in return for $1.8 million dollars per year. Between 2003 and 2005, the FBI sent out more than 140,000 “National Security Letters” ordering phone companies to hand over information about their customers’ calling and Internet histories. About half of these letters requested information on U.S. citizens.

Human agents are not required to monitor most calls. Speech-to-text software creates machine-readable text from intercepted audio, which is then processed by automated call-analysis programs, such as those developed by agencies such as the Information Awareness Office, or companies such as Verint, and Narus, which search for certain words or phrases, to decide whether to dedicate a human agent to the call.

Law enforcement and intelligence services in the United Kingdom and the United States possess technology to remotely activate the microphones in cell phones, by accessing phones’ diagnostic or maintenance features in order to listen to conversations that take place near the person who holds the phone.

Mobile phones are also commonly used to collect location data. The geographical location of a mobile phone (and thus the person carrying it) can be determined easily even when the phone is not being used, using a technique known multilateration to calculate the differences in time for a signal to travel from the cell phone to each of several cell towers near the owner of the phone. The legality of such techniques has been questioned in the United States, in particular whether a court warrant is required. Records for one carrier alone (Sprint), showed that in a given year federal law enforcement agencies requested customer location data 8 million times.

CREDIT CARDS

Think Uncle Sam knows where you buy your coffee? He might be able to tell you the exact cafe.

It all starts with that stripe on the back of your credit card, which gets swiped through thousands of readers every year.

That solid black bar is made up of millions of iron-based magnetic particles, each one 20-millionths of an inch wide. Each credit-card owner has a personalized strip full of intimate data sitting right inside his or her pocket. Any purchase can be traced directly back to your wallet.

Although the scope of credit-card tracking efforts are unknown, the Journal reported that the NSA has established relationships with credit card companies akin to those that they had established with phone carriers, which provide them with data under warrant, subpoena or court order. These former officials didn’t know if the efforts were ongoing.

What could they find? Based on the technology of the mag stripe, quite a bit.

Even with just the metadata – digitally contained bits of information – on a credit card, they could most likely see when and where a purchase was made, and how much it cost.

SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS

Whether they’re walking to work, withdrawing money from an ATM or walking into their favorite local grocer, Americans could be within sight of one of the United States’ estimated 30 million surveillance cameras.

Police use them to monitor streets, subways and public spaces. Homeowners put them on their houses. Businesses mount them in stores and on buildings.

In Boston, for example, the FBI used still photos and video pulled from cameras to identify suspects after the Boston Marathon bombing. The images showed the suspects making calls from their cellphones, carrying what the police say were bombs, and leaving the scene.

New high-tech, high-definition security camera manufacturers give police departments the options of thermal imaging, 360-degree fields of view and powerful zoom capabilities for identifying people. Advances in camera technology enable new ways to monitor American citizens.

Surveillance cameras are video cameras used for the purpose of observing an area. They are often connected to a recording device or IP network, and may be watched by a security guard or law enforcement officer. Cameras and recording equipment used to be relatively expensive and required human personnel to monitor camera footage, but analysis of footage has been made easier by automated software that organizes digital video footage into a searchable database, and by video analysis software (such as VIRAT and HumanID). The amount of footage is also drastically reduced by motion sensors which only record when motion is detected. With cheaper production techniques, surveillance cameras are simple and inexpensive enough to be used in home security systems, and for everyday surveillance.

In the United States, the Department of Homeland Security awards billions of dollars per year in Homeland Security grants for local, state, and federal agencies to install modern video surveillance equipment. For example, the city of Chicago, Illinois, recently used a $5.1 million Homeland Security grant to install an additional 250 surveillance cameras, and connect them to a centralized monitoring center, along with its preexisting network of over 2000 cameras, in a program known as Operation Virtual Shield. Speaking in 2009, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley announced that Chicago would have a surveillance camera on every street corner by the year 2016.

As part of China’s Golden Shield Project, several U.S. corporations, including IBM, General Electric, and Honeywell, have been working closely with the Chinese government to install millions of surveillance cameras throughout China, along with advanced video analytics and facial recognition software, which will identify and track individuals everywhere they go. They will be connected to a centralized database and monitoring station, which will, upon completion of the project, contain a picture of the face of every person in China: over 1.3 billion people Lin Jiang Huai, the head of China’s “Information Security Technology” office (which is in charge of the project), credits the surveillance systems in the United States and the U.K. as the inspiration for what he is doing with the Golden Shield Project.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a research project called Combat Zones That See that will link up cameras across a city to a centralized monitoring station, identify and track individuals and vehicles as they move through the city, and report “suspicious” activity (such as waving arms, looking side-to-side, standing in a group, etc.).

At Super Bowl XXXV in January 2001, police in Tampa, Florida, used Identix’s facial recognition software, FaceIt, to scan the crowd for potential criminals and terrorists in attendance at the event (it found 19 people with pending arrest warrants).

Governments often initially claim that cameras are meant to be used for traffic control, but many of them end up using them for general surveillance. For example, Washington, D.C. had 5,000 “traffic” cameras installed under this premise, and then after they were all in place, networked them all together and then granted access to the Metropolitan Police Department, so they could perform “day-to-day monitoring”.

The development of centralized networks of CCTV cameras watching public areas – linked to computer databases of people’s pictures and identity (biometric data), able to track people’s movements throughout the city, and identify whom they have been with – has been argued by some to present a risk to civil liberties. Trapwire is an example of such a network.

FEDERAL HIGHWAY SURVEILLANCE 

A joint Pentagon/Department of Transportation plan to conduct a permanent surveillance of all motor vehicles using the Federal Highway System is code named ARGUS. It was initially a part of an overall public surveillance program instituted and organized by Admiral Poindexter, who was convicted of various criminal acts as the result of the Iran-Contra affair and then brought back to government service by the Bush Administration. Following public disclosure of Poindexter’s manic attempts to pry into all aspects of American life and his subsequent public departure from government service (he is still so employed but as a “private consultant” and not subject to public scrutiny) many of his plans were officially scrapped. ARGUS, however, is still valid has been fully developed and now is in experimental use on twelve Federal highways across the country..

This surveillance consists of having unmanned video cameras, soon to be installed over all Federal highways and toll roads with Presidential approval. These cameras work 24/7 to video all passing vehicles, trucks, private cars and busses. The information is passed to a central data bank and entered therein. This data can readily viewed at the  request of any authorized law enforcement agency to include: private investigative and credit agencies licensed to work with Federal law enforcement information on any user of the road systems under surveillance. Provision will be made, according to the operating plans, to notify local law enforcement immediately if any driver attempts to obscure their license plate number and instructs them to at once to “apprehend and identify” the vehicle or vehicles involved. Federally-funded high-tech street lights now being installed in American cities are not only set to aid the DHS in making “security announcements” and acting as talking surveillance cameras, they are also capable of “recording conversations,” bringing the potential privacy threat posed by ‘Intellistreets’ to a whole new level.

The program has cost to date over $5 billion over a three year period.

This program can easily be installed and running on a nationwide basis within two years from its commencement.

It also is now a Federal crime to attempt to damage or in any way interfere with these surveillance devices.

Some states such as Colorado are using cameras as an alternative method of charging motorists toll fares. As a motorist drives through the toll lanes, motion-activated camera

Cameras are watching if you speed or run a red light, too.

Also, police departments in several metro areas began employing cameras to deter traffic infractions and raise revenue.

Libertarians and electronic privacy advocates oppose these methods, citing a lack of transparency in the use of the cameras and the retention of the data they collect.

DRONES

As many as 30,000 domestic drones will travel the skies above U.S. soil within 20 years, according to a report for Congress by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Congress has called on the FAA to integrate unmanned aircraft into the national air system by 2015.

Already, the FAA has approved domestic drone use by 81 agencies, including schools, police departments and the Department of Homeland Security.

Among the applicants approved: the Arlington Police Department in Texas; California State University in Fresno; Canyon County Sheriff’s Office in Idaho; the city of Herington, Kan.; the Georgia Tech Research Institute; Kansas State University; the Miami-Dade Police Department in Florida; the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources; the Seattle Police Department; and the Universities of Alaska at Fairbanks, California-Davis and Florida.

Although these drones range in size, most are able to hover tens of thousands of feet in the sky, collecting images of people on the ground below.

Based on current trends – technology development, law enforcement interest, political and industry pressure, and the lack of legal safeguards – it is clear that drones pose a looming threat to Americans’ privacy.

Law enforcement agencies all over the United States are starting to use unmanned drones to spy on us, and the Department of Homeland Security is aggressively seeking to expand the use of such drones by local authorities….

The Department of Homeland Security has launched a program to “facilitate and accelerate the adoption” of small, unmanned drones by police and other public safety agencies, an effort that an agency official admitted faces “a very big hurdle having to do with privacy.”

The $4 million Air-based Technologies Program, which will test and evaluate small, unmanned aircraft systems, is designed to be a “middleman” between drone manufacturers and first-responder agencies.

The EPA is already using drones to spy on cattle ranchers in Nebraska and Iowa. Will we eventually get to a point where we all just consider it to be “normal” to have surveillance drones flying above our heads constantly?

The FBI uses aerial surveillance drones over US soil, and has agreed that further political debate and legislation to govern their domestic use may be necessary.

The bureau’s director, Robert Mueller, admitted it used drones to aid its investigations.

However, the potential for growing drone use either in the US, or involving US citizens abroad, is an increasingly charged issue in Congress, and the FBI acknowleged there may need to be legal restrictions placed on their use to protect privacy.

“It is still in nascent stages but it is worthy of debate and legislation down the road,” said Mueller, in response to questions from Hawaii senator Mazie Hirono.

Hirono said: “I think this is a burgeoning concern for many of us.”

Dianne Feinstein, who is also chair of the Senate intelligence committee, said the issue of drones worried her far more than telephone and internet surveillance, which she believes are subject to sufficient legal oversight.

It is known that drones are used by border control officials and have been used by some local law enforcement authorities and Department of Homeland Security in criminal cases.

Mueller said he wasn’t sure if there were official agreements with these other agencies.

“To the extent that it relates to the air space there would be some communication back and forth [between agencies],” Mueller said.

Pre-Crime” Surveillance Cameras

Also aiding and abetting police in their efforts to track our every movement in real time is Trapwire, which allows for quick analysis of live feeds from CCTV surveillance cameras. Some of Trapwire’s confirmed users are the DC police, and police and casinos in Las Vegas. Police in New York, Los Angeles, Canada, and London are also thought to be using Trapwire.

Using Trapwire in conjunction with NGI, police and other government agents will be able to pinpoint anyone by checking the personal characteristics stored in the database against images on social media websites, feeds from the thousands of CCTV surveillance cameras installed throughout American cities (there are 3,700 CCTV cameras tracking the public in the New York subway system alone), as well as data being beamed down from the more than 30,000 surveillance drones taking to the skies within the next eight years. Given that the drones’ powerful facial recognition cameras will be capable of capturing minute details, including every mundane action performed by every person in an entire city simultaneously, soon there really will be nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, short of living in a cave, far removed from technology.

NGI will not only increase sharing between federal agencies, opening up the floodgates between the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Defense, but states can also get in on the action. The system was rolled out in Michigan in February 2012, with Hawaii, Maryland, South Carolina, Ohio, New Mexico, Kansas, Arizona, Tennessee, Nebraska, and Missouri on the shortlist for implementation, followed by Washington, North Carolina, and Florida in the near future.

Going far beyond the scope of those with criminal backgrounds, the NGI data includes criminals and non-criminals alike – in other words, innocent American citizens. The information is being amassed through a variety of routine procedures, with the police leading the way as prime collectors of biometrics for something as non-threatening as a simple moving violation. For example, the New York Police Department began photographing irises of suspects and arrestees in 2010, routinely telling suspects that the scans were mandatory, despite there being no law requiring defendants to have their irises scanned. Police departments across the country are now being equipped with the Mobile Offender Recognition and Information System, or MORIS, a physical iPhone add-on that allows officers patrolling the streets to scan the irises and faces of individuals and match them against government databases.

To start with, there’s the government’s integration of facial recognition software and other biometric markers into its identification data programs. The FBI’s Next Generation Identification (NGI) system is a $1 billion project that is aimed at dramatically expanding the government’s current ID database from a fingerprint system to a facial recognition system. NGI will use a variety of biometric data, cross-referenced against the nation’s growing network of surveillance cameras to not only track your every move but create a permanent “recognition” file on you within the government’s massive databases. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab are developing software that can read the feelings behind facial expressions. In some cases, the computers outperform people. The software could lead to empathetic devices and is being used to evaluate and develop better advertisements.

By the time it’s fully operational in 2014, NGI will serve as a vast data storehouse of “iris scans, photos searchable with face recognition technology, palm prints, and measures of gait and voice recordings alongside records of fingerprints, scars, and tattoos.” One component of NGI, the Universal Face Workstation, already contains some 13 million facial images, gleaned from “criminal mug shot photos” taken during the booking process. However, with major search engines having “accumulated face image databases that in their size dwarf the earth’s population,” the government taps into the trove of images stored on social media and photo sharing websites such as Facebook.

A company known as BRS Labs has developed “pre-crime” surveillance cameras that can supposedly determine if you are a terrorist or a criminal even before you commit a crime and dozens of these cameras are being installed at major transportation hubs in San Francisco….

In its latest project BRS Labs is to install its devices on the transport system in San Francisco, which includes buses, trams and subways.

The company says will put them in 12 stations with up to 22 cameras in each, bringing the total number to 288.

The cameras will be able to track up to 150 people at a time in real time and will gradually build up a ‘memory’ of suspicious behavior to work out what is suspicious.

Mobile Backscatter Vans

Police all over America will soon be driving around in unmarked vans looking inside your cars and even under your clothes using the same “pornoscanner” technology currently being utilized by the TSA at U.S. airports….

American intelligence agencies are set to join the US military in deploying American Science & Engineering’s Z Backscatter Vans, or mobile backscatter radiation x-rays. These are what TSA officials call “the amazing radioactive genital viewer,” now seen in airports around America, ionizing the private parts of children, the elderly.

These pornoscannerwagons will look like regular anonymous vans, and will cruise America’s streets, indiscriminately peering through the cars (and clothes) of anyone in range of its mighty isotope-cannon. But don’t worry, it’s not a violation of privacy. As AS&E’s vice president of marketing Joe Reiss sez, “From a privacy standpoint, I’m hard-pressed to see what the concern or objection could be.”

RFID Microchips

Most Americans don’t realize this, but RFID microchips are steadily becoming part of the very fabric of our lives. Many of your credit cards and debit cards contain them. Many Americans use security cards that contain RFID microchips at work. In some parts of the country it is now mandatory to inject an RFID microchip into your pet.

Now, one school system down in Texas actually plans to start using RFID microchips to track the movements of their students….

Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.

District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to locate students — and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school day to help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance.

Automated License Plate Readers

Automated license plate readers are being used to track the movements of a vehicle from the time that it enters Washington D.C. to the time that it leaves….

More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.

With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.

Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.

Data Mining

The government is not the only one that is spying on you. The truth is that a whole host of very large corporations are gathering every shred of information about you that they possibly can and selling that information for profit. It is called “data mining”, and it is an industry that has absolutely exploded in recent years.

One very large corporation known as Acxiom actually compiles information on more than 190 million people in the U.S. alone….

The company fits into a category called database marketing. It started in 1969 as an outfit called Demographics Inc., using phone books and other notably low-tech tools, as well as one computer, to amass information on voters and consumers for direct marketing. Almost 40 years later, Acxiom has detailed entries for more than 190 million people and 126 million households in the U.S., and about 500 million active consumers worldwide. More than 23,000 servers in Conway, just north of Little Rock, collect and analyze more than 50 trillion data ‘transactions’ a year.

Cable television spying

When people download a film from Netflix to a flatscreen, or turn on web radio, they could be alerting unwanted watchers to exactly what they are doing and where they are.

Spies will no longer have to plant bugs in your home – the rise of ‘connected’ gadgets controlled by apps will mean that people ‘bug’ their own homes.

The CIA claims it will be able to ‘read’ these devices via the internet – and perhaps even via radio waves from outside the home.

Everything from remote controls to clock radios can now be controlled via apps – and chip company ARM recently unveiled low-powered, cheaper chips which will be used in everything from fridges and ovens to doorbells.

These web-connected gadgets will ‘transform’ the art of spying – allowing spies to monitor people automatically without planting bugs, breaking and entering or even donning a tuxedo to infiltrate a dinner party.

‘Particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft. Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters –  all connected to the next-generation internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing.’

One of the world’s biggest chip companies, ARM, has unveiled a new processor built to work inside ‘connected’ white goods.

The ARM chips are smaller, lower-powered and far cheaper than previous processors – and designed to add the internet to almost every kind of electrical appliance.

It’s a concept described as the ‘internet of things’.

Futurists think that one day ‘connected’ devices will tell the internet where they are and what they are doing at all times – and will be mapped by computers as precisely as Google Maps charts the physical landscape now.

The forced conversion to High Definition TV means we will only be able to receive a digital TV signal instead of an analog TV signal. This began in  2009. The surveillance specialists will then have the ability to manipulate that digital signal in any direction desired, for any purpose desired.

In addition, all of the newer wide-screen High Definition TVs found in retail outlets today have both tiny cameras and audio detection devices covertly installed within them so the NSA can both observe and listen to everything within it operatinal radius.

The conversion boxes that have been offered with those free government coupons will have the same detection and surveillance devices.

And covert monitoring/tracking chips have been installed in all automobiles manufactured since 1990

: Do I have proof? No, but common sense tells me this is where it’s going and it fits with the escalating evidence of the Big Brother, police state controlled society which we are being forced into.

  1. Don’t buy the newer HD TVs and don’t get their conversion box. Forget getting TV from broadcast or cable or satellite directly. One idea is to watch TV shows from your older computer with currently availabe TV reception hardware/software (newer computers probably have the surveillance devices installed) or send the video and audio from the computer into the AV jacks on your TV or VCR.
  2. Watch TV shows from programs previously recorded on VHS tapes or from DVDs using your older TV and VCR equipment. This could become a cottage industry overnight if enough people become aware of the covert surveillance agenda riding along on the coattails of the forced conversion to High Definition digital television.
  3. You can listen to only television audio from many inexpensive radios that include the TV audio bands from channel 2-13 In most cases, audio is good enough for me. I’m mainly looking for those few comedy offerings here and there that will provide a laugh. Most sitcoms are just awful: ‘boring’ or ‘banal’ would be complimentary descriptions.

There are also many “black box technologies” being developed out there that the public does not even know about yet.

The nation’s courts are also doing their part to “build” the database, requiring biometric information as a precursor to more lenient sentences. In March 2012, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a law allowing DNA evidence to be collected from anyone convicted of a crime, even if it’s a non-violent misdemeanor. New York judges have also begun demanding mandatory iris scans before putting defendants on trial. Some Occupy Wall Street protesters who were arrested for trespassing and disorderly conduct were actually assigned bail based upon whether or not they consented to an iris scan during their booking. In one case, a judge demanded that an Occupy protestor, who was an unlikely flight risk, pay $1,000 bail because she refused to have her iris scanned.

Then there are the nation’s public schools, where young people are being conditioned to mindlessly march in lockstep to the pervasive authoritarian dictates of the surveillance state. It was here that surveillance cameras and metal detectors became the norm. It was here, too, that schools began reviewing social media websites in order to police student activity. With the advent of biometrics, school officials have gone to ever more creative lengths to monitor and track students’ activities and whereabouts, even for the most mundane things. For example, students in Pinellas County, Fla., are actually subjected to vein recognition scans when purchasing lunch at school.

Of course, the government is not the only looming threat to our privacy and bodily integrity. As with most invasive technologies, the groundwork to accustom the American people to the so-called benefits or conveniences of facial recognition is being laid quite effectively by corporations. For example, a new Facebook application, Facedeals, is being tested in Nashville, Tenn., which enables businesses to target potential customers with specialized offers. Yet another page borrowed from Stephen Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report, the app works like this: businesses install cameras at their front doors which, using facial recognition technology, identify the faces of Facebook users and then send coupons to their smartphones based upon things they’ve “liked” in the past.

Making this noxious mix even more troubling is the significant margin for error and abuse that goes hand in hand with just about every government-instigated program, only more so when it comes to biometrics and identification databases. Take, for example, the Secure Communities initiative. Touted by the Department of Homeland Security as a way to crack down on illegal immigration, the program attempted to match the inmates in local jails against the federal immigration database. Unfortunately, it resulted in Americans being arrested for reporting domestic abuse and occasionally flagged US citizens for deportation. More recently, in July 2012, security researcher Javier Galbally demonstrated that iris scans can be spoofed, allowing a hacker to use synthetic images of an iris to trick an iris-scanning device into thinking it had received a positive match for a real iris over 50 percent of the time.

The writing is on the wall. With technology moving so fast and assaults on our freedoms, privacy and otherwise, occurring with increasing frequency, there is little hope of turning back this technological, corporate and governmental juggernaut. Even trying to avoid inclusion in the government’s massive identification database will be difficult. The hacktivist group Anonymous suggests wearing a transparent plastic mask, tilting one’s head at a 15 degree angle, wearing obscuring makeup, and wearing a hat outfitted with Infra-red LED lights as methods for confounding the cameras’ facial recognition technology.

Consider this, however: while the general public, largely law-abiding, continues to be pried on, spied on and treated like suspects by a government that spends an exorbitant amount of money on the security-intelligence complex (which takes in a sizeable chunk of the $80 billion yearly intelligence budget), the government’s attention and resources are effectively being diverted from the true threats that remain at large – namely, those terrorists abroad who seek, through overt action and implied threat, to continue the reign of terror in America begun in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

Mobile carriers responded to a staggering 1.3 million law enforcement requests last year for subscriber information, including text messages and phone location data. ,

The revelation marks the first time figures have been made available showing just how pervasive mobile snooping by the government has become in the United States.

The companies said they were working around the clock and charging millions in fees to keep up with ever-growing demands. At least one of the carriers urged Congress to clarify the law on when probable-cause warrants were required to divulge customer data.

Nine mobile phone companies forwarded the data as part of a Congressional privacy probe brought by Rep. Edward Markey, (D-Massachusetts), who co-chairs the Congressional Bi-partisan Privacy Caucus.

The number of Americans affected each year by the growing use of mobile phone data by law enforcement could reach into the tens of millions, as a single request could ensnare dozens or even hundreds of people. Law enforcement has been asking for so-called “cell tower dumps” in which carriers disclose all phone numbers that connected to a given tower during a certain period of time.

So, for instance, if police wanted to try to find a person who broke a store window at an Occupy protest, it could get the phone numbers and identifying data of all protestors with mobile phones in the vicinity at the time — and use that data for other purposes.

“We cannot allow privacy protections to be swept aside with the sweeping nature of these information requests,” Markey said in a statement. Markey divulged the data Monday, a day after leaking it to The New York Times.

The carriers have refused for years to make clear to Americans how much data they keep and for how long — or how often — and under what standards — data is turned over to authorities. The newly released data shows that the police have realized the country has moved to an age when most Americans carry a tracking device in their pockets, leaving a bread crumb trail of their every move and electronic communication.

The reports showed that AT&T, the nation’s second largest carrier, received about 125,000 requests from the authorities in 2007 — mushrooming to more than 260,000 last year. It charged $2.8 million for the work in 2007 and $8.25 million last year. Though AT&T promises in its own human rights policy that it will “generate periodic reports regarding our experience with such requests to the extent permitted by the law,” the company has never done so until requested by Congress.

Verizon, the nation’s largest carrier, did not provide a clear breakdown as did AT&T, but said it also received about 260,000 requests last year, and added that the numbers are growing at a rate of about 15 percent annually.

Oddly, the third largest carrier, Sprint said it has received nearly double what each of the top two reported: 500,000 requests last year. Finally, the last of the top four carriers, T-Mobile, declined to divulge how many requests it gets. But it said in the last decade, the numbers have increased by up to 16 percent annually.

Overall, the companies said they respond to tens of thousands of emergency requests annually when authorities ask for data claiming there is an imminent threat of death or serious injury. Sprint, for example, said it handles those via fax from law enforcement.

The figures come as Twitter and Google have also reported a major uptick in the number of government demands for user-information data. Twitter, for example, said it received more requests for data in the first half of this year than all of last year. The United States was responsible for the bulk of the requests.

The carriers said they responded to police emergencies, subpoenas and other court orders. They did not clearly say how many times they responded to probable-cause warrants. That’s because much of Americans’ mobile-phone data is not protected by the Fourth Amendment.

“AT&T does not respond to law enforcement without receipt of appropriate legal process,” Timothy McKone, an AT&T vice president, wrote Markey as part of the congressional inquiry. “When the law requires a warrant for disclosure of customer usage information, AT&T requires that a warrant be required — as is also the case for court orders, subpoenas or any other form of legal process.”

AT&T: The category PSAP stands for Public Safety Answering Point, which takes emergency 911 calls for subscriber data.

McCone said the company employs more than 100 full-time staffers and “operates on a 24/7 basis for the purpose of meeting law enforcement demands.”

All the while, the Justice Department employs a covert internet and telephone surveillance method known as pen register and trap-and-trace capturing. Judges sign off on these telco orders when the authorities say the information is relevant to an investigation. No probable cause that the target committed a crime — the warrant standard — is necessary.

Pen registers obtain non-content information of outbound telephone and internet communications, such as phone numbers dialed, and the sender and recipient (and sometimes subject line) of an e-mail message. A trap-and-trace acquires the same information, but for inbound communications to a target.

According to a separate report, from 2004 to 2009, the number of those have more than doubled to 23,895. The Justice Department has failed to report figures for 2010 and 2011. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the Justice Department, seeking the records.

What’s more, the government asserts, and judges are sometimes agreeing, that no warrant is required to obtain so-called cell-site data which identifies the cell tower to which the customer was connected at the beginning of a call and at the end of the call. Such location data can be collected by mobile phone companies whenever a phone is turned on, making it possible for police to obtain, without probable cause, a detailed history of the movement of a phone.

Sprint said sometimes it’s hard for the company to know whether it is being properly served, and that the legal standard of whether a probable-cause warrant was needed is unclear.

“Given the importance of this issue, the competing and at times contradictory legal standards, Sprint believes Congress should clarify the legal requirements for disclosure of all types of location information to law enforcement personnel,” Voyan McCann, a Sprint vice president, wrote Markey.

The use of the television set as a receiver for illegal and clandestine listening purposes and got an enormous response. When concerned people asked me how to neutralize this, I told them to disconnect their set from the cable hookup and I am told that many do. All it takes is a knuckle-dragger down at the cable head and very simple equipment (according to a friend in the New Jersey Bell labs) to reverse the system and listen. One doesn’t need elaborate and expensive equipment to neutralize this. Simple disconnection is much more effective in the end.

There exists a top-secret NSA program called NUCLEON, which intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a database.

Harvest

In April 1958, the final design for the NSA-customized version of IBM’s Stretch computer had been approved, and the machine was installed in February 1962. The design engineer was James H. Pomerene, and it was built by IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York. Its electronics (fabricated of the same kind of discrete transistors used for Stretch) were physically about twice as big as the Stretch to which it was attached. Harvest added a small number of instructions to Stretch, and could not operate independently.

An NSA-conducted evaluation found that Harvest was more powerful than the best commercially available machine by a factor of 50 to 200, depending on the task.

One purpose of the machine was to search text for key words from a watchlist. From a single foreign cipher system, Harvest was able to scan over seven million decrypts for any occurrences of over 7,000 key words in under four hours.

The computer was also used for codebreaking, and this was enhanced by a system codenamed Rye, which allowed remote access to Harvest. According to a 1965 NSA report, “RYE has made it possible for the agency to locate many more potentially exploitable cryptographic systems and `bust’ situations. Many messages that would have taken hours or days to read by hand methods, if indeed the process were feasible at all, can now be `set’ and machine decrypted in a matter of minutes”.Harvest was also used for decipherment of solved systems; the report goes on to say that, “Decrypting a large batch of messages in a solved system [is] also being routinely handled by this system”.

Harvest remained in use until 1976, having been in operation at the NSA for fourteen years. Part of the reason for its retirement was that some of the mechanical components of Tractor had worn beyond use, and there was no practical way to replace them. IBM declined to re-implement the architecture in a more modern technology.

Social network analysis

One common form of surveillance is to create maps of social networks based on data from social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter as well as from traffic analysis information from phone call records such as those in the NSA call database, and others. These social network “maps” are then data mined to extract useful information such as personal interests, friendships & affiliations, wants, beliefs, thoughts, and activities.

Many U.S. government agencies such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are investing heavily in research involving social network analysis. The intelligence community believes that the biggest threat to U.S. power comes from decentralized, leaderless, geographically dispersed groups of terrorists, subversives, extremists, and dissidents. These types of threats are most easily countered by finding important nodes in the network, and removing them. To do this requires a detailed map of the network.

Jason Ethier of Northeastern University, in his study of modern social network analysis, said the following of the Scalable Social Network Analysis Program developed by the Information Awareness Office:

The purpose of the SSNA algorithms program is to extend techniques of social network analysis to assist with distinguishing potential terrorist cells from legitimate groups of people…. In order to be successful SSNA will require information on the social interactions of the majority of people around the globe. Since the Defense Department cannot easily distinguish between peaceful citizens and terrorists, it will be necessary for them to gather data on innocent civilians as well as on potential terrorists.

AT&T developed a programming language called “Hancock”, which is able to sift through enormous databases of phone call and Internet traffic records, such as the NSA call database, and extract “communities of interest”—groups of people who call each other regularly, or groups that regularly visit certain sites on the Internet. AT&T originally built the system to develop “marketing leads” but the FBI has regularly requested such information from phone companies such as AT&T without a warrant, and after using the data stores all information received in its own databases, regardless of whether or not the information was ever useful in an investigation.

Some people believe that the use of social networking sites is a form of “participatory surveillance”, where users of these sites are essentially performing surveillance on themselves, putting detailed personal information on public websites where it can be viewed by corporations and governments. About 20% of employers have reported using social networking sites to collect personal data on prospective or current employees.

Biometric surveillance

Biometric surveillance is any technology that measures and analyze human physical and/or behavioral characteristics for authentication, identification, or screening purposes. Examples of physical characteristics include fingerprints, DNA, and facial patterns. Examples of mostly behavioral characteristics include gait (a person’s manner of walking) or voice.

Facial recognition is the use of the unique configuration of a person’s facial features to accurately identify them, usually from surveillance video. Both the Department of Homeland Security and DARPA are heavily funding research into facial recognition systems The Information Processing Technology Office, ran a program known as Human Identification at a Distance which developed technologies that are capable of identifying a person at up to 500 ft by their facial features.

Another form of behavioral biometrics, based on affective computing, involves computers recognizing a person’s emotional state based on an analysis of their facial expressions, how fast they are talking, the tone and pitch of their voice, their posture, and other behavioral traits. This might be used for instance to see if a person is acting “suspicious” (looking around furtively, “tense” or “angry” facial expressions, waving arms, etc.)

A more recent development is DNA fingerprinting, which looks at some of the major markers in the body’s DNA to produce a match. The FBI is spending $1 billion to build a new biometric database, which will store DNA, facial recognition data, iris/retina (eye) data, fingerprints, palm prints, and other biometric data of people living in the United States. The computers running the database are contained in an underground facility about the size of two American football fields.

The Los Angeles Police Department is installing automated facial recognition and license plate recognition devices in its squad cars, and providing handheld face scanners, which officers will use to identify people while on patrol.

Facial thermographs are in development, which allow machines to identify certain emotions in people such as fear or stress, by measuring the temperature generated by blood flow to different parts of their face. Law enforcement officers believe that this has potential for them to identify when a suspect is nervous, which might indicate that they are hiding something, lying, or worried about something.

Aerial surveillance

Aerial surveillance is the gathering of surveillance, usually visual imagery or video, from an airborne vehicle—such as an unmanned aerial vehicle, helicopter, or spy plane

Digital imaging technology, miniaturized computers, and numerous other technological advances over the past decade have contributed to rapid advances in aerial surveillance hardware such as micro-aerial vehicles, forward-looking infrared, and high-resolution imagery capable of identifying objects at extremely long distances. For instance, the MQ-9 Reaper, a U.S. drone plane used for domestic operations by the Department of Homeland Security, carries cameras that are capable of identifying an object the size of a milk carton from altitudes of 60,000 feet, and has forward-looking infrared devices that can detect the heat from a human body at distances of up to 60 kilometers. In an earlier instance of commercial aerial surveillance, the Killington Mountain ski resort hired ‘eye in the sky’ aerial photography of its competitors’ parking lots to judge the success of its marketing initiatives as it developed starting in the 1950s.

HART program concept drawing from official IPTO (DARPA) official website

The United States Department of Homeland Security is in the process of testing UAVs to patrol the skies over the United States for the purposes of critical infrastructure protection, border patrol, “transit monitoring”, and general surveillance of the U.S. population. Miami-Dade police department ran tests with a vertical take-off and landing UAV from Honeywell, which is planned to be used in SWAT operations. Houston’s police department has been testing fixed-wing UAVs for use in “traffic control”.

The United Kingdom, as well, is working on plans to build up a fleet of surveillance UAVs ranging from micro-aerial vehicles to full-size drones, to be used by police forces throughout the U.K.

In addition to their surveillance capabilities, MAVs are capable of carrying tasers for “crowd control”, or weapons for killing enemy combatants.

Programs such as the Heterogenous Aerial Reconnaissance Team program developed by DARPA have automated much of the aerial surveillance process. They have developed systems consisting of large teams drone planes that pilot themselves, automatically decide who is “suspicious” and how to go about monitoring them, coordinate their activities with other drones nearby, and notify human operators if something suspicious is occurring. This greatly increases the amount of area that can be continuously monitored, while reducing the number of human operators required. Thus a swarm of automated, self-directing drones can automatically patrol a city and track suspicious individuals, reporting their activities back to a centralized monitoring station

Data mining and profiling

Data mining is the application of statistical techniques and programmatic algorithms to discover previously unnoticed relationships within the data.. Data profiling in this context is the process of assembling information about a particular individual or group in order to generate a profile — that is, a picture of their patterns and behavior. Data profiling can be an extremely powerful tool for psychological and social network analysis. A skilled analyst can discover facts about a person that they might not even be consciously aware of themselves.

Economic (such as credit card purchases) and social (such as telephone calls and emails) transactions in modern society create large amounts of stored data and records. In the past, this data was documented in paper records, leaving a “paper trail”, or was simply not documented at all. Correlation of paper-based records was a laborious process—it required human intelligence operators to manually dig through documents, which was time-consuming and incomplete, at best.

But today many of these records are electronic, resulting in an “electronic trail”. Every use of a bank machine, payment by credit card, use of a phone card, call from home, checked out library book, rented video, or otherwise complete recorded transaction generates an electronic record. Public records—such as birth, court, tax and other records—are increasily being digitized and made available online. In addition, due to laws like CALEA, web traffic and online purchases are also available for profiling. Electronic record-keeping makes data easily collectable, storable, and accessible—so that high-volume, efficient aggregation and analysis is possible at significantly lower costs.

Information relating to many of these individual transactions is often easily available because it is generally not guarded in isolation, since the information, such as the title of a movie a person has rented, might not seem sensitive. However, when many such transactions are aggregated they can be used to assemble a detailed profile revealing the actions, habits, beliefs, locations frequented, social connections, and preferences of the individual. This profile is then used, by programs such as ADVISE and TALON, to determine whether the person is a military, criminal, or political threat.

In addition to its own aggregation and profiling tools, the government is able to access information from third parties — for example, banks, credit companies or employers, etc. — by requesting access informally, by compelling access through the use of subpoenas or other procedures, or by purchasing data from commercial data aggregators or data brokers. The United States has spent $370 million on its 43 planned fusion centers, which are national network of surveillance centers that are located in over 30 states. The centers will collect and analyze vast amounts of data on U.S. citizens. It will get this data by consolidating personal information from sources such as state driver’s licensing agencies, hospital records, criminal records, school records, credit bureaus, banks, etc. — and placing this information in a centralized database that can be accessed from all of the centers, as well as other federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Under United States v. Miller (1976), data held by third parties is generally not subject to Fourth Amendment warrant requirements.

Corporate surveillance

Corporate surveillance is the monitoring of a person or group’s behavior by a corporation. The data collected is most often used for marketing purposes or sold to other corporations, but is also regularly shared with government agencies. It can be used as a form of business intelligence, which enables the corporation to better tailor their products and/or services to be desirable by their customers. Or the data can be sold to other corporations, so that they can use it for the aforementioned purpose. Or it can be used for direct marketing purposes, such as the targeted advertisements on Google and Yahoo, where ads are targeted to the user of the search engine by analyzing their search history and emails (if they use free webmail services), which is kept in a database.

For instance, Google, the world’s most popular search engine, stores identifying information for each web search. An IP address and the search phrase used are stored in a database for up to 18 months. Google also scans the content of emails of users of its Gmail webmail service, in order to create targeted advertising based on what people are talking about in their personal email correspondences. Google is, by far, the largest Internet advertising agency—millions of sites place Google’s advertising banners and links on their websites, in order to earn money from visitors who click on the ads. Each page containing Google advertisements adds, reads, and modifies “cookies” on each visitor’s computer. These cookies track the user across all of these sites, and gather information about their web surfing habits, keeping track of which sites they visit, and what they do when they are on these sites. This information, along with the information from their email accounts, and search engine histories, is stored by Google to use for building a profile of the user to deliver better-targeted advertising.

According to the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute that undertake an annual quantitative survey about electronic monitoring and surveillance with approximately 300 U.S. companies, “more than one fourth of employers have fired workers for misusing e-mail and nearly one third have fired employees for misusing the Internet“.More than 40% of the companies monitor e-mail traffic of their workers, and 66% of corporations monitor Internet connections. In addition, most companies use software to block non-work related websites such as sexual or pornographic sites, game sites, social networking sites, entertainment sites, shopping sites, and sport sites. The American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute also stress that companies “tracking content, keystrokes, and time spent at the keyboard … store and review computer files … monitor the blogosphere to see what is being written about the company, and … monitor social networking sites“.Furthermore, about 30% of the companies had also fired employees for non-work related email and Internet usage such as “inappropriate or offensive language“ and ”viewing, downloading, or uploading inappropriate/offensive content“.

The United States government often gains access to these databases, either by producing a warrant for it, or by simply asking. The Department of Homeland Security has openly stated that it uses data collected from consumer credit and direct marketing agencies—such as Google—for augmenting the profiles of individuals whom it is monitoring. The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and other intelligence agencies have formed an “information-sharing” partnership with over 34,000 corporations as part of their Infragard program.

The U.S. Federal government has gathered information from grocery store “discount card” programs, which track customers’ shopping patterns and store them in databases, in order to look for “terrorists” by analyzing shoppers’ buying patterns.

Human operatives

Organizations that have enemies who wish to gather information about the groups’ members or activities face the issue of infiltration.

In addition to operatives’ infiltrating an organization, the surveilling party may exert pressure on certain members of the target organization to act as informants (i.e., to disclose the information they hold on the organization and its members).

Fielding operatives is very expensive, and for governments with wide-reaching electronic surveillance tools at their disposal the information recovered from operatives can often be obtained from less problematic forms of surveillance such as those mentioned above. Nevertheless, human infiltrators are still common today. For instance, in 2007 documents surfaced showing that the FBI was planning to field a total of 15,000 undercover agents and informants in response to an anti-terrorism directive sent out by George W. Bush in 2004 that ordered intelligence and law enforcement agencies to increase their HUMINT capabilities.

Satellite imagery

On May 25, 2007 the U.S. Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell authorized the National Applications Office (NAO) of the Department of Homeland Security to allow local, state, and domestic Federal agencies to access imagery from military intelligence satellites and aircraft sensors which can now be used to observe the activities of U.S. citizens. The satellites and aircraft sensors will be able to penetrate cloud cover, detect chemical traces, and identify objects in buildings and “underground bunkers”, and will provide real-time video at much higher resolutions than the still-images produced by programs such as Google Earth.

Identification and credentials

One of the simplest forms of identification is the carrying of credentials. Some nations have an identity card system to aid identification, whilst many, such as Britain, are considering it but face public opposition. Other documents, such as passports, driver’s licenses, library cards, banking or credit cards are also used to verify identity.

If the form of the identity card is “machine-readable”, usually using an encoded magnetic stripe or identification number (such as a Social Security number), it corroborates the subject’s identifying data. In this case it may create an electronic trail when it is checked and scanned, which can be used in profiling, as mentioned above.

RFID and geolocation devices

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tagging is the use of very small electronic devices (called “RFID tags”) which are applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves. The tags can be read from several meters away. They are extremely inexpensive, costing a few cents per piece, so they can be inserted into many types of everyday products without significantly increasing the price, and can be used to track and identify these objects for a variety of purposes.

Many companies are already “tagging” their workers, who are monitored while on the job. Workers in U.K. went on general strike in protest of having themselves tagged. They felt that it was dehumanizing to have all of their movements tracked with RFID chips. Some critics have expressed fears that people will soon be tracked and scanned everywhere they go.

RFID chip pulled from new credit card

Verichip is an RFID device produced by a company called Applied Digital Solutions (ADS). Verichip is slightly larger than a grain of rice, and is injected under the skin. The injection reportedly feels similar to receiving a shot. The chip is encased in glass, and stores a “VeriChip Subscriber Number” which the scanner uses to access their personal information, via the Internet, from Verichip Inc.’s database, the “Global VeriChip Subscriber Registry”. Thousands of people have already had them inserted.

In a 2003 editorial, CNET News.com’s chief political correspondent, Declan McCullagh, speculated that, soon, every object that is purchased, and perhaps ID cards, will have RFID devices in them, which would respond with information about people as they walk past scanners (what type of phone they have, what type of shoes they have on, which books they are carrying, what credit cards or membership cards they have, etc.). This information could be used for identification, tracking, or targeted marketing. As of 2012, this has largely not come to pass

Global Positioning System

When people talk about “a GPS,” they usually mean a GPS receiver. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is actually a constellation of 27 Earth-orbiting satellites (24 in operation and three extras in case one fails). The U.S. military developed and implemented this satellite network as a military navigation system, but soon opened it up to everybody else.

Each of these 3,000- to 4,000-pound solar-powered satellites circles the globe at about 12,000 miles (19,300 km), making two complete rotations every day. The orbits are arranged so that at any time, anywhere on Earth, there are at least four satellites “visible” in the sky.

A GPS receiver’s job is to locate four or more of these satellites, figure out the distanc¬e to each, and use this information to deduce its own location. This operation is based on a simple mathematical principle called trilateration. Trilateration in three-dimensional space can be a little tricky, so we’ll start with an explanation of simple two-dimensional trilateration.

In cell phones.

At the end of 2005, all cell phone carriers were required to provide the ability to trace cell phone calls to a location within 100 meters or less. 1 meter = 3.2808399 feet   100 meters = 328 feet

So, in general, you can not track someone using their cell phone, unless the person you want to track has the right kind of cell phone, connected to the right network, with the right service.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a space-based global navigation satellite system (GNSS) that provides location and time information in all weather, anywhere on or near the Earth, where there is an unobstructed line of sight to four or more GPS satellites. It is maintained by the United States government and is freely accessible by anyone with a GPS receiver with some technical limitations which are only removed for military users.

The GPS project was developed in 1973 to overcome the limitations of previous navigation systems, integrating ideas from several predecessors, including a number of classified engineering design studies from the 1960s. GPS was created and realized by the U.S. Department of Defense (USDOD) and was originally run with 24 satellites. It became fully operational in 1994.

In addition to GPS, other systems are in use or under development. The Russian GLObal NAvigation Satellite System (GLONASS) was in use by only the Russian military, until it was made fully available to civilians in 2007. There are also the planned European Union Galileo positioning system, Chinese Compass navigation system, and Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System.

Basic concept of GPS

A GPS receiver calculates its position by precisely timing the signals sent by GPS satellites high above the Earth. Each satellite continually transmits messages that include

  • the time the message was transmitted
  • precise orbital information (the ephemeris)
  • the general system health and rough orbits of all GPS satellites (the almanac).

The receiver uses the messages it receives to determine the transit time of each message and computes the distance to each satellite. These distances along with the satellites’ locations are used with the possible aid of trilateration, depending on which algorithm is used, to compute the position of the receiver. This position is then displayed, perhaps with a moving map display or latitude and longitude; elevation information may be included. Many GPS units show derived information such as direction and speed, calculated from position changes.

Three satellites might seem enough to solve for position since space has three dimensions and a position near the Earth’s surface can be assumed. However, even a very small clock error multiplied by the very large speed of light— the speed at which satellite signals propagate — results in a large positional error. Therefore receivers use four or more satellites to solve for the receiver’s location and time. The very accurately computed time is effectively hidden by most GPS applications, which use only the location. A few specialized GPS applications do however use the time; these include time transfer, traffic signal timing, and synchronization of cell phone base stations.

Although four satellites are required for normal operation, fewer apply in special cases. If one variable is already known, a receiver can determine its position using only three satellites. For example, a ship or aircraft may have known elevation. Some GPS receivers may use additional clues or assumptions (such as reusing the last known altitude, dead reckoning, inertial navigation, or including information from the vehicle computer) to give a less accurate (degraded) position when fewer than four satellites are visible.

In the U.S., police have planted hidden GPS tracking devices in people’s vehicles to monitor their movements, without a warrant. In early 2009, they were arguing in court that they have the right to do this.

Several cities are running pilot projects to require parolees to wear GPS devices to track their movements when they get out of prison.

Mobile phones

Mobile phones are also commonly used to collect geolocation data. The geographical location of a mobile phone (and thus the person carrying it) can be determined easily (whether it is being used or not), using a technique known multilateration to calculate the differences in time for a signal to travel from the cell phone to each of several cell towers near the owner of the phone.

Surveillance devices

Surveillance devices, or “bugs”, are hidden electronic devices which are used to capture, record, and/or transmit data to a receiving party such as a law enforcement agency.

The U.S. has run numerous domestic intelligence, such as COINTELPRO, which have bugged the homes, offices, and vehicles of thousands of U.S. citizens, usually political activists, subversives, and criminals.

Law enforcement and intelligence services in the U.K. and the United States possess technology to remotely activate the microphones in cell phones, by accessing the phone’s diagnostic/maintenance features, in order to listen to conversations that take place nearby the person who holds the phone.

Postal services

As more people use faxes and e-mail the significance of surveilling the postal system is decreasing, in favor of Internet and telephone surveillance. But interception of post is still an available option for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, in certain circumstances.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation have performed twelve separate mail-opening campaigns targeted towards U.S. citizens. In one of these programs, more than 215,000 communications were intercepted, opened, and photographed.

God we trust,” goes an old National Security Agency joke.  “All others we monitor.

Given the revelations last week about the NSA’s domestic spying activities, the saying seems more prophecy than humor.

First, the Guardian reported details on a domestic telephone dragnet in which Verizon was forced to give the NSA details about all domestic, and even local, telephone calls. Then the Guardian and the Washington Post revealed another massive NSA surveillance program, called Prism, that required the country’s major Internet companies to secretly pass along data including email, photos, videos, chat services, file transfers, stored data, log-ins and video conferencing.

While the Obama administration and Senate intelligence committee members defend the spying as crucial in its fight against terrorism, this is only the latest chapter in nearly a century of pressure on telecommunications companies to secretly cooperate with NSA and its predecessors.  But as stunning technology advances allow more and more personal information to pass across those links, the dangers of the United States turning into a secret surveillance state increase exponentially.

The NSA was so flooded with billions of dollars from post-Sept. 11, 2001 budget increases that it went on a building spree and also expanded its eavesdropping capabilities enormously.  Secret rooms were built in giant telecom facilities, such as AT&T’s 10-story “switch” in San Francisco.  There, mirror copies of incoming data and telephone cables are routed into rooms filled with special hardware and software to filter out email and phone calls for transmission to NSA for analysis.

New spy satellites were launched and new listening posts were built – such as the recently opened operations center near Augusta, Ga. Designed to hold more than 4,000 earphone-clad eavesdroppers, it is the largest electronic spy base in the world.

Meanwhile, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, where top-secret work was done on the atomic bomb during World War II, the NSA is secretly building the world’s fastest and most powerful computer.  Designed to run at exaflop speed, executing a million trillion operations per second, it will be able to sift through enormous quantities of data – for example,  all the phone numbers dialed in the United States every day.

Today the NSA is the world’s largest spy organization, encompassing tens of thousands of employees and occupying a city-size headquarters complex on Fort Meade in Maryland.  But in 1920, its earliest predecessor, known as the Black Chamber, fit into a slim townhouse on Manhattan’s East 37th Street.

World War One had recently ended, along with official censorship, and the Radio Communication Act of 1912 was again in effect. This legislation guaranteed the secrecy of electronic communications and meted out harsh penalties for any telegraph company employee who divulged the contents of a message.  To the Black Chamber, however, the bill represented a large obstacle to be overcome—illegally, if necessary.

So the Black Chamber chief, Herbert O. Yardley, and his boss in Washington, General Marlborough Churchill, head of the Military Intelligence Division, paid a visit to 195 Broadway in downtown Manhattan, headquarters of Western Union. This was the nation’s largest telegram company – the email of that day.

The two government officials took the elevator to the 24th floor for a secret meeting with Western Union’s president, Newcomb Carlton. Their object was to convince him to grant them secret access to the private communications zapping through his company’s wires.

It was easier achieved than Yardley had ever imagined. “After the men had put all our cards on the table,” Yardley later described, “President Carlton seemed anxious to do everything he could for us.’”

Time and again over the decades, this pattern has been repeated.  The NSA, or a predecessor, secretly entered into agreements with the country’s major telecommunications companies and illegally gained access to Americans’ private communications.

For more than a quarter-century, the NSA obeyed this law. The intelligence agency turned its giant ears outward — away from the everyday lives of Americans.  But that all changed soon after Sept. 11, 2001, when the Bush administration began its warrantless wiretapping program.

Once again, an NSA director sought the secret cooperation of the nation’s telecom industry to gain access to its communications channels and links. Again, the companies agreed — despite violating the laws and the privacy of their tens of millions of customers.  Eventually, when the operation was discovered, a number of groups brought suit against the companies, Congress passed legislation granting them immunity.

Thus, for roughly 100 years, whenever the government knocked on the telecommunications industry’s door and asked them to break the law and turn over millions upon millions of private communications, the telecoms complied. Why not, since they knew that nothing would ever happen to them if they broke the law.

Now, as a result of these new revelations, it appears that the NSA has again gone to Verizon and other telephone companies, as well as many of the giant Internet companies, and obtained secret access to millions, if not billions, of private communications.  There are still many questions as to what, if any, legal justification was used.

But unlike with Yardley and the Black Chamber, the dangers today of secret cooperation between the telecom and Internet industry and the NSA are incomparable. Because of technology back then, the only data the government was able to obtain were telegrams — which few average people sent or received.

Today, however, access to someone’s telephone records and Internet activity can provide an incredibly intimate window on their life.

Phone data reveals whom they call, where they call, how often they call someone, where they are calling from and how long they speak to each person.  Internet data provides e-mail content, Google searches, pictures, and personal and financial details.

We now live in an era when access to someone’s email account and web searches can paint a more detailed picture of their life then most personal diaries. Secret agreements between intelligence agencies and communications companies should not be allowed in a democracy.  There is too much at risk.

In a dusty corner of Utah, NSA is now completing construction of a mammoth new building, a one-million-square foot data warehouse for storing the billions of communications it is intercepting. If the century-old custom of secret back-room deals between NSA and the telecoms is permitted to continue, all of us may digitally end up there.

Contrary to what Simpson may have asserted, gentlemen (and women) do read each other’s mail — at least if they work for the National Security Agency.

And in the future, given NSA’s unrestrained push into advanced technologies, the agency may also be able to read your thoughts as well as your mail.

  • Successor to the NSA ‘Harvest” programs that catalog important overseas telephone calls made via communications satellites.
  • In depth information on the DoD’s DISA sytems / VIPER and others
  • USIA/Warrentown files
  • In depth dossiers on members of Congress. These, the list advises us, consists of medical and financial records.
  • A 250 page report on the fake Anthrax scare
  • Firms and individuals in foreign countries known to be friendly sources.
  • Scanned copies of Governor George W. Bush’s personal correspondence and financial records, now hidden in the George H.W.Bush Presidential Library
  • Lists of offshore bank accounts for senior political and military figures

The so-called ‘Wilson Blvd.’ technical and scientific records

Official Government Disinformation Methodology  

Prior to the event of printed, and later television, media, it was not difficult for the world’s power elites and the governments they controlled, to see that unwelcome and potentially dangerous information never reached the masses of people under their control. Most of the general public in more distant times were completely illiterate and received their news from their local priest or from occasional gossip from travellers. The admixture of kings, princes and clergy had an iron control over what their subject could, or could not hear. During the Middle Ages and even into the more liberal Renaissance, universities were viewed with suspicion and those who taught, or otherwise expressed, concepts that were anathama to the concept of feudalism were either killed outright in public or permanently banished. Too-liberal priests were silenced by similar methods. If Papal orders for silence were not followed, priests could, and were, put to the torch as an example for others to note.

However, with the advent of the printing press and a growing literacy in the piopulation, the question of informational control was less certain and with the growing movements in Europe and the American colonies for less restriction and more public expression, the power elites found it necessary to find the means to prevent unpleasant information from being proclaimed throughout their lands and unto all the inhabitants thereof.

The power elites realized that if they could not entirely prevent inconvenient and often dangerous facts to emerge and threaten their authority, their best course was not censorship but to find and develop the means to control the presentation and publication of that they wished to keep entirely secret.

The first method was to block or prevent the release of dangerous material by claiming that such material was a matter of important state security and as such, strictly controlled. This, they said, was not only for their own protection but also the somewhat vague but frightening concept of the security of their people.

The second method was, and has been, to put forth disinformation that so distorts and confuses actual facts as to befuddle a public they see as easily controlled, naïve and gullible.

The mainstream American media which theoretically was a balance against governmental corruption and abuses of power, quickly became little more than a mouthpiece for the same government they were supposed to report on. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, most American newspapers were little better than Rupert Mudoch’s modern tabloids, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing but during the First World War, President Wilson used the American entry into the First World War as an excuse for setting up controls over the American public. Aside from setting up government control over food distribution, the railroads, much industry involved in war production, he also established a powerful propganda machine coupled with a national informant system that guaranteed his personal control. In 1918, citing national security, Wilson arrested and imprisoned critical news reporters and threatened to shut down their papers.

Wilson was a wartime president and set clear precidents that resonated very loudely with those who read history and understood its realities.

During the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt, another wartime leader, was not as arrogant or highhanded as Wilson (whose empire fell apart after the end of the war that supported it) but he set up informational controls that exist to the present time. And after Roosevelt, and the war, passed into history, the government in the United States created a so-called cold war with Soviet Russia, instead of Hitler’s Germany, as the chief enemy. Control of the American media then fell into the hands of the newly-formed Central Intelligence Agency who eventually possessed an enormous, all-encompassing machine that clamped down firmly on the national print, and later television media, with an iron hand in a velvet glove. Media outlets that proved to be cooperative with CIA propaganda officials were rewarded for their loyalty and cooperation with valuable, and safe, news and the implication was that enemies of the state would either be subject to scorn and derision and that supporters of the state and its policies would receive praise and adulation.

The methodology of a controlled media has a number of aspects which, once clearly understood, renders its techniques and goals far less effective.

Some of the main tactics used by the mainstream media to mislead the American public are illustrated here:

The American media, both press and television, has long been known for promoting sensationalism over accuracy on the one hand and practicing subservience to

Mainstream media sources (especially newspapers) are notorious for reporting flagrantly dishonest and unsupported news stories on the front page, then quietly retracting those stories on the very back page when they are caught. In this case, the point is to railroad the lie into the collective consciousness. Once the lie is finally exposed, it is already too late, and a large portion of the population will not notice or care when the truth comes out. A good example of this would be the collusion of the mainstream media with the Bush administration to convince the American public after 9/11 that       Iraq had WMDs, even though no concrete evidence existed to prove it. George W. Bush’s eventual admission that there had never been any WMDs in Iraq (except chemical weapons which the U.S. actually sold to Saddam under the Reagan / Bush administration) was lightly reported or glazed over by most mainstream news sources. The core reason behind a war that has now killed over a million people was proven to be completely fraudulent, yet I still run into people today who believe that Iraq had nukes…

Unconfirmed Or Controlled Sources As Fact

Cable news venues often cite information from “unnamed” sources, government sources that have an obvious bias or agenda, or “expert” sources without providing an alternative “expert” view. The information provided by these sources is usually backed by nothing more than blind faith. A recent example of this would be the Osama Bin Laden audio tapes which supposedly reveal that the Christmas “Underwear Bomber” was indeed Al-Qaeda:

The media treats the audio tape as undeniable fact in numerous stories, then at the same time prints a side story which shows that the White House cannot confirm that the tape is even real:

If the White House cannot confirm the authenticity of the tape, then why did the media report on its contents as if it had been confirmed?

Calculated Omission

Otherwise known as “cherry picking” data. One simple piece of information or root item of truth can derail an entire disinfo news story, so instead of trying to gloss over it, they simply pretend as if it doesn’t exist. When the fact is omitted, the lie can appear entirely rational. This tactic is also used extensively when disinformation agents and crooked journalists engage in open debate.

Distraction, and the Manufacture of Relevance

recent push for an audit of the Federal Reserve which was gaining major public support, as well as political support. Instead of reporting on this incredible and unprecedented movement for transparency in the Fed, the MSM spent two months or more reporting non-stop on the death of Michael Jackson, a pop idol who had not released a decent record since “Thriller,” practically deifying the man who only months earlier was being lambasted by the same MSM for having “wandering hands” when children were about.

Dishonest Debate Tactics

Sometimes, men who actually are concerned with the average American’s pursuit of honesty and legitimate fact-driven information break through and appear on T.V. However, rarely are they allowed to share their views or insights without having to fight through a wall of carefully crafted deceit and propaganda. Because the media knows they will lose credibility if they do not allow guests with opposing viewpoints every once in a while, they set up and choreograph specialized T.V. debates in highly restrictive environments which put the guest on the defensive, and make it difficult for them to clearly convey their ideas or facts.

1) Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

We see this tactic in many forms. For example, projecting your own movement as mainstream, and your opponent’s as fringe. Convincing your opponent that his fight is a futile one. Your opposition may act differently, or even hesitate to act at all, based on their perception of your power.

2) Never go outside the experience of your people, and whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.

Don’t get drawn into a debate about a subject you do not know as well as or better than your opposition. If possible, draw them into such a situation instead. Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty in your opposition. This is commonly used against unwitting interviewees on cable news shows whose positions are set up to be skewered. The target is blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address. In television and radio, this also serves to waste broadcast time to prevent the target from expressing his own positions.

3) Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

The objective is to target the opponent’s credibility and reputation by accusations of hypocrisy. If the tactician can catch his opponent in even the smallest misstep, it creates an opening for further attacks.

4) Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

“Ron Paul is a crackpot.” “Dennis Kucinich is short and weird.” “9-11 twoofers wear tinfoil hats.” Ridicule is almost impossible to counter. It’s irrational. It infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage. It also works as a pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

5) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

The popularization of the term “Teabaggers” is a classic example, it caught on by itself because people seem to think it’s clever, and enjoy saying it. Keeping your talking points simple and fun keeps your side motivated, and helps your tactics spread autonomously, without instruction or encouragement.

6) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

See rule number 6. Don’t become old news. If you keep your tactics fresh, its easier to keep your people active. Not all disinformation agents are paid. The “useful idiots” have to be motivated by other means. Mainstream disinformation often changes gear from one method to the next and then back again.

7) Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new. Never give the target a chance to rest, regroup, recover or re-strategize. Take advantage of current events and twist their implications to support your position. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

This goes hand in hand with Rule #1. Perception is reality. Allow your opposition to expend all of its energy in expectation of an insurmountable scenario. The dire possibilities can easily poison the mind and result in demoralization.

9) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

The objective of this pressure is to force the opposition to react and make the mistakes that are necessary for the ultimate success of the campaign.

10) If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

As grassroots activism tools, Alinsky tactics have historically been used (for example, by labor movements) to force the opposition to react with violence against activists, which leads to popular sympathy for the activists’ cause. Today, false (or co-opted) grassroots movements use this technique in debate as well as in planned street actions. The idea is to provoke (or stage) ruthless attacks against ones’ self, so as to be perceived as the underdog, or the victim. Today, this technique is commonly used to create the illusion that a certain movement is “counterculture” or “anti-establishment.”

11) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem. Today, this is often used offensively against legitimate activists, such as the opponents of the Federal Reserve. Complain that your opponent is merely “pointing out the problems.” Demand that they offer a solution.

12) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. The targets supporters will expose themselves. Go after individual people, not organizations or institutions. People hurt faster than institutions.

The next time you view an MSM debate, watch the pundits carefully, you will likely see many if not all of the strategies above used on some unsuspecting individual attempting to tell the truth.

Internet Disinformation Methods

Because the MSM’s bag of tricks has been so exhausted over such a long period of time, many bitter and enraged consumers of information are now turning to alternative news sources, most of which exist on the collective commons we call the internet. At first, it appears, the government and elitists ignored the web as a kind of novelty, or just another mechanism they could exploit in spreading disinformation. As we all now well know, they dropped the ball, and the internet has become the most powerful tool for truth history has ever seen.

That being said, they are now expending incredible resources in order to catch up to their mistake, utilizing every trick in their arsenal to beat web users back into submission. While the anonymity of the internet allows for a certain immunity against many of Saul Alinsky’s manipulative tactics, it also allows governments to attack those trying to spread the truth covertly. In the world of web news, we call these people “disinfo trolls.” Trolls are now being openly employed by governments in countries like the U.S. and Israel specifically to scour the internet for alternative news sites and disrupt their ability to share information.

Internet trolls, also known as “paid posters” or “paid bloggers,” are increasingly being employed by private corporations as well, often for marketing purposes. In fact, it is a rapidly growing industry.

Trolls use a wide variety of strategies, some of which are unique to the internet, here are just a few:

1) Make outrageous comments designed to distract or frustrate: An Alinsky tactic used to make people emotional, although less effective because of the impersonal nature of the web.

2) Pose as a supporter of the truth, then make comments that discredit the movement: We have seen this even on our own forums — trolls pose as supporters of the Liberty Movement, then post long, incoherent diatribes so as to appear either racist or insane.

The key to this tactic is to make references to common Liberty Movement arguments while at the same time babbling nonsense, so as to make those otherwise valid arguments seem ludicrous by association.

In extreme cases, these “Trojan Horse Trolls” have been known to make posts which incite violence — a technique obviously intended to solidify the false assertions of the notorious MIAC report and other ADL/SPLC publications which purport that constitutionalists should be feared as potential domestic terrorists.

3) Dominate Discussions: Trolls often interject themselves into productive web discussions in order to throw them off course and frustrate the people involved.

4) Prewritten Responses: Many trolls are supplied with a list or database with pre-planned talking points designed as generalized and deceptive responses to honest arguments. 9/11 “debunker” trolls are notorious for this.

5) False Association: This works hand in hand with item #2, by invoking the stereotypes established by the “Trojan Horse Troll.”

For example: calling those against the Federal Reserve “conspiracy theorists” or “lunatics”. Deliberately associating anti-globalist movements with big foot or alien enthusiasts, because of the inherent negative connotations. Using false associations to provoke biases and dissuade people from examining the evidence objectively.

6) False Moderation: Pretending to be the “voice of reason” in an argument with obvious and defined sides in an attempt to move people away from what is clearly true into a “grey area” where the truth becomes “relative.”

7) Straw Man Arguments: A very common technique. The troll will accuse his opposition of subscribing to a certain point of view, even if he does not, and then attacks that point of view. Or, the troll will put words in the mouth of his opposition, and then rebut those specific words. For example: “9/11 truthers say that no planes hit the WTC towers, and that it was all just computer animation. What are they, crazy?”

Sometimes, these strategies are used by average people with serious personality issues. However, if you see someone using these tactics often, or using many of them at the same time, you may be dealing with a paid internet troll.

Government Disinformation Methods

Governments, and the globalists who back them, have immense assets — an almost endless fiat money printing press — and control over most legal and academic institutions. With these advantages, disinformation can be executed on a massive scale. Here are just a handful of the most prominent tactics used by government agencies and private think tanks to guide public opinion, and establish the appearance of consensus:

1) Control The Experts: Most Americans are taught from kindergarten to ignore their instincts for the truth and defer to the “professional class” for all their answers. The problem is that much of the professional class is indoctrinated throughout their college years, many of them molded to support the status quo. Any experts that go against the grain are ostracized by their peers.

2) Control The Data: By controlling the source data of any investigation, be it legal or scientific, the government has the ability to engineer any truth they wish, that is, as long as the people do not care enough to ask for the source data. Two major examples of controlled and hidden source data include; the NIST investigation of the suspicious 9/11 WTC collapses, in which NIST engineers, hired by the government, have kept all source data from their computer models secret, while claiming that the computer models prove the collapses were “natural”. Also, the recent exposure of the CRU Climate Labs and their manipulation of source data in order to fool the public into believing that Global Warming is real, and accepting a world-wide carbon tax. The CRU has refused to release the source data from its experiments for years, and now we know why.

3) Skew The Statistics: This tactic is extremely evident in the Labor Department’s evaluations on unemployment, using such tricks as incorporating ambiguous birth / death ratios into their calculation in order to make it appear as though there are less unemployed people than there really are, or leaving out certain subsections of the population, like those who are unemployed and no longer seeking benefits.

3) Guilt By False Association: Governments faced with an effective opponent will always attempt to demonize that person or group in the eyes of the public. This is often done by associating them with a group or idea that the public already hates. Example: During the last election, they tried to associate Ron Paul supporters with racist groups (and more recently, certain Fox News anchors) in order to deter moderate Democrats from taking an honest look at Congressman Paul’s policies.

4) Manufacture Good News: This falls in with the skewing of statistics, and it also relies heavily on Media cooperation. The economic “Green Shoots” concept is a good example of the combination of government and corporate media interests in order to create an atmosphere of false optimism based on dubious foundations.

5) Controlled Opposition: Men in positions of power have known for centuries the importance of controlled opposition. If a movement rises in opposition to one’s authority, one must usurp that movement’s leadership. If no such movement exists to infiltrate, the establishment will often create a toothless one, in order to fill that social need, and neutralize individuals who might have otherwise taken action themselves.

During the 1960’s and 70’s, the FBI began a secretive program called COINTELPRO. Along with illegal spying on American citizens who were against the Vietnam conflict or in support of the civil rights movement, they also used agents and media sources to pose as supporters of the movement, then purposely created conflict and division, or took control of the direction of the movement altogether. This same tactic has been attempted with the modern Liberty Movement and the Tea Party movement, on several levels, but has so far been ineffective in stopping our growth.

The NRA is another good example of controlled opposition, as many gun owners are satisfied that paying their annual NRA dues is tantamount to actively resisting anti-gun legislation; when in fact, the NRA is directly responsible for many of the compromises which result in lost ground on 2nd amendment issues. In this way, gun owners are not only rendered inactive, but actually manipulated into funding the demise of their own cause.

6) False Paradigms: Human beings have a tendency to categorize and label other people and ideas. It is, for better or worse, a fundamental part of how we understand the complexities of the world. This component of human nature, like most any other, can be abused as a powerful tool for social manipulation. By framing a polarized debate according to artificial boundaries, and establishing the two poles of that debate, social engineers can eliminate the perceived possibility of a third alternative. The mainstream media apparatus is the key weapon to this end. The endless creation of dichotomies, and the neat arrangement of ideologies along left/right lines, offers average people a very simple (though hopelessly inaccurate) way of thinking about politics. It forces them to choose a side, usually based solely on emotional or cultural reasons, and often lures them into supporting positions they would otherwise disagree with. It fosters an environment in which beating the other team is more important than ensuring the integrity of your own. Perhaps most importantly, it allows the social engineer to determine what is “fair game” for debate, and what is not.

Stopping Disinformation

The best way to disarm disinformation agents is to know their methods inside and out. This gives us the ability to point out exactly what they are doing in detail the moment they try to do it. Immediately exposing a disinformation tactic as it is being used is highly destructive to the person utilizing it. It makes them look foolish, dishonest, and weak for even making the attempt. Internet trolls most especially do not know how to handle their methods being deconstructed right in front of their eyes, and usually fold and run from debate when it occurs.

The truth, is precious. It is sad that there are so many in our society that have lost respect for it; people who have traded in their conscience and their soul for temporary financial comfort while sacrificing the stability and balance of the rest of the country in the process. The human psyche breathes on the air of truth, without it, humanity cannot survive. Without it, the species will collapse in on itself, starving from lack of intellectual and emotional sustenance. Disinformation does not only threaten our insight into the workings of our world; it makes us vulnerable to fear, misunderstanding, and doubt, all things that lead to destruction. It can lead good people to commit terrible atrocities against others, or even against themselves. Without a concerted and organized effort to diffuse mass-produced lies, the future will look bleak indeed.

A classic example of disinformation:

News that Mohamed Atta had been on the payroll of the elite international program surfaced in a curious way just a month after the 9/11 attack: a brief seven-line report by German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Oct. 18, 2001, under the headline “ATTA WAS TUTOR FOR SCHOLARSHIP HOLDERS.”

The story quoted spokesmen for “Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft,” described as a “German international further education organization,” as having admitted paying Hamburg cadre principal Atta as a “scholarship holder” and “tutor,” between 1995 and 1997.

But what makes the story curious is that the German paper concealed the  shocking implications of their story, that Mohamed Atta had been on the payroll of a joint U.S.—German government program, through the simple expedient of neglecting to mention that the “Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft” was merely a private entity set up to administer the “exchange” initiative of the two  governments.

The U.S. end of the program is run out of an address at United Nations Plaza in New York by CDS International. The letters stand for Carl Duisberg Society, also the name of its German counterpart in Cologne, the Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft. Both are named for Carl Duisberg, a German chemist and industrialist who headed the Bayer Corporation during the 1920’s.?

The list of elite power brokers backing CDS International ranges from the aforementioned Kissinger and Rockefeller to former President Bill Clinton and other Democratic heavyweights like former First Lady Hillary Clinton and Clinton White House adviser Ira Magaziner.”

One sign of an intelligence asset is his involvement in organizations backed by the Western power elite. The fact that 911 hijacker Mohamed Atta was being paid to “tutor” others in the program means that he was probably an Illuminati Trainer as well. That is, he was involved as a “handler”  of other Illuminati-Intelligence assets as well. In other words, Attah was a programmed multiple that managed other program multiples for the CIA-Illuminati.

This would explain the erratic behavior he exhibited to others, including his one-time American girlfriend in Florida:

Now what is interesting in the video is the massive amounts of cocaine and other narcotics available to Attah. This is more evidence that he was an “MK-Ultra” multiple mind slave. The process of traumatic mind programming is  so emotionally damaging to the victim that narcotics are used to dull the   impact and create some psychic stability.  It is also used as a reward for following directions and obeying your Illuminati masters.

Narcotics are also something that no fervent follower of Islam would be involved with. It is anathema and carries the death penalty under Sharia Law. Tied in with Attahs former involvement with an organization named after the guy that commercialized Heroin production, Carl Duisberg, makes even less sense:

“Metzger also provides an account of the discovery of heroin by British chemist C.R.A. Wright in 1874, and the subsequent shepherding of this astounding substance into worldwide usage, a process initially overseen by Carl Duisberg of Germany’s Bayer Company, and later by the I.G. Farben chemical cartel

So, Muhamed Attah held a scholarship named after the guy who commercialized the use of Heroin, through Bayer, and that same organization can be linked to Americans identified as MK-Ultra handlers and proponents. Looks like a German Illuminati meets American Illuminati kind of thing.

So, how many Muhamed Attas were running around inside the 911 ringleaders head? Drastic mood changes, hatred of the Christian crucifix, killing small animals, violent outbursts etc., seem to indicate that their were multiple ones. Satanists kill small animals hate the crucifix. Those that are victims of Satanic Ritual Abuse are often forced to kill small animals, even family pets, as part of the trauma that causes multiple personality disorder. Some other symptoms include:

 

* Multiple mannerisms, attitudes and beliefs that are not similar to each other

* unexplainable headaches and other body pains

* distortion or loss of subjective time

* comorbidity (other illnesses as well)

* depersonalization (disassociation from self)

* derealization (separation from what is “real”)

* severe memory loss

* depression

* flashbacks of abuse/trauma (controlled through narcotics)

* unexplainable phobias

* sudden anger without a justified cause

* lack of intimacy and personal connections (sex without love)

* frequent panic/anxiety attacks (Paranoia)

* auditory hallucinations of the personalities inside their mind

 

No responses yet

Leave a Reply