CIA and the Internet

[John Simkin]

An article by Daniel Ellsberg in today's Guardian is well worth reading:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/10/edward-snowden-united-stasi-america

Obviously, the United States is not now a police state. But given the extent of this invasion of people's privacy, we do have the full electronic and legislative infrastructure of such a state. If, for instance, there was now a war that led to a large-scale anti-war movement – like the one we had against the war in Vietnam – or, more likely, if we suffered one more attack on the scale of 9/11, I fear for our democracy. These powers are extremely dangerous.

There are legitimate reasons for secrecy, and specifically for secrecy about communications intelligence. That's why Bradley Mannning and I – both of whom had access to such intelligence with clearances higher than top-secret – chose not to disclose any information with that classification. And it is why Edward Snowden has committed himself to withhold publication of most of what he might have revealed.

But what is not legitimate is to use a secrecy system to hide programs that are blatantly unconstitutional in their breadth and potential abuse. Neither the president nor Congress as a whole may by themselves revoke the fourth amendment – and that's why what Snowden has revealed so far was secret from the American people.

In 1975, Senator Frank Church spoke of the National Security Agency in these terms:

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

The dangerous prospect of which he warned was that America's intelligence gathering capability – which is today beyond any comparison with what existed in his pre-digital era – "at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left."

That has now happened. That is what Snowden has exposed, with official, secret documents. The NSA, FBI and CIA have, with the new digital technology, surveillance powers over our own citizens that the Stasi – the secret police in the former "democratic republic" of East Germany – could scarcely have dreamed of. Snowden reveals that the so-called intelligence community has become the United Stasi of America.

So we have fallen into Senator Church's abyss. The questions now are whether he was right or wrong that there is no return from it, and whether that means that effective democracy will become impossible. A week ago, I would have found it hard to argue with pessimistic answers to those conclusions.

But with Edward Snowden having put his life on the line to get this information out, quite possibly inspiring others with similar knowledge, conscience and patriotism to show comparable civil courage – in the public, in Congress, in the executive branch itself – I see the unexpected possibility of a way up and out of the abyss.

Pressure by an informed public on Congress to form a select committee to investigate the revelations by Snowden and, I hope, others to come might lead us to bring NSA and the rest of the intelligence community under real supervision and restraint and restore the protections of the bill of rights.

Snowden did what he did because he recognised the NSA's surveillance programs for what they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity. This wholesale invasion of Americans' and foreign citizens' privacy does not contribute to our security; it puts in danger the very liberties we're trying to protect.

[Pat Speer]

The story about the NSA that has everyone up in arms is NOT NEW. James Bamford broke this story last year. Much of the story was available before that.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about all this, then, is not what's been going on, but how the media failed to report it, until it reached a tipping point, where it became all they wanted to talk about.

Weird.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

I must admit that this stuff makes my head hurt.

Book review from today's New York Times:

June 10, 2013

Watched by the Web: Surveillance Is Reborn By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

BIG DATA

A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think

By Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier

242 pages. Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/11/books/big-data-by-viktor-mayer-schonberger-and-kenneth-cukier.html?hpw&_r=0

[John Simkin]

When I was in Australia a couple of years ago I was informed by one member of this forum that he had heard from a reliable source that I was a CIA agent who had started this forum so it would be easy for the agency to track the activities of JFK researchers. Of course, I am not, but if I was, I would do something like this.

Do you know the story of Roman Malinovsky? He was a Bolshevik who was recruited by S. P. Beletsky, the director of Okhrana (the Russian Secret Police) in 1911. Beletsky later admitted that: "Malinovsky was given the order to do as much as possible to deepen the split in the Party. I admit that the whole purpose of my direction is summed up in this: to give no possibility of the Party's uniting. I worked on the principle of divide et impera." Beletsky ordered Malinovsky to "attach himself as closely as possible to the Bolshevik leader (Lenin)". Beletsky later testified that, in view of this important mission, he freed his agent at this time "from the further necessity of betraying individuals or meetings (though not from reporting on them), as arrests traceable to Malinovsky might endanger his position for the more highly political task."

Malinovsky met Lenin in 1912. According to Bertram D. Wolfe: "When he met Lenin at the Prague Conference of 1912, he was thirty-four, robust, ruddy complexioned, vigorous, excitable, a heavy drinker, a rude and eloquent orator, a gifted leader of men." Lenin was impressed with Malinovsky and suggested that he should join the Bolshevik Central Committee. Lenin also advocated that Malinovsky should be a Bolshevik candidate for the Duma. Malinovsky became known as an eloquent and forceful orator. Before making his speeches he sent copies to Lenin and S. P. Beletsky.

After being elected in October, 1912, Malinovsky became the leader of the group of six Bolshevik deputies. Lenin argued: "For the first time among ours in the Duma there is an outstanding worker-leader. He will read the Declaration (the political declaration of the Social Democratic fraction on the address of the Prime Minister). This time it's not another Alexinsky. And the results - perhaps not immediately - will be great."

Malinovsky was now in a position to spy on Lenin. This included supplying Okhrana with copies of his letters. In a letter dated 18th December, 1912, S.E. Vissarionov, the Assistant Director of Okhrana, wrote to the Minister of the Interior: "The situation of the Fraction is now such that it may be possible for the six Bolsheviks to be induced to act in such a way as to split the Fraction into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Lenin supports this. See his letter (supplied by Malinovsky)".

Rumours began to circulate that Malinovsky was a spy working for Okhrana. This included an anonymous letter sent to Fedor Dan about Malinovsky's activities. Another Bolshevik leader, Nikolai Bukharin, became convinced that Malinovsky was a spy. David Shub, a member of the Mensheviks, has argued: "There was a wave of arrests among the Bolsheviks in Moscow. Among those rounded up was Nikolai Bukharin... Bukharin, then a member of the Moscow Committee of the Bolshevik Party, had distrusted Malinovsky from the start, despite the latter's assiduous attempts to win his confidence. For Bukharin had noticed several times that when he arranged a secret rendezvous with a party comrade, Okhrana agents would be waiting to pounce on him. In each case Malinovsky had known of the appointments and the men whom Bukharin was to meet had been arrested."

Bukharin wrote to Lenin claiming that when he was hiding in Moscow he was arrested by the police just after a meeting with Malinovsky. He was convinced that Malinovsky was a spy. Lenin wrote back that if Bukharin joined in the campaign of slander against Malinovsky he would brand him publicly as a traitor. Understandably, Bukharin dropped the matter. Nadezhda Krupskaya later explained: "Vladimir Ilyich thought it utterly impossible for Malinovsky to have been an agent provocateur. These rumors came from Menshevik circles... The commission investigated all the rumors but could not obtain any definite proof of the charge." Instead of carrying out an investigation into Malinovsky, Lenin made him his deputy inside Russia.

In 1912, the wife of Alexander Troyanovsky, was arrested. As David Shub, the author of Lenin (1948) has pointed out: "In February 1913 Troyanovsky's wife, who had just returned from Austria with instructions from Lenin, was arrested in Kiev. She had been asked to become secretary to the Bolshevik group in the Duma. Important secret documents were found in her possession. Very few people had known of her arrival. Both Bukharin and Troyanovsky suspected Malinovsky's hand in her arrest. To confirm their suspicions, Troyanovsky sent a registered letter to his wife's father, telling him he knew who had betrayed his wife to the police and that he was determined to square accounts with the informer. The letter brought the results Troyanovsky expected. His wife was immediately released." S. P. Beletsky later testified that when he showed this letter to Malinovsky he "became hysterical" and demanded that she was released. In order that he remained as a spy Beletsky agreed to do this.

Shub argues: "Convinced now that his wife's arrest was the work of an agent provocateur, Troyanovsky investigated the details of her trip to Russia, whom she met there - as well as the circumstances of her arrest and release. All the evidence pointed strongly to Malinovsky." After discussing the matter with Nikolai Bukharin, both men wrote to the Central Committee demanding that Malinovsky appear before a Party court. Lenin, speaking for the Central Committee, forbade them to spread these rumours about Malinovsky. Lenin called their action worse than treason, and threatened to have them expelled from the Bolsheviks if they persisted. Bukharin obeyed, but Troyanovsky decided to resign from the party.

In June 1914 Lenin published an article in Prosveshchenie, where he continued to attack people like Jules Martov and Fedor Dan who continued to denounce Malinovsky as a spy: "We do not believe one single word of Dan and Martov.... We don't trust Martov and Dan. We do not regard them as honest citizens. We will deal with them only as common criminals - only so, and not otherwise... If a man says, make political concessions to me, recognize me as an equal comrade of the Marxist community or I will set up a howl about rumors of the provocateur activity of Malinovsky, that is political blackmail. Against blackmail we are always and unconditionally for the bourgeois legality of the bourgeois court... Either you make a public accusation signed with your signature so that the bourgeois court can expose and punish you (there are no other means of fighting blackmail), or you remain as people branded... as slanderers by the workers."

After the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks got hold of the Okhrana files and discovered that Malinovsky was indeed a spy. He was arrested and at his trial he made a full confession. He was executed a few hours after the trial ended.

Si Liberman has argued: "Malinovsky's life was a series of crimes, his talents, his mind, and his will being used for one purpose: to sell himself at the highest possible price where he could do the most possible harm to the liberation of the working class. He will go down in history as one of its greatest traitors."

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSmalinovsky.htm

[Robert Charles-Dunne]

When I was in Australia a couple of years ago I was informed by one member of this forum that he had heard from a reliable source that I was a CIA agent who had started this forum so it would be easy for the agency to track the activities of JFK researchers. Of course, I am not, but if I was, I would do something similar.

No need, John. It's already been done, several times. One of the JFK sewing circles even published an online directory in which members self-identified their areas of interest, so that the most problematic ones could be surveilled, to determine the extent of their progress.

Purging members of the EF who advocate CIA involvement in the assassination won't do much to dispel such notions of your Agency sponsorship, however. You and I know they're not connected, but it helps keep such canards vibrantly alive in fevered imaginations.

[John Dolva]

When I was in Australia a couple of years ago I was informed by one member of this forum that he had heard from a reliable source that I was a CIA agent who had started this forum so it would be easy for the agency to track the activities of JFK researchers. Of course, I am not, but if I was, I would do something similar.

I assume it's a current member.

As far as I know there are not many.

some initial thoughts on this:

If one is a CIA agent then revealing the name of a CIA agent to someone who is not supposed to know then that is a serious thing. If one is not a CIA agent and reveals the name of a CIA agent then that is a serious thing. If one tells a person that it is known that that person is a CIA agent then then that is a serious thing particularly if that person is a CIA agent. If one knows of a rumour that someone who is not a CIA agent is rumoured to be so by a reliable source and tells that person then it is serious, tho in this instance the originator of the rumour is important. it is either reprehensible behaviour of a naiive kind or deliberately malicious or idle chatter. Whatever it is it is, imo, important. I revisit this post because I'm an australian member and I don't think there are many australian members on this forum so I do have a personal interest in this.

No need, John. It's already been done, several times. One of the JFK sewing circles even published an online directory in which members self-identified their areas of interest, so that the most problematic ones could be surveilled, to determine the extent of their progress.

Purging members of the EF who advocate CIA involvement in the assassination won't do much to dispel such notions of your Agency sponsorship, however. You and I know they're not connected, but it helps keep such canards vibrantly alive in fevered imaginations.

[Paul Rigby]

The story about the NSA that has everyone up in arms is NOT NEW. James Bamford broke this story last year. Much of the story was available before that.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about all this, then, is not what's been going on, but how the media failed to report it, until it reached a tipping point, where it became all they wanted to talk about.

Weird.

The question of timing is an interesting one. The only sustained attempt I've found so far to make sense of it is the following. I can't say I'm in agreement with all of it, but it does offer food for thought, not least in its characterisation of Petraeus, and the enduring appeal of the man to a significant section of the US elite.

Britain, France prodding Obama into attacking Syria

Webster G. Tarpley, Ph.D.

PressTV, June 8, 2013

http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/06/08/307786/uk-france-goading-us-into-striking-syria/

On the eve of this year’s Bilderberg meeting, the Anglo-French intelligence bosses have clearly shown their hand with two high-profile attacks on Obama. Wednesday, June 5 marked the liberation of Qusayr, the great Stalingrad of the Syrian terrorist death squads deployed by NATO against Assad. With the rout of these terrorists, the main units of the self-styled Free Syrian Army, along with the Nusra branch of al Qaeda, are likely to face annihilation in the short to medium term.

On the same day that Qusayr fell, the British and French governments hysterically demanded that Obama undertake a total bombing campaign against Syria, whatever the consequences in regard to Russia and other powers. To his credit, Obama is continuing to say no to this lunatic Anglo-French neocolonial adventure. On that same June 5, the London-based daily The Guardian, in an article by the expatriate American Glenn Greenwald, hyped a court order from the secret FISA panel of federal judges showing that the US National Security Agency was routinely monitoring the telephone records (including time, locations, call duration, and unique identifiers, but not the contents of the conversations) of possibly unlimited millions of Verizon phone subscribers. Back in the US, reactionary talk show hosts began screaming “Obama taps your phones!”

On June 6, again in advance of every other newspaper in the world, The Guardian published another article by Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill revealing that the National Security Agency, under a program called Prism, had obtained direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Youtube, Skype, AOL, and Microsoft, and was busily monitoring the content of e-mails, file transfers, and live conversations. Back in the US, reactionary talk show hosts began screaming, “Obama reads your e-mail!”

Under George Bush, warrantless wiretaps and similar illegal programs were revealed by various media organs. These revelations had minimal impact on Bush, whose base was indifferent to civil liberties. Obama’s base, by contrast, cares very much, and has been visibly upset by these new reports. While strongly condemning these totalitarian programs, we must also not lose sight of who is putting these reports into circulation, and why. Phone taps are bad, but a general war in the Middle East leading to a possible Third World War is far worse.

The British and French defense and intelligence establishment (they have virtually merged) want Obama and the American people to take the lead and shoulder the risk in a perilous attack on Syria, in time to preserve the death squads so they can fight another day in another country. London and Paris, of course, see themselves as the principal beneficiaries of the breakup of Syria. Since Obama is currently blocking their plans, they are bringing up their big guns of scandal, with the center-left Guardian evidently chosen to take the point, doubtless to obtain more attention among Obama’s leftist supporters. (During the initial Clinton scandals of Whitewatergate and Troopergate, the flagship of scandal was the reactionary London-based Daily Telegraph, especially through its columnists Peregrine Worthshorne and Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.)

Coming as they do on the eve of the yearly Bilderberg conference, these scandals stamped Made in England suggest that the majority of this elitist cabal have maintained their anti-Obama line already evident in last year’s meeting, and are using the current gathering to further their plans.

From Lady Astor’s Cliveden Set to the Bilderbergs

This year’s Bilderberg conference is beginning today at the Grove Hotel in the town of Watford, England, not far from Heathrow Airport. Up to 150 announced and unannounced members of the transatlantic financier oligarchy and their retainers are expected to attend. Watford is only 15 miles away from Cliveden, infamous as the country home of Lady Nancy Astor, where some 75 years ago a clique of fascist “cagoulords” including Lord Waldorf Astor, Lord Vincent Astor, Lord Brand, Lord Lothian, Lord Halifax, Geoffrey Dawson of the London Times, and Sir Neville Chamberlain schemed with the likes of Joachim von Ribbentrop to build up Hitler and then play him against Stalin in an apocalyptic world war that somehow went awry. Today’s financier elite is ideologically very much the descendent of that “Cliveden Set” which often dictated policy to the British Foreign Office. Will any of today’s Bilderbergers make the 20-minute drive to Cliveden?

The big news at this year’s Bilderberg meeting is the arrival of General David Petraeus, who was forced out last November as head of the US Central Intelligence Agency under circumstances which strongly suggested that he had taken part in a Seven Days in May scenario, joining with a shadowy cabal of generals, admirals, politicians, pollsters and defense contractors to oust Obama from the White House regardless of the actual vote count last November, and to install a permanent dictatorship of war and austerity under the figurehead of the Wall Street financier Willard Mitt Romney. The best-known public manifestation of that effort has so far been the Benghazi incident of September 11, 2012, an orchestrated pre-election provocation (or “October surprise”) intended to put the Obama campaign on the defensive. The Benghazi incident occurred in the area of command responsibility of General Petraeus as CIA Director, and of General Carter Ham, head of the US Africa Command. Both of these officers, along with Afghanistan commander General Allen, NATO commander Admiral Stavridis, and a dozen or more others of flag rank were ousted for various official reasons in a post election purge. But there is good reason to conclude that the United States had narrowly escaped what might be called a veiled military coup d’état.

Last year’s Bilderberg meeting in Chantilly, Virginia was clearly dominated by anti-Obama and pro-Romney forces. At that time, it was revealed by Charlie Skelton ofGuardian - one of the very few serious and reliable Bilderberg observers -- that Romney had made an unannounced visit to the Bilderberg confab. Obama, on the other hand, had not attended, although both he and Hillary Clinton had reportedly been on hand in 2008. The Bilderbergers had also provided valuable assistance to the Romney campaign. One leading example, which I discuss in detail in my book Just Too Weird: Bishop Romney and the Mormon Takeover of America - Polygamy, Theocracy, and Subversion is the activities of the PayPal and Facebook financier Peter Thiel, who contributed a reported $3.9 million to a super pack active on behalf of presidential candidate Ron Paul, who assisted Romney by draining votes away from serious candidates challenging Romney from his right, such as Senator Rick Santorum. Without a well-funded Ron Paul, the Ohio and Michigan primaries might have gone to Santorum, quite possibly giving him the Republican nomination. Ron Paul, representing the racist Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, was seeking to obtain the vice presidential nomination for Senator Rand Paul, his son. As it turned out, Romney did not need Paul’s convention votes, and turned elsewhere for his running mate.

At that time, it was widely recognized in Washington that Bilderberg was backing Romney. For example, an article in the superficial gossip blog Wonkette by Kirsten Boyd Johnson dated June 6, 2012 was headlined: “Did Bilderberg Monsters Just Crown Mitt Romney Your Next Leader?” We can therefore assume that be 2012 Bilderberg meeting also involved planning for the provocations and media strategies that would attempt to catapult Romney into the White House by fair means or foul.

In the event, the sneering plutocrat Romney turned out to be so inept and odious as a candidate that not even the massive resources of the Bilderberg network sufficed to make him president. This outcome teaches an important lesson: however preponderant their power, the Bilderberg elite does not possess magical powers to shape world events. If they want to take the presidency while preserving the formalities of an election, then they too must mobilize their forces for the long slog, and in this the Obama forces proved more adroit. But, by the same token, the Bilderbergers have not given up on their project of a permanent austerity and aggression dictatorship for the United States. Quite the contrary.

Petraeus and the problem of Bonapartist dictatorship

For years, General David Petraeus has been the principal focus of Bonapartist and authoritarian tendencies in US politics. We can think of him as a kind of American equivalent of France’s Marshall Philippe Pétain, especially as the latter emerges from the groundbreaking historical studies of historian Annie LaCroix-Riz. After World War I, Pétain - a defeatist and pessimist who had never really won a battle, and who collapsed psychologically during the final German assault of 1918 - became the convergence of French fascist forces associated with the secret networks known as the Cagoule and the Synarchie. General Petraeus, for his part, has long been the darling of the neocon faction, which wanted him to run for president in 2012. Petraeus has attended the Bilderberg meeting several times before, and has long been a member of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. Petraeus has signaled that the disagreement with Obama’s policy of ending the Iraq war, and now of winding down Afghanistan. We can assume that Petraeus shares the violent contempt for Obama which was imprudently expressed by his close associate, General Stanley McChrystal, who got fired when his comments were revealed by a journalist.

It may be argued that Petraeus has never really won a campaign. One could just as easily argue that the US military has not won against an opponent capable of serious warfare since General Douglas MacArthur’s masterful Inchon landing of September 1950. Although Petraeus has bitter enemies, he is widely regarded as the leading general of the current age. His return to Bilderberg this year shows that last year’s Paula Broadwell adultery scandal has not removed him from contention. Pétain, after all, was also famous for his dalliances.

Petraeus’ patron, Henry R. Kravis of KKR

General Petraeus does not arrive in Watford alone. He comes as the central figure of his own delegation. He is accompanied by his current patron, the Wall Street financier Henry Kravis of Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts. Kravis, with a personal fortune in excess of $4 billion, gives Petraeus a fantastically wealthy sponsor for his future activities. Kravis has just appointed Petraeus to head the KKR Global Institute, a new think tank supposedly devoted to studying problems of environment, economics, society, and governance.

In reality, the KKR Global Institute looks very much like the kind of private intelligence operation which would be needed to launch a rather unorthodox quest for the White House. One of Petraeus’ associates in his new job will be Ken Mehlman, a veteran political hack who once headed the Republican National Committee. Mehlman would not be much use for forecasting global trends, but would be tremendously valuable for someone attempting to assemble a political faction centered on Republican and reactionary circles. A certain Henry McVey of KKR will also be involved.

The Kravis family has something of a history of promoting presidential contenders. As I show in the chapter entitled “The Permian Basin Gang” of my 1992 George Bush: the Unauthorized Biography, the founder of the Kravis family fortune was Oklahoma oilman Ray Kravis, who became a close friend of GOP Senator Prescott Bush of the Wall Street firm Brown Brothers Harriman, for many decades the most politically connected private bank. When Prescott Bush wanted to send the young George H. W. Bush to learn the oil business, he asked Ray Kravis to give his son a job. Henry Kravis later served as a top financial angel for Bush 41. During those years, Henry Kravis wrote the largest single check in world history to complete his leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco.

Also part of Petraeus retinue is Henry’s third wife Marie Josée Kravis, the dominant figure of the reactionary/neocon Hudson Institute. With this, the Petraeus regroupment acquires the services of a significant think tank to generate policy positions, personnel and staffing choices, and the like. Also part of the Petraeus party is Michael Gfoeller, who has ties to former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, and served for over a quarter century in the State Department. Gfoeller has been associated with Petraeus in the past, and is currently a political consultant with the lobbying division of Exxon Mobil.

The Bilderbergers supported Obama in 2008 because they wanted to use him as a tool to get the Anglo-American banking system safely through the world derivatives panic with US Treasury and US Federal Reserve bailouts, and a minimum of additional regulation. This was the function which Obama fulfilled. But now, the Bilderbergers are dissatisfied with Obama, and wish to reward him for his services by dumping him as soon as possible, as we saw in 2012.

On the one hand, the Bilderberg group remains deeply dissatisfied with what they regard as the slow and inadequate pace of primitive accumulation and austerity measures under the Obama regime. Obama promises the gradual demolition of Social Security and Medicare, but not fast enough to satisfy these austerity ghouls. Romney would have attempted a much more ambitious program of entitlement destruction, union busting, service cuts, and related measures.

Qusayr, the Stalingrad of the terrorist death squads

Another principle of Bilderberg complaint against Obama has emerged with greater urgency during the last several days. The civil war in Syria systematically fomented by NATO intelligence with the help of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and the other reactionary Persian Gulf monarchies has now reached a decisive turning point with the fall of the rebel stronghold of Qusayr on June 5. Tens of thousands of terrorists organized into anti-Assad death squads over several years with the help of the CIA and the State Department now face short-term defeat, rout, encirclement, and annihilation. In the meantime, the British and especially the French government are busy manufacturing dubious stories about the alleged use of poison gas by the Syrian government against the Anglo-French terrorist clients. This operation reeks of the worst neocolonialism: it is the Paris-London entente cordiale of 1904, the Sykes-Picot powers, and the infamous duo of Suez 1956, who are demanding the re-imposition of colonial rule in the Levant. Ironically, current Russian opposition and US skepticism in regard to this project are also a distant echo of that same Suez crisis.

The British, the French, the Israelis, and the neocons are doing everything possible to pressure Obama into attacking Syria and Hezbollah now, a move which would commit him to an attack on Iran a little later. Obama is guilty of numerous crimes and atrocities, including drone strikes, assassinations, cyber warfare, economic sanctions, the bombing of Libya, and many more, but the simple fact is that the Syrian crisis has gone on for more than two years and Obama is still refusing to launch the massive US bombing campaign demanded by the British Colonel Blimps and the French Vichy nostalgics. No one can tell how long Obama’s resolve will last, but this is the reality we have observed so far. Even Obama’s appointments of the warmongers and meddlers Susan Rice and Samantha Power to important regime posts can be variously interpreted. According to one view, these two charming ladies are being set up as prominent and visible targets for the raving attacks of the Congressional tea party fanatics, meaning that Obama personally will be spared a significant part of the flak. Whether Obama will ever follow their urgings towards aggression has yet to be seen. He turned down a demand from Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey and Petraeus to arm the Syrian death squads in the fall of 2012, and Rice and Power are both far weaker than that combination.

Assuming that Obama continues to resist an attack on Syria, and continues to move towards austerity at the current pace, the moment may soon come when the Bilderbergers will want to get him out of the White House. Last year, that operation could have been accomplished under the cover of an election, which is always the preferred way. This year, Obama’s ouster would have to involve impeachment and removal from office on the Watergate model. There is no doubt that House Tea Party fanatics would be happy to impeach Obama at any time. They have pushed aside all other public business to focus on their lunatic account of the Benghazi events, their grotesque interpretation of the Internal Revenue Service affair, and their endless tub-thumping about regime snooping on the Associated Press, Fox reporter James Rosen, etc.

At the present time, the impeachment of Obama might prove to be an exercise in futility, since his support in the Senate remains intact. But that can change. The chances of removing Obama have just improved today with the appointment of a new Republican Senator by New Jersey Governor Christie to replace the recently deceased Senator Lautenberg of that state until October.

Ray McGovern: Obama fears assassination by the CIA

And then, 50 years after the Kennedy assassination, there are more energetic methods, as Obama personally seems to realize. One source shedding light on this matter is ex-CIA officer Ray McGovern, the former intelligence briefer of President George H. W. Bush, and now a peace activist. On a recent Pacifica radio broadcast, McGovern has reported this interesting account of remarks made by Obama after hours with supporters:

“He’s afraid of what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And I know from a good friend who was there when it happened, that at a small dinner with progressive supporters - after these progressive supporters were banging on Obama before the election, Why don’t you do the things we thought you stood for? Obama turned sharply and said, ‘Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?’ That’s a quote, and that’s a very revealing quote. McGovern spoke on WBAI's show Law and Disorder this morning He was talking about his recent article calling Obama ‘a wuss’ and speculated that Obama had also placed John Brennan as head of the CIA out of fear that the CIA might turn on him, as it had on John Kennedy. I’m pretty convinced that the president of the United States is afraid of the CIA.” (Philip Weiss, “Obama told friends he reneged on progressive promises out of fear of assassination - former CIA analyst,” Mondoweiss, June 3, 2013)

The notion that Obama’s life is in danger has been methodically cultivated by his devoted supporters from the start of his presidential campaign in 2007. Ray McGovern, however, cannot be counted as one of those acolytes, and would be more likely to lambaste Obama than to make excuses for him. This account therefore acquires a certain authority.

From his own point of view, Obama has had a rough time lately. It has long been known that his greatest psychological satisfaction comes through the adulation he receives when making public speeches. When he delivered his speech on national security at the National Defense University, he was subjected to prolonged heckling by the veteran provocateur, Medea Benjamin of Code Pink. This heckling went on for a long time. Ms. Benjamin is very suspect, because she demanded that Obama stop old drone attacks and close Guant?namo, but said nothing at all about the far greater danger of a short-term attack on Syria, a country she has vilified in the recent past. And now, in an act of complete lese majesté, the hitherto untouchable First Lady Michelle Obama has been accosted at a private fundraiser by a lesbian activist demanding that Obama sign an executive order providing benefits for same-sex couples. Are these coincidences, or part of a psychological warfare pattern designed to remind Obama that he can be reached at any time?

Hollywood accredits the meme of storming the White House

There is also another dimension. Serious students of the events of September 11, 2001 are aware of the process by which the memes or elements of that tragic day were carefully introduced, accredited, and developed in the public mind, especially through a series of Hollywood movies. An example is the final scene of the movie The Fight Club, which shows the collapse of a number of skyscrapers in a manner eerily prophetic of the fate of the New York Twin Towers. Hollywood is, after all, not far away from Santa Monica, the home of that leading scenario factory known as the Rand Corporation.

Precisely in this field we have this sudden emergence of a new genre of a Hollywood blockbuster - the movie extravaganza devoted to an armed assault on the White House. The first of these arrived in March of this year under the title of Olympus Has Fallen, directed by Antoine Fuqua and starring Gerard Butler, Ashley Judd, and Morgan Freeman. Here a large force of North Korean rogue terrorists strafe and storm the White House and take the president prisoner in the situation room, demanding that the US get out of Korea. The tone is paranoid/serious, with no element of satire or irony. The accent is on a certain kind of naturalism, including by having the real-life MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell report the events in a newscast. Many images portray the blowing up of the entire West Wing of the premises.

Due in theaters in late June is a second movie with virtually the identical theme, this time called White House Down, from Sony Pictures and Columbia. The director is the German Roland Emmerich, known for Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Patriot. The stars are Channing Tatum and Jamie Foxx. This time, the White House is attacked by a domestic paramilitary group led by Emil Stenz, according to the script by James Vanderbilt of the well-known oligarchical clan. The attackers also blow up the dome of the US Capitol as a diversion. So far as is known, Obama has not commented on either of these two motion pictures.

The Kokesh march on Washington: Rifle-toting reactionaries

Are there correlated developments in the real world? There certainly are: over a period of several weeks, the disgruntled Iraq war veteran Adam Kokesh was recently calling for a July 4 anti-Obama march of 10,000 black-clad white reactionaries to violate federal and District of Columbia law by crossing the Potomac from Virginia into the District and thence around the National Mall, passing by most of the executive departments, the Congress, and the White House - all the while armed with loaded rifles. Until about a year ago, Kokesh was a leading supporter of the Republican austerity fanatic and antigovernment demagogue Ron Paul, but he then broke with Paul and set out on his own course of provocation and adventurism. In the unlikely event that Kokesh’s march had succeeded, he would have had the equivalent of one rifle division in position to intimidate the Congress and the White House in turn - a clear step towards anarchy. After being arrested at a pro-marijuana rally in Philadelphia and spending a few days in jail, Kokesh has changed his strategy, and is now calling for marches on July 4 in the 50 state capitals to demand immediate secession and breakup of the federal union. Loaded rifles would still be de rigeur. The question of secessionism was answered with thundering finality in the American Civil War of a century and a half ago, an episode which caused this nation more than 700,000 dead. Since the Confederate surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, anyone attempting to be open this question must be regarded as a dangerous madman. For our purposes here, it is enough to recall that the Kokesh march is too close for comfort to the two scenario films we have just discussed.

Such then is the immediate background for the Bilderberg 2013 deliberations this weekend. It remains to say a word about the abysmal quality of most Bilderberg analysis.

Last year at Chantilly, they obtained an incongruous situation in which the majority of the protesters assembled outside of the hotel gate were supporters of the Ron Paul presidential campaign. Whether they know it or not, these poor dupes were thus also supporting Mitt Romney, for whom Paul was serving as the right wingman. There was a direct convergence between Paul backer Peter Thiel inside the meeting, and the Paul backers outside. This amounts to a classic control the opposition. Things like this have been happening since ancient Greece, when it was the general rule that the cult of Apollo at Delphi controlled the various cults of Dionysios which appeared to naïve observers as the opposition.

Cutting through disinformation and controlled opposition

Any group as sophisticated as Bilderberg knows that its arrogant and oligarchical machinations will inevitably call forth a resistance. One way to control such a resistance is by providing them with a steady flow of disinformation, disguised as leaks from the inside. A conduit for such leaks was precisely the late Jim Tucker, who wrote for the American Free Press, the descendent of the house organ of the Roosevelt-hating and fascist-loving American Liberty League of the 1930s. Tucker was an unreconstructed Confederate racist. At his last Bilderberger meeting, Tucker told a group of journalists that he regarded the American Civil War as the “War of Northern Aggression.” He added that he wanted reparations, not for those who had been enslaved, but rather for the slave owners, whom he said had been illegally deprived of their property by the evil President Lincoln. Tucker claimed that the Bilderberg group was in favor of socialism, and ferociously opposed to free market laissez-faire capitalism. In reality, David Rockefeller, one of those who paid for Bilderberg activities over several decades, had hired the Austrian school libertarian economist Friedrich von Hayek as his personal tutor at the London School of Economics in the 1930s, and had later financed an American professorship for Ludwig von Mises, another Austro-libertarian luminary. This means that David Rockefeller must be regarded as a founder of both the Bilderberg group and the Austrian school of economics. But it did no good to call these plain facts to Tucker’s attention: he kept repeating that the Bilderberg group supported Obama for reelection.

Whether Tucker was fed these stories by a functionary from within Bilderberg, or whether he simply invented them out of whole cloth on his own, is a matter for further inquiry. To the extent that Tucker was seen as the public face of the opposition to Bilderberg, the elitists had nothing to worry about.

Similarly, at last year’s Bilderberg event it was breathlessly reported that the name of Ron Paul was being cursed inside the meeting. Since the Bilderberg faction around Thiel was contributing large sums to help Ron Paul’s campaign efforts, and since the overwhelming consensus of Bilderberg as a whole was pro-Romney, we might be driven to the conclusion that this report was just a face-saving trick by the Paulbearers to conceal the embarrassing elitist support for their man. But it is also possible that the name of Ron Paul was being cursed by the waiters, busboys, and cleaning ladies when they found out that Paul wanted to take away their union, their minimum wage, their food stamps, their unemployment benefits, their hope for Social Security and Medicare in their old age, the Head Start program and Pell Grants for their kids, and the WIC high-protein meals for their pregnant wives and babies.

The Paul supporters feel an enduring gratitude towards Thiel. This week, we read in an article by Paul Joseph Watson appearing on Infowars of June 3, 2013: “Another notable attendee is Peter Thiel, the man who provided the financial muscle for online ventures like Facebook and Paypal, as well as LinkedIn and Friendster.” More to the point is the fact that Thiel also “provided the financial muscle” for Ron Paul’s super pack to the tune of $3.9 million. The fear is evidently that this inconvenient fact might cause some pesky cognitive dissonance among Watson’s readers, many of whom were and are devoted supporters of the Paul dynasty’s inhuman super-austerity policies.

This line of argument currently also attempts to portray the anarcho-capitalist Thiel as a benign force for openness and transparency within the sinister Bilderberg context. This is so absurd that no comment is necessary. It will be wise to remain skeptical in regard to such accounts.

The inability of libertarians to discover and report the truth about Bilderberg comes down to this. Bilderberg is a creature of the Rockefellers, and so is the Austrian school to which the libertarians subscribe. They are thus pre-programmed, as if with an inner gyroscope, to converge on the policy goals of the financier elite. The Bilderberg group demands genocidal austerity across the board. The libertarians, calling this the fight against big government (even though the sacrifices are borne by innocent individuals), heartily agree. The Bilderberg group ardently desires to oust Obama from the White House. The libertarians, blinded by their fanatical hatred of Obama, and long since aligned with the far right demagogic line emanating from such scurrilous websites as Drudge and Breitbart, are totally on board.

Only when it comes to the attack on Syria, Hezbollah, and Iran, about which Obama is dragging his feet, might the libertarians have some objections. But by that point, they themselves, through their very own efforts, would have largely destroyed the institutional basis for resistance to a future and wider war - such as through trade unions, which the Pauls wish to destroy. The irony of the libertarians is that they always claim technically not to be fascists in the full 1930s central European sense of the term- but, as the example of German Chancellor Brüning shows, libertarian economic and social policies can be counted on to degrade social and economic conditions to the point where fascist rule becomes virtually inevitable, as seen in 1932-1933.

And remember: Bilderberg is of Dutch origin, and so is Petraeus.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

WASHINGTON — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration over its “dragnet” collection of logs of domestic phone calls, contending that the once-secret program — whose existence was exposed by a former National Security Agency contractor last week — is illegal and asking a judge to both stop it and order the records purged.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/12/us/aclu-files-suit-over-phone-surveillance-program.html?hp

[Paul Rigby]

NSA Deception Operation? Questions Surround Leaked PRISM Document’s Authenticity

Was Edward Snowden spotted before he decided to leak documents, and set up by the NSA?

By Steve Kinney

Global Research, June 12, 2013

http://www.globalresearch.ca/nsa-deception-operation-questions-surround-leaked-prism-documents-authenticity/5338673

“I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, Internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.” - Edward Snowden

Intelligence services have been feeding false information to known enemy informants in their own ranks for a long time, and they are very good at it.

Today, the potential whistleblower is one of the most dangerous informants an intelligence service can confront.

Was Edward Snowden spotted before he decided to leak documents, and set up by the NSA?

Substantial evidence supports the possibility that he was. Numerous questions cast doubt on the authenticity of the Power Point slide show describing PRISM, but the UK Guardian has not seen fit to release it to the public. Perhaps Glenn Greenwald should anonymously leak this file: In the words of Snowden himself, “The public needs to decide.”

Was Edward Snowden under surveillance at intelligence contractor Booz Allen in advance of releasing the PRISM document?

In the wake of the Wikileaks scandals, the U.S. intelligence community has answered “Who shall watch the watchmen?” by introducing active surveillance and detailed profiling of their own analysts and contractors, looking for potential whistleblowers.[1] By his own account, Snowden often discussed perceived Agency wrongdoing with his co-workers, which suggests that he should have been profiled and flagged as a potential leaker by the NSA’s internal surveillance process.

Interviewed by Glenn Greenwald, Snowden described his workplace behavior in the time leading up to his decision to leak documents:

“When you see everything, you see them on a more frequent basis and you recognize that some of these things are actually abuses, and when you talk about them in a place like this, were this is the normal state of business, people tend not to take them very seriously and move on from them. But over time that awareness of wrongdoing sort of builds up and you feel compelled to talk about it, and the more you talk about it, the more you’re ignored, the more you’re told it’s not a problem, until eventually you realize that these things need to be determined by the public, not by somebody who is simply hired by the government.”[2]

Questioning The Document

Classified DoD briefing files are created to meet formal style specifications and are subject to stringent internal reviews. After the publication of pages from the PRISM presentation, independent analysts were quick to notice and report substantial deficiencies in the document.[3] Others have expressed serious doubts about the PRISM slide show’s pedigree, including the NSA’s former top attorney:

“Stewart Baker, the NSA’s general counsel in the 1990s and now an attorney at Steptoe and Johnson, said he was not familiar with PRISM or similar government activity, but the leaked Powerpoint presentation sounds “flaky,” as do the initial reports.

“The Powerpoint is suffused with a kind of hype that makes it sound more like a marketing pitch than a briefing — we don’t know what its provenance is and we don’t know the full context,” Baker said. He added, referring to the Post’s coverage: “It looks rushed and it looks wrong.” – Declan McCullagh, Wired, June 7, 2013[4]

The logos of major U.S. IT and communication service providers are splashed across the top of PRISM power point slides like sponsor patches on a NASCAR driver’s jacket. Vendor logos often do appear next to product illustrations in DoD briefing documents, and are sometimes used to indicate a vendor’s position in process or procurement flow charts. But the “ad banner” format present in the leaked PRISM slides is very unusual and apparently unique to the PRISM document. All of the vendors named have vehemently denied knowledge of the PRISM program described in the slides.[5] Some of these denials, such as those by Twitter and Google, are from companies which have previously fought court battles against arbitrary disclosure of their users’ data to Federal agencies.[6]

A second PRISM?

Unclassified documents available on the Internet identify a completely different PRISM program, a powerful integrated network communications tool for Department of Homeland Security counter-terrorism crisis management. This PRISM integrates incident reporting, GPS tracking of emergency service and law enforcement vehicles, “outbound 911″ public alert networks, CBN and other technical sensor data, etc. A detailed, unclassified 2004 description of the “DHS PRISM” is available at Cryptome.[7] A 2007 report from the RAND Corporation defines PRISM as a “Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management”[8]. It seems unlikely that two network-centric programs as large and different as the DHS and NSA PRISMs, both operating inside the United States, would bear the same name. Only Monty Python calls everyone Bruce “to avoid confusion.”

Would the NSA lie to us?

The National Security Administration is one of the country’s most officially secretive agencies. In the Washington press corps, its popular nicknames have included “No Such Agency” and the “Never Say Anything” agency.

It is against long standing Agency policy to comment directly on any classified matter, and its Directors have consistently refused to confirm or deny any Agency activity when questioned by the press. But when the UK Guardian broke the story of the PRISM leak, the Director of National Intelligence promptly confirmed the document as authentic, calling the leak “reprehensible”:

“The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.” – James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence[9]

This very unusual confirmation raises more questions about the PRISM document than it answers.

Is it possible that the PRISM leak was set up by the NSA as a deception operation in support of the Obama Administration’s ongoing wars against whistleblowers and the 4th Amendment? Documents from Federal intelligence contractor HBGary, published in 2011 by anonymous hackers, include a Power Point presentation proposing methods for attacking Wikileaks, and this document names Glenn Greenwald, who broke the PRISM story, as a specific target:

“The presentation, which has been seen by The Independent, recommends a multi-pronged assault on WikiLeaks including deliberately submitting false documents to the website to undermine its credibility, pioneering cyber attacks to expose who the leakers to WikiLeaks are and going after sympathetic journalists.

“One of those mentioned is Glenn Greenwald, a pro-WikiLeaks reporter in the US. Writing on Salon.com. Greenwald stated that his initial reaction was “to scoff at its absurdity.” – Jerome Taylor, The Independent[10]

The UK Guardian released the PRISM story on the opening day of PFC Bradley Manning’s court martial. The leaked PRISM document will certainly influence public debate on both whistleblower protections and State surveillance – and influence is one of our intelligence community’s regular daily chores. Some commentators have been very quick to present forceful talking points in favor of free and unrestrained State surveillance[11], and there is growing consensus that reports depicting PRISM as a mass domestic surveillance dragnet were a false alarm. The Washington Post, which broke the story at the same time as the UK Guardian, has walked back its position on the civil rights implications of the PRISM materials.[12] Meanwhile, it seems that everyone has forgotten about Romas/COIN.

Universal Surveillance: Romas/COIN, Odyssey and beyond

The same security breach at HBGary that revealed formal proposals to plant false leaks and target reporter Glenn Greenwald personally, also disclosed the existence of a real surveillance program with dramatically more dangerous civil liberty implications than PRISM: Romas/COIN, and its planned successor, Odyssey. Barrett Brown summarizes what is known about this program in an article on the Project PM website:

“A successful bid for the relevant contract was seen to require the combined capabilities of perhaps a dozen firms – capabilities whereby millions of conversations can be monitored and automatically analyzed, whereby a wide range of personal data can be obtained and stored in secret, and whereby some unknown degree of information can be released to a given population through a variety of means and without any hint that the actual source is U.S. military intelligence. All this is merely in addition to whichever additional capabilities are not evident from the limited description available, with the program as a whole presumably being operated in conjunction with other surveillance and propaganda assets controlled by the U.S. and its partners.”[13]

According to its internal e-mail from 2010 and 2011, HBGary was a prime contractor coordinating bids from Google, Apple, AT&T and others to build an expanded, upgraded version of the Romas/COIN information warfare system. Minor publicity attending the naming of these high profile vendors in the HBGary documents may have inspired the NASCAR-style sponsor logos decorating the dubious PRISM slides.

When HBGary’s e-mails were disclosed, the Odyssey bid was on hold with HBGary and its partners waiting for a revision in program requirements from the DoD. Two years have passed since HBGary was preparing to bid against Northrop Grumman for the prime contractor position on the Odyssey program. Odyssey should now be completed or nearing completion.

Is it possible that the PRISM leak was intended to mislead the American people into dramatically under-estimating the real domestic surveillance capabilities of our National Security Agency? You might well think so, but this reporter could not possibly comment.

Notes

1) Eric Schmitt, White House Orders New Computer Security Rules, New York Times, October 6, 2011
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/07/us/politics/white-house-orders-new-computer-security-rules.html

2) Glenn Greenwald interviews Edward Snowden, Guardian US, Sunday 9 June 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video

3) Are the NSA’s PRISM slides photoshopped?, Top Level Telecommunications, June 7, 2013
http://electrospaces.blogspot.nl/2013/06/are-nsas-prism-slides-photoshopped.html

4) Declan McCullagh, “No evidence of NSA’s ‘direct access’ to tech companies”, Wired, June 7, 2013 at
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57588337-38/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-to-tech-companies/

5) Joanna Stern, NSA PRISM: Dissecting the Tech Companies’ Adamant Denials of Involvement in Government Spying Program, ABC News, June 7, 2013
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/nsa-prism-dissecting-technology-companies-adamant-denial-involvement/story?id=19350095

6) Declan McCullagh, Justice Department tries to force Google to hand over user data, CNET News, May 31, 2013
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57587005-38/justice-department-tries-to-force-google-to-hand-over-user-data/

Declan McCullagh, DOJ sends order to Twitter for WikiLeaks-related account info, CNET News, January 7, 2011
http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20027893-281.html

7) MAJ Gregg Powell and COL Charles Dunn III, Homeland Security: Requirements for Installation Security Decision Support Systems, Battle Command Battle Lab (Gordon), March 21, 2004
http://cryptome.org/2013/06/dhs-prism.pdf

8) Carl Rhodes, Jeff Hagen, Mark Westergren, A Strategies-to-Tasks Framework for Planning and Executing Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Operations, RAND Corporation, 2007
http://www.rand.org/pubs/technical_reports/TR434.html

9) James R. Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, DNI Statement on Activities Authorized Under Section 702 of FISA, June 06, 2013
http://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/191-press-releases-2013/869-dni-statement-on-activities-authorized-under-section-702-of-fisa

10) Jerome Taylor, The US bank and the secret plan to destroy WikiLeaks, The Independent February 13, 2011
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/the-us-bank-and-the-secret-plan-to-destroy-wikileaks-2215059.html

11) Tim Worstall, NSA’s PRISM Sounds Like A Darn Good Idea To Me: This Is What Governments Are For, Forbes, June 7, 2011
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/06/07/nsas-prism-sounds-like-a-darn-good-idea-to-me-this-is-what-governments-are-for/

12) Peter Weber, Is the NSA PRISM leak much less than it seems?, Yahoo! News, Jun 10, 2013
http://news.yahoo.com/nsa-prism-leak-much-less-seems-141000562.html?.tsrc=rtlde/

13) Barrett Brown, Romas/COIN, Project PM, http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Romas/COIN,
See also Barrett Brown, A sinister cyber-surveillance scheme exposed, UK Guardian, June 22, 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/22/hacking-anonymous

Steve Kinney is an independent researcher and writer on computer and network security topics, with a long standing interest in the civil and human rights implications of Internet censorship and surveillance by State and corporate actors.

[Paul Rigby]

Did someone help Ed Snowden punch a hole in the NSA?

by Jon Rappoport

June 11, 2013

https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/06/11/did-someone-help-ed-snowden-punch-a-hole-in-the-nsa/

Snowden worked for the CIA. He was pushed up the ranks quickly, from an IT position in the US to a posting in Geneva, under diplomatic cover, to run security on the CIA’s computer systems there.

Then, Snowden quit the CIA and eventually ended up at Booz Allen, a private contractor. He was assigned to NSA, where he stole the secrets and exposed the NSA.

The CIA and NSA have a long contentious relationship. The major issue is, who is king of US intelligence? We’re talking about an internal war.

Snowden could have been the CIA’s man at NSA, where certain CIA players helped him access files he wouldn’t have been able to tap otherwise.

You can bet your bottom dollar that NSA analysts are looking into this possibility right now.

Did the CIA give the NSA documents to Ed Snowden?

by Jon Rappoport

June 13, 2013

JON RAPPOPORT'S BLOG

http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/did-the-cia-give-the-nsa-documents-to-ed-snowden/

Current press reports focus on PRISM, the NSA’s relationships with the biggest tech companies in the world, and the spilled leaks of Ed Snowden.

I’ve already laid out serious questions about Snowden’s work history and whether he’s told the truth about it.

Is it likely he could have accessed and snatched thousands of highly classified NSA documents?

“Let’s see. Who’s coming to work for us here at NSA today? Oh, new whiz kid. Ed Snowden. Outside contractor. He’s not really a full-time employee of the NSA. Twenty-nine years old. No high school diploma. Has a GED. He worked for the CIA and quit. Hmm. Why did he quit? Oh, never mind, who cares? No problem.

“Tell you what. Let’s give this kid access to our most sensitive data. Sure. Why not? Everything. That stuff we keep behind 986 walls? Where you have to pledge the life of your first-born against the possibility you’ll go rogue? Let Snowden see it all. Sure. What the hell. I’m feeling charitable. He seems like a nice kid.”

Here is a more likely scenario.

Snowden never saw any of those thousands of documents on an NSA computer. Never happened.

Instead, he was either used or volunteered as a CIA operative to carry the endless turf war between CIA and NSA a new step forward. People at the CIA WERE able to access those NSA documents and they gave the documents to Snowden and he ran with them.

This was a covert op launched by the CIA against a chief rival, the NSA. NSA, the agency that’s far bigger than the CIA. NSA, the agency that’s been taking over intelligence gathering, that considers itself superior to everybody else in the intelligence field.

The CIA, of course, couldn’t be seen as the NSA leaker. They needed a guy. They needed a guy who could appear to be FROM the NSA, to make things look worse for the NSA and shield the CIA.

They had Ed Snowden. He had worked for the CIA in Geneva, in a high-level position, overseeing computer-systems security. People would later assume he had the wherewithal to get into NSA files and steal documents all by himself.

Somewhere in his CIA past, Ed meets a fellow CIA guy who sits down with him and says, “You know, Ed, things have gone too damn far. The NSA is spying on everybody all the time. I can show you proof. They’ve gone beyond the point of trying to catch terrorists. They’re doing something else. They’re expanding a Surveillance State, which can only lead to one thing: the destruction of America, what America stands for, what you and I know America is supposed to be. The NSA isn’t like us, Ed. We go after terrorists for real. That’s it. Whereas NSA goes after everybody. We have to stop it. We need a guy…and there are those of us who think you might be that guy…”

During the course of this one disingenuous conversation, the CIA is killing 37 innocent civilians all over the world with drones, but that’s beside the point. Ahem.

Ed says, “Tell me more. I’m intrigued.”

He buys in.

[Paul Rigby]

Snowden and the war between the CIA and the Pentagon

http://xymphora.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/snowden-and-war-between-cia-and-pentagon.html

FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 2013

"Did someone help Ed Snowden punch a hole in the NSA?" by Jon Rappoport:

"Snowden worked for the CIA. He was pushed up the ranks quickly, from an IT position in the US to a posting in Geneva, under diplomatic cover, to run security on the CIA’s computer systems there.

Then, Snowden quit the CIA and eventually ended up at Booz Allen, a private contractor. He was assigned to NSA, where he stole the secrets and exposed the NSA.

The CIA and NSA have a long contentious relationship. The major issue is, who is king of US intelligence? We’re talking about an internal war.

Snowden could have been the CIA’s man at NSA, where certain CIA players helped him access files he wouldn’t have been able to tap otherwise."

"NSA leaker: are there serious cracks in Ed Snowden’s story?" by Jon Rappoport

"Did the CIA give the NSA documents to Ed Snowden?" by Jon Rappoport

The two big oddities in the Snowden story are his remarkable employment history and his remarkable access to high-level secrets for somebody who was a relatively low-level employee of an outside contractor. Snowden was recruited as a CIA asset at an early age, probably is still a CIA asset today, and could very easily have been manipulated by the CIA into a position where he could plausibly pose as a whistleblower against the NSA. This does not impugn his personal credibility or the credibility of his information, but answers some big mysteries about how he came to be the face of all the secrets.

Barry just replaced the #2 at the CIA with an outsider: "President Obama's pick for the CIA's second-in-command once held erotica nights at her Baltimore bookstore" She replaces a career CIA guy who retired, in the words of John Brennan, "to spend more time with his family and to pursue other professional opportunities". Standard firing words. A thirty-three year CIA veteran replaced by Barry with an erotica expert.

Ever since 9/11, the CIA has been losing power and influence to the Pentagon. Most recently, Barry is moving the current jewel of American might, the drone program, from the CIA to the Pentagon. The NSA is part of the Pentagon (something that is seldom mentioned). The way things are going, erotica may be all the CIA has left.

[David Andrews]

Interesting that I heard NPR coverage of Snowden all day Monday, and marveled a bit that he was so well spoken with just a GED and a few community college classes - but never once did NPR mention his stint at CIA in many repetitions of his work history. Strangely, NPR also gave no curriculum vita that would explain Snowden's IT training.

I hear the squeak of a well-kept gate.

Edited June 14, 2013 by David Andrews

[Paul Rigby]

THE STONE, June 14, 2013

The Real War on Reality

By PETER LUDLOW

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/the-real-war-on-reality/#more-145378

If there is one thing we can take away from the news of recent weeks it is this: the modern American surveillance state is not really the stuff of paranoid fantasies; it has arrived.

The revelations about the National Security Agency’s PRISM data collection program have raised awareness — and understandably, concern and fears — among American and those abroad, about the reach and power of secret intelligence gatherers operating behind the facades of government and business.

Surveillance and deception are not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but a real sort of epistemic warfare.

But those revelations, captivating as they are, have been partial —they primarily focus on one government agency and on the surveillance end of intelligence work, purportedly done in the interest of national security. What has received less attention is the fact that most intelligence work today is not carried out by government agencies but by private intelligence firms and that much of that work involves another common aspect of intelligence work: deception. That is, it is involved not just with the concealment of reality, but with the manufacture of it.

The realm of secrecy and deception among shadowy yet powerful forces may sound like the province of investigative reporters, thriller novelists and Hollywood moviemakers — and it is — but it is also a matter for philosophers. More accurately, understanding deception and and how it can be exposed has been a principle project of philosophy for the last 2500 years. And it is a place where the work of journalists, philosophers and other truth-seekers can meet.

In one of the most referenced allegories in the Western intellectual tradition, Plato describes a group of individuals shackled inside a cave with a fire behind them. They are able to see only shadows cast upon a wall by the people walking behind them. They mistake shadows for reality. To see things as they truly are, they need to be unshackled and make their way outside the cave. Reporting on the world as it truly is outside the cave is one of the foundational duties of philosophers.

In a more contemporary sense, we should also think of the efforts to operate in total secrecy and engage in the creation of false impressions and realities as a problem area in epistemology — the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of knowledge. And philosophers interested in optimizing our knowledge should consider such surveillance and deception not just fodder for the next “Matrix” movie, but as real sort of epistemic warfare.

To get some perspective on the manipulative role that private intelligence agencies play in our society, it is worth examining information that has been revealed by some significant hacks in the past few years of previously secret data.

Important insight into the world these companies came from a 2010 hack by a group best known as LulzSec (at the time the group was called Internet Feds), which targeted the private intelligence firm HBGary Federal. That hack yielded 75,000 e-mails. It revealed, for example, that Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it. The Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Willliams, which in turn connected the bank with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis.

Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of the N.S.A.’s Prism program), because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to “sabotage or discredit the opposing organization” including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave “if pushed” because he would “choose professional preservation over cause.” That evidently wasn’t the case.

Team Themis also developed a proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to undermine the credibility of one of its critics, a group called Chamber Watch. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that U.S. Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.”

In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.”

Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them.

The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support. The contract was eventually awarded to another private intelligence firm.

This may sound like nothing so much as a “Matrix”-like fantasy, but it is distinctly real, and resembles in some ways the employment of “Psyops” (psychological operations), which as most students of recent American history know, have been part of the nation’s military strategy for decades. The military’s “Unconventional Warfare Training Manual” defines Psyops as “planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals.” In other words, it is sometimes more effective to deceive a population into a false reality than it is to impose its will with force or conventional weapons. Of course this could also apply to one’s own population if you chose to view it as an “enemy” whose “motives, reasoning, and behavior” needed to be controlled.

Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them, and in the case of private intelligence contractors, there are both incentives (billions of dollars in contracts) and capabilities.

Several months after the hack of HBGary, a Chicago area activist and hacker named Jeremy Hammond successfully hacked into another private intelligence firm — Strategic Forcasting Inc., or Stratfor), and released approximately five million e-mails. This hack provided a remarkable insight into how the private security and intelligence companies view themselves vis a vis government security agencies like the C.I.A. In a 2004 e-mail to Stratfor employees, the firm’s founder and chairman George Friedman was downright dismissive of the C.I.A.’s capabilities relative to their own: “Everyone in Langley [the C.I.A.] knows that we do things they have never been able to do with a small fraction of their resources. They have always asked how we did it. We can now show them and maybe they can learn.”

The Stratfor e-mails provided us just one more narrow glimpse into the world of the private security firms, but the view was frightening. The leaked e-mails revealed surveillance activities to monitor protestors in Occupy Austin as well as Occupy’s relation to the environmental group Deep Green Resistance. Staffers discussed how one of their own men went undercover (“U/C”) and inquired about an Occupy Austin General Assembly meeting to gain insight into how the group operates.

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Stratfor was also involved in monitoring activists who were seeking reparations for victims of a chemical plant disaster in Bhopal, India, including a group called Bophal Medical Appeal. But the targets also included The Yes Men, a satirical group that had humiliated Dow Chemical with a fake news conference announcing reparations for the victims. Stratfor regularly copied several Dow officers on the minutia of activities by the two members of the Yes Men.

One intriguing e-mail revealed that the Coca-Cola company was asking Stratfor for intelligence on PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) with Stratfor vice president for Intelligence claiming that “The F.B.I. has a classified investigation on PETA operatives. I’ll see what I can uncover.” From this one could get the impression that the F.B.I. was in effect working as a private detective Stratfor and its corporate clients.

Stratfor also had a broad-ranging public relations campaign. The e-mails revealed numerous media companies on its payroll. While one motivation for the partnerships was presumably to have sources of intelligence, Stratfor worked hard to have soap boxes from which to project its interests. In one 2007 e-mail, it seemed that Stratfor was close to securing a regular show on NPR: “[the producer] agreed that she wants to not just get George or Stratfor on one time on NPR but help us figure the right way to have a relationship between ‘Morning Edition’ and Stratfor.”

On May 28 Jeremy Hammond pled guilty to the Stratfor hack, noting that even if he could successfully defend himself against the charges he was facing, the Department of Justice promised him that he would face the same charges in eight different districts and he would be shipped to all of them in turn. He would become a defendant for life. He had no choice but to plea to a deal in which he may be sentenced to 10 years in prison. But even as he made the plea he issued a statement, saying “I did this because I believe people have a right to know what governments and corporations are doing behind closed doors. I did what I believe is right.” (In a video interview conducted by Glenn Greenwald with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong this week, Snowden expressed a similar ethical stance regarding his actions.)

Given the scope and content of what Hammond’s hacks exposed, his supporters agree that what he did was right. In their view, the private intelligence industry is effectively engaged in Psyops against American public., engaging in “planned operations to convey selected information to [us] to influence [our] emotions, motives, objective reasoning and, ultimately, [our] behavior”? Or as the philosopher might put it, they are engaged in epistemic warfare.

The Greek word deployed by Plato in “The Cave” — aletheia — is typically translated as truth, but is more aptly translated as “disclosure” or “uncovering” — literally, “the state of not being hidden.” Martin Heidegger, in an essay on the allegory of the cave, suggested that the process of uncovering was actually a precondition for having truth. It would then follow that the goal of the truth-seeker is to help people in this disclosure — it is to defeat the illusory representations that prevent us from seeing the world the way it is. There is no propositional truth to be had until this first task is complete.

This is the key to understanding why hackers like Jeremy Hammond are held in such high regard by their supporters. They aren’t just fellow activists or fellow hackers — they are defending us from epistemic attack. Their actions help lift the hood that is periodically pulled over our eyes to blind us from the truth.

Peter Ludlow is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and is currently co-producing (with Vivien Weisman) a documentary on Hacktivist actions against private intelligence firms and the surveillance state.

[J. Raymond Carroll]

By PETER LUDLOW

On May 28 Jeremy Hammond pled guilty to the Stratfor hack, noting that even if he could successfully defend himself against the charges he was facing, the Department of Justice promised him that he would face the same charges in eight different districts and he would be shipped to all of them in turn. He would become a defendant for life. He had no choice but to plea to a deal in which he may be sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Peter Ludlow is a professor of philosophy at Northwestern University

Peter Ludlow has interesting things to say,

but I was surprised at his naivete in the Jeremy Hammond case.

If Hammond believed that he could be prosecuted over and over for the same offense

and if Ludlow finds the threat credible,

then I can only say that neither has read the Bill of Rights:

The Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides:

[N]or shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb . . . ."^[42]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy#cite_note-fifth_amendment_double_jeopardy-42

I have encountered my fair share of dodgy judges in the U.S.

but I would bet the ranch that no American judge, in whatever state you like,

would allow Mr. Hammond to be twice put in jeapordy

for the same actions.

If Mr. Hammond was persuaded to believe this then his attorney

(assuming he had one)

was either a really lousy lawyer or else

he was in league with the prosecution,

like Percy Foreman in the case of James Earl Ray.

[Mark Knight]

Mr. Carroll, if the Constitution was still in force, this gathering of private information without the legal authority of a warrant would have been declared unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment.

Therefore...if the Fourth Amendment is null and void, why would the Fifth Amendment be upheld?